Cumming, Robert. A Discourse on Domestic Disorder by Robert Cumming.

 Self-published artist's book, 1975. Wraps, 21 pages.1st edition. [A presumably fictional discourse by Cumming about his relationship with his neighbor Wayne, interspersed with his conceptual staged photographs.] Like new. Summary:

A Discourse on Domestic Disorder (1975) is a classic conceptual artist's book by American photographer and sculptor Robert Cumming, published during his celebrated period of bookmaking in Southern California.

Key Summary & Highlights

• Domestic Misadventures: The book presents a series of staged, black-and-white photographs depicting bizarre, chaotic, or engineered "accidents" within domestic interior spaces—such as disrupted furniture, precarious balances, and subtle household catastrophes.

• Pseudoscientific Analysis: Each image is paired with Cumming's signature deadpan text and technical commentary, analyzing these bizarre domestic mishaps with the rigorous, clinical tone of an official investigator or forensic scientist.

• Themes of Illusion and Control: The work explores the tension between human attempts to maintain order within the home and the absurd, unpredictable forces that disrupt it. Cumming highlights how photography can be manipulated to make fabricated, highly staged illusions appear like authentic, documented reality.

• Conceptual Legacy: Combining wry humor, meticulous craftsmanship, and narrative misdirection, A Discourse on Domestic Disorder remains a key example of 1970s conceptual art that destabilizes the viewer's trust in photographic truth.

Robert Cumming (1943–2021)

Robert Cumming was an American painter, sculptor, photographer, and printmaker renowned for his witty, cerebral investigations into perception, illusion, and the mechanics of representation. Born in Worcester, Massachusetts, he earned a B.F.A. from the Massachusetts College of Art and an M.F.A. in painting and printmaking from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Moving to Southern California in the late 1960s, Cumming embraced photography not to document reality, but to construct theatrical set-ups, optical illusions, and pseudoscientific experiments that challenged how viewers process visual information. His work combined rigorous draftsmanship with deadpan humor, spanning artist's books, large-format Polaroid photographs, prints, and sculptures. Over a distinguished career that included teaching positions at institutions such as UC Riverside, Hartford Art School, and MIT, Cumming received multiple National Endowment for the Arts fellowships and a Guggenheim Fellowship, leaving a lasting mark on conceptual art and post-modern photography.