Robert Gober
The
American, b. 1954
Commissions
Untitled (1999)
Exhibitions
Sculpture Inside Outside (1988; catalogue), Duchamp’s Leg
(1994; catalogue, tour), Robert Gober: Sculpture + Drawing
(1999; catalogue, tour), The Cities Collect (2000)
Holdings
4 sculptures, 2 photographs, 1 slide projection, 6 edition prints/
proofs, 1 portfolio of prints, 1 multiple, 1 book
In 1984, Robert Gober had his first solo exhibition. For
five days only, an invited audience could see the artist’s
Slides of a Changing Painting (1982–1983). The work
was a documentation of a constantly morphing paint-
ing on board that Gober photographed in his studio.
“I had this little board on a table, about 11-by-14 inches,
on which I painted on and off for a year. I had my cam-
era and lights mounted over it. I would paint, take a
slide, scrape the paint off, add more paint, take a slide.
I took thousands of slides over the course of a year and
then edited them down and showed them with a dis-
solve—basically a memoir of a painting.”1 As one slide
merges into the next, a haunting narrative of loss and
regeneration glides by, with the clicking of the slide pro-
jector playing the role of a relentless metronome. The
images themselves linger most attentively on a human
torso that evolves from male to female to hermaphro-
dite. The torso becomes a room, is penetrated by a con-
duit, disappears into a thicket of vines, splits to reveal a
waterfall. Seasons pass from one to the next and every-
where there is water—gushing, pouring, pooling. As
remarkable as the images themselves is the fact that
Slides of a Changing Painting has remained over the
succeeding years the abundant source for much of
Gober’s ensuing sculpture. Back in 1984, only a handful
of people saw Slides of a Changing Painting, and there
were no reviews. To this day, it has been seen only
rarely; but for those who have experienced the piece,
it becomes clear that it is the Rosetta stone for Gober’s
sculpture. Talking about the work, the artist comments:
“I knew in the beginning what the end form would be,
that they [the paintings] would be slides. I always
thought of myself as a painter, but I could never make
paintings. I was never interested in the physical object-
ness of a painting, but the process and imagery really
interested me. It was the heyday of neo-expressionism,
and I had a kind of allergic reaction to it. So, in a way,
my intuitive response to that gluttonous situation was
to make a surfeit of paintings that didn’t really exist.”2
The following year, Gober opened an exhibition
devoted exclusively to his sculpture and everything
changed. The dominant sculptural form in the show
was a sink—kitchen sink, laundry sink, bathroom sink.
Each was instantly recognizable, yet completely alien.
The sculptures’ materiality was built up from a wooden
armature covered in wire lath, then plastered and
painted. The semigloss enamel paint covering the sinks
did not pretend to mimic porcelain any more than the
plasterwork imitated a flawless, machined surface.
234 ROBERT GOBER
Each work reveled in its handmade homeliness.
exhibition offered a whole new hypothesis for sculpture,
one that affirmed the seriality of Minimalism while
celebrating the virtues of the handcrafted. That the
sinks had no provision for plumbing also signaled a
Surrealist edginess that would remain a signature of the
work. Then too, the exhibition came at the height of the
AIDS epidemic, and it was remarked early on that the
unplumbed sinks functioned something like surrogates
for the dead, deprived as they were of that which
defined their nature. This resolve to deal with the poli-
tics of disease would continue in Gober’s work through-
out the 1980s. Yet, in the sinks (and succeeding works
such as male legs protruding from walls, some embed-
ded with drains or candles), Gober is continually drawn
to a vocabulary of functional forms (beds, chairs, play-
pens, drains, urinals, doors, conduits) that, in his hands,
take on grave emotional beauty. Each of his sculptures,
in its own way, is a portrait of an emotion or a human
condition, whether it be the isolation of childhood or the
seductive power of the reimagined fact.
In 1992, at the Dia Art Foundation in New York,
Gober staged the most intricate of an ongoing series of
psychologically plotted installations that, in their physi-
cal scope and metaphoric sweep, truly fall under the
rubric of Gesamtkunstwerk. These installations exhibit
a totality of vision as well as a growing thematic bra-
vado that snakes its way into many corners of the
human experience. It is the water (first seen in Slides of
a Changing Painting) that turns Gober’s environments
into a drowned world where redemption is always a
whispered promise, but often heard in a cautionary
voice. In the Dia installation, the sinks—this time fully
plumbed and gushing with water—gave voice to the
promise. Talking of the exhibition, Gober said: “I
wanted the feeling of the show to be positive and
mature. And I think I felt that making the sink functional
wasn’t only an internal imperative of expressing who I
am, but maybe it was also a response to so much of the
interpretation that had to do with the nonfunctioning
sink and the epidemic and myself as a gay man. I think
I felt a need to turn that around and to not have a gay
artist represented as a nonfunctioning utilitarian object,
but one functioning beautifully, almost in excess.”3
After the Dia exhibition, Gober continued to make
individual objects as he had before, but the anxiety of
their presence did not diminish. Sculptures of a lounge
chair and enormous tissue and lard boxes gutted by
bronze conduit pipes, a Brobdingnagian stick of butter
occupying an equivalently extravagant piece of wax
paper that measures out gigantic tablespoons all gen-
erated strange adventures in scale and psychological
perception. Male/female torsos, which earlier in the
decade were hermaphroditic wax torsos tossed into
right-angled corners, began turning up in laundry bas-
kets and milk crates—not as horrific back-alley discov-
eries, but as strangely commodified inevitables. A
standard child’s nursery-school chair placed over a
drain accommodates a larger-than-life box of tissues to
create a portrait of the psychologically freighted all-
American child sitting on a world of repressed anxiety.
As the last century drew to a close, Gober created
another work of shattering power (now on permanent
display at the Schaulager in Basel, Switzerland). The
installation was created for Los Angeles’ Museum of
Contemporary Art and resolves itself around a larger-
than-life-size concrete statue of the Virgin Mary stand-
ing atop a sewer drain. Below the drain lies a limpid
pool of water filled with sea plants and outsize coins all
inscribed with Gober’s birth year. The Madonna’s
womb is penetrated by a large bronze conduit. Behind
her, in the distance (visible through the conduit), is a
domestically scaled wooden staircase down which tor-
rents of water rush, producing a sound that, if experi-
enced in one’s home, would spell disaster. At the bottom
of the steps, the water gathers and then gushes into the
blackness of a storm drain. Off to the right and left of the
Madonna are two silk-lined suitcases lying open on the
floor. Their interiors are also drains in which one can
glimpse sparkling tidal pools and the legs of a man
holding a diapered infant over the water. The work is
apocalyptic in its complex merger of rapture and seren-
ity. In that complexity lies the profound seductiveness of
Gober’s art, which looks unblinkingly at life as a grand,
occasionally grinding reality that is, by turns, harrow-
ingly ordinary and breathtakingly transcendent.

