Comments on: Meet the Season 5 Artist: Allan McCollum

By: Jennifer Roland

Jennifer Roland — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 02:53:12 +0000

Allan McCollum is surely influenced by the thinking in the 60s and 70s, who of his age isn’t? He began showing his work in 1969, and his “structuralist” anthropological viewpoints come through all the time, in his interviews. But what’s interesting is how he has turned critical thought into so many varying PRACTICES over the last 40 years, I think, and how he remains so relevent and admired by even the very youngest artists. I like the question he poses on the website of his Imperal Valley project, about their local mountain and the sand concretions found at it’s base: “MAYBE THE MEANING OF AN ARTWORK IS THE SUM OF ALL MEANINGS GIVEN TO IT BY THE SUM OF ITS VIEWERS?” I think his work interestingly explores all the different ways objects have meaning to all sorts of people, which of course would have to include “manufacturing” as well as handicrafters and amateur painters, collecting souvenirs, exchanging gifts, all types of ways of making and owning and enjoying objects. And the generosity of his publishing handouts and pamphlets, all downloadable from the internet; and his great interviews with other artists, especially the one with Harrell Fletcher, who is also interested in social practices and doing art with small town communities.

Tim, let us know what you think after the Art21 broadcast, and after studying McCollum’s website! You can’t simply accept Art21’s or a magazine critic’s categorization of artists as “systems” artists or “romance” artists or whatever, and base your thought on that, thereby letting journalists and critics define an artist’s terms, or your terms and your entire outlook — this is how television shows and magazines always do things, to package their products. Read what the artist himself has to say in all his lengthier, non-edited interviews.

By: Tim Nowakowski

Tim Nowakowski — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 18:37:02 +0000

I have no questions. His read on options available to artists fits competently within all the right tropes and guidelines afforded late 20th C. art. Curators can do their job w/o upsetting board members and patrons. I have concern along another, more broadly related issue of white male privileging, but that’s for elsewhere. I worry he may have been preempted in project by McDonald’s ‘over 6 billion’ and the “I’d like to buy the world a coke.”
Don’t get me wrong, however. This does not mean he shouldn’t do what he does. I’m looking for some significant development within his tradition. Let’s take Monet as my model for the moment. Cliche Monet, coffee table publication champion of all time. If we were to stop our knowledge of him w/ the end of the 19th C., then we would miss one of the most spectacular Late Styles, to use art historical jargon, possibly ever. It’s what we miss from the premature deaths of Pollock, Hesse, Smithson, e.g. McCollum is no Pollock, but he can tweak what he is doing into something meaningful. For right now, I’m feeling a holding pattern.

By: Wesley Miller, Art21 Associate Curator

Wesley Miller, Art21 Associate Curator — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 15:27:12 +0000

Hey Tim — do you have a question for Allan? If so, leave it here: http://blog.art21.org/2009/09/30/allan-mccollum-at-the-new-york-public-library-oct-6-ask-a-question

By: Tim Nowakowski

Tim Nowakowski — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 13:45:03 +0000

