Double Vision
Together, Joe and John Dumbacher Are Creating A Singular Body of Art

By Blake Gopnik
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, April 13, 2008

LOS ANGELES

"Collaboration" is possibly the most fashionable word in art right now. Heroic single authorship is out; a bunch of artists working toward a common goal is in.

John and Joe Dumbacher have been in fashion since 5:05 p.m. on Oct. 14, 1960. That's when John was born. Joe had hit the scene five minutes earlier. They've been collaborating ever since.

The twins started making art together as preschoolers, they say, around the kitchen table in Indianapolis. They were jointly elected "class artists" for their high school in Huntsville, Ala., where their engineer father had moved the family when he took a job at NASA.

From the first appearance of an abstract painting at Washington's Artomatic show in 1999, to several solo exhibitions (or were they duos?) of minimal sculpture with dealers in Los Angeles and Washington, to two new photographic works now up at Civilian Art Projects in Penn Quarter, all their art has been signed "Joseph Dumbacher John Dumbacher." It's a tag that functions more like one quadruple-barreled name than two separate identities lashed together.

Looking at the brothers, their oneness comes as no surprise. They're only fraternal twins, but you'd swear they were identical. They have precisely the same athletic, 6-foot-something build. They also have the same shoulder-length brown hair. And the same attractive face, just a bit too quirky to be model-handsome.

There are differences. John's a touch slighter, sunnier, more sociable; Joe's a bit more solid and remote. Joe's sunglasses, always dangling from his neck, hang over clothes that are California casual. John's ever-present sunglasses tend to pair with sporty-chic outfits.

For 10 years, Joe has lived in Los Angeles and John has lived in Washington. But whatever the difference or distance between them, they are still clearly a "we," as it seems they've always been.

"We thought of applying to architecture school," Joe says in Los Angeles. "But the day we found out we were going to be drawing toilets until the time we were 40 -- that did it for us," John elaborates in an interview in Washington. So "we" decided instead to study business and marketing, they separately explain, at the University of Alabama.

The brothers moved on together to master's degrees in entrepreneurial management at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. Then, for more than a decade, they both made good money in product licensing -- for Disney and Universal Studios (John) and Guess (Joe).

Artmaking, however, "had always been the highest priority after the day job," John explains. "We aren't married, we don't have kids to look after." According to their mom, John says, at 10 they'd already declared that "the first million would be made in business, the second million in art."

That's why, with finances more than secured, the Dumbacher "we" decided that it could afford to split in two, to help build a new life around aesthetics. In 1998, John moved to D.C. as senior vice president of licensing for National Geographic, contributing to the art on evenings and weekends and to their joint economy from 9 to 5. That let Joe take to the studio full time in L.A.

He works and lives inside the much-profiled house the brothers built on hilltop land in Pasadena. It sits up above the valley like a ship beached on a mountain. Inside, it's full of open spaces, air and light, with floors in polished wood and poured concrete.

In Washington, John lives a bit more modestly: His studio off Logan Circle is small and below grade, but it's tricked out nearly as gorgeously as the L.A. house.

And he has easy access to a third Dumbacher Bros. property, in New York, intended as the place where they can meet to look at art and make it. Starchitect Richard Gluckman has built them a tiny loft designed to house two people not afraid of sharing space. Like the brothers' other assets, all this real estate belongs to both of them.

Their transcontinental sprawl has helped their art develop. If one point of collaborating is to undo cliches of the big romantic ego, could there be a better way than putting 3,000 miles between the halves of a split personality?

* * *

An ongoing body of work the Dumbachers call their "Pivots," first shown at the Patricia Faure Gallery in Los Angeles, is built around that split. It begins, in either L.A. or D.C., with bizarre, fist-size sculptures cobbled together from plastic foam and tape, then mailed back and forth across the continent so each twin can have a go at them. The aim is to construct a shape that is so messy, edgy and complex, Joe says, that there's no describing it in ordinary geometric terms.

Once that's been achieved -- either brother might declare an object done -- Joe takes the blob to a machine shop in Los Angeles, where it's rendered as a 3-D digital file and then carved into solid metal. The result is a sleek, high-tech echo of the scrappy object that once bounced back and forth across the country. The sculptures themselves may have appeal, but it's their genesis that makes them most intriguing: single, polished artworks born from piles of trash exchanged between two sundered twins.

The brothers don't quite seem to recognize how much their twinness and collaboration, especially now that it's challenged by geography, matters in our readings of their art. They see themselves as very different beings: Where Joe studied marketing and finance, John points out, he followed a very a different track . . . in marketing and management. Though they view their collaboration as central to their art -- "We don't even try to separate it," says John, "it's both of us working through an idea, then moving on to the next one" -- they don't bill it as that much more than a convenience. "The work is simply better because we're both working on it."

They also cite the convenience of being able to have one partner making money in marketing -- the National Geographic brand has flourished under John -- and another managing their art career. Ironically, their allegiance to the market in the world outside of art has freed them from the tyranny of the art market: "It's allowed us to do what we've wanted to do," says John, "as opposed to being solely dependent on a collector dictating your next move and having to create art for the marketplace."

Dealer Sarah Finlay launched Washington's Fusebox gallery with a show of the Dumbachers' work. She, too, cites the practical side of their collaboration -- how they have twice the time to work on every piece, as well as the benefit "of literally being in two places at one time." But she also talks about the special appeal of their doubleness for collectors and art lovers: "There is a little sense of mystery there. . . . Without exception, people are fascinated by their collaboration."

And where most collectives come together as a clash of opposites, in its unique Dumbacher version collaboration is "about two people coming together to refine an aesthetic," Finlay says.

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.

* * *

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.