. . .If I like a work, it is meaningful; if I do not, it is meaningless (or vice versa).
Yet, if I dislike it, isn't that also a form of meaning? Thus, the critic fails to
distinguish between the meaningful character of a work, a potential object-
language, and the meta language of its own attribution. Put differently, the
meaning he sees in a work, whether intellectual or emotional, lies in his
own head: the work in itself may or may not have any meaning.

Dick Higgins, "Modernism since
Postmodernism: Essays on intermedia"

For a moment I laughed, because I didn't know how we were going to explain to the Korean guy that asked us for our passports, exactly what it was in those boxes. Our first smuggling, I thought. When he asked What are your bringing from Mexico?, I was tempted to tell him, "well, we're carrying trays full of shish kebabs and in those boxes a hundred original artworks by Allan McCollum."

These "hundred original pieces by Allan McCollum" should neither be seen as original pieces nor like artistic works in the most classic sense of the word. In fact they are a series of reproductions—very faithful, by the way—that the artist made out of a natural phenomenon: "sand spikes," sand concretions once found on Mount Signal's surroundings, that little by little began to disappear—victims of modernity or maybe of a particular local collector. While integrating his vision of the nature of artistic creation—using the reproduction and multiplication of objects as a way of breaking down the preconception of an artwork as a unique, indivisible and praiseworthy piece from here to eternity—with the discovery of this geological phenomenon, Allan McCollum decided to reinvent the sand spike, by reproducing it many times, and to present it in different spaces, surrounded by pictorial and photographic works that, through the years, have been made throughout the community, as homages to the enigmatic mountain, where the spikes were originally found.

Allan McCollum: Enlarged Model of a Sand Spike from Mount Signal ( in progress, 2000 ). Concrete, steel, and sand; 14' long. Installed permanently on the grounds of the Imperial Valley Historical Society Pioneer Museum, Imperial, California.

These exhibits are placed simultaneously at the University's museum of UABC in Mexicali, the Steppling Gallery in SDSU, Imperial Valley campus, and the Imperial Valley Pioneers Museum, as part of the INSITE2000 project. Basically, it is the same visual dynamic: on a certain space, you can find a number of tables or sculpture bases, where the reproductions of these sand spikes are filed harmoniously, their conic, root or phallus-like form (depending on the perception, but this detail is not relevant), giving the impression of being half way between the purely natural and the purely artificial creation.They are made with genuine sand from mountain, and judging by the original sand spikes (whose majority can be found at the Pioneer's Museum), they can be seen as genuine replicas up to the most minimum details: the bad formations and the careless way with which the nature decides to create things, are found intact in these reproductions. In the walls surrounding the tables, we can find different pictorial and photographic works that depict in a naturalistic and detailed way in turn, an infinity of panoramic views of Mount Signal. From oil paintings to watercolors to engravings, drawings and color pictures, they are an intimate and precious reflection of the mountain, realistic images that are prefixed visually to the great profusion of sand spikes reproduced in the tables.

At the opening at Steppling Gallery, it caught my attention how people directed their vision, from the tables with the sand concretions, towards the pictorial images that surrounded them. They meditated for a few seconds before the startling presence of the replicas, and they immediately looked elsewhere to recover their understanding, by looking at the paintings and pictures, as if somehow, its understanding of what they appreciated was outside of its reach. In another table, Allan McCollum placed, also, countless miniature reproductions of the mountain, made with a mold that represented it as if seen from the sky above. The spectators, strolling around the exhibition, looked for the pertinent questions, but could only construct them by focusing themselves on the paintings. To a certain extent, they refused to understand the meaning of what they saw. Many preferred to fill themselves with the enormous amount of snacks prepared for the occasion, contemplating their environment and nervously watching the artist out of the corner of their eyes, a question mark on their foreheads.

For indeed, which is the true meaning of things? At the Pioneer's Museum I found myself with the artist's statement, on a sheet of paper the artist had placed at the entrance to the exhibit tables, and it tells us: Where does does the meaning come from? MAYBE THE MEANING OF AN ARTWORK IS THE SUM OF ALL THE MEANINGS GIVEN TO IT BY THE SUM OF ITS VIEWERS. When I finished reading that sentence, I turned to my surroundings, and the only thing I saw were a group of elderly people, contemplating the paintings with certain parsimony, their lengthened fingertips pointing out to the heap of Mount Signals, as if amid... a museum!, almost without paying attention to the heap of genuine sand spikes placed on the tables.

That's when I came to the following conclusion: We are so self-absorbed inside a world of reproduced objects that every time we are located in a space designed to make us aware of that reproduction, we get lost along the way. I return to the exhibition in the Steppling Gallery. Most people didn't know "what to make of what they were witnessing"; they understood the natural origins of the pieces, but they didn't understand the reason for their massive reproduction. If I looked at the same individuals inside a Vons or a Wal Mart, lost before the massive reproduction of detergents, shampoos, soaps, deodorants, cereals, cans of soup, tuna, olives, peaches in syrup and other etceteras, I don't believe they would question with the same acrimony the origins of their environment. They would only be devoted to choose the necessary thing so as to leave harmonious and diluted from those establishments.

But maybe this isn't the point either. Maybe we shouldn't even look for a specific meaning in to what we observe. Maybe it is more interesting to let each one make their own impression of what they observed that night. After all, the important thing is the existence of the phenomenon, not the effects it can cause. The reaction of uncertainty in spectators—their incredulity, even their anger, when being challenged by a particular artist—tells us about the different levels or horizons of meaning that each individual gives to the surrounding reality. Denying the understanding of an artwork becomes a horizon of meaning at the same time. The pleasure or the displeasure, the acceptance or the rejection, these have nothing to do with the work. On the other hand, they have a lot to do with the multiplicity of perceptions that anyone can have before a certain phenomenon. And that is more interesting than any other thing. Because it is precisely this way that art acquires its infinite meanings. And this is better than granting it a single meaning.

Allan McCollum: Souvenirs of Mount Signal for the Imperial Valley, 2000. Plaster and latex paint; 2 1/4" x 6" x 4" each. Installed at the Steppling Gallery, San Diego State University, Calexico, California.

Personally, what I do recommend is to allow ourselves to take in the experience in its entirety. To stand in front of the particular reality, and to eat up it, to inhale it in all its purity of expression. I remember that in the Steppling Gallery a little girl observed from her point of reference those miniature mountains. Her vision of the pieces was totally different from that of the rest of the spectators. It would've been interesting to invite the present spectators to experience that girl's perspective, to seize the reality that we contemplated, and to look with smiling eyes at those natural or artificial objects that Allan McCollum presents to us, with the possible intention of reading in them a more playful and less closed minded understanding of the world that surrounds us. This way, if the multiplicity of meanings is enlarged and nurtured and supplemented, the end result would not necessarily be the sum of meanings born out of a collective experience, towards a search for an understanding, nor a reaffirmation of our environment, but rather a simple game of the imagination.