Lot Essay
Robert Gober's sculptures based on common household objects such as sinks, urinals, beds and doors are powerful and eloquent statements because his objects of choice all lie at the fulcrum of seemingly opposing ideas. Their position at this fulcrum gives them an edginess and an enigmatic quality that compellingly draws the viewer in to decipher their meaning.
Because of its form, Three Urinals relates to the modernist strategy exemplified by Marcel Duchamp's first "readymade," the Fountain, which he signed and exhibited at the Armory exhibition as his own, and which in fact was a storebought urinal. Gober's urinals are, despite their sleek and refined surfaces which relate to Minimalist practice, resolutely handmade. Unlike his contemporary Jeff Koons, whose presentation of objects culled from contemporary consumer culture are meant to celebrate that culture, Gober's finely wrought surfaces deflate the "readymade" strategy. Their handmade surface versus the readymade's industrial finish gives them a human quality, and reinforces the artist's search for meaning in form and content rather than artworld strategizing.
The Three Urinals' white surface and its refinement of form represent a fetishized concern with cleanliness, which in turn can be seen as a signifier of morality. Its form is like a handmade Minimalist sculpture, with its serial elements installed at uniform distance from one another, its reductive purity another signifier of moral rectitude. However, real urinals generally lie in an ambiguous territory, found in public restrooms--public spaces set aside for private activity. And because the urinal is identified with a bathroom, the very obsessiveness with which Gober treats its form carries the implicit message that the Three Urinals' meaning lies in the elucidation of the opposing messages it seems to present: public and private, hygiene and filth, pure and polluted, taste and distaste, pleasure and shame.
Like Eric Fischl's paintings dealing with suburban familial morality, Gober's presentation of the tension existing between ideas of societal norms are among the most powerful in contemporary culture, as he explores the mores and values of the puritanical, repressed straight male culture of post-war American families.
Because of its form, Three Urinals relates to the modernist strategy exemplified by Marcel Duchamp's first "readymade," the Fountain, which he signed and exhibited at the Armory exhibition as his own, and which in fact was a storebought urinal. Gober's urinals are, despite their sleek and refined surfaces which relate to Minimalist practice, resolutely handmade. Unlike his contemporary Jeff Koons, whose presentation of objects culled from contemporary consumer culture are meant to celebrate that culture, Gober's finely wrought surfaces deflate the "readymade" strategy. Their handmade surface versus the readymade's industrial finish gives them a human quality, and reinforces the artist's search for meaning in form and content rather than artworld strategizing.
The Three Urinals' white surface and its refinement of form represent a fetishized concern with cleanliness, which in turn can be seen as a signifier of morality. Its form is like a handmade Minimalist sculpture, with its serial elements installed at uniform distance from one another, its reductive purity another signifier of moral rectitude. However, real urinals generally lie in an ambiguous territory, found in public restrooms--public spaces set aside for private activity. And because the urinal is identified with a bathroom, the very obsessiveness with which Gober treats its form carries the implicit message that the Three Urinals' meaning lies in the elucidation of the opposing messages it seems to present: public and private, hygiene and filth, pure and polluted, taste and distaste, pleasure and shame.
Like Eric Fischl's paintings dealing with suburban familial morality, Gober's presentation of the tension existing between ideas of societal norms are among the most powerful in contemporary culture, as he explores the mores and values of the puritanical, repressed straight male culture of post-war American families.