In his "surrogates"—urn-shaped sculptures and plaster casts of a miniature painting-in-frame form—Allan McCollum created beta-version distillations of some of the critical concerns that defined Neo-Conceptualism: the myth of originality, the reality of art's commodification and the values that accrue from each. His objects, displayed in clusters, were problematic though: their deliberate lack of visual charisma was witty and pointed, but it also tended to reduce them to little more than illustrated mini-lectures. How fascinating it was, then, to see McCollum, in his recent and simultaneous solo shows, playing out his dialectical drama on a formally spectacular scale.

At Pretto we were actually on familiar ground. The gallery space was small, the work (dating from the early '80s) chromatically neutral and discreetly displayed. It consisted of dozens of "Polaroids" with images blacked out as if the film had been prematurely exposed. In fact, the "photos" were painstakingly crafted fakes—cut out white-paper borders surrounding dark rectangles drawn with ink, Magic Marker or watercolor and burnished to an emulsionlike gloss. Mounted in random groups within large frames, each piece was a circular Benjaminian irony: the photographic image is already a repeatable surrogate reality; here the surrogate itself is fictional, though clearly handmade.

The "paintings" at Nosei were the same little plaster models McCollum has used for nearly a decade, now presented not only in relentlessly cheery colors, from sharp primaries to drippy decorator pastels, but in unprecedented quantities (the gallery press release announced a count of a cool 1,700), which filled, from floor to ceiling, two sizable rooms. Their massed presence effectively enacted the programmatic matter at hand—the disheartening fact of art's infinite capacity for self-reiteration—but actually it rendered it of far less interest than the sheer decorative éclat of the installation itself.

McCollum's gift for the brilliant collective image was most strikingly evident at Weber. Here the object-count was preposterously high and the small objects themselves, which McCollum labelled generically Individual Works, were unlike anything he had made before: compact, oddly contoured fit-in-your-hand-size shapes that suggested a cross between toys and machine parts or grenades. They were, in fact, the result of an elaborate mix-and-match process by which McCollum joined dozens of small cast-off elements—bottle caps, hardware fixtures—together to make over 200 individual sculptural forms, and then further joined these together in pairs in every possible permutation to create a total of over 10,000 distinct objects. He painted each the same low-gloss swimming-pool turquoise and set them out side by side on a long table that stretched from one end of the floor-through gallery to the other. The incremental absurdity underscored the rather poignant fact that although each one of these objects was, in fact, unique, who, faced with their similarity and vast numbers, would notice or care?

It is probably best to avoid taking an over-poeticizing view of work which has in the past set up carefully circumscribed metaphoric boundaries for itself. But if one shifts the trope of lost individuality from objects to people in this last installation, one detects a humanist subtext that has only fitfully warmed McCollum's work before. (He has located a source for Individual Works in the fact of his own parents being assembly-line factory workers.) And carrying the notion of method-as-metaphor further still, one sees that McCollum's new work exemplifies what may be the distinguishing formal principal of Neo-Conceptualist sculpture so far: a repudiation of the organic and the integral in favor of the fragment as the valid unit of conceptual currency. In his image of a field of tiny blue forms ranging away into the distance, McCollum has built an ambitious public sculptural presence that proves, and sweetens, the postmodern rule that art is, after all, exactly the sum of its parts.