Moulds, Casts and Clichés

On Knowledge in Allan McCollum’s Projects

Abstract

The article focuses on the work of the contemporary American artist Allan McCollum. For several decades McCollum has been investigating the condition of artefacts and objects in culture and science, their semantic potential and the status of uniqueness imparted to them, for example, in the practices of collecting or the commonness achieved through the process of mass production. In projects carried out in the 1990s, such as The Dog from Pompei, Lost Objects, Natural Copies and The Event. Petrified Lightning from Central Florida, McCollum made casts of hundreds of objects in collaboration with archaeological and science museums, such as the body of a dog killed by the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 CE, casts of dinosaur bones and their natural footprints, and thousands of casts of natural forms created by the melting of quartz sand after a lightning strike. In all these cases, the casts are presented in the galleries in even rows, arranged on tables, pedestals or on the floor, imitating museum objects while at the same time operating as a parody of the uniqueness of natural objects. They are always accompanied by ‘literature’ − scientific studies of their origin and history. The article refers to the way the objects are displayed and their scientific elaborations evokes the oppressive classification system of the museum, the role of the museum as an expression of the dominant ideology and the practice of museification as an element of the exercise of power, as indicated by Michel Foucault and followed by Douglas Crimp and Eilean Hooper-Greenhill, among others.