Border Crossings: Tell me about your growing up and what, if any, connection it had to art.
Allan McCollum: I grew up in a working-class family and it seemed that everybody had been some kind of artist or actor or poet. There were a couple that were pretty successful and one of them was Jon Gnagy, who had married my mother's sister. His 15 minute drawing show—I think it had a couple of different titles, but Draw With Me is the one I remember—was the first show broadcast from the Empire State Building in 1946.
BC: Which I saw in Canada, as did tens of thousands of other kids. He was famous.
AM: He was, although it wasn't like all my friends were artists, so it didn't gain me any popularity at school, or anything. But it did give me a sense that there was something else going on outside of the area I grew up in. He had lived in New York for years, and when he and my aunt came by it was like New York Bohemia coming to our house in the southern California suburb of Redondo Beach.
BC: Why do you think there such an interest in art and aesthetics in your family?
AM: I really don't know but it seems to have gone on for a number of generations. My great grandfather was a traveling ventriloquist during the Civil War, for instance. I only know sketchy stories but I know my father had been a model and an actor as a child. He had a good part in Reefer Madness, one of the worst movies ever made. My mother was a young actress and singer who studied voice all through my growing up, my grandmother was a piano teacher, and my grandfather was a draftsman and a frustrated cartoonist. My paternal grandmother was an actress and a nightclub singer, and my mother's brother was a very well-known folk singer named Sam Hinton, who released record albums in the '50s. Then many of these relatives' children went into the arts in one way or the other.
BC: I read in a few earlier interviews where you referred to your life as impoverished.
AM: It was, I guess, financially. There's no reason on earth anyone should associate being in an artistic family with being rich, or even informed, though. For instance, I have an aunt who is a wonderful watercolourist, a wonderful musician, and she also made wonderful pottery. But I never got the sense that she was studying to see what John Cage was doing, or reading contemporary criticism. She is more like a person who loves craft and the folk arts. I mean you can see from Jon Gnagy's drawings that he wasn't teaching his audience how to draw like Ben Nicholson, who was a friend of his, or like any other modern artist. He said he made his own specific choice to develop new forms of art education rather than in becoming a modern, gallery artist. But he must have been influenced by the genre artists where he grew up in Kansas because he chose all kinds of traditional middle western types of imagery that would have probably fit very well in rural Canada, too.
BC: In your case you got a high school education but didn't bother go on to university or to art school. Was there an economic reason why you didn't, or was it just lack of interest?
AM: I don't think I can separate them. I mean there wasn't any money in the family to send me to college but then again I didn't have the knowledge to know how important it was, either; and I definitely didn't have the patience for dealing with authority! I didn't have the experience of being with a really good teacher, and I was a loner, and I think I imagined that in all of my schooling I'd often been told what to do by people who were sometimes less competent than myself, and in my own ignorance about this, I imagined that all university schooling would be about the same. That's why I was very surprised when I sat in on a class ten years later at Cal Arts and realized it wasn't even remotely like public high school at all. But my mother or father hadn't been to college and none of my siblings went either, so higher education was like a blind spot in my family. In thinking back to who my best friends were, not many of them went to college either.
BC: So how did you get interested in art?
AM: Jon Gnagy's influence stayed with me in many ways, I'm only now really realizing this. He was raised in a Mennonite craft-oriented community in Kansas where everybody knew how to do everything. This is the way he described it. You didn't call a specialized carpenter to build your house; you called your friends. All the men knew how to cook and the women knew how to build a fence and there wasn't much specialization and division of labour. When he went out into the secular world he was surprised and disappointed that the rest of the world didn't function like this. He was totally serious about hating to hear somebody say "I can't draw," or "I can't sing." I remember him saying on television, " . . . people often say to me 'I can't draw a straight line.' Well, I always tell them, 'Neither can I. When I draw a straight line I use a ruler.'" He was also an avid fan of all kinds of grassroots music that didn't come from elite training. And although his ambitions weren't the same as Cézanne, he utilized Cézanne's system of breaking things down into rods, cones, cubes, and spheres. He turned Cézanne's system into a teaching technique, and he was always very clear about where he had borrowed it. I think in television he was a great innovator. In the '40s and '50s national advertising was limited to large companies, so he invented a way of promoting his books and his kits by "mass-producing" ads, in his New York television studio, for local stations all over the country. He would do ads for local art stores, he'd stand there in the studio and they'd do kinescopes of him saying 'you can buy my kits down at Jay and Kim's Art Supply Store at the corner of Main and Elm Streets.' He'd do these spot ads and send film clips out to all the local TV stations that carried his shows. That way he was literally recommending each little store by name. It must have been exciting in those days to invent marketing strategies that hadn't existed before.
BC: I remember being absolutely mesmerized by him. My whole family would sit around and watch him actually make a drawing or painting. It seemed like magic; in front of your eyes these marks would add up to a landscape. Did you share a sense of wonder in watching your uncle?
AM: Me too, I kept thinking, how did he do that? Of course they'd keep cutting to commercials, and when they came back you knew he'd done something more than what you'd seen. But he broke things down in a really clever way. He probably taught an entire generation of us to draw. And I admired his generosity very much. Not that I always found him easy to get along with. But he obviously loved new technology and anything that came out, he was the first to know about it. His goal was to democratize art. That had a really strong influence on me. For instance, like Jon, I have never done any artwork that I didn't think someone else could do just as well, before or after me. I think that reads in my artwork. It allows a person to identify with the art in a different way than they would if I were a master painter, doing something that was beyond them. I think in the end that's alienating to the viewer and asks them to deify the artist in a way that I distrust.
