Assignment 2 Modernist art and theory in relation to Allan McCollum’s Surrogates
- Marina WitteMann
- Sep 7, 2018
- 7 min read
Updated: Jun 16, 2020
For a definition of Modernism in large I begin with this:
The terms modernism and modern art are generally used to describe the succession of art movements that critics and historians have identified since the realism of Gustav Courbet and culminating in abstract art and its developments in the 1960s. (TATE, Modernism [Online] Available from: https://www.tate.org.uk/art/art-terms/m/modernism [Accessed 03/09/18]) But it would be too simple to call Modern as “the way from the last realism artists thought abstract and toward postmodernism”. Of course here is important to mention about Clement Greenberg’s (1960) “Modernist Painting”, who was so to say “The father” of modernist theory, and here is valuable to quote him:
…flatness was the only condition painting shared with no other art, Modernist painting oriented itself to flatness as it did to nothing else. … The essential norms or conventions of painting are also the limiting conditions with which a marked-up surface must comply in order to be experienced as a picture. Modernism has found that these limits can be pushed back indefinitely before a picture stops being a picture and turns into an arbitrary object; but it has also found that the further back these limits are pushed the more explicitly they have to be observed and indicated. (Greenberg (1960) 2,5)
Defining flatness as the essential norm of modernist painting he pointed theoretical end of this natural border. But artists, I suppose, like to challenge all theoretical aspects so this border between painting and an arbitrary object immediately found its realisation in practice.
These movements didn’t arise suddenly, for instance, Kasimir Malevich “with his White on White series ... pushed the limits of abstraction to an unprecedented degree. Reducing pictorial means to their bare minimum, he not only dispensed with the illusion of depth and volume but also rid painting of its seemingly last essential attribute, colour.” (TATE, Kazimir Malevich [Online])
Alexander Rodchenko in 1921 took the physical matter out of the painting and left only colour - Pure Red Colour, Pure Yellow Colour, Pure Blue Colour. He declared that there is no representative art it is only canvases on the wall.
Alexander Rodchenko Pure Red Color (Chistyi krasnyi tsvet), Pure Yellow Color (Chistyizheltyi tsvet), Pure Blue Color (Chistyi sinii tsvet). 1921 Oil on canvas. Each panel 62.5 x 52.5 cm. A. Rodchenko and V. Stepanova Archive, Moscow [Online] Available from: https://www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/1998/rodchenko/texts/death_of_painting_jpg.html [Accessed 07/09/18]
With this in mind, this was not the ultimate border of a plain narrative. In 1996 Thierry de Duve in a chapter “The monochrome and the blank canvas” in his book “Kant after Duchamp” argued statements of Greenberg and as an example refers to Frank Stell’s black paintings.
Frank Stella The Marriage of Reason and Squalor, II 1959. Enamel on canvas, (230.5 x 337.2 cm) [Online] Available from: https://www.moma.org/learn/moma_learning/frank-stella-the-marriage-of-reason-and-squalor-ii-1959 [Accessed 03/09/18]
At this stage, Duve addresses the rhetorical question of what can be called a modern painting and how exactly we can define this? Around 1960 some artists started more and more exaggerate “flatness” and definition of painting itself. The difference between the art objects, like painting or sculpture, became indifferent. Still, Clement Greenberg was supporting his essential idea of two-dimensionality, and three-dimensionality would mean non-art and so no painting.
Nonetheless, minimal art which flourished since Frank Stella integrated more and more different examples of works which couldn’t be called a painting nor sculpture. Donald Judd, for instance, creates an “art objects” which “are not accountable to the tradition of either modernist painting or modernist sculpture.” (Duve,1996:231-232).
Minimalism by Frank Stella ‘What you see is what you see’ (MoMa, Modernism [Online])
So it turned that modernism not limited to flatness and canvas, it can be more than this. Painting transformed into the art object and can be essentially everything. For example “Reinhardt believed that his Black Paintings (1953-67) were the absolute zero of art.” (The art story, Ad Reinhardt [Online] Available from: https://www.theartstory.org/artist-reinhardt-ad-artworks.htm#pnt_5 [Accessed 07/09/18]).
Or another example, Robert Rauschenberg intentionally removed all authorial marks, so no any gesture of artist's hand, only domestic white colour. Rauschenberg believed that this would give a viewer a feeling of real art, kind of interaction with it – some shadows on the surface, a reflection of the light, dust and fly which can sit on the art object, sounds.
Another artist Yves Klein “...was genuinely fascinated by mystical ideas, by notions of the infinite, the indefinable, the absolute, and his use of a single rich and suggestive tone of blue might be seen as an attempt to free the viewer from all imposed ideas and let their mind soar. For, as Klein believed, lines in pictures were a form of "prison grating," and only colour offered the path to freedom.” (The art story, Yves Klein [Online] Available from: https://www.theartstory.org/artist-klein-yves.htm [Accessed 07/09/18]).
Yves Klein, Blue Monochrome, 1961 Dry pigment in synthetic polymer medium on cotton over plywood (195.1 x 140 cm) [Online] Available from: https://www.moma.org/collection/works/80103?artist_id=3137&locale=en&page=1&sov_referrer=artist [Accessed 07/09/18]
Coming back to Allan McCollum and his series of work which called Surrogate we need to have an understanding of what surrogates can be? Cambridge dictionary defines Surrogate as - someone or something that replaces or is used instead of someone or something else; a substitute for another. Pretending to be someone else – what can it mean in sense of this art object?