R.F.

Notes
1. Quoted in Richard Flood, Robert Gober: Sculpture + Drawing,
exh. cat. (Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 1999), 127.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid., 21.

Robert Gober Selections from Slides of a Changing Painting 1982–1983

89 color transparencies for projection 26 x 39 in. (66 x 99.1 cm) projected
T. B. Walker Acquisition Fund, 1992 1992.152 ©Robert Gober

ROBERT GOBER 235

Robert Gober The Subconscious Sink 1985 plaster, wood, steel, wire, lath, paint 90 x 83 5/8 x 25 1/2 in. (228.6 x 212.4 x 64.8 cm) Clinton and Della Walker
Acquisition Fund and Jerome Foundation Purchase Fund for Emerging Artists, 1985 1985.396 ©Robert Gober

236 ROBERT GOBER

Robert Gober Untitled 1982 plaster over matrix wire lath 65 1/2 x 34 3/4 x 40 in. (166.4 x 88.3 x 101.6 cm) Gift of Jennifer Bartlett, 1994 1994.224
©Robert Gober

ROBERT GOBER 237

Robert Gober Untitled Door and Door Frame 1987–1988 wood, enamel paint, door door: 84 x 31 3/4 x 1 1/2 in. (213.4 x 80.7 x 3.8 cm); door frame: 90 x 43 1/4 x
8 in. (228.6 x 109.9 x 20.3 cm) Gift of the John and Mary Pappajohn Art Foundation, 2004 2004.68 ©Robert Gober

