DOWNTOWN

Robert Cumming isn’t as well known as Julian Schnabel but he certainly helped pioneer the line of thinking that led to the hottest new art-isms, Appropriationism and Simulationism. A conceptualist who also happens to be a dandy maker of things, Cumming built an underground reputation for staged “documentary” photographs that poked fun at the authority of scientific data.

Designed to illustrate the fact that it’s a bit absurd to apply analytic thinking to a world that refuses to walk a straight line, Cumming’s photo-fictions ingratiate themselves with an off-kilter wit evocative of William Wegman as they conduct a disinterested inquiry into the believability of the world around us. Taking us into a secondhand reality that’s as bogus as an abandoned movie set, Cumming’s work leaves the viewer eager to accept it at face value--for the simple reason that his fabricated reality looks the way we think “real” things look. Hence, the very root of the idea of “real” is put to the test.

The same slightly skewed aesthetic is at work in an exhibition of Cumming’s sculptural wall pieces, drawings and paintings. His sculpture has the cozy, homemade look of something Uncle Ed threw together in the basement, but these disturbingly unclassifiable abstract objects wiggle out of any metaphor you’d care to construct. Each of the four large pieces on view is composed of a long, slender, vertical shape bracketed to an angular metal support affixed to the wall. At turns, the vertical shape resembles a gigantic darning egg, a pool cue and a primitive spear; essentially the pieces are “somethings” that don’t look like “anything.” Drawings are visual puns involving artists’ tools and implements of measure. In “Heroic Pencils” we see four crisply sharpened pencils jutting up from a raging sea, while “The Measure of Media” depicts a geometric maze cluttered with exotic measuring devices. It’s easy to giggle at Cumming’s work; it has the veneer of something endearingly naive. However, some fairly advanced thinking is at the heart of his jokes. (Cirrus, 542 S. Alameda St., to May 9.)