JT Noh. It was Noh drama, not Kabuki. The music of course comes from Noh drama. Conversation First we considered the film’s setting: we went to the ghost town in Colorado and decided to do a ghost story with dramatic devices taken from Noh and the Western. Allan McCollum and Lilian Tone Oedipus is outside of time, he’s atemporal, because Oedipus came from the Greeks but he’s still with us and I hope he will stay with us. We can also see him as an archetype. In the film it’s hard to know at what point the action is taking place, because Lilian Tone One thing that I would like to point out is that I think Ivo invited us here to you could say that the characters are rehearsing their tragedy for all eternity… That’s show how Allan’s work transits into and out of these two models: studio practice and why the Noh masks were the most effective tool. The mask is basically a connector the more collaborative model. And I’m going to ask Allan to very briefly tell us the between Greek tragedy and the Western, that allowed us to photograph ghosts. story of his work, which stretches over thirty-five years, concentrating on the lesser- MA Well, I’d just like to thank Javier and Ivo Mesquita for giving us the opportunity known projects and on recent projects that he has developed in the last ten years. And to talk here. And of course the people at SITAC. I think that it’s going to become clear that the history of his work has covered quite JT Thank you. varied terrain while remaining the same exact project. I was very fortunate to hear Allan give an overview of his work and it was a wonderful thing to see how in the same proj- Translated by Michael Parker Stainback. ect, there are continued attempts to look for a bigger picture of the world. […] Allan McCollum Thank you, Lilian. As Lilian said, I have thirty-five years to discuss. I don’t know how I’ll describe thirty-five years in twenty or thirty minutes, so I’ll try to only say one or two sentences per project, and I apologize if I don’t give you enough infor- mation but this is the nature of the situation. I’m going to start in the 1960s. During that period I considered myself a painter, in the sense that I wanted to be an artist, and what is an artist? A painter. That was the stereotype in my head. But I wanted to include the ideas of making, production and mass production. So I produced paintings using mass-production techniques in my studio, mainly gluing two-inch-wide strips of canvas together with boat caulking, and eventually created a painting that was little more than the demonstration of how that painting was made. That was in 1969-1970. In 1975 I invented—I like to say “invented” because it sounds so silly—a “kit” for producing an artwork. These little grid paintings were made using mass-production techniques from offset lithography. I printed sixteen little shapes over and over, tore them out, and glued them together like tile-work or knitting or weaving. You could come up with any possible number of small paintings or large paintings, depending on what you wanted. And this kit would produce paintings, colors, watercolors, whatever you wanted to put on the paper. One of the reasons for this was that I was trying to be a little humorous about the formal description of a painting as being something flat, hanging on a wall. The American painters said “The first four lines of your composition are the edges of the canvas.” I decided to make art using only edges—that was part of the humor. I was very young, but I did get tired of hearing people talking about art in terms of the history of art and the history of painting. What I wasn’t hearing often enough in those days, I thought, was people talking about the art object as an object that exist- ed not only in relation to the paintings that came before it but in relation to the couch that was underneath it and the lamp that was next to it, and the people walking around ARTISTIC PRACTICES 253 looking at it. So I decided to create a kind of painting that was basically a sign for a LT Maybe you could talk a little bit about them, because so many of these works painting or something that was going to function as a theatrical prop, so that if you relate to your background in theater. installed it in a gallery my hope was that the viewer would become more aware of AM I have a small background in theater. My father was an actor and my parents were himself or herself as a viewer, walking around looking at the paintings which weren’t often in plays, in local amateur theater groups. My father was even in a few movies, really paintings—they were symbols that stood for paintings like props in a play. sometimes only as a walk-on. I was used to noticing the backgrounds of movies when I developed this idea in a number of ways. One of the offshoots of this idea watching TV because sometimes my father would walk by. Growing up in Los Angeles, was a series called Glossies in 1980. These were imitations of photographs. The sub- it is not an atypical experience to see people you know in the backgrounds of movies. ject of this work was meant to be more how it felt to go through photographs as opposed I didn’t go to art school but I did take a few theater classes in high school and was to actually looking at them, because all they were was watercolor and ink on paper in some local plays. I remember being influenced by the thinking of Bertolt Brecht as I with plastic laminate adhered over their surfaces. They looked and felt like photographs understood it, about the importance of recognizing that you are presenting a play, and but in fact they weren’t. I would leave them on a table during exhibitions. then in the mind of the audience, the importance of recognizing that the play is a play, Another series was called the Surrogate Paintings, so I’m going to keep referring not reality, and that you are a viewer—not to disappear into a sort of fantasy of identifica- to it that way. A supplement to the Surrogate Paintings was a series of photographs— tion with the performers, but rather to be aware of the entire social situation. So his plays Surrogates on Location—that I did, not as an artwork but as a kind of a supplement had constant devices to remind you that you were watching a play. This stuck in my mind. that I would sometimes send to magazines if they asked for photos, or that I would When I first began learning about art—I learned mostly through reading—I read hang on the wall wherever I was asked to exhibit. They were just pictures that I had about Alan Kaprow and John Cage and the Fluxus artists, who were very concerned taken of the television when I saw an object in the background that reminded me of with calling attention to the conditions of the gallery, the performance, the experience one of my surrogates. of the artwork. That was very important to me from the beginning. That, and mass Connected to this habit of taking pictures of images on television, I developed production—the latter probably because my parents worked in factories and my friends’ a series called The Plaster Surrogates—this was in the early 1980s. These were the parents worked in factories and I found a pleasure in factory work, in group work, same as the Surrogate Paintings but cast in plaster. I could make hundreds and hun- team work, this sort of thing. dreds of them if I wanted to. The work’s topic included the idea of looking for the LT About your family, you had an uncle [who influenced you, in terms of] making kits differences between the individual works. I used many different colors of frames, dif- on how to produce artworks. ferent colors of brown, so that each one was unique. I made over a couple of thousand AM I had an uncle who made kits on how to draw, Jon Gnagy. They were sold nation- of them—not that each was sold individually: they were usually configured and sold in ally in the United States and he had a television show on learning to draw. I didn’t know large groups. They were always unique: they had all the characteristics that a painting him very well, but since he was my uncle I somehow identified with him when I saw him was supposed to have except that they were sort of a cross between a mass-pro- on television. One thing I liked about him was that he never drew anything unless he duced object and the kind of painting you’d see in a gallery. could tell you how to draw it yourself. He thought that anyone could be an artist and During the same period, I was doing a series called Perpetual Photos. All the I was influenced by this, too. I think I have never done any project that I couldn’t explain while I was trying to reinforce the idea of a prop that could stand for an artwork.