Allan McCollum
interviewed by Thomas Lawson

Allan McCollum reviews his work from the late 1960's to the present and discusses his ongoing obsession with the question of what makes an object an "art object." McCollum is best known for creating enormous quantities of singularly unique objects, which, by sheer power of their numbers, force us to rethink notions of identity and uniqueness.

McCollum: “We live in a world filled with substitutions for things that are absent, since every copy, in a certain sense, only exists because the original is gone. So copies are always about something absent, and in that way, they carry a sense of mourning, death, or loss. [...] I think that we all lose out when we all ask our artists to eliminate their feelings about large quantities from their vocabulary of expression just to please a certain exclusive group. And for this reason it's really important that as artists we should feel free to take a stand on this point by making as many artworks as we want.”

1996, 9 x 12 inches
96pp, 258 b&w and 76 color reproductions

Hardcover, ISBN 0-923183-21-3 $25.00

Softcover, ISBN 0-923183-14-0 $17.00