Body-to-Body: The Works of Donigan Cumming

In Cumming’s work, we find ourselves confronted with poverty and the limits of human existence, not by way of a quickly sketched portrait or a subject directly exploited, but through their consequence, their drama we might say. And everything depends on the artist who creates it, who sculpts from his material this misery, this decay or this mortality, more through reflection than conjecture.

Donigan Cumming, born in 1947 in Virginia, could existentially be seen as a product of the 1950s. He arrived in Montreal at the start of the 1970s, an immigrant from Florida, a young American rejecting the Vietnam war and the violence of the society in which he had grown up. He devoted himself to photography and, in the 1980s, his work brought him international recognition. Photography occupied a considerable place in his creative practice until 1991, when, long after having dabbled in Super 8 in 1968, he revisited the moving image and used a camcorder to relay his relationship with Nettie Harris, one of his preferred models who had previously been an actress and journalist, recently deceased in A Prayer for Nettie (1995)¹.

An art student in the United States in the 1960s, he could not escape the influence of the movements that came like tidal waves: counter-culture and the civil rights movement. If we focus on this implicit aspect of his work we can find a number of values pertaining to them: a critique of consumerism and the spectacle, a compassion, the surpassing of set limits of existence, the development of a community, an interest in the socially excluded, antipsychiatry, respect for human dignity, the famous “here and now”, experiments in theatre in many forms, the Fluxus movement and action art.

Some of the individuals that he has us watch and listen to, who certainly appear poor and unwell, with whom he builds his theatre of cruelty (which we should re-baptise the theatre of honesty after having followed his work for many years) belong to this past. They belong to the generation that confronted the powers that be, often violently, in demanding an end to war and racism.

Here is what Cumming had to say in 2000 on the subject of his own practice:

We understand, consequently, that this text, and the fact that you are reading it and reflecting on Cumming’s work, as well as the sometimes violent and repulsed reactions that his images provoke, indeed the plethora of critical essays that have been written about his work for more than 30 years, are an integral part of an ethnographic creative process that he established decades ago, in which the observer finds himself as implicated as the observed. A global approach, certainly, but a fascinating one: an attempt to surpass a documentary protocol that he finds too reductive and judges unfit to report on the complexity of social reality.

In video as in photography, Cumming interrogates the social representation of the self. His narrative strategy consists in creating dialogue about the interior and exterior, the immobile and the mobile, the dead and the living, the normalized and the unconventional, the public and the private, the Montrealer and the universal, with a rawness that cannot, and should not, leave you indifferent. While poses that imitate classical painting or sculpture recur in his photographs – think of Les Pleureurs (1994), acquired by the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec – his videos seem dependent on the simplicity of the video recording equipment available to him or, rather, with which he has decided to work: the MiniDV, whose intrinsic qualities he profusely exploits. The skilful photographer voluntarily chooses poor quality video imagery and has also decided to participate in his videos while holding the camera in his hand. This generates a hic et nunc effect, accentuating the illusion of “veracity.” At times, for instance in Locke’s Way (2003), which is essentially constructed from this hyper-subjective perspective, we feel as though we have found ourselves inside a brain affected with logorrhea.

Cumming also often parodies what is referred to in Hollywood as an “establishing shot” (Cut the Parrot, 1996; Culture, 2002) in his video tapes. This is where, in order to situate a protagonist for us, he creates a panoramic or sweeping shot, like a drone flying over the domestic chaos of the room in which they live. It is intrusive but helps us to assess the situation. Cumming does not play with moral precepts. It is up to us to draw our own conclusions. Is that not the aim of his provocation?

He is provocative, certainly, but not without purpose. In interviews he often talks about the influences of double-bill theatres, of detachment, of cruelty and absurdity in his visual art practice. What Cumming has to say about his relationship with his amateur actors and the staging is quite evocative.

Cumming stands out for having built a somewhat family-like dynamic with his models. We might say it’s almost genealogical, when he describes the gestation of these individuals’ time in front of his lens.⁴

In truth, the connections that he has maintained with his models far surpasses the temporary contact that often takes place in the world of professional filmmaking and then fades after the shoot. Whether the stories of their lives as they are told to us are true or false, and their pains or derelictions real or not, he has maintained close relationships with them. If Cumming believes all fiction to be a lie and that the same can even be said of documentary, he plays with this in his videos and offers us narrative works with a biographical flavour to situate the protagonists for us. But the pact that he seems to have made with the members of his community is this: “Bare yourself, offer yourself up to my lens, submit yourself for a few minutes to my scrutinizing gaze, we are going to play a truth game. And with an array of tools, we are going to candidly reflect the image of the human condition and combat the lie upon which the majority of social representations have been constructed.”

Cumming will deepen his group dynamic still further and will remain loyal, even after their death, to these men and women who, in offering to his camera lens with as much shamelessness as generosity, the extremity of their lives, their physical injuries, their material deprivation or their nudity, have irreversibly changed the course of his life. He demonstrates this, using a process that employs both anamnesis and allegory, in major works such as Prologue (2005), Epilogue (2005), Lying Quiet (2005) and Kincora (2008). 

This proximity allows him to express situations that the distance between the observer and the observed would have rendered impossible. But we also understand that these protagonists intercede on behalf of an observer whose pursuit dates back many years.

Cumming’s brother features in his video Locke's Way. He has suffered intellectual disability since childhood. Having spoken about it in numerous interviews, it seems Cumming has always carried this with him and developed his entire œuvre with this existential dimension in the background, attempting to understand the marginalization and exile imposed on certain people by others. He has devoted himself to understanding the issue by looking at other lives in distress that have been left behind by most of society. He has therefore magnified, in both size and glorification, those destined to be outcast by giving them a raison d’être and, in drawing them out of the vicissitudes and absurdities of life, he has provided new material for humanity. A questioning, yes, but also a game.

Over the last decade, Cumming’s work has changed; he multiplies perspectives, recycles his images. With Kincora he delivers a troubling conclusion in which the protagonists of his videographic and photographic acts find themselves transformed into angelic figures. Viewers who are familiar with his older works find themselves destabilized once again because the symbolic dimension of the angel, as a supernatural figure, contrasts considerably with the warts-and-all realism, the rawness and cruelty of the situations portrayed in his previous photographs and videos.

But this is a fallen angel, an angel of mercy on welfare, an angel of the compassion administered by civil servants. He comes to visit the Petit Jésus (1999) who is called out to by Pierre Lamarche, who remains invisible and who, clearly, will never return.

This integration of drawing can be seen in his latest videos, in which he has inserted sequences animated by his own hand. More recently still, in 2019, he exhibited his drawings and inks along side photographic prints.

One wonders what has motivated this move to a pure pictorial approach, particularly as he has adopted an expressionist stance. What is the urge that drives him, if there is an urge? Perhaps a solution can be found in these late drawings. Rarely have we seen an artist revisit past work and rework it with such fervor.