ROBERT CUMMING’S ECCENTRIC ILLUSIONS
SINCE MOVING TO CALIFORNIA IN 1970 from the Midwest, Robert Cumming has collected movie stills and has made slide documentations of the California milieu, documentations of Hollywood movie lots, the Golden Glove Awards and other Hollywood events. In addition, he has photographed the behind-the-scenes workings of the Rose Parade, the Farmer John pig mural and other strange visions on the California landscape. Theatrical elements are evident in Cumming’s recent photographic illusions. His use of stagings, on-location settings, real/unreal mixtures, and indoor-outdoor confusions are reminiscent of moviedom techniques. According to Cumming, “The turn toward illusion probably came as the result of thousands of slides taken in Southern California of illusion architecture, painting, and movie sets, not to mention the ‘surfacy’ mood of everything that seemed to transpire in the area without question:”*
During the past two years, Cumming, born in Worcester, Massachusetts in 1943, has produced a series of photographic works concerned with illusion. The pieces—8″ x 10″ contact-printed photographs and a few enlargements—are nonheroic narratives, rich in visual intrigue and humor. Complex in conception, methodology, and construction, these works represent a search for new “content.”
Settings, devices, and props caught in space, discrepancies in scale, and negative manipulations are essential to the creation of Cumming’s illusions. The photographic format fixes the illusory realities. A tilted trapezoid becomes a normal tabletop, reversed images become different sides of a building, miniature becomes lifesize, and frozen split-seconds of a barrier explosion are produced by the stationary positions of wired fragments. The photographic presentation also provides clues, the precise details recorded by the 8″ x 10″ contact prints, which give away the illusions on close study.
The 50-odd illusion pieces vary in subject and methodology. Chair Trick (1973) portrays a floating chair, one of a small number of magic-trick subjects. Like other early illusion pieces, Chair Trick was staged at night in Cumming’s narrow strip of backyard under floodlights. The lightstands present in the photograph recall the props present in movie stills. Close observation exposes a sheet of glass as a simple supporting device. Broken Screen or It Was Around Dinner When the Ball Went Through the Screen (1974) is a pair of sequential photographs depicting the split-seconds before and after an ordinary event. One of his most complicated and artificial works to date, Broken Screen results from many props and devices. The exterior of the house is actually a five-foot-high staging photographed indoors, the interior view is a projected image, the ball is fixed with a wire, and the breaking screen is scratched or “drawn” on identical negatives. The subject would slip by the viewer through its sheer banality were it not for the visibility of the wire, the quality of the drawn line, and other inconsistencies. Like the house owned by Universal Studios which occurs one year in Hazel and another in Marcus Welby M.D., the “house” in Broken Screen has been around before. Before it was a house, it was a garage. The transition from garage, wooden wall with no apertures, to housefront, wall with two windows and a door, is the subject of 3 Sides of a Small House (1974)—each photograph purporting to be the view of another side actually represents the addition of another feature. 2 Explanations for a Small, Split Pond (1974) presents fantastic explanations, one in which the water from a split bucket produces a split pond, and one in which sand poured from a whole bucket divides a pond in two. In Cumming’s world a split bucket does “hold water”; but, in fact, the water in the bucket is plexiglass and the pond, a mirror. 2 Explanations and Night Water Hole, shot within an hour of one another in Joshua Tree National Monument, illustrate the rapid changes characteristic of the entire series. The same mirror and buckets are used to create a daylight fantasy in one work and a mundane subject, a half-submerged bucket theatrically lit by floodlights, in the other.
Although working under the canopy of Conceptual or story art, Cumming remains studio oriented and conceives of his work as sculpture. His photographic pieces are the result of sculptural activity, the building—props and stagings recorded are first designed and constructed by Cumming—and the placing of objects in space. Cumming’s precise photographic technique has drawn the attention of professional photographers. Obviously the works are not simple documentations or casual snaps. Formal, compositional decisions revolve around organizing the finished image within an 8″ x 10″ gridded viewfinder; save the possibility of some occasional negative manipulations, the image seen is the image printed. Granted, it is a strange sense of studio that compels an artist to go out to the desert at dusk equipped with props, camera, lights, and a rented generator to photograph Night Water Hole. Nevertheless craftsmanship, sculptural activity, and a concern for composition derive from studio sensibility.
Cumming differs from other story artists in being concerned primarily with visual narration. His hopelessly banal and occasionally fantastic stories are transmitted by visual images; and the verbal description is limited more often than not to a title which often diverts the viewer’s attention. In Circular Saw Cuts 36″ Radius (1974), the title is a smoke screen directing the spectator to contemplation of circular cuts, an impossibility in this case, and movement, an illusion. He occasionally uses double-entendre titles: in Nail in 2″ x 2″ + Enlargement (1974) the title puns the notion of photographic enlargement since an actual constructed enlargement has been photographed.
Typical of Cumming’s work is what he calls “a subtle perversity in replicating life situations and objects in such a similar fashion that were it not for a few incongruities there would be no difference in the art and life form whatsoever. Insidious and humorous mimicry.” In the process of imitating the commonplace, Cumming parodies Hollywood techniques and the logic of visual perception. Although Conceptual art has often mimicked traditional art, Cumming’s flamboyant pseudo-documentations spoof Conceptual art itself.
Cumming’s work includes the possibility of two readings. In one, the illusions are primarily apprehended; in the other, actual details are apprehended. The photographs by Cumming that work well are those that teeter—with subtle changes in the spectator’s alert-ness and viewing distance—between realism and fabrication. Those that do not, the diagonal cardhouses and the early indoor scenes staged outdoors, never allow the viewer the chance to be convinced of the illusion at any point.
The combination of disparate parts is characteristic of Cumming’s methodology. He says:
I have my reservations . . . [about] the longevity of “story art”. . . . There’s got to be something else out there beyond the old conceptual guidelines which seems to have been the last end-of-the-tracks depot on the way to “more being less- and “less being more”. . . I don’t think “more being more” is the answer, but I’m going to do a bit more browsing to find out what’s out there short of the Baroque. . . . I don’t think the answer to art’s dilemma is literature.
