The world—and even the world of artists—is full of people who can go into the Louvre, walk rapidly, without so much as a glance, past rows of very interesting, though, secondary, pictures, to come to rapturous halt in front of a Titian or a Raphael—one of those that have been most popularized by the engravers art; then they will go home happy, not a few saying to themselves, I know my Museum.

Charles Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life.

The cult of the personality is purposefully absent. In and of itself that is a frank admission to our cultural circumstances for, since the Renaissance, the artistic persona has been a currency of difference, the plasma of aesthetic exchange. Allan McCollum found it emptied out of meaning but chose to let its hopeless candor speak for itself. This was a judicious thing to have done, for in an era in which differentia is increasingly rare, but still taken for granted, McCollum has indelibly marked the discrepancy between the mythology of difference and its disappearance.

His art suspends the chance to estimate value as an expression of the difference between creative personalities. Therefore, if only momentarily, the meaning of his art, its terms for cultural exchange, seem unfamiliar until a subtext, which has always been there, rises in relief. What comes to light is a profile of an art object prepared to be a candid witness to its own circumstances. No longer capable of conveying even discrete nuances of a personality, it is the agent for the social promotion of ideas, finance and prestige.

McCollum has been enormously careful to screen his personality from his serial projects: the Surrogates, the Perfect Vehicles and the Perpetual Photos. To do otherwise would have entrapped him in the art-historical vice of periodicity which tightens around perceived changes in an artists mood or temperament; differences conveyed by the subtlest modulation in style. Expecting to discover changes of the heart like the ones between Picassos Blue and Rose periods no longer makes sense when chronology dissipates and history becomes archaic.

I'm interested in locating the meaning of my work—and the emotional content of my work—somewhere within those transactions which occur between the various someones who are involved in the artworks circulation. To do this I have to try to dislocate the objects so-called content. When we speak of a content as residing somehow within the art object, we disregard the object's meaning as an item in the real, social world, and replace this with all sorts of imaginary constructs.

Allan McCollum, Excerpt from an interview [Arts Magazine, October 1985].

What is it we want from art that our belief in content works to hide from us?

Allan McCollum, Excerpt from an interview, 1985

A striking parallel exists between the new car of the automobile stylist and the syndrome of formalist invention in art, where discoveries are made through visual manipulation. Incredibly products—either in art or life—become irrelevant and a different set of needs arise: these revolve around such concerns as maintaining the biological livability of the Earth, producing more accurate models of social interaction, understanding the growing symbiosis in man-machine relationships, establishing priorities for the usage and conservation of natural resources, and defining alternative patterns of education, productivity and leisure. [1]

The relentlessly present absence of McCollum's art hinges it to a peculiarly unconventional strain of modern art history. Andy Warhol's film, Blow Job, 1964, Roy Lichtenstein's canvas, Big Painting, 1965, and Robert Barry's All the Things I Know..., 1969, are expressions of conspicuous absence: one a graphic sexual act, the next, the explicit residuals of emotional turmoil and finally the banality of personal knowledge. Each is an icon of an iconoclast, emblems of a freakish modern Platonism. McCollum's Perfect Vehicles similarly attempt to shadow an intangible subject: the Ideal, the proportions, the qualities of the perfect art object. [2] Each vase politely asks us to believe that it alone conveys the inexpressible.

Shouldn't I be able to isolate this signal, and reproduce it with the sparest of means? Then my objects could exist as pure potential, which no superfluous meaning or value other than that which they may accrue in relation to our aesthetic pleasure. Is it not my role as an artist to reproduce—and repeat at will—that psychic effervescence associated with the unrepeatable and perfectly unique timeless moment in which the rest of the world simply fades away ?

Allan McCollum, Excerpt from Perfect Vehicles , 1986

Everywhere prestige haunts our industrial societies, whose bourgeois culture is never more than the phantom of aristocratic values. Everywhere the magic of the code, The magic of an elective and selective community, fused together by the same rules of the game and the same system of signs, is collectively reproduced, beyond economic value and on the basis of it. Everywhere this process comes to penetrate class conflicts, everywhere—diluted over the entire extent of society, whatever the economic status and class condition—it acts to the advantage of the dominant class. It is the keystone of domination. [4]

As an artist, I will repeat the signal, like a flashing beacon. I will rehearse my position, over and over, as a gesture to you, in and of itself. I will construct for you a world of fabulous substitutes for what is already a world of substitutes. I will muster the world for your review, and I will make you the object of the world's address. [5]

Like the endless array of Surrogates and the idealized profile of the Perfect Vehicles, McCollum's Perpetual Photos draft a realm of experience existing beyond the ordinary. The photograph is a perfect visual record that transcends the physical limits of human sight. In a spirit of honest appraisal McCollum exploits photography, not to alter or disguise, but to totally reveal things otherwise unnoticed (in this respect, the Perpetual Photos may be viewed as a metaphorical expression of his art at large). The Perpetual Photos are, in a way, ready-made versions of the Surrogates, detected and uncovered within another dimension. They are the photographic renditions of pictures excised from television scenes. The original artists of these pictures will never be known. Their styles, once conductors of their personalities, have dissipated through serial rehearsals of the original, lost forever in the complex baffles of reproduction. Freed of their history, whatever it might have been, the Perpetual Photos have become the props of social exchange. They have been transferred from their previously discrete existence as televisions decor into the present tense with the expectation that we will know what to do with them now that they are actually here.

[1.] Jack Burnham, Great Western Salt Works: Essays on the Meaning of Post-Formalist Art, George Braziller, New York, 1974, pp. 15-16.

[2.] In his catalog essay "Perfect Vehicles" which appeared in the catalog Damaged Goods: Desire and the Economy of the Object, McCollum wrote, and I think in a highly sardonic tone,: I aim to fashion the most perfect object possible.

[3.] Jean Baudrillard, For A Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign, Telos Press, St. Louis, 1981, p. 117.

[4.] Baudrillard, p. 119.

[5.] Allan McCollum, "Perfect Vehicles" in Damaged Goods: Desire and the Economy of the Object, The New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, p. 10.