BETWEEN MODERNISM AND CONCEPTUAL ART
McFarland & Company, Inc., 1997
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Allan McCollum Five Perfect Vehicles, 1985/86.
Enamel on solid-cast Hydrocal.
Allan McCollum's
Robert C. Morgan
Perfect Vehicles
The "Perfect Vehicles" have, by now, appeared in many diverse contexts according to various arrangements and numbers and have recently gotten much larger. The original vehicles, which I became acquainted with in spring 1986, were more like "objects" — more readily commodifiable. They sat on pedestals, generally below eye level, and tended to work playfully in a smaller room. The larger versions, which are figurative in scale, actually a bit larger than the Vetruvian Man, seem more related to the architecture, in one way, less with the plight of the artwork as commodity.
McCollum's work is, after all, to a large degree Conceptual in that he conceives of an idea or a plan and then proceeds to realize it in terms of a three-dimensional artifact. Even the earlier framed wall pieces of varying sizes are less about the frame than they are about the consumerist object, the thing desired, available to be plucked from the gallery space and inserted into one's domicile. Many artists that I know have a grouping of these early cast frames and cherish them as signs of smart art — that which inspires discourse upon visual contact and which offers itself as a decoy for art: a representation effected reversibly by mass culture and art world consensus.
If one were to imagine what twelve 6' 5" vehicles were to look like, each painted in a distinct color taken from a commercial paint manufacturer's chart, the variety of responses could not be that distinct from one another. Apparently a great deal of effort went into organizing the placement of the vehicles so as to create the most stimulating interior to walk through and gaze upon them; in other words, to present objects in such a way implies a cynical view of the entire art world establishment. Yet, this ultimately becomes an antiheroic gesture as if to offset the effect of much Neo-Expressionist painting.
It is impossible to dismiss the decorativeness of the larger vehicles in spite of what their cynicism is trying to encapsulate for the viewer. The photograph on the gallery announcement taken at the Venice Biennale last summer suggests a more interesting discourse than the context in which they are presented. The pristine designer colors taken from the everyday secular world of commerce and given to these figurative monuments (figurative in the sense of scale and shape) in an older space makes for an interesting statement, one that is clearly bound to a context, a site-specific instance.
In some sense McCollum's challenge is not far removed from Daniel Buren in the mid-seventies: that is, to make those striped configurations function politically they required an inventiveness of placement, one that would consider the exact place in which they would be seen. For McCollum to subvert the nature of recent art it would appear that his arrangement of the vehicles is an essential component of the work. On the contrary, one could always acknowledge their relationship to commercial logos which generally exist free of context; logos may appear anywhere at anytime in any space and somehow communicate their referent, regardless of how annoying this fact of advertising might be. Logos are two-dimensional signs, however, and art — no matter how distanced from its origin — is not. The simpler the format the more obvious the context of it's delivery becomes. Put another way, the form cannot exist without a cultural space.
Review of Allan McCollum exhibition
at Brooke Alexander Gallery, 1988.
"Selected texts"
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