ART REVIEW : Taking the Ordinary to Extremes

Art is said to be a dialogue, but let’s face it: Artists do most of the talking (or showing) and we do the listening (or looking). Given that the so-called dialogue is really a monologue, then it’s not so much of a stretch to claim an affinity between Robert Cumming, whose retrospective just opened at the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego/Downtown, and Spalding Gray, master of the one-man word show. Both take long hikes inside their own minds and then report back on the scenery. Both have the knack of invigorating our experience of the ordinary, making it seem ludicrous at one moment, profound the next.

What Cumming doesn’t have that Gray excels in is a compact delivery. This selection of around 75 works, titled “Cone of Vision,” is a relatively concentrated survey, considering the breadth of Cumming’s output in photography, painting, printmaking, sculpture and book works, but it still strays.

Its brightest moments come early, in the works of the 1970s, when Cumming first began to romp in the playground of perceptual phenomena. Fresh out of graduate school, he armed himself with a camera and a wit far more gleeful than most of his Conceptualist peers. His photographs of the period skewer expectations and toy with issues of representation and reality. Along with his friend William Wegman, Cumming made sure that Conceptual art was not all high and dry.

He implanted a slice of white bread seamlessly into the rind of a watermelon, and photographed the result among the tabletop clutter of a domestic still-life. He carved the brand-name Ivory on a golden bar of Dial soap, and vice versa, then photographed the two bars side by side with a mirror reiterating the perceptual joke.

Cumming’s 1974 pair of photographs showing doughnuts spelling out a mathematical equation cuts to the heart of the ticklish logic of representation. In the first image, one doughnut added to another equals just one doughnut. In the second photograph, the doughnuts total two. The title: “Zero Plus Zero Equals Zero/A Doughnut Plus a Doughnut Equals Two Doughnuts.” Using a quintessentially mundane prop--a real nutritional zero--Cumming presents contradictory sides of the language conundrum: the doughnut as taken literally, as the shape of the quotient zero, or as an arbitrary stand- in to represent a concept.

Cumming has continued to use humble subjects to frame issues of real consequence, but the photographic work of the ‘70s, made when the artist lived and taught in Los Angeles and briefly shot illusionistic movie sets for Universal Pictures, probes those issues with unsurpassed spunk. In his lively essay for the show’s catalogue, Robert Harbison correctly describes Cumming’s work as having grown more “tranquil” in the past decade. Cumming, who now lives in Massachusetts, still mines the same bottomless philosophical pits--which is more trustworthy, knowing or seeing? When two interpretations are equally convincing, which is the truth?--but his strategy now is more oblique, and as a result, less incisive.

From being a conceptual prankster, Cumming has become some thing of a sensualist. His large paintings on paper and canvas from the ‘80s to the present have all of the atmospheric appeal that the earlier photographs lacked, but little of their intellectual spark. Each of the richly rendered images draws attention to the duality of its subject. When an oversized image of a rotary saw blade hovers on a luminous ground, it appears to spin even as it stands still; its circular form evokes unity, wholeness, while its blade promises bifurcation, destruction in the name of creation.

Another of the schizophrenic images Cumming monumentalizes is the light bulb that doubles as a skull. For this show, he created a monstrous, room-sized version out of rubberized vinyl. Inflated with helium, the sculpture is more jarring in its sheer ugliness than for the way it melds the symbols of death and light, negation and inspiration. The more that is made of these polarized images, the skimpier their impact. The paintings are large and lush, but much more is happening on the surface than beneath it. The network of mixed messages that charged Cumming’s photographs has been reduced to a few crossing currents, and barely a fizzle of energy.

Cumming complements his painterly paintings with drawings and prints that adopt the drier, diagrammatic tone of blueprints. One of these, a 1987 drypoint with watercolor, is one of the most poignant images in the show. It depicts a pair of hands whose fingers are starting to mesh. The fingers, however, are shaped like semicircular blades, so the simple gesture of clasping together also suggests its corollary, slicing apart. In pushing the ordinary to extremes, Cumming makes the hands look like dangerous tools. But the image also has its goofy, oafish side, in which the hands resemble big, benign machines.

At its most nourishing, Cumming’s work bridges the visual accessibility of pop with the intellectual acuity of Conceptual art. If the show’s curators, Museum of Contemporary Art Director Hugh M. Davies and curator Lynda Forsha (working with the Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston, where the show will travel) fail to define Cumming’s place within this historical frame work, perhaps they have fallen prey to the same syndrome that afflicts the artist himself, the vain attempt to impose order on matter that defiantly resists it.

* Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego/Downtown, through Aug. 4. Tuesdays through Sundays, 11 a.m.-6 p.m., Thursdays until 9 p.m. (619) 454-3541.