Double Vision

Whether it's intentional or not, there's a touch of performance art in everything the brothers do. Their art depends on a back story that includes how each work gets made, but extends to the businessman brothers who've made it.

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There's something notably businesslike behind the conceit that's at the heart of every Dumbacher: Take something messy, and work on it together to get a piece where every hair's in place. Take the confusion of reality, that is, and team up to pull a gleaming product out of it.

The brothers' first fully mature works, which they launched in Washington at the Corcoran and Fuseboxgallery at the same moment in 2001, involved raw powdered pigment, the very least controllable material. But the brothers -- sons of a homemaker whom they describe as "white-glove clean" -- tamed the mess. They mixed their pigment with binders, then packed it neatly into troughs a few inches wide by up to several feet in length, immaculately fabricated for them out of stainless steel. They managed to make uptight minimal sculpture out of a material normally favored by loosey-goosey painters. And that, John says, was their intent: They wanted their "paintings," as they like to label these pieces, to look as though the pigment could spill out again, however fully stabilized it was. The work appealed to Finlay as "a sensual riff on hard-line formalism," and that contrast gave it an extra bit of edge.

Unidentified powders tightly packed into metal troughs about the length of, say, pipe bombs? Special pleading with airport screeners got the objects across the country more than once, Joe says, but eventually one of them insisted that, art or not, he never wanted to see these things again. That, plus the danger of manipulating toxic pigments, helped convince the Dumbachers to move on to the Pivots.

A few of the Pivots actually feel messier than their predecessors. That's not only because of their origins in packing tape and foam. Although the finished works are absolutely slick and clean, their effect on a viewer's reflection can make them register as especially complex. When you look at the Pivots finished in black chrome, their complex surfaces wildly distort your face, the worse the more you move around in front of them. They yield a positively infernal result -- minimal modernism with the feel of a poltergeist film.

And that's what's led to the current batch of digital photographs. One day in 2005, Joe took a teenage niece out to the movies, snapping a photo of her as she sat waiting for the film to start. The result, vastly underexposed in the dim light, had some of the effect of a reflection in black chrome: a few recognizable details popping out from a well of inky darkness.

Once the brothers set out to make a body of work built on this premise, a new back story was born, too, with once again a hint of performance art in it. To find an interesting range of models -- shades of the range of wild forms in their Pivots and of colors in their pigment works -- the Dumbachers advertise on the Craigslist "talent" pages. Their collaboration has been extended to include all Netizens.

"Free movie ticket for the movie of your choice," read their ads. "I'm a fine art photographer working on a series of people in the dark. I'll buy your ticket and take your photo before the trailers begin. It takes about 10 minutes."

There's obfuscation in that "I": Joe makes all the arrangements on the phone, and John is often the one who shows up to take the East Coast pictures. ("Same voice," John points out -- and maybe fewer echoes of creepy movies like "Dead Ringers.") But then, the whole series is about obscurity and complication and contrasts.

It's expressive art that's built around a businesslike transaction between strangers. It was picked for the group show at Civilian because of the Craigslist angle; involvement with that Web site is the exhibition's guiding thread.

It's also a portrait project that hides personality as much as it reveals it. Pushing back against cliches, these 10-minute portraits of anonymous people picked from the Web can't pretend to get at their sitters' "hidden essences."

The project also manages to reduce the snapshot, the most straightforwardly representational of all pictures, to an almost abstract, minimal essence -- to the "white and the light and the forms and the shapes" that stand out in the surrounding gloom, says Joe. (The black-chrome Pivots did just the opposite. The shifting reflections of their viewers had managed to animate the abstraction -- which came as a shock to the brothers, but also led them to portraiture.)

There's even tension built into the surface of the photographs. Blown up huge by a deluxe printer in New York, their pure-black backgrounds are as slick as anything could be. Wherever the figure starts to emerge, however, it's all massive grain and pixelation. That contrast, which feels deeply artificial -- like the kind of thing a painter might construct in oils -- yields an effect that's surprisingly emotional, even elegiac. One of the movie-theater pictures at Civilian, of a tattooed rocker, recalls Renaissance paintings of the crucified Christ, whose face was sometimes kept in shadow to speak of the blackness of the moment and his passing out of normal ken.

Could that mean the Dumbachers' darkling portraits represent the sublimation of the One into the Many -- the individual who disappears into the larger mass? And could twinness, ever-present in their art, work as a symbol for the death of authorship? Collaboration is often touted as the single author's killer.

Or, given the brothers' businesslike ways, it could be that their work reflects a model that's less collective than corporate.