TRACES: Allan McCollum

Today is the occasion to bear in mind Allan McCollum (4/8/1944- ) one of the most original and influential post-Conceptual American artists alive today. His work is repeatedly characterised by his use of mass-production to create a vast quantity of unique objects. Whether comprised of sculptures, drawings, or photographs, each of his works form “collections”, which range in number from a few objects, to several thousand. Through documents or interviews, starting with: moments and memories, we reveal out from the past-unknown sides of big personalities, who left their indelible traces in time and history…

By Dimitris Lempesis

Allan McCollum was born in Los Angeles, in 1964, he moved to Essex, England, pursuing the idea of being an actor, and joined a local theater group in Southend-on-Sea, but he changed his mind about a career in theater and returned to California in 1965, moved into a small mobile home park in Venice Beach, California, and attended Los Angeles Trade Technical College for five months, attempting to learn the trade of restaurant management and industrial kitchen work. For two years, he worked for Trans World Airlines at the Los Angeles International Airport, preparing meals for flights but, in 1967, he decided to educate himself as an artist. During the late 1960s, McCollum produced his early work while living in small rented storefront spaces, first in Venice Beach, and later in Santa Monica. In 1970, he established a studio in a converted parking garage in Venice Beach, where he lived and worked until 1975. During these years, he exhibited his work regularly at the Nicholas Wilder Gallery and also at the Claire Copley Gallery, both in Los Angeles. Viewing his work often produces a sublime effect—as one slowly realizes that the dizzying array of thousands of identical-looking shapes is, in fact, composed of subtly different, distinct things. Engaging assistants, scientists, and local craftspeople in his process, McCollum embraces a collaborative and democratic form of creativity. His drawings and sculptures often serve a symbolic purpose—as surrogates, faithful copies, or stand-ins for people—and are presented theatrically, transforming the exhibition space into a laboratory where artifice and context are scrutinized. Economical in form, yet curious in function, his work and mechanical-looking processes are infused with humor and humility. In 1988-91, he created over 30,000 completely unique objects he titled “Individual Works” which were gathered and exhibited in collections of over 10,000. The objects were made by taking many dozens of rubber molds from common household objects and combining plaster casts of these parts in thousands of possible ways, never repeating a combination. In 1989, he used a similar system to create thousands of handmade graphite pencil drawings, using hundreds of plastic drafting templates he designed for this purpose, each drawing made unique by combining the templates according to a combinatorial protocol that never repeated itself. Beginning in the early 1990s, McCollum expanded his interests in quantity production to include explorations into the ways regional communities give meaning to local landmarks and geological oddities in establishing community identity, and collaborated with a number of small towns and small historical museums in Europe and the United States, bringing attention to the way local narratives develop around objects peculiar to geographic regions, and drawing comparisons to the way artworks develop meaning in a parallel manner. In 2005, McCollum designed “The Shapes Project” a combinatorial system to produce “a completely unique shape for every person on the planet, without repeating”. The system involves organizing a basic vocabulary of 300 “parts” which can be combined in over 30 billion different ways, created as “vector files” in a computer drawing program.