Allan McCollum at Galerie Thomas Schulte

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This is perfect, exactly what we've been talking about, the interpretative box of art, a painting as tarot card, tea leaves, humans as meaning production machines. Make an object that performs it, dancing, meaning. 

Allan McCollum at Thomas Schulte

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Words becomes their blotted ink test: viewer create shape in them. For many, there is a lot to worry about; everything will not be okay. Saying otherwise is hard irony. You'll notice it's 90+% white people, a few police. Taking words and turning them to lip service. A dehumanizing project.


see too: Allan McCollum at Mary Boone, Allan McCollum at Petzel

Allan McCollum at Mary Boone

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McCollum's brute force attack on "creativity," ironizing uniqueness with its interminable variation, like try and stand out in this crowd kid, pulling out the cornerstones of value with machine made uniqueness, the scary "algorithm," and handcrafted replaced with stand-ins, surrogates, and stage props. Making uniqueness bland. How cruel. Showing on the doll where the creativity hurt him. It all ends in death. Did you think your bones were unique. etc.


See too: Rob Pruitt at MOCAD

Group Show at Greene Naftali

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How quickly this work has accumulated the look of the academic.  Possibly because it all went in hand with the theory that consumed it as their banner in its initial flourish it has as quickly dehydrated in the burning of its moments usefulness. Harrison’s dissonant abstraction, packaging the painter's studio schizo positioning of inside/out, its initial edge worn to the look of safety scissors in its childlike spoils. Or as recent as 2008 writers speaking of Krebber’s ability to “make us nervous” or in 2013 still describing his second 2003 Greene Naftali exhibition, “these works were if anything even more unfriendly to critics and collectors expecting a show of Important European Painting.”  Yet who today is really nervous about these text paintings. Surely for all the descriptive language of “evasion, deflection, deferral and refusal; diffidence, apprehension, ambivalence and doubt” and the sloganesque “preferring not to” Krebber’s greatest “evasion” was his willingness for absorption into those so willing have him, the conceptual disposability of a practice premised on the initial shock of the “evasion” in plain sites, readied for gallery’s recoup, to be making the most historically assailable paintings around. A horse on a wall as if mocking it all from behind the wall of the institution. The murderer dreaming not of the murder but of tacks placed on the map of the detective.

Allan McCollum at Petzel



So McCollum continues his endless objects, repeating one singular idea. 31 billion hopeless object, higher than peak population, the good schoolboy bringing enough to share, no two snowflakes alike.
A strange market, even distribution amongst population and they would be valueless, without rarity in their uniqueness, but a collector’s majority stake, hoarding wealth like diamonds, irradiating gold, that old Dr.No trick, a governed population, produces power. McCollum still playing in the 1980’s 8bits when today whole new versions of crypto-wealth premised on staggering permutations of bits, 128, and the mining of time in numbers larger than the mass of a universe. This looks comparatively Kinkade quaint. A cold humanism, depressing individuality. The endgame summated in the center of far sides's black/white sea innumerate, an individual, a penguin, singing, “I gotta be me, Oh I just gotta be me.”