Art as a symbol of social and economic status and thus a means of exclusion has been the focus of Allan McCollum's work since the late 1970s. The museum as well as the commercial gallery is implicated as a governing authority.[1] McCollum's work self-consciously addresses the production, distribution, acquisition, display, and reading of the artwork. He has done this through a limited production of "Surrogate Paintings" (1978-82), "Plaster Surrogates" (1982-present), "Perpetual Photos" (1981-present), "Perfect Vehicles" (1986-present), and "Individual Works" (1987-89), as well as works produced in collaboration with other artists (Louise Lawler, "Ideal Settings" [1983] and "Fixed Intervals" [1988]; and Laurie Simmons, "Actual Photos" [1985]). His "Surrogates," begun in wood in 1978 and in plasterlike Hydrostone in 1982, are painted castings, one-piece, self-framed and matted, imageless objects. Hung in salon-style arrangements, they function at once as signs for painting and as art objects. They can be assimilated into the art system and they infiltrate it, exposing the economic and social forces that produce desire for a specialized, symbolic object. The "Surrogates" function repetitively, drawing attention to the labor in the production of a work of art and the value of labor in mass production.[2] Each Surrogate is unique. Produced in quantity, they are reduced to "simple tokens of exchange,"[3] to symbolic commodities, as Craig Owens remarked:

. . . the potentially endless repetition of essentially identical objects prevents us from mistaking difference for uniqueness. For although it is possible to view each work as a mirror reflecting all the others, at the same time, it is impossible to forget that each is merely a reflection of all of the others. [4]

The "Perpetual Photos" are rephotographed details from photographs McCollum made of TV screens where "surrogate"-like images appeared in the background of various television programs. Blown-up, matted, and framed, these "Perpetual Photos" become indecipherable grainy forms, no longer resembling their unknown originals.

The "Perfect Vehicles," objects shaped like Ming ginger jars, are painted, solid castings of Hydrostone that "function" as art. McCollum has written about them: "In extinguishing absolutely the possibility of any recourse to utility, I mean to accelerate the symbolic potential of the Vehicles toward total meaning, total value. I aim to fashion the most perfect art object possible."[5] The recent giant "Vehicles" accentuate the body shape of urnlike objects that are larger than an average adult male.

The "Individual Works," small, approximately two-by-five-inch painted Hydrostone objects, have been produced in two sets, each numbering approximately 10,000. The first set (1988) is aqua-blue, and the current set for MOCA is salmon - each object cast from two molds comprising castings of household objects (cologne bottle tops, bottle caps, candy molds, etc.). These objects were assembled according to a mathematical structure that ordered their stacked compositions and ultimately ensured their "individuality." Their excessive production subsumes each piece into a sea of like objects divisible into wholesale "lots," their "individuality" mitigated by their quantity. Andrea Fraser considered the "Individual Works" in relation to McCollum's other production:

If McCollum's Plaster Surrogates are signs for painting, and his Perfect Vehicles signs for the antique or exotic objet d'art, his Individual Works are not signs for anything. They're simply bibelot; small, decorative, household objects. They are not now, symbolic objects, but, rather, they are made to become symbolic objects, in use, as souvenirs, keepsakes, tokens of affection; little mnemonic traces.[6]

Ann Goldstein
The Museum of Contemporary Art
Los Angeles, 1989