ALLAN MCCOLLUM: If you can draw these simple forms–
the ball, cone, cube, and cylinder– you can draw
a real picture the very first time you try.
- I had an Uncle– his name was Jon Gnagy– who had a television show
Learn to Draw.
-Today we're going to draw
a snow scene, in which we make the paper work for us.
We don't have to do too much work ourselves.
- And he would design these drawings that he could then
teach other people how do to.
- Just put in those ragged
strokes, always remembering that a pine tree is a rough cone form.
That post, you know, is a cylinder form,
so you shade it down the left,
like this, to really make it Round out.
Remember, our light's coming from the other– upper right.
Yes, it used to be that the mailbox was the chief point of
contact, but, you know, nowadays, a lot of these folks
have television.
-You know, I knew him, and
I just got the feeling that it never occurred to him to come up
with a painting or drawing that he couldn't tell someone else
step-by-step how to do.
So I was just a child, but that influenced me.
Whenever I design a project,
it's in my head while I'm designing it that I would be
able to show someone else how to do it.
This looks a little bare up here, but for now, it's okay,
I guess.
The drawings that I sent
to Sao Paulo were done in 1989, and they were created from
templates that I made in 1988.
The stimulus for this particular drawings were triggered by an interest
in heraldry and the way that families come up with images to
represent their family.
And I was thinking about symbols, and I was thinking,
"Well, okay, we typically create
singular symbols so that we can all feel we belong."
Like, we look at the American
flag, and we say, "Oh, we're all Americans."
It occurred to me that if one used a certain kind of logic
and really worked at it, one could come up with a system
that would produce a shape for everybody on the planet.
The idea of trying to picture a billion or a million
Is something we think we can do. But we can't.
Say you're a general in the
army, and you have to send al these troops out to have
a battle, and you know only so many are going to come back,
and it's gonna break your heart and make you sick unless you
start thinking of them as all alike in some way:
just soldiers, just units, you know.
And, I mean, that's an extreme
example, but there's times when you have to think about people
in categories, or you'll go crazy.
But that can go wrong also, and
it's something you have to watch and think about.
One of the things that I'm a little concerned about is,
when you get, like, a whole bunch of the same width
and the same...
- Mm-hmm.
- you know, that's just another thing to...
- Wait, you mean like different sizes?
- Like, you don't want two the
same size together.
You don't want two the same width together.
You don't want two...
- Yeah.
- I mean, it's so funny. It has nothing to do with what's
in the frame, you know? [both chuckle]
Sometimes you can't do anything
about it, but if you can, you know, shift it so that--
-Okay, so I'll double-check that.
-Yeah, I mean, that's just one thing.
In my youth, I worked in factories quite a lot.
I mean, I worked in industrial kitchens quite a lot.
And my parents worked in factories.
I found myself wanting to try to
work in quantities and make things that were singular and
unique at the same time.
We probably define uniqueness by
thinking, "Oh, it's not mass-produced."
I felt I wanted to resolve that on a higher level.
But there is, of course, the drama of thousands of things.
It can be nightmarish, or it can be wonderful feeling of
abundance, and it can go back and forth.
And there's a lot of emotionality when you see
thousands of things.
Some people would want to run
out of the room when there's too many objects to look at,
and other people would stand there in awe.
There's also a kind of science fiction element in here where–
of, like, something that sort of takes over and grows.
When I'm juggling ideas of what I'm gonna do next,
one of the considerations that's major always in my mind is, "Does it
make a good story?"
I put it in my mind that it
would be interesting to work with people I had never met,
that I only communicated with over email or telephone.
Like, you go in to see the exhibit.
Well, it could just be looked at as a bunch of little decorative objects.
But there's a story that goes with it.
You can tell it rather quickly.
I wanted it to be: "Oh, the artist went on the internet.
The artist found four people
from the state of Maine who all of whom worked from their homes
and all of whom made shapes, and he never met them.
