Body-to-Body: The Works of Donigan Cumming

It is generally accepted that Cumming first began developing his critical practice in the three-part black-and-white photographic series Reality and Motive in Documentary Photography (1986). The series, published in catalogue form in 1986 to accompany a large-scale exhibition produced by the Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography, was also shown in smaller instalments throughout the early 1980s (figs. 01–03). At the core of this groundbreaking work was Cumming’s personal argument with the tradition of documentary photography – a deep suspicion of but also active engagement with the notion of documentary truth that has remained a constant in his photographic and video work since. To enact the argument, he chose to focus his camera on a group of “disadvantaged” people living on the margins of society, several of whom would become important co-conspirators, appearing repeatedly in his works over the following decades.³ The faces Cumming photographed in Reality and Motive in Documentary Photography – both as sociological “types” and as individuals – have in fact come to define his oeuvre in the sense of being inseparable from it. As the first, forceful step in the creation of what has been termed Cumming’s “invented community,”⁴ the series may be understood as the foundation, the basic fabric, of what was to come.

A direct offshoot of Reality and Motive in Documentary Photography is the series The Stage, published in 1991 as a photobook (figs. 04–06) and presented in exhibition form in The Mirror, The Hammer, and The Stage. Described by Cumming as “the laugh track behind the pictures,” The Stage is a generous compilation of images he had made for the first series but left on the cutting-room floor. As a photobook, it consists of a dense sequence of 250 full-bleed, vertical photographs bookended by two short texts (or rather one text divided into two sections).⁵ Compared with the images of Reality and Motive in Documentary Photography, those in The Stage actually seem less staged, or at least less static: while the former portrays its subjects in the guise of rather stoic statues, the latter is full of exuberance, spontaneous movement, and obvious jokes. What comes through most clearly, perhaps, is the fact that the shoots Cumming organized involved a fair amount of trial and error and, frankly, messing about. The standard power relation between photographer and subject, which one might imagine held sway in the initial series, is destabilized, and any presumption about the part each played within that relation turned on its head. This sense of destabilization is reinforced by The Stage’s form, which, with its uninterrupted yet staccato rhythm, purposefully thwarts the natural impulse to read it as a story. Cumming, who by his own admission is allergic to art that is too easy or manageable, was deliberately aiming to frustrate, and he succeeded in making viewers uncomfortable, not only by avoiding linear narrative but by forcing them to rethink their perception of his work. Already, with this second major piece, the artist was provoking the suspicion that he cannot be relied upon to do the same thing twice, no matter how hard to digest the initial thing may have been.

In the mid-1990s, Cumming turned to video, a medium he has continued to exploit compellingly ever since. It was while shooting Pretty Ribbons (1993), a body of photographs created in collaboration with Nettie Harris (fig. 07), one of the subjects who first appeared in Reality and Motive in Documentary Photography, that the artist began using a video camera. Harris died shortly after Pretty Ribbons was completed, so Cumming integrated the footage he had collected into the video A Prayer for Nettie (1995), a “grotesque elegy” (in the artist’s words) that would later become a stimulus for new works. In 2004, he published the photobook Lying Quiet, which complemented Donigan Cumming: Moving Pictures, an exhibition bringing together a decade of video work that was presented at Toronto’s Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art (MOCCA) in 2005. Similar to The Stage in its composition, Lying Quiet is composed of 200 full-bleed, horizontal colour photographs (92 single images and 27 four-image montages) preceded by an essay by Peggy Gale, curator of the MOCCA exhibition, and followed by an afterword by Cumming. The photographs, assembled to function like an avalanche of in-your-face visual stimulation, are stills extracted from the 143 hours of footage recorded for the eighteen videos which Cumming had by that time produced (figs. 08–10). Consisting of “the images in-between the dramatic passages that constitute the edited tapes,”⁶ many of them close-ups, Lying Quiet allows viewers the time to fully absorb the subtle corporeal details of the people Cumming has filmed and the depth of feeling they evoke, without the “distractions” of sound, movement, and individual personality. Made after ten years of video work, but also after almost twenty years of engagement with a particular group of subjects, this photobook presents as a kind of meditative – though not restful – return to the muteness of the early photographic series.⁷

In 2003, Cumming began work on Epilogue and Prologue, two monumental photographic murals that would be completed in 2005 (figs. 11–13).⁸ Modelled on the compositional structure of Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s The Suicide of Saul (1562) and James Ensor’s Christ’s Entry into Brussels in 1889 (1888), respectively, they are made up of innumerable photographic fragments culled from Cumming’s previous series – or, as he puts it, “from garbage in the studio.”⁹ The artist painstakingly cut out thousands of figures drawn chiefly from Reality and Motive in Documentary Photography, The Stage, and Lying Quiet, overlaying them in some areas with thick paint and gilt, and combining them to create two extravagantly layered, tactile collages of epic proportions. Borrowing a religious undertone from the paintings they emulate, both of which picture religious themes in contemporaneous settings, Prologue and Epilogue imbue Cumming’s familiar subjects with a new symbolic potency, as though the cord that once tied them to the real was being finally and irremediably cut. Paradoxically, this instance of elevation to a sacred realm is the result of an essentially iconoclastic gesture – the act of debasing or destroying worshipped imagery. But the gesture is not levelled at individual images, or even particular subjects, but at the oeuvre as a whole.¹⁰ It is tempting to see these works as an incitement by the artist, to his viewers, to once again discard the foundations on which their interpretation of his works had previously been based.