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MULTIPLE MEANINGS: ALLAN McCOLLUM SUSAN INGLETT GALLERY VISIBLE MARKERS
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 Allan McCollum Visible Markers Pigmented Concrete |
Multiples, as an artistic venue often stamped out by machine, have made art accessible to a larger public. But is there anything special to what the public receives beyond, often, a more cheaply made copy with the artist's name? In its concept, is it different than the average watercolor print duplicated by the thousands? In other words, can the audience's involvement by buying and appropriating such an object contribute to a creative expansion process similar to a Fluxus event or performance and get beyond what Rosalind Krauss calls the "entropy" or identity congealment of a repeated cast object? In his new installation, Allan McCollum deals squarely with these issues by finding another way of saying "thanks" - with a multiple. Hundreds of sets of multiples will be laid on folding display tables and made available to the general public for $300 each set a series of bricks in pale black, green, yellow (ochre), brown, grey, and red with the deeply impressed statement of gratitude on top. McCollum's concept is that they will be given as individual bricks (a paper weight, a door jam) to a friend as a present, a token gesture and art piece with the constant reminder of both the source and its sentiment. It is hard to see these heavy, mutely toned bricks as something warm and inviting, but that is also the point. McCollum's art has historically demonstrated the overabundance of object identification and in doing this points toward the lack of meaning in consumer collecting, be it art (hundreds of fake empty frames, "Surrogate Paintings,") or artifact (hundreds of molded dinosaur footprints, "Natural Copies"). The codification of objects as to their power as signifiers or fakes, has always been a focal point for McCollum. Now the artist presents hundreds of bricks repeating "thanks," which in its own way continues an exposure of the emptiness in mass production culture and mechanical activity. Oddly enough, the end product of this process will be a single person with a single brick saying, "thanks." To McCollum, creating multiples is a "highly orchestrated expression of a wish, a wish we all share, a wish that we might be as productive as nature."
--Stuart Nicholson |