Allan McCollum once asserted that a typical viewer’s relationship to a work of art is predicated on the desire “to be involved in the Primal Scene, not out in the hall looking through the keyhole.”¹ It is, however, precisely out in the metaphoric hall that McCollum has established an outpost, basing his oeuvre on the ways in which fantasies of immersion play themselves out in the fetishistic production, circulation, and consumption of art and other symbolic objects. His best-known series, the “Surrogate Paintings,” from 1978, and the related “Plaster Surrogates,” began in 1982, made this point explicit, rendering a generic idea of “painting” as so many interchangeable props: theatrical effects designed to represent representation while unmasking those scripts that determine the cultural significance of things.

McCollum’s most recent exhibition also marked an insistence on the play between raptness and remove, pairing a number of his “Perpetual Photos” (begun in 1982) with “The Recognizable Image Drawings” executed just a year ago. The earlier series comprises large black-and-white and sepia-tone photographs that, at a glance, walk a fine line between figuration and abstraction, mimicking the indiscriminate contours of Rorschach inkblots. Yet the difficulty in reading these images owes less to any inherent formal opacity than a kind of counterintuitive distancing effect. It is as though the eye has been pressed too close to the object it wants to see. And, indeed, it was precisely this desire to get nearer to images as they stubbornly recede that propelled the “Perpetual Photos.” Noting the ubiquity of indecipherable framed “art” images that appeared as props in television programs, McCollum began snapping shots of them directly from the screen. The arist then blew-up these highly suggestive—if hard-to-discern—images and framed them, pasting the original shots on the back as slippery evidence of their original context.