Not buying. Roland in her ad hominemish response misses the fact that this site positions McCollum under the category of system. It’s not just me; as of 2007 Nancy Princenthal says pretty much the same thing. Moreover, in your very list of ingredients u have a sine qua non of Systems origin, gift giving. The tie is scholarly: proto structuralist, quasi Marxist Marcel Mauss’ Essais Sur Le Don describes the SYSTEM or economy of exchange in non industrial cultures, potlatch; Levis-Strauss adopts this approach to reading ‘primitive’ cultures known as Structuralism (religious system, language system, kinship system, etc.); Jack Burnham of Structure of Art fame coalesces this methodology into the art world in the 70’s, influencing system’s artists like Hans Haacke. McCollum’s debts are evident. I would argue that art historians would position McCollum between systems aesthetic, Duchamp’s Ready-Made or the HAND- oh how ironic – crafted Tzanck check, and Ad Reinhardt’s art object as tautology (Surrogate Paintings), and a little bit of Baudrillard’s media cranked, consumer embedded simulacra. McCollum = art as cultural anthropology, a rug, which is kinda worn, but w/ pluralistic sites like this, still serviceable, though questionably viable. So, yeah, he’s systems and he’s 70-80 ish, but of course he has the right to petition to get his view shown.
I think this methodology is out of touch when u think of some of recent paradigm shifts in scholarship. McClintock’s Imperial Leather introduces what she calls the Great Mantra: race, class, gender; and fits this into ‘articulated categories’ such as commodity racism. Now ask yourself does McCollum address manufacturing in our society that admits the fact of racist labor, anti-union practices of a mass producer like Nike? We have seen a plethora of queering of white feminism (Cherie Moraga being lesbian, brown, Hispanic and a spokesperson for pregnant farm laborers exposed to pesticides on a daily basis). Ask yourself if this addresses the meltdown in capitalism that Marx railed against and Rosi Braidotti characterized as having no teleology other than its own self perpetuation like an addict on crack. I’d like to update that to crank. Does this relate to Spivak’s spearheading the discussion on identity politics and ethnicity? And if u ask what works do, I would just start w/ something like a Nayland Blake’s Gorge. It seems it’s exactly the systems aesthetic of the 70’s warmed over into Baudrillardian mediatized consumerism that gets in his way now, like Wittgensteins metaphysics engine that simply rev’s but has not a gear box. For me this is looking like a gift shop out in Malldumb and the Museum a Versaille in October of 1789. I’m not looking for retreaded Expressionism, but I want to hear a voice. I think Roland misunderstand that I’m not critiquing the potential content, but the form of expression or vehicle. Tired of yet another SUV, ha ha.

By: Wesley Miller, Art21 Associate Curator

Wesley Miller, Art21 Associate Curator — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 17:00:11 +0000

Tim, I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised by the full McCollum episode as it delves into precisely some of the 2.0 currents you’ve just addressed. Perhaps what’s most compelling about McCollum’s work is that he’s able to bridge the 70s “system’s aesthetic” and an interest in mass manufacturing with more contemporary concerns of this information age — showing how they interrelate and how generational shifts are not so clear-cut. Hope you’ll tune in October 28th!

By: Jennifer Roland

Jennifer Roland — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 05:25:29 +0000

Hmmm … it seems Mr. Nowakowski knows nothing about McCollum’s work beyond what he read on this page. Check out his website, as listed above, and you’ll see that this “manufacturing” thread plays a small part within a much larger picture, one that explores community identity in small towns around the world, geological curiosities, movies and TV, the occult, the culture of gift-giving and exchange, educational publishing, paphleteering, social relations, achaeological history, all sorts of things … not to mention that many of his projects are totally internet-related. The 70s? Take some time to learn a little, Tim …

By: What’s Cookin at the Art21 Blog: A Weekly Index | Art21 Blog

What’s Cookin at the Art21 Blog: A Weekly Index | Art21 Blog — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 20:01:02 +0000

[...] Meet the Season 5 Artist: Allan McCollum [...]

By: Tim Nowakowski

Tim Nowakowski — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 12:22:26 +0000

McCollum’s attempts fall into the system’s aesthetic of the 70’s, where permutations of a whole systemic procedure play out options, at times beyond the direction of the artist’s intention. A more organized version of Pollock’s chance permutations of liquid paint, canvas and gravity. The problem I have w/ this is relevancy. Having seen this type of piece played out many times b4 I lose arousal. We have this huge juggernaut called the Internet out there that encompasses people in a web of ‘connectivity’: the college student w/ Macbook, cell, iPod and cable tv, all simultaneously wired into nervous system of the cultural imaginary. God is not dead anymore, God is Google. McCollum seems stuck in the world of mass manufacturing when we have moved onto a world of hyper-information.