Bread, Watermelon and David Campany

We recently sat down with David Campany to discuss a rather beautiful book he edited for us last year: Robert Cumming’s Very Pictorial Conceptual Art.

Cumming, who emerged in the 1970s Los Angeles art scene, was a quietly subversive figure in the world of conceptual photography. Trained as a painter and sculptor, he brought a meticulous, almost theatrical sensibility to the construction of his photographs—images that confound as much as they delight. His work is precise yet joyfully unresolvable: objects staged for the camera with the kind of studied mischief found in the margins of an architect’s sketchpad—part instruction manual, part visual riddle. The pictures remain playful without tipping into novelty, serious without ever turning solemn.

For this book, David brought a distinctive sensibility to the archive: selecting and arranging images with the quiet care of someone in conversation with the artist across time.

S/B: You are a writer, a curator, an image maker and a teacher. Do you find it difficult toggling between hats? 

David Campany C: Not at all. Each is different but each provides its own way of being with photography - coming to understand it, thinking about it, and enjoying it.  Writing is intense in its solitary dimension. Teaching is deeply social. Image making is a lovely combination of thought and intuition.  I need them all. One of them alone wouldn’t work for me.

S/B: What's the first photograph you remember having more than a passing interest in? 

DC: Difficult to say. I think it was the magazine feature in which the fists of the boxers Muhammad Ali and George Foreman were reproduced actual size. I would have been seven years old seven. In 2022 I was able to includes that magazine spread in an exhibition about actual size images. That was a nice feeling.    

S/B: We seem to find ourselves at a moment when we are being bombarded with information. Look away from a screen for a week, and the world seems hardly recognisable. Do you still see a purpose for looking back at artist archives?

DC: I have never felt this, although I do understand it’s how many people feel. I hear the complaint often that there are too many images in the world (when did we reach a comfortable number??). The complaint is not new. It first appears in the 1920s during that sudden growth of what we now call the mass media. That’s where we first hear talk of ‘bombardment’, 'flooding'  and 'overloading' by images. Whether you feel we are or not, it’s definitely helpful to put it in a historical perspective. It’s not an internet thing or smartphone thing.  I have a hunch the excess of photography is really nothing to do with the number of images. Each and every photograph is excessive, with more information than anyone could want. That’s the bombardment; that’s the overload. Open the shutter and the world as light floods in.  

 

 

 

S/B: How did you first come across Robert Cumming's Work? 

DC: I think I first came across Robert Cumming’s photographs in an old 1970s catalogue from California, for a group exhibition.  His strange but exquisitely made images seemed like nothing else I had seen. They still don’t. I could see something of a conceptual artist, driven by ideas and instructions, hypotheses and method. But there was such care and joy taken in the crafting of these pictures. I kept looking for more publications and eventually discovered h has self published quite a few books, so I tracked down those. Soon a whole Cumming universe seemed to open up. 

S/B: Robert's images are a joy to spend time with, but never tip over into one liners. What is your relationship with humour in art? 

DC: I generally think humour in art is a bad idea. But then bad ideas can sometimes make good art. Cumming seemed to intuit this. In the passage from idea to image something genuinely humorous but also profound and philosophical might emerge. He often said he never claimed to be funny but he knew humour was a consequence of what he was doing and making. 

S/B: Would you describe Cummings' work as mischievous?

DC: Yes, I do, in the sense that he took a certain pleasure from the fact that his work confounded expectations - perceptual expectations, aesthetic expectations, and also expectations of what an artist can been. I don’t think he set out to be mischievous, but he soon realised his approach was. 

S/B: Much of Cumming’s work seems to play with the boundaries between photography and sculpture. Do you see him more as a photographer who built things, or a sculptor who photographed?

DC: I see Cumming as an artist who had the insight that one could be a sculptor in the service of photography and a photographer in the service of sculpture.     

S/B: Is there an image that you feel encompasses the book best? 

DC: ‘Watermelon/Bread’, which is quite an early work, is a favourite with many people, including me. A slice of bread sits perfectly embedded into the side of a watermelon, on a busy kitchen table. We have no idea why, or even why it occurred to Cumming to make this, but there it is. All the objects are familiar but the arrangement is so endearingly odd, but because the image is so perfectly well made, we just accept it as a fact, somehow. It’s like a still life from a lucid dream. 

S/B: Did you find any surprises in Cumming's archive that challenged how you'd previously read the work?

DC: Oh, there are endless surprises. I haven’t fully come to terms with the scope of his achievement even in his photography, let alone in painting, 3-D work and his book making. There is a big retrospective exhibition in the works and it’s going to be full of surprises.   

S/B: The book requires several small design decisions to display Roberts's work, could you talk me through what qualifies a diptych?  

DC: It qualities as a diptych if Robert said it was a diptych, and who are we to question it? Haha. He was quite precise. We followed Robert’s instructions very carefully in the book.  Diptychs are reproduced with a small gap between them, whereas pairings that I have made across the book’s spreads have a slightly wider gap. Then there are gatefolds for some multi-panel works, so that we don’t compromise the size of the images. Our book reproduces Robert’s work large on the page, so you can see all the amazing details he was able to capture with his 8x10 inch camera.  

S/B: It feels distinctly American, but also oddly placeless. 

DC: There was a moment in the 1970s, particularly in California, when a number of artists were fabricating things to be photographed. That’s one context. There’s also something in Cumming’s idiosyncratic single-mindedness and self-taught know-how that feels somewhat American to me. Although he didn’t really see the connection to the art of Marcel Duchamp - with all its arcane craft, oblique humour and odd digressions that turned out to be far ahead of their time - I do, and very clearly. It’s interesting that Duchamp led a very transatlantic life and his art feels neither particularly American nor European.

 

S/B: Where do you locate him in the broader context of American conceptual photography?

DC: In the gaps and in the overlaps.

S/B: Do you think there’s a lineage between Cumming and contemporary artists working today?

DC: There’s a lineage but I couldn’t say for sure that it’s a direct influence. I certainly see affinities between Cumming and artists such as Lucas Blalock, Thomas Albdorf, Peter Puklus, and Shannon Ebner, for example. The impulse to make things and then photograph them is widespread today.   

You can see more of Robert Cummings book here