<p>How the American sculptor established a unique visual language</p>

Evan Moffitt

The uncanny bodies of Robert Gober

<p>In the early 1980s, <a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/6941/Robert-Gober">Robert Gober</a>’s art seemed to emerge fully formed from an enigmatic, subconscious world. There was certainly nothing else at the time like his sinks, meticulously constructed from plaster and enamel – artificial readymades that recalled the ambivalence of Duchamp’s <em>Fountain</em> (1917), an inverted urinal, towards notions of cleanliness and defilement. Removed from a domestic context, they became 'minimal forms with maximum content,' as critic John Russell observed in <em>The New York Times</em> of Gober’s breakthrough 1985 show at <a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/gallery/1094/Paula-Cooper-Gallery">Paula Cooper Gallery</a>; they evoked the artist’s working-class upbringing in small-town Connecticut while inviting viewers to consider their own bodies as full of holes and fluids. </p>
<p>By 1985, no corner of the arts and gay communities of New York City, where Gober was then living, seemed unaffected by the rapidly worsening AIDS epidemic. The government, news media, and many in the medical profession treated gay men dying of the disease as undeserving of care, and often acted – despite emerging scientific evidence to the contrary – as if everything they touched, even the air they breathed, might be contagious. Gober has always been resistant to overt political expressions in his art, despite his own activist engagements, but his favorite sculptural form spoke perfectly to the fear of contagion that plagued an unsympathetic American public. The sinks also recalled baptismal fonts, whose water a young Gober would have been told in Catholic Sunday school had the power to cleanse 'lost souls,' including homosexuals, of their sins. </p>

<p>Not long after, Gober completed <em>Two Partially Buried Sinks</em> (1986-7), literalizing the link between the sanitizing forces of heterosexuality and the spectre of death by turning two washbasins into a pair of tombstones. The work also took his sculptures out of the gallery and into nature for the very first time. Nature has featured prominently in his work ever since, though it has always been notable for its lack of fixity. His sculptures, carefully constructed to look real, undermine the essentializing logic that has long been used to oppress queer people and other minorities by throwing the entire concept of what is natural – as well as its opposite – into question.  </p>
<p>            This false dichotomy was central to a series of untitled photographs that Gober produced with <a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/8049/Christopher-Wool">Christopher Wool</a> for a 1988 exhibition at <a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/gallery/1051/303-Gallery">303 Gallery</a>. Gober stitched a summer dress from fabric that Wool painted by hand which the artists planned to hang from a tree, installed in the gallery, that they had harvested from the woods of Pennsylvania. In a timeline he co-authored for 'The Heart is Not a Metaphor,' his 2015 MoMA retrospective, Gober recalled that they considered the move 'unsuccessful,' and so he returned to the forest with Wool and photographed the dress on a branch, producing a haunting image that has since recurred in his work in various ways. The artists’ preference for a less theatrical medium that renders increasingly blurry distinctions between the readymade and the constructed, the natural and the artificial, is notable here. </p>

<p>Gober took another stab at scenography for his 1991 exhibition at Paris' Jeu de Paume, which featured <em>Forest</em>, a hand-printed silkscreen on paper of an autumnal beech grove. Its pattern, which repeated by kaleidoscopic mirroring, seemed less real than the product of hallucinogenic fantasy. The following year, his landmark show at the Dia Art Foundation included a scenic, 360-degree hand-painted panorama of a Northeastern forest in midsummer, upon which Gober installed a set of sinks and, crucially, above them, cutout windows with prison bars. Once again, a forest vista – even one which resembled the Connecticut woods where Gober grew up – seemed less like a real place than an impossible idyll. The sinks recalled the residue of Puritanism in the artist’s childhood landscape, with its obsession for physical and spiritual 'cleanliness.' The forests along I-95, which passes through Gober’s home state, are dotted with cruising sites where men seek each other for sex. The illicit nature of this activity, which always involves a degree of nondisclosure, makes the site of their erotic liberation a space that, by encouraging homosexuality to be kept secret or refused as an identity altogether, paradoxically contributes to its marginalization. </p>

<p>After World War II, oppressive norms of sexuality and gender were primarily reinforced through the social and spatial logics of the suburban family home. It’s this sense, as Dave Hickey notes in the exhibition’s catalogue, that the Dia installation is both 'prison and abattoir.'</p>
<p>I emailed Gober recently to ask him if his depictions of forests, waterfalls, and the like are meant to evoke nature as a kind of prelapsarian Eden or a social construction – which is to say, a place we are either fleeing from or towards. 'Both,' the artist replied. I don’t think he was being evasive; when it comes to identity and desire, things are never all that simple. The very thing that frees you can also become a trap.</p>


<p>Nothing embodies this better than Gober’s works that incorporate running water, the most pervasive and mutable of earthly natural elements. His untitled 1995-7 installation in the collection of Schaulager features a babbling brook under a set of sewer grates. Atop a central grate stands a concrete cast of the Virgin Mary pierced by a steel culvert pipe, while two others have been tucked into open suitcases. Beneath these, wax casts of men’s legs can be seen standing ankle-deep in the stream. Gober directs the liquid meant to sanctify and cleanse us of our sins through unholy places, literal holes that funnel human and industrial waste. Like a Doubting Thomas, he sticks his finger into the floor as if to demonstrate that behind or beneath every institution lies hidden infrastructure and undisclosed intentions. 'Gober’s water erodes our confidence because it is not "just" water. It is as invisible and present as faith,' writes Hilton Als in <em>The Heart is Not A Metaphor</em> (2015). 'It’s the sound of a purification that won’t happen, that won’t change us, because we can’t quite get to it… Where’s the hope or redemption there? How do you "make" the natural?'</p>

<p>In recent years, Gober has continued to riff on his favored forms of sinks, drains, manholes, trees, and forests in ways that open them up to new subjective interpretations. It’s an approach that acknowledges the unfixity of human life as it chafes, constantly, at the boundaries between natural and unnatural, organic and inorganic, clean and impure, that our own culture has forcefully constructed. Gober insists on the right of his art, and by extension all of us, to be both at once.  </p>
<hr>
<p>Robert Gober is represented by <a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/gallery/1205/Matthew-Marks-Gallery">Matthew Marks Gallery</a> (New York and Los Angeles). His work is currently included in 'Avant l’orage' at Bourse de Commerce - Pinault Collection in Paris through September 11, 2023.</p>
<p>Evan Moffitt is an author based in New York City.<br></p>

<p>Published on May 3, 2023.</p>

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