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

Gummer continued to build temporary, large-scale environments in his studio until 1976, although in 1974 he reacted against their ephemerality and began to yearn for a more permanent kind of work. It occurred to him then that the planar "tabletops" and the related "roofs" of the open constructions, which were composed of linear geometric elements, could be attached to the wall. The subsequent reliefs were somewhat reminiscent of the open structure of Separation and also of Constructivist reliefs illustrated in Rickey's book. In a seminal work of 1978, Gummer translated a 24-foot-long installation, named Ionic Loggia, into a relief of the same title.

Relief was a favorite Constructivist format. It partook of both painting and sculpture, yet was neither. Reliefs avoided painting's illusionism and sculpture's sense of being tied down by gravity. Moreover, influential older colleagues of Gummer, such as Donald Judd and Frank Stella, had been extending their paintings into three dimensions. As an art critic, Judd had made a strong case for relief as a "third" medium, seeing it as less traditional and more advanced than either painting or sculpture. However, unlike the wall works of Stella, which were increasingly baroque, or those of Judd, which were volumetric, Gummer's were linear and open. They had some characteristics in common with the open structures of Sol LeWitt.

Composed of thin, sticklike elements, Gummer's reliefs constituted drawings in space. In them, he suppressed for a time the organic component of earlier works and based the compositions on the floor plans of Renaissance cathedrals and palaces--not surprisingly, given his interest since boyhood in architectural construction. He recalled being impressed by Peter Gay's essay on Pythagorean palaces, which detailed the way in which a floor plan functioned as a kind of DNA for generating a building's integrated structure, volume and space. Gummer was moved by the order and poetry of these architectural diagrams, but he also thought of them as early foreshadowings of Conceptual art. In retrospect, it appears that in introducing into Constructivist abstraction subjects appropriated from art history (which the historic Constructivists generally tried to avoid), Gummer was combining what would later be dubbed "modernist" and "postmodernist" approaches.

The painted wood relief, Ionic Loggia II, consists of a gray plane, flush against the wall, from which a spare, two-dimensional white framework of vertical open rectangles is extended forward. Just behind the white structure is another planar framework, this one black, composed of similar vertical rectangles not quite as tall as the white ones. The black framework is tilted backward on a diagonal so that only its upper edge touches the white element. The structure of Ionic Loggia II is clear. However, what you see is not what you get. The tilt pitches the geometry out of Miter and the components seem oddly juxtaposed. The work looks balanced but is actually subtly unbalanced. As in Sol LeWitt's constructions, the conception is logical, but visually the work is illogical, made even more so by a complex play of shadows on the background plane. As LeWitt once remarked about his own work, logic is used only to be ruined.