Photo from TV with Painting, 1981.

It should be noted that each of Allan McCollum's Perpetual Photos is based on or derived from a parallel series of works, Photo from TV with Painting. In other words, the latter works serve as the source (or source-situation) for the former works. The Photo(s) from TV with Painting are literally just that: photographs of scenes from TV shows or news events that include a painting or paintings in them. It is this painting or paintings, which usually go unperceived or unnoticed in the 'scene', that are then isolated and magnified to become the presiding element or focus of the Perpetual Photos. In effect, the secondary or background material of the Photo from TV with Painting, which, in a sense, functions as the latent or subliminal content of the image, is transformed, through this process of hyper-isolation and magnification, i.e., 'refamiliarization,' into the primary or foreground material of the Perpetual Photo, which becomes now the manifest, de-sublimated content of the image. This procedure objectifies the experience of looking more deeply or closely at the stream of phenomena and 'values' that are being presented to the surface layer of perception. Even where such examination yields, in its specificity, ambiguous results (witness the amorphous forms that constitute the content of the Perpetual Photos), nevertheless it emphasizes, in general, the principle that perception constitutes itself as a social construct, a mutable percept that is not only the outcome of facts but is subject to the process of facts, interpretation, the exigencies of temporality, and, more often than not, a hermeneutic that is generated by special interests. In this regard, the Perpetual Photos serve structurally and specifically as a telling comment upon the source situation of the 'original' photograph (Photo from TV with Painting). The fact that the 'commentary' yields generally an opaque content speaks to the absurdity of the 'situation-comedy' of the Social, and ultimately, to the threshold- conditions of the mortal predicament. (Tricia Collins and Richard Milazzo)

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