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

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.

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.

In 1985, Gummer moved off the wall and again into freestanding sculpture. The turn from relief to sculpture in the round led to radical changes in his work. He retained the geometric figures associated with Constructivism, but his method of building was now improvisational, in the tradition of David Smith. Wanting both intuition and preconception, Gummer would have it both ways.

From the mid-1980s to the present, the dominant components in his sculptures have been planes composed of parallel horizontal and vertical slats or bars. The repeated linear elements form "systemic" geometric compositions, like those of Max Bill or Richard Lohse. Unlike the work of these Constructivists, however, Gummer's forms evoke motion, like the lines of three in Futurist paintings. The sense of movement is enhanced when the slatted forms resemble ladders, suggesting climbing and descending, doubling back, or twisting and turning vertically and diagonally. When varied in size and shape and situated in different parts of a work, the ladderlike elements are choreographed, as it were, giving rise to rhythms that course through the entire piece. Spiraling and spinning upward and outward, his works not only create a sense of motion but look top-heavy, off balance, as if about to tumble. At the same time, the top-heavy elements often seem to rest gracefully on a tiny base, balanced like a ballet dancer on pointe. The works, while clear, are also ambiguous; a number look ramshackle, jerry-built, jumbled--even chaotic. Visually following Gummer's ladderlike forms and other open configurations, and seeing through them to still other forms and complexes of forms, requires prolonged viewing.

In many of his constructions, Gummer incorporates a variety of wavelike open planes, as in Passage (1998), the kinds of organic shapes avoided by the Constructivists. Gummer has invented a novel means of integrating sharp-angled rectilinear with undulating curvilinear complexes by having them pass through each other. The very conception of the work is organic, indeed biomorphic, beginning with "seed" forms at the bottom of a work and growing expansively upward and out, level by level. Sometimes the pieces look like Tatlin's tower upside-down, as in The Fifth Floor (2000) and Anniversary (2002). Elsewhere, defying gravity, they evoke treelike growth or the human body. Gummer once said that his sculptures are metaphors for his own body with his lungs full of air.

While constructing freestanding sculptures, Gummer continued to create increasingly complex multilayered reliefs incorporating both right-angled and curvilinear forms. For example, Angel (2000) consists of three layers of open triangles, trapezoids, parallelograms and pentagons, once again made of wood.

In the middle 1980s, Gummer began to make many of his sculptures in bronze. He had become interested in producing pieces that could be installed outdoors and would withstand weather. In using bronze, Gummer adopted a medium rejected by the Minimalists and many of their modernist precursors, and joined such sculptors as Joel Shapiro, Nancy Graves and Bryan Hunt. (l) Gummer has continued to cultivate many of the traditional qualities of sculpture. Peter Plagens characterized Gummer's works as "spatial fugues on the perennial dualities of sculpture of whatever century, period, style, or fashion: Straight/ curved, open/closed, symmetrical/asymmetrical, and most important, completeness/ incompleteness. The last is the most important because it's the quality that draws the viewer into the work again and again." (2)

Having arrived at a personal and distinctive formal vocabulary, Gummer extended it in diverse directions. In the early 1990s, he introduced into his work a variety of other materials, such as stainless steel, aluminum and stained glass. He also developed new themes and forms. In Core Belief (2002), an interior complex composed of a linear structure of open cubes is encircled by a curvilinear lattice. Perseverance (2002) consists of just a freestanding, spiraling, latticelike framework. Increasingly, he is intent on inventing new structures, combining forms that are right-angled and curved, solid and open, linear and planar, volumetric and void. The possibilities are infinite.

Gummer's shift from wood to more permanent materials was accompanied by an interest in public art. Among his works in public spaces are House of Music (1993) in Kitakyushu, Japan, and Primary Compass (2000) at the Butler Institute of American Art in Youngstown, Ohio. Recently, he has received two major new public commissions. One, still in the planning stages, will entail the fabrication at large scale (14 feet high) of Separation, Gummer's first major work (originally 14 inches high); it will be placed at the entrance of MASS MoCA in North Adams, Mass. A recent piece, Southern Circle, 25 feet high and made of stainless steel with stained-glass insets, was installed near the center of Indianapolis in the summer of 2004.

Ludwig Wittgenstein once wrote: "An old style can be translated into a new language, reintroduced so to speak, in a manner appropriate to our age." In our case, it is an age marked by flux and uncertainty that yearns for solutions but cannot accept utopian cravings, such as those of the original Constructivists. In extending and deflecting Constructivist art in a new direction, Gummer has rendered it peculiarly contemporary.

(1.) As Wade Saunders wrote about the embrace of traditional materials and techniques by the generation of sculptors horn between 1946 and 1955, "We make things ourselves, instead of jobbing them out.... Our passion is for centuries of modeled or carved figures and objects that preceded Minimalism." In "Talking Objects: Interviews with Ten Younger Sculptors," Art in America, November 1985, pp. 110-11.

(2.) Peter Plagens, "The Lyrical Constructivist," Don Gummer: Lyrical Constructivist, Youngstown, Ohio, Butler Institute of American Art, 2002, n.p.

Don Gummer exhibited new sculptures in New York at the Salander O'Reilly Gallery [Sept. 30-Oct. 25, 2003]. Two exhibitions for spring 2005 are in the planning stages.

Author: Irving Sandler's latest book is A Sweeper Up After Artists: A Memoir (2003).

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