238 ROBERT GOBER

On an untitled sculpture by Robert Gober
Robert Gober is a poet of the uncanny, the fragmented, and the inexplicable. The objects he creates are at once
down-to-earth and fantastic, appealing to our knowledge of the everyday—ordinary bodies, utensils, house-
wares—at the same time as they reach down to perturb the deepest levels of the unconscious.
Untitled (1999), a work of modest dimensions made of cast plastic, beeswax, hair, pigment, and cedar, is a
perfect example of Gober’s achievement. A torso lies in an ordinary milk crate—a torso that is a bit wrinkled and
rumpled, rather like the clothes one would expect to find in a laundry basket. Already the viewer is unsettled,
distressed. What is a realistic human torso doing in a milk crate? Memories of Jeffrey Dahmer flash through our
heads, shades of perversity and violence. Yet the piece as a whole exudes tranquility, a benign peacefulness.
The torso lies there like a baby in its bed, protected and enclosed by its latticework cradle.
But then, what a torso! For the body in question is half female and half male, the halves joined fluently, without
borders or separation, in the middle. Manly hair covers the chest and belly of one side; a soft, hairless breast and
an obtrusive pink nipple mark the other. On one level, one might say that this torso is a paradigm of Platonic per-
fection, the human body at its origins as Aristophanes described it in Plato’s Symposium, before the two halves of
humanity were cut apart and thereby rendered imperfect. “The original human nature was . . . man, woman, and
the union of the two having a name corresponding to this double nature, which once had a real existence, but
is now lost, and the word ‘androgynous’ is only preserved as a term of reproach.” Our lives are spent in search of
that lost totality, and it is this desire and pursuit of the whole that is called love. From this point of view, Gober’s
Untitled may be understood as the paradigmatic image of a lost felicity.
On the other hand, this torso as a visible object suggests a perverse joining of irreconcilable opposites, a freak
of nature. The hermaphrodite strikes us as an appalling anomaly, a never-to-be-resolved contradiction. Having it
all, in gender terms, can only be disturbing, and the absence of head, arms, and legs in the context of convincing
realism—body hair, nipple, delicately nuanced flesh—can only have sinister implications.
Gober’s torso, though, must mean something different to male and female spectators. Although it literalizes
androgyny, it is yet not quite a hermaphrodite, which needs both male and female sex organs. To the male specta-
tor, this torso must be unsettling: his manly, hairy chest has sprouted a perky breast! For the female, it has over-
tones of loss, associated with the omnipresent specter of breast cancer, mastectomy, masculinization. For men and
women alike, of course, it presents a disconcerting ambiguity; yet for me, a distinct seductiveness as well. Both at
once! The baglike integument, softening and derealizing the body form, suggests perhaps a kind of gift, a present
of erotic takeout, as it were. Sometimes I think I am a little in love with Gober’s torso. It’s not the first time someone
fell in love with a statue, after all; think of Pygmalion and Galatea, brought to life by Venus. I don’t want to bring
Gober’s torso to life, however, because it seems to me that, in its irreconcilable doubleness, it is already pregnant
with a poignant vivacity. Alive, it would merely be a monster.

Linda Nochlin

Robert Gober Untitled 1999 cast plastic, beeswax, hair,

pigment, cedar 12 1/2 x 18 3/4 x 13 in. (31.8 x 47.6 x 33 cm)
T. B. Walker Acquisition Fund, 1999 1999.38 ©Robert Gober

ROBERT GOBER 239

Bits & Pieces Put Together to Present a Semblance
of a Whole: Walker Art Center Collections
Joan Rothfuss and Elizabeth Carpenter

Bits & Pieces Put Together to Present a Semblance Every reasonable attempt has been made to identify
of a Whole: Walker Art Center Collections is published owners of copyright. Errors or omissions will be
on the occasion of the opening of the newly expanded corrected in subsequent editions.
Walker Art Center, April 2005.
Wayne Koestenbaum, “Jackie and Repetition,” from
Major support for Walker Art Center programs is Jackie Under My Skin: Interpreting an Icon (New York:
provided by the Minnesota State Arts Board through Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1995), © by permission of
an appropriation by the Minnesota State Legislature, the author.
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Cover art
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Walker Art Center

Bits & pieces put together to present a semblance of a
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