Allan McCollum is a contemporary American artist, whose work often blurs the boundary between unique artifacts and mass production. He has produced numerous public art projects in the United States and Europe.
Background
Allan McCollum was born on August 4, 1944 in Los Angeles, California, United States. He is the son of Ann Hinton, who regularly acted as an actress and singer in local theater productions, and Warren McCollum, who performed a few small roles in movies in the late 1930s and early 1940s, including the role of "Jimmy Lane" in the 1938 cult classic, Reefer Madness.
Education
Initially, McCollum was educated at Aviation High School in Redondo Beach, California. Some time later, Allan briefly studied restaurant management and industrial kitchen work at Los Angeles Trade Technical College, but decided to educate himself as an artist in 1967. In lieu of formal art education, he read the writings of artists of the international Fluxus movement, and of conceptual artists, including Daniel Buren and Sol LeWitt.
Career
Before beginning his career as an artist, Allan worked for Trans World Airlines at the Los Angeles International Airport, preparing meals for flights. He also served as a truck driver and crate builder for an art handling company in West Hollywood and learned about the mechanisms of the contemporary art world through meeting artists, art dealers, collectors and curators.
Some time later, Allan decided to start career as an artist and during the late 1960s, McCollum produced his early work. Establishing his first studio in 1970 in a converted parking garage on Venice Beach, McCollum soon began exhibiting work in Nicholas Wilder Gallery and Claire Copley Gallery, both in Los Angeles. He lived and worked there until 1975.
In 1975, he moved to the SoHo district of New York, where he lives today.
Early on, his work focused on the intersection of mass production and the uniqueness, both material and conceptual, of the art object. His series Over 10,000 Individual Works (1987–88), exhibited in 1988 at John Weber Gallery, New York, comprised rows of miniature objects, each one cast separately from a unique combination of found household items, such as bottle caps and kitchen tools. McCollum repeated this process in 1989 in a series of thousands of drawings, each one created using a unique combination of hundreds of plastic drafting templates according to a systemic, nonrepetitive process.
In his Perpetual Photo series, which Allan created during the period from 1982 to 1989, he photographed television stills, obscuring his source material through cropping and enlargement, creating a visually frustrating hybrid of copy and original.
In 1995, he collaborated with the College of Eastern Utah Prehistoric Museum in Price, Utah, to make replicas of their entire collection of dinosaur track casts, and exhibited these in New York and throughout Europe.
Two years later, in 1997, Allan worked with the International Center for Lightning Research and Testing in Starke, Florida, to trigger lightning with rockets, and worked with a local souvenir manufacturer to create over 10,000 replicas of a fulgurite created by the lightning strike.
In 2003, he created 120 topographical models of the states of Missouri and Kansas, which he donated and delivered himself to 120 small historical society museums.
In a recent work, The Shapes Project (2005), McCollum employed a computerized combinatorial system to generate billions of similar but nonrepeating shapes from combinations of 300 "parts", ostensibly to provide one "for every person on the planet". Since then, he has used the database of shapes to produce both prints and sculptures in Plexiglas, Corian, plywood, hardwood, metal, and other materials.
In his 2010 publication The Book of Shapes, McCollum further explored his interest in combining conceptual and material accessibility with theoretical ideas on the "uniqueness" of the art object. The publication provides both the 300 basic shape parts and instruction for generating all possible combinations of those parts.
Views
Quotations:
"I quickly realized that a painting is ultimately defined by its context. And all contexts are within other contexts within other contexts, so I'm always drawn into an ever-expanding idea of contexts."