Enter the Barbarians: Essays on the History and Culture of the Post-Appropriation Art of the 1980s –Vol. I: Allan McCollum
by Richard Milazzo.

First edition paperback: March 2024.
Designed by Richard Milazzo.
256 pages, 41 black and white illustrations, a black and white photograph of the artist by Peter Bellamy on the frontispiece, an exhibition history, a bibliography, and biographical notes about the author and the artist.
9.25 x 6.5 in., printed, sewn and bound in Savignano sul Panaro, Italy.
ISBN: 1-893207-51-X  //  ISBN: 978-1-893207-51-6.
Published by Tsukuda Island Press, Hayama and Tokyo, Japan, 2022.

RETAIL PRICE: $40.00 (includes postage and handling)

In this, the first volume of the series, Enter the Barbarians: Essays on the History and Culture of the Post-Appropriation Art of the 1980s, Richard Milazzo focuses on Allan McCollum’s work – his inordinate effort to distance himself from the artists of the 1980s, and to reinvent himself as a ’70s and ’90s and beyond artist in a futile attempt to relocate himself on the so-called ‘right side of history.’ “Politikal (sic) correctness at its most problematical,” according to the author. Enter the Barbarians also analyzes other artists of the 1980s, such as Gretchen Bender and Sarah Charlesworth, and their related cooption by the academic Picture Theory school of criticism, even as the so-called “Pictures Generation” “hitched a ride on the backs of the post-critical work and success of the post-appropriation artists,” of which McCollum is one.

In what amounts to an exposé, the author shows how McCollum endeavors to alter his identity, and the facts of his evolution as an artist, describing this Houdiniesque phenomenon in great detail in such chapters as “The Barbarism of History,” “Duchamp and the Anti-Duchampian Ethos: Bidlo, Levine and Gober,” and “The Horror of ‘Making History Forgotten,’” bringing not only Adorno and the Frankfurt School, Debord and the Situationists, but also applying his own theory of ‘poignant dialectics’ to bear upon the arguments, in which contradiction upon contradiction stand relentlessly in apposition to each other.  This, among the author’s efforts to counter the cherry-picking of facts and the construction of an ‘alternative reality’ in the specious spirit of POV (point-of-view) and worthy of Fox News.

This volume of Enter the Barbarians is predicated upon the author’s critical texts devoted to Allan McCollum’s work written during the course of four decades, from 1984 to 2020. Part One presents a much expanded version of the lecture, “Neo-Expressionism, Picture Theory Art, Post-Appropriation, and the Spectacle and Meta-Spectacle of the 1980s – Allan McCollum (Gretchen Bender, Sarah Charlesworth),” the author delivered at the conference “Political Values, Market Values, Art Values: The Ethics of American Art in the 1980s” organized by AnnMarie Perl and Anthony Grudin, Department of Art and Archeology, University Center for Human Values, Council of Humanities and Program in American Studies, Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey, October 31, 2020. It includes the seminal email exchanges between the author and Allan McCollum that took place between May 11 and June 13, 2017. It also includes a paper the author wrote and made available for a class on McCollum and Koons to which he was invited in the same department, October 15, 2021, originally titled the “The Horror of Forgetting History.”

Part Two of Enter the Barbarians is comprised of the author’s critique (an extensive deconstruction) of the artist’s recent monograph Allan McCollum: Works Since 1969, accompanying his eponymous exhibition, organized by the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, in September 2021, and published by DelMonico Books and D.A.P. The author shows how McCollum’s persistent efforts to ‘rebrand’ (sic) himself is accommodated by so-called ‘institutional critique.’

Part Three collects texts previously written and co-written by the author from 1984 to 2016, in various monographs, catalogues and magazines such as New Observations, Tema Celeste, and Kunstforum, subject only to minor revisions.

Enter the Barbarians also includes critical discourses he will elaborate at still greater length in his forthcoming book, Scam Likely: Post-Critical Essays on Art and Culture, 1988-2023, where he disputes terms like ‘Neo Geo’ and ‘Simulationism,’ used in a reductive way not only to compromise Peter Halley’s thinking and work but also to stigmatize a whole generation, namely the post-appropriation artists, in essays such as “Slouching Toward Avenue ‘D’ for Dialectics,” “The Problem with Craig Owens’ Puerilism,” and “‘Art History, After Sherrie Levine’ and Mike Bidlo.”

One might ask: how could this series, Enter the Barbarians, not take for its conceptual and visceral emblem Cavafy’s poem, “Waiting for the Barbarians”:

Why this sudden bewilderment, this confusion?
(How serious people’s faces have become.)
Why are the streets and squares emptying so rapidly,
everyone going home lost in thought

     Because night has fallen and the barbarians
     haven’t come. And some of our men
     just in from the border say
     there are no barbarians any longer.

Now what’s going to happen to us without barbarians?
Those people were a kind of solution.

And for its abiding visual trope, the series has taken to heart, as in many of the author’s books, Picasso’s painting Family of Satimbanques (1905), in which we see the players, the circus performers – ‘sword-swallowers,’ ‘clowns,’ ‘fire-eaters,’ ‘tight-rope walkers,’ ‘harlequins,’ so to speak, one and all – spent and dispersing in opposite directions, or, as Debord puts it, “a structuring without community,” this, even in relation to the author’s vaunted theory of the meta-Spectacle.

In the end, the author writes: “McCollum is even willing to seek out and assign value and credit to his father’s work as a minor actor and extra in the movies of the 1930s and ’40s in a poignant series of works he calls The Uncredited, and yet is unwilling to acknowledge, much less credit and value, the seminal role his own work played in the 1980s as one of the major actors of this diverse, controversial, unruly and gifted generation of artists.”