It was sort of about the– the exotic, faraway place,
I mean, which, to me–
I've only been to Maine once in my life, and it seems very
exotic to me, Maine.
[low, deep rumbling]
And I started becoming interested in people who had
businesses in their homes and also kind of very independent.
And kind of like the contrary to our obsession with globalism
right now, you know, is that there are people locally all
around us working in their homes, making thousands of things.
I looked on the web.
I looked up "Maine," you know, On– googled, "Maine, craft,
home," you know, all the words that would lead me to people who
worked at home and made craft in Maine.
And I had to sift through hundreds and hundreds and–
and slowly realized, "This is a huge thing in maine: you know,
people working at home making crafts and then selling them on
the internet.
I chose a narrow group of them who basically did shapes,
Like rubber stamps, ornaments,
silhouettes, and cookie cutters.
And then I wrote them lengthy emails about my work and what
my interests were and why I wanted do to this, I mean,
emails that--much too long, I'm sure.
- I had no idea who he was.
My first thought was that he might be a kid claiming
to be an artist.
Of course, you don't ever know on an email.
And then after I investigated and went to his website,
I found out that he was quite an accomplished contemporary artist.
[metal clicks softly] -The cookie cutter people?
I don't know–
I don't know how they–
I never watched how they did what they did, so they–
If they invented a new– a way they hadn't done before–
I do know that they used to make snowflakes, and there's no way
this shape is more complicated than the snowflakes
they were making.
[laughs]
-Some of his shapes were very difficult.
It was challenging.
[chuckles]
And actually, I would say, after making the shapes for Allan,
That I'm improved.
I mean, I'm better at what I do because– because of that
project, because I actually learned how to do some things better.
- I've been doing combinatorial projects for 40 years.
All my projects have had combinatorial elements, where
I'm taking a vocabulary of parts and putting them together to
make something else, you know, which is very computerlike,
but there was never any computer Involved.
The Shapes Drawings Individual Works Project,
neither of which involved any computers.
The drawings even look like the shapes that I'm working on
now, but they were all done by hand with pencil.
And I didn't have a computer at that time.
In those days, I was using photocopiers and stencils and
things like that.
Whereas if I had to do this with stencils, it would've taken me
an hour, but what I can do now is just reach up here
and copy one shape, like that, and then go over here
and copy another one, and then I can put those together.
And then copy a bottom, and put that together.
And then copy, you know, a bottom that goes on the right,
and we'll put that together.
And then I have a shape, and it has its own I.D. Number.
I mean, this just doesn't take very long.
So with these four shapes, I can make around 200 or so million
unique shapes.
But there's another system where I use six shapes,
and then there's these things I call necks, like your neck.
Like, this is a body with a neck, and then the top part
is a head.
So then once you start using this system, you can produce
60 billion shapes.
Once I got all the shapes made, I started combining them into
tops and bottoms.
Then instead of making four parts, I would only have to put
together two at a time.
Then I put them in what I call arrays of 144.
So I can copy this array and combine it with this array.
Then I'm making 144 shapes at once, and that's called
a collection.
That's how I produce them: in collections of 144.
The number 144, there's an irony to it 'cause it's considered
a gross in industry.
This is one of the collections that was sent to horace varnum
to do the wooden shapes.
-Every one is absolutely unique.
Every one is different.
ome, you sit there, and you work with them.
You cut with them.
And it's almost like sitting in a psychologist's office, and you
see shapes: this is a wolf head. This is an angel.
This is–
So it's fun. [machine whirring]
See, it's soft enough that it
won't cause any damage, unless you're doing it for an hour or two.
It's what thieves do to take off their fingerprints.
[laughs]
-The idea of making an object for everybody in the world
is absurd. Yeah, of course.
I mean, I couldn't possibly do it.
But it would be nice if everyone in the world– doesn't this sound
like a child talking– if everyone in the world could
agree on a symbolic system, You know?
And it hasn't happened yet, but it's– I think it's–
it might, you know, one day.
[soft electronic music]