Surrogate Paintings... series have begun in 1978. ... made from wood and museum board, glued and pressed together, and painted all over with many coats of paint. Each Surrogate Painting is unique in size. (McCollum, 1968-2016, 9) Plaster Surrogates with black centres are given different coloured “mats” and “frames,” using enamel paints. ...different sizes of Plaster Surrogates have been painted with ... different frame colours, which have been combined with around a dozen different mat colours, which can produce many thousands of unique Plaster Surrogates. The Plaster Surrogates are grouped into collections of many different quantities. (McCollum, 1968-2016, 11)
Firstly, The Plaster Surrogates perhaps pretend to substitute something which seems to us as a painting? As we just looked through the modernist art development we saw that monochrome painting was changing its essential meaning, from painting without limits, via "arbitrary objects" up to epic theory about it. In Plaster Surrogates McCollum probably makes a point of the primacy in art. When Greenberg had supported painting as the main medium, perhaps McCollum uses monochromes in order to substitute the multitude into one work, create a different medium. McCollum at the beginning of his career was interested in understanding of the edges of the canvas. That’s why first works of him are basically glued together, so the artist not taking the material as an apriori right beginning for action (the act of paint or draw) but he builds it how he needs. Thus edges of the art object became important. One art piece with a frame would create a separate painting and at the same time, one art object contains a number of paintings. I could see here the discussion of the position of the painting and the object in art.
Secondly, the question raises about the purpose of such a quantity of “paintings” with a flat surface which by the way quite unique (we can see it in the way of the production)?! “Handmade but standardized, Collection of ... Plaster Surrogates integrates art and mass production, challenging conventional distinctions between these types of labour.” (MOMA, McCollum Collection of Forty Plaster Surrogates 1982 (cast and painted in 1984) [Online] Available from: https://www.moma.org/collection/works/79653 [Accessed 03/09/18])
During the presentation of the artist from Institute of fine arts in New York (available on Vimeo) he mentioned that economy of the gallery is an interesting aspect to him as well as a choice of the customer… how they choose 100$ artwork? So here artist likely experiments with viewers and represents a micro-economy in the Gallery space.
Here I would say we are facing rather a presentation of “the commodity form in which paintings and sculptures inevitably participated as they were forced to compete in a market for art increasingly looked just like any other.” (Krauss, 1999, 11). Andy Warhol was repeating cans of soup in 1962 as a reflection on consumerism and in the same way, McCollum refers to modern history and repeats art pieces as mass production in art. Here is obvious artist's concern about the relationship between mass-manufacturing and crafting artworks as one of the aspects of the modern art theory.
Thirdly, quoting the artist “not allow the viewer to get lost in a fiction” but rather let viewer absorb and realise that he is in an Art Gallery and in front of him a painting (or something in between painting and object). Also, the space in a Gallery is like a part of "a theatre” where art object as important as viewer itself who plays a role. This idea correlates with the “Distancing effect” introduced by German playwright Bertolt Brecht. This form of acting involved a man as a viewer, in other words, he needs to be aware that in front of him is a play and this play is here in order to make a point of position the question. Likewise McCollum request from the viewer this awareness.
All things considered, if modernism is a period which finished with postmodernism and if modern art can be called something which is happening now, it seems reasonable to assume that Allan McCollum’s work Plaster Surrogates has a big relationship to this theories. With monochrome colour referring to the past and uniting one painting into the art object, positioning the problem of the primacy in art. Quantity of paintings and at the same time uniqueness of them, repetition and production represent the relationship with theory production of modern art. And in the end, the viewer becomes a part of this “artwork theatre”.
Bibliography and references
1. Cambridge Dictionary [Online] Available from: https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/surrogate [Accessed 03/09/18]
2. Thierry de Duve (1996) Kant after Duchamp, “The monochrome and the blank canvas”, The MIT Press, Cambridge
3. Series’ of Artworks by Allan McCollum from 1968 to 2016 Brief Descriptions [Online] Available from: http://artarchives.net/allanmccollum/projects1967-2016/descriptions.pdf [Accessed 03/09/18]
4. Allan McCollum. Twenty Plaster Surrogates, 1982/91. Enamel on cast Hydrostone. This installation: 81 x 74 inches [Online] Available from: http://allanmccollum.net/amcnet2/album/plastersurrogates5.html [Accessed 03/09/18]
5. Allan McCollum. Plaster Surrogates, 1982/84. Enamel on cast Hydrostone. [Online] Available from: http://allanmccollum.net/amcnet2/album/plastersurrogates4.html [Accessed 03/09/18]
6. Allan McCollum. Plaster Surrogates, 1982/83. Enamel on cast Hydrostone. [Online] Available from: http://allanmccollum.net/amcnet2/album/plastersurrogates3.html [Accessed 03/09/18]
7. Allan McCollum. Plaster Surrogates, 1982/84. Enamel on cast Hydrostone. [Online] Available from: http://allanmccollum.net/amcnet2/album/plastersurrogates2.html [Accessed 03/09/18]
8. TATE, Modernism [Online] Available from: https://www.tate.org.uk/art/art-terms/m/modernism [Accessed 03/09/18]
9. Greenberg (1960) “Modernist Painting”
10. MoMA Kazimir Malevich [Online] Available from: https://www.moma.org/collection/works/80385?artist_id=3710&locale=en&page=1&sov_referrer=artist [Accessed 07/09/18]
11. Rosalind Krauss (1999) A voyage on the North Sea, Thames & Hudson Ltd, London
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