The case of Robert Gober = Der Fall Robert Gober
Autor(en): Liebmann, Lisa / Nansen
Objekttyp: Article
Zeitschrift: Parkett : the Parkett series with contemporary artists = Die Parkett- Reihe mit Gegenwartskünstlern
Band (Jahr): - (1989)
Heft 21: Collaboration Alex Katz
PDF erstellt am: 27.09.2021
Persistenter Link: http://doi.org/10.5169/seals-680389
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http://www.e-periodica.ch L/Sd T/.EÄAMAGV THE
BOBESZ GOBER, ZWZZTZED (7M/R OES/AOLS',)/OHNE TITEL
(ZWEI BECKEN), 1985, PZASTBR, WOOD, R7RZZA7Z/, SPEEZ, SSM/- CASE OF GZOSS RAMMBZ PA/AIP, 2 P/SCSS/ GIPS, HOLZ, MASCHENDRAHT, STAHL, SEIDENGLANZ-EMAILFARBE, 2-TEILIG, OKERAZZ/ ZUSAMMEN: 50x 54*27 "/ 76 x213 x 68 cm. rPSOro./OAVB. ROBERT GOBER
When Robert Gober's smooth, white, ineffably ob- that big - but by a swollen thickness, like the effect scene sinks began to appear as if out of nowhere - of some unseen magnifier. They had under-artic- this was about four years ago - they brought with ulated, almost ectoplasmic-looking features (ab- them a sense that something weird, maybe unstop- sent or rudimentary faucets, knobs and drains) that pable was happening. The sinks had traits we as- made you think of the Pilsbury dough boy and sociate with the slow-witted killers of pulp fiction, Caspar the Ghost, or of the murderer who wears or with Diane Arbus' view of small children. They a stocking over his face. seemed benign at first, really familiar, until you The sinks were also ideal receptacles for critical realized that you'd never seen anything quite like sputum. By early 1986, the time of Gober's first one- them before, and that they looked a little off. They man show at the Paula Cooper Gallery, it looked as if seemed to suffer from a mild giantism, suggested the artist had struck dialectical gold. He was staking not so much by great size - they weren't actually all a pretty obvious claim on the Duchampian preroga- tive and was basking in the more fluorescent glow of Z./5ZI writes regularly for THE NEW YORKER. contemporary, design-conscious absurdism as well.
PARKETT 21 1989 5 An art of lavatory fixtures did not seem a far cry sculpture. He is not even really a sculptor per se, from Jeff Koons' vacuum cleaners, and certainly not and his gestural restraint seems, quite simply, from Haim Steinbach's toilet-bowl cleaners, but repressed - the way of one not given to leaving many Gober's sinks were not readymades and were decid- clues. Before the sinks, his body of work was both edly low-tech. Made of plaster, steel, wood, wire and pictorial and ephemeral, and consisted most notably paint, they were at about the level of engineering ex- of one 1984 slide show in three parts, each involving pected of most summer-stock stage-set builders. a single picture board, that served as a kind of semi- And, as if the result of some glitch in the evolution of disposable, sequential painting; they were photo- industrial technology, they projected something of graphed at every installment, then improvised the look of derailed obsolescence that characterized further or wiped clean again. The second, especially the work of a number of young sculptors at that time compelling segment of the slide-series, CHEST, is a - R. M. Fischer, for instance. It was a look, further- 42-part saga of transformation in which the straight- more, that had just entered the arena of popular high forward male torso of slide 1 is the site of many inci- style with the release of the movie BRAZIL. Yet these dents - including hormonal developments, mortifi- homely and evocative basins were nearly perfect cations of the flesh, environmental spills and a cof- basic units, almost as plain and solid as the cube. For fee break - before becoming an abstracted forest this reason they suggested Donald Judd's modular landscape in slide 42. Frame by frame, CHEST, sug- wall pieces, but notJudd's gleaming Apollonian pro- gests a guided tour of the scene of a covered-up gram. They reminded one of Joel Shapiro's 1970s crime. house-structures, too, but without the fine-honed After he buried the sinks, Gober moved on to estheticism. In short, they had a bit of almost every- beds - narrow, chilling little wooden cots, sheets thing going for them, while providing that extra little tucked-in tight, that are the very essence of repres- psycho-kick all their own. Surely, it seemed, Gober's sion. These tended to crop up in