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Deconstructive constructivist: over more than 30 years, Don Gummer has moved from architecturally influenced installations to intricate, large-scale sculptures that give postmodern life to classic principles of abstract composition
Art in America, Jan, 2005 by Irving Sandler
As a boy growing up in Indiana, Don Gummer liked assembling model airplanes, Erector-set constructions, tree houses and forts. He lived in a neighborhood where a great many houses were being built. He admired their frames and enjoyed playing in the construction sites. In 1960, at age 13, he drew a small picture of a house, which incorporated a ladder, stairs with a banister, and open windows, set against curving trees in the background. He could not have known it then, but he already was disposed toward construction in space and had fastened on the kinds of shapes that would be prevalent in his mature sculpture.
But first, Gummer went through a traditional art training. He studied at the John Herron School in Indianapolis from 1964 to 1966 and then at the Boston Museum School. There he attended a lecture by T. Lux Feininger, who impressed him with the idea that abstract shapes could be expressive in their own right. This was a revelation, but even more significant was reading George Rickey's Constructivism. In a kind of epiphany, Gummer experienced an immediate rapport with both Rickey's text and the work illustrated. Like his boyhood tinkering, Gummer's interest in Constructivist art led him eventually to construction-sculpture.
Gummer began to build abstract sculptures in a Constructivist vein in 1968. In a seminal work, Separation (1969), he started with a stone that attracted him because it looked like Brancusi's Fish. In using it, Gummer had Duchamp's readymades in mind, except that he encountered his found object in nature. After sawing the stone in half, he suspended the two sections, leaving a narrow void between them, within a pair of adjacent rectangular enclosures composed of wires extending from vertical pipes, the shiny cylinders and thin steel cables reminiscent of Kenneth Snelson's tensegrity structures and Takis's kinetic sculptures. And finally, with an eye to recently emerging Earth art, Gummer positioned the split stone above a patch of grass growing in a rectangular slot at the base of the piece. Separation anticipated Gummer's recurring concern with the integration of the manmade and the natural, the geometric and the organic--and more generally, the fusion of opposites, most notably in his constructions of the last two decades.
In 1970, upon obtaining a BFA from the Boston Museum School, Gummer went on to graduate studies at the Yale School of Art. Developing the organic/geometric theme of Separation, he began to create earthworks in his studio, the "formless" earth and stones in each piece spread on the floor and overlaid with a geometric wire grid, as in Lake (1971).
At the time, Gummer was reading Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception, a popular text in avant-garde circles. This led him to create installations that would induce viewers to exercise their memory in experiencing a work. They would also become conscious of the passage of time--the temporal as a kind of fourth dimension. Gummer began to build room-size environments with windowlike openings and containing occasional furniturelike structures, such as tables. He then incorporated films and photographs of diverse sections of the environments into the pieces themselves. The totality of these installations could not be perceived at a glance. Instead, the multiple views, photographs and films provided clues, which spectator-participants would have to remember as they walked about, connecting the clues to arrive at, or more accurately, to discover, a sense of the whole.
After his graduation with an MFA from Yale in 1973, Gummer moved to New York City. The following year, he was selected by Richard Serra to mount a solo show at Artists Space. There he built his most ambitious installation to date. Titled Hidden Clues, it was a massive, room-size structure, composed of Sheetrock, wood and paper. From a distance it looked Minimalist, but as one experienced it from different viewpoints it became increasingly complex. The incremental process of exploration called for a lengthy dialogue with the work, during which viewers' awareness of both space and time was intensified. Most of Gummer's subsequent works would also be complex, and would have to be experienced in time.
Beginning with Hidden Clues, Gummer progressed in an organic manner, as ideas he developed in one piece flowed into the next, or circled back to extend or elaborate on ideas in earlier works.
He continued to create large-scale installations in his studio. A few had tablelike structures whose tops were open geometric configurations composed of wood slats. In 1974, with these two-dimensional "tabletops" in mind, Gummer eliminated the bulky walls in his installations and began to compose new frameworks made up of linear and planar elements. Contributing to this change was his job as a union carpenter at the Olympic Tower on Manhattan's Fifth Avenue, where he was employed from 1973 to 1975. This experience enabled him to hone his woodworking skills. It also influenced his conception of composition, because buildings are put together incrementally, piece by piece, just as his new open structures would be. In Axis, exhibited in 1976 at Sperone Westwater Fischer Gallery, diverse spaces, demarcated by vertical, off-white, solid planes, set up a dialogue between symmetry and asymmetry. The roof, black in contrast to the off-white support, is an open structure, like the "tabletops," but composed of arced linear elements.
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