Robert Gober

Robert Gober’s recent show was his first in New York in 11 years. Conceived specifically for Matthew Marks’ luminous street-level space, Gober’s signature objects – waxy body parts, furniture, driftwood, crucifixes, running water, newspapers – were placed like reliquaries or ecclesiastical elements in a church.
Gober has always been a political artist, and his breakthrough work in the 1980s and early 1990s was lauded partly for its ability to address divisive social issues such as AIDS, gay identity and religion in America. Using a limited repertoire of straightforward representational sculptures and drawings that were indebted in various measures to Marcel Duchamp, Surrealism and Minimalism, he developed a uniquely provocative idiom of religion, politics, sexuality, mortality and memory: a visual language that sometimes sparked public outrage. The irony of Gober’s now celebrated status is that the controversial nature of his work – still graphic and demanding – has been dulled somewhat by its canonical status, and the Marks show was more abuzz with reverence than with frisson. Nevertheless, his shrine-like installation was worthy of a pilgrimage: a rare opportunity to experience mature work dealing with some of the more momentous events of recent years in a thoughtful, courageous manner.
Placed four to a wall on the long sides of the gallery – like a sanctuary’s stained-glass windows – eight photo lithographic copies of front-section New York Times spreads from 12 September 2001 were the exhibition’s most transgressive works, serving as bleak grounds for figures painted delicately over them. In pale, fleshy tones the legs, torsos and arms of lovers tenderly intertwined across the black and white newsprint. Conceived as mirrored pairs, the broadsheets on one wall were printed normally while those on the opposite wall were reversed, newspapers whose back-to-front text was unreadable. The subtle alteration heightened the illegible horror of each reprinted photograph (a lone individual tumbling headlong from one tower; an airliner frozen in mid-air as it approaches the side of another; a fire department priest being carried from the rubble, his dead, limp body draped like a Renaissance pièta) and drew attention to the jarring juxtaposition of content and commerce (in the form of banal advertisements). The result was disquieting, the horrific quality of text and image lending gravitas to the awkward beauty of the basic human need for physical reassurance and compassion.
Between these ‘windows’ were two rows of ‘pews’ – cast blocks of polystyrene modelled on pieces of foam found washed up on the shore – functioning as plinths for various objects: fruit bowls, packs of disposable nappies in plastic milk crates, bronze casts of driftwood planks draped over the foam like oxidized manacles. The objects conveyed a multitude of associations both ominous and humdrum, alluding to destruction, domestic life, same-sex unions and processes of regeneration within the context of the church. Furthering the sense of renewal, Gober placed an ‘altar’ with a headless sculpture of a crucified Christ at the gallery’s head. Water cascaded from its nipples into a pit jackhammered in the concrete floor, a stuffed robin perched over the figure’s shoulder, while a plastic garden chair and a carton of yellow bug lights casually adorned the floor below.
On either side of this dramatic scene were two doors left ajar. There, barely visible through the narrow crack between door and jamb, Gober had crafted identical bathtubs with running water and the upright knees of a man and a woman. Next to each, as if cast aside, lay the New York Times from 12 September 1998 – the lurid headlines devoted to the just released Starr Report, the official investigative findings describing in exhaustive and sexually explicit detail the dalliance between President Clinton and intern Monica Lewinsky. If the newspapers operate as mnemonic devices for triggering particularly vivid memories about recent history, Gober’s selection of these two moments in our collective consciousness (three years to the day apart) is particularly shrewd. It alludes to the voyeuristic, pornographic quality of socially traumatic events and the mediated reactions to two very different kinds of public spectacle.
Fusing personal and public spaces, Gober’s intensely theatrical and somewhat didactic installation seemed designed to weigh political moralizing and empty pieties against evidence of genuine individual spirituality. (That the show coincided with the very public deaths of Terri Schiavo and Pope John Paul II made his questions all the more relevant.) In a society more concerned with safety and avoidance than with meaningful connection, notions of shared responsibility have been subsumed by increasingly solipsistic behaviour. Perhaps, by turning a gallery into a chapel, Gober also suggests that the art world has itself become a haven from reality.