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Robert Cumming: An Interview

Video Data Bank

1976 00:32:16 United StatesEnglishB&W4:3Video
Tags:
Photography, Sculpture, VDB Interviews

Description

Robert Cumming (b. 1943) is an American photographer/sculptor/bookmaker who borrows from the artifice of theatrical sets to construct his elaborate and often absurd images. He has also published several books of photography and narration.  Central to his work is his desire to remind us that we are looking at a photograph, and not at the thing being photographed. His captions sometimes draw on a photograph's narrative aspects or are used to mislead the viewer.

“I started to go against the avant-garde ‘less is more’ and began to work on more varied levels—sculpture, photography, and writing that has a number of layers. Illusion worked in under that guise,” Cumming says in this interview with Alex Sweetman.

A historical interview originally recorded in 1976.

The Video Data Bank is the leading resource in the United States for videotapes by and about contemporary artists. The VDB collection features innovative video work made by artists from an aesthetic, political or personal point of view. The collection includes seminal works that, seen as a whole, describe the development of video as an art form originating in the late 1960's and continuing to the present. Works in the collection employ innovative uses of form and technology, mixed with original visual style to address contemporary art and cultural themes.

Founded in 1976 at the inception of the media arts movement in the United States, the Video Data Bank is one of the nation's largest providers of alternative and art-based video. Through a successful national and international distribution service, the VDB distributes video art, documentaries made by artists, and recorded interviews with visual artists, photographers and critics.