group shows, often work would help pave the way to a picturesque de- installations curated by the artist himself, where tour for sculpture. they cast an eerie and rather cinematic spell. One For two years perhaps, the artist's work fulfilled could easily imagine a child imprisoned in one of this promise of Minimalism-cum-melodrama. With these beds, in exile but only a wall away from the Gober, conventional serial properties took on a cer- dreaded primal scene. In one collaborative exhibi- tain sensationalism. Paired sinks, for instance, tion, organized by Gober at the Cable Gallery in became twins, and double sinks assumed the even 1986, the painter Alan Turner provided appropri- more tabloid-worthy association of Siamese twins. ately monstrous faces for the usual protagonists of Mutations proliferated: There were carbuncular that scene. By 1987, the beds had regressed to crib corner sinks, upside down bat-sinks, sinks that form - wooden, slatted affairs painted a soothing, seemed to have been spliced or cloned and ones dowdy, postwar, creamy white. The cribs, however, such as TWO BENT SINKS, suggesting labia. Towards evoke furniture of the Wiener Werkstätte in addition the end of 1986, however, Gober resolved to lay this to evoking Freud, and in their permutations and chapter to rest and - with a half-nod perhaps to the variations they marked a return of formal plasticity interred objects of a Walter de Maria - made HALF- in Gober's work - at least until the appearance of BURIED SINK, which not only resembled a tomb- the doors. stone but recalled the shock ending of Carrie, the Crime and punishment, nature and culture, sin classic modern horror tale, where an arm reaches and salvation - to Gober they all seem to be the out from the grave. After this, only a few close same set of twins. In the last year or so, his ambigu- cousins of the sink, such as urinals, lingered on. ous relationship to these double founts of perversity Enticing as these formal prospects may have has begun to reveal itself in more explicit, almost appeared, they were misleading. Gober's aims have literary terms. A portfolio of six drawings, published very little to do with the future of post-Minimal in the Winter 1988 edition of THE PARIS REVIEW,
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consists of two simply drawn images repeated three writerJoyce Carol Oates, whose short story inspired times in alternating order and offset in slightly dif- the drawings.) Seduction or guilt-trip? Which is ferent degrees of graphic intensity. One drawing is which? And to whom? of a tree with a thin black hanged man, whose fly So, the crime in question is no doubt sexual, appears to be down - it looks like a spontaneous and it is remembered from a child's point of view. doodle, but is actually a tracing of a 1930s political But where does that leave Gober? Alive and adult, cartoon. The other, a close-up of a young white man, but in the morgue - or so it would seem. There is a smooth-fleshed and sleeping, was based on a Sun- forensic quality to Gober's preoccupation with hy- day-paper advertisement for fancy sheets. These giene - as expressed through wipe-away paintings two scenes were reproduced on a fabric used to that leave no trace more physical than a slide or upholster a dog-basket, seen later in the season in bathroom fixtures doubling as genitalia or beds with the Whitney Biennial. Yet another dog-basket was hospital corners or immaculate cribs. There is some- upholstered with scenes from the hunt. Sport? Or a thing clinical as well in the inexorable thematic reminder that all beasts kill beasts? A drawing that logic of his work. Slides and sinks are both labo- will soon become a wallpaper repeat includes the ratory necessities. Beds belong next door to bath- image of adult-male genitals alongside the nude, rooms. Doors separate the shitter from the shit. As headless and footless figure of what appears to be Gober continues to furnish his Amityville-horror a 10- or 12-year-old girl. (This repeat image will also house with such crafty perplexities, it dawns on you be the endpapers in the locked, diarylike binding of that, if he were a cop, he'd be precisely the sort of a special-edition book to be published by the Whit- cop who is suspiciously good at reconstructing the ney; the book is a collaboration by Gober and the crime.
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