LA CIENEGA AREA

Since 1975, Allan McCollum has become well known for his generic or surrogate paintings. Hung salon style, these painted plaster props resembled international symbols for paintings, reducing the artwork to the bare essentials of image, mat and frame. By turning painting into a simulation or symbol of itself, McCollum deflected attention away from issues of image or the language of representation, focusing instead on the art work as pure object, a stereotype of repetitious serial production where any sense of “difference” had more to do with nuances of size and color than real material values.

“Perfect Vehicles,” McCollum’s latest exhibit, moves into more overtly political and psychological realms, taking on the slippery subject of the “Fine Arts” through a series of painted plaster Chinese vases. McCollum contends that a household object like a common vase becomes a valuable art object largely by losing its utilitarian status. Priceless Sevres porcelain or Attic earthenware, for example, are rarely exploited for their original function, but are instead displayed and treasured for their artistic/historical “worth” as objects. McCollum satirizes this state of mind by eschewing pretentions to utility altogether. His vases are solid, and thus constitute perfect vehicles toward that elevated state of connoisseurship--unmitigated value.

While McCollum’s conceptual critique of the (art) market economy and mass production could be read as a cynical exploitation of a self-fulfilling prophesy, he also works in far more subtle ways, creating objects that both resonate with ambiguity and allude to wider archetypal schema. Mounted on rectangular plinths and arranged in seven rows of five, the identically molded vases are differentiated only by their varying candy colors and enamel finishes. It is this repetition, however, that imbues the exhibit with its eerie presence. The lidded vases suddenly begin to take on the aura of strange totems. Are they tin soldiers with pointed Teutonic helmets, bowling pins, chess pieces, or simply iconic substitutions for “real” aesthetic pleasures? That the answer is perhaps all and none of these things underlines McCollum’s success and failure as an artist. The more he tries to remove himself from the art process, the more visible he becomes as a crafty manipulator of his audience’s desires. (Kuhlenschmidt/Simon, 9000 Melrose Ave., to Oct. 11.)