“I was a painter in my artistic adolescence, became a better sculptor and found photography simultaneously, moon-lighted as a Mail artist, did a book or two, became recognized as a conceptual artist and photographer, wrote a lot, now doing a little video, back into sculpture and may try out painting again this spring.”—Robert Cumming in Art Rite, Winter 1976–77
Though the American artist Robert Cumming (1943–2021) participated in many of the exhibitions that defined conceptual art as a movement, his work hardly looked “conceptual” to audiences. Throughout his career he remained committed to skilled fabrication and detail-driven photography in addition to themes of language and ephemerality, the tools and practices most closely associated with conceptual artists. As a result, he is considered one of the most unconventional artists within an already convention-breaking movement, an artist of restless creativity who is still seeking a home in art historical narratives.
Split-Second Misreads is one of the largest presentations to date of Cumming’s practice, beginning with his mostly unknown early works made while he was a student (at the Massachusetts College of Art and then the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign) and young professor (at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee). In Milwaukee he photographed William Wegman’s early sculptures and moved from modular or performative paintings toward photographic documentation; he also collaborated with Canadian art collectives General Idea and Image Bank. But it was after Cumming moved to Los Angeles in 1970—the period illuminated in this exhibition—that he fully brought together themes of fabrication and illusion.
In Los Angeles, Cumming met artists who freelanced for Hollywood studios such as Todd Walker, and, alongside John Baldessari and John Divola, began to collect 8x10 studio continuity photographs made in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s from photo resale shops and thrift stores. He also started making his own detailed 8x10 photographs of sculptural elements meticulously fabricated from scratch. Cumming stated in an interview with Michal Auping in 1975 that he approached his photography as a sculptor: “nailing and hammering and building the photographs from the beginning rather than photographing things the way they are.” This new body of sculpture and photographs staged tricks in perception or demonstrated how photographs lie, inducing in the viewer what he called “a split-second perceptual misread.” By the time he was given permission by Al Dorskind to photograph the sound stages of Universal Studios in 1977–78, the project seemed inevitable: the massive armatures of Jaws II or submarine cross-section of Gray Lady Down looked just like an artwork by Robert Cumming.
Split-Second Misreads includes recently rediscovered works such as the photo collage Hollywood Front and Back (1971) and a new exploration of his 8x10 photographic negatives. The exhibition also brings together Cumming’s slides, paintings, photographs, sculptures, mail art, performance documentation, artist books, magazine spreads, and videos from his archives—as well as multiple institutional loans and key works by other artists—to probe his analytical process and interest in ideas such as doubling, photographic perception, physics, and humor.
This long overdue exhibition ultimately asks how we train ourselves to look again and how we learn from the misperceptions that ground our shared social, aesthetic, and political world. How do we rationally analyze what appears, at first glance, to be surreal? And most broadly, why does conceptual art continue to matter?
Presented in collaboration with the Robert Cumming archives, Split-Second Misreads:
Robert Cumming and the Fabrication of Illusion will be on view from February 20, 2027 to June 27, 2027 in the main gallery suite at the Benton Museum of Art at Pomona College. Organized by Solveig Nelson, curator of photography and media, the exhibition will be accompanied by a full-color scholarly catalogue, robust programming, and academic outreach.
