Who was Allan McCollum?

Allan McCollum (born 1944) is an contemporary American artist known for his conceptual artwork and installations that explore the relationship between the individual and the mass-produced object. He has exhibited his work internationally in galleries and museums, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Allan McCollum has had an extensive solo exhibition career, with over 100 shows to his name. Some notable retrospectives include those at the Musée d'Art Moderne in Villeneuve d'Ascq, France (1998), the Sprengel Museum in Hannover, Germany (1995-96), and the Serpentine Gallery in London (1990). Other notable institutions that have exhibited McCollum's work include the Rooseum Center for Contemporary Art in Malmo, Sweden, the IVAM Centre del Carme in Valencia, Spain, the Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven, Netherlands, and Portikus in Frankfurt, Germany. In addition to his gallery exhibitions, McCollum has also produced public art projects in both the United States and Europe. His work can be found in the collections of nearly seventy major art museums worldwide.

The concept behind his works

Allan McCollum's artistic approach allows him to examine the various factors that shape the role of art within the commercial art world. These include aesthetic, emotional and psychological, social, and economic considerations. Through the use of mass-produced, artificial surrogates - such as his "Surrogate Paintings" series - which represent various art forms like paintings, photographs, sculptures, and drawings but lack inherent meaning, McCollum is able to comment on the way in which the art system ascribes value and function to these objects. However, as an artist who is actively participating in this system and its complex rules, McCollum cannot fully step back and observe objectively. Therefore, his works - which serve as both art and surrogates for art - are able to generate responses and operate on multiple levels. While McCollum works within the confines of the art market and its exchange, he also maintains a critical perspective towards them.

“With his three most recent series, begun in the nineties and presented together for the first time in Hanover, Allan McCollum has started to exploit additional motifs and dimensions of meaning for his art. McCollum's casting material and production process may have remained the same, with his work still hovering on the boundary between industrial mass production, individual craftsman ship and unique artistic creativity. However, he has expanded his spectrum of subjects by selecting his models from the realms of natural history and archaeology. This new orientation has been accompanied by the artist's abandonment of surrogates of esthetic objects, replacing these with a world of figurative motifs in the broadest definition of the term. The figure, which is retained in the casting of The Dog from Pompei in the greatest detail, has already been reduced in the series Lost Objects to the fossilized dinosaur bones, while in the most recent series—Natural Copies from the Coal Mines of Central Utah—no more remains than the petrification of an ephemeral dinosaur footprint.”(allanmccollum.net)

A few words about “Plaster Surrogates”

Looking at Plaster Surrogates, the first question that arises in our minds is why the central part inside the frames are black and uniform? Shouldn't there be a photo or image in them? This is what the artist has tried to form in our minds, he makes us think not about the paintings and images themselves, but about the process of analyzing and valuing them. This is what I found when I first encountered this work, and it made me think a lot. Thinking about social and commercial processes and valuations is something that has been on my mind for a while and I found it in this work, so I tried to present a reproduction of this work that is a digital version of Allan's work but with some differences. The display of a wall on which there are frames with rectangular designs makes us think about cultural concepts and social and commercial valuations on works of art. Usually, in the digital world, an artwork does not include several frames and images, but here, in order to distance ourselves from what is happening inside the frames and address their social impact and valuation, the created artwork has an external and realistic view of walls and frames.

About Digital Surrogates: A recreation

This generative art piece aims to prompt reflection on the cultural and social processes of art valuation. Upon first glance, the artwork may appear simple, but it is actually quite complex. To achieve a realistic appearance, multiple layers have been used to create natural-looking shadows and textured frames and canvases, so with opening this artwork in live mode and zooming in on each of the frames, you can see details in them.

To recreate the look of a gallery wall, the first layer is a gradient that mimics the point lighting often used in galleries. The color and intensity of the gradient were properly chosen to accurately mimic the original work.

Many changes have been made in this work compared to the original, due to the lack of some restrictions, I decided to use wooden frames instead of the original plaster frames. I saw this idea somewhere in "Surrogate Painting" and it seemed to me , the result will be better in terms of aesthetics. The central part includes an additional canvas that has protrusions, the use of a linen-like texture gives us aesthetic features that are different from the original version.

Next, a rectangle packing algorithm is used to determine the placement of the frames based on their number and distance. The dimensions of each frame are randomly selected and proportionally based on the dimensions used by Allan. Once their placement is determined, layers of frames are added. The first layer is the wooden frame, which is created using colors from a palette that harmonize with the light and wall color. Each wood grain pattern is unique to give a more realistic effect.

On top of the frames, a canvas-like layer with a unique texture is added, followed by a second canvas with randomly selected dimensions based on the original work.

The rectangles on the canvas are monochromatic, with most variations being black like the original, but some also have a multi-color mode with an acrylic-like texture in the center. So the central part is not just a rectangle and it filled with layers of lines to create a realistic acrylic painting effect. After the central part is completed, a pale, glaze-like layer is added to the frames to simulate light and shadow in two dimensions.

This work is available in 12 color palettes and aims to inspire and recreate the Allan’s work in the digital realm. It challenges our valuation of digital art in the current era with integrating the generative art and conceptual art.

References:

• "Allan McCollum." The Museum of Modern Art, New York. https://www.moma.org/collection/works/79653
• "Allan McCollum." http://allanmccollum.net/allanmcnyc/McCollum-Starke.html
• "Plaster Surrogates (No. 3)." The Museum of Contemporary Art. https://www.moca.org/collection/work/60-plaster-surrogates-no
• "Allan McCollum." Guggenheim Museum. https://www.guggenheim.org/artwork/artist/allan-mccollum