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拍品專文
Robert Gober describes his working method as follows:
"Most of my sculptures have been memories remade, recombined and filtered through my current experiences." (quoted in K. Schampers, 'Robert Gober' in Robert Gober, Rotterdam, Museum Boymans-van Beuningen, 1990, p. 33)
Gober was brought up as a Roman Catholic in rural Connecticut, the son of a factory-worker and a nurse, who was strongly affected by the objects around him and the associations that they had with particular experiences. For example, he remembers the sinks he saw at his grandmother's house and retained the image to become a potent symbol of his own rejections of the values of the bourgeois world. He talked of "a nursing of an image that haunts me...letting it sit and breed in my mind and then, if it's resonant, then I'll try to figure out formally, this could be an interesting sculpture." (quoted in R. Flood, "An Interview with Robert Gober", exh. cat. Robert Gober, London, Serpentine Gallery and Liverpool, Tate Gallery, 1993, p. 8) He acknowledged in another interview that his work embodied a personal narrative but that he wanted 'to place it into a larger consciousness...[to] try to place it within perhaps an historical perspective, a broader American view." ('Robert Gober interviewed by Craig Gholson,' Bomb, Fall 1989, p. 32)
This wider context, in Gober's case, concerns the politics of representing himself as a homosexual in mainstream American culture. His works have developed a critique of family values through the reconstruction and modification of everyday objects. Lynne Cooke writes, "If in these works the artist negatively mirrors the way the child socializes its attitudes towards the family by playing with miniaturised replicas, so his making by hand of the spaces, and later, the contents--sinks, beds, armchairs, etc.--of the familial house, bespeaks not only a deep-seated desire to master the home emotionally and psychologically but also to recreate it differently." (L. Cooke, 'Disputed Terrain,' exh. cat., Rober Gober, London, Serpentine Gallery and Liverpool, Tate Gallery, 1993, p. 19.)
Gober's "different" re-creation was grounded in his insistence that his "nature", a real homosexual nature, exists alongside the conventional family-oriented heterosexual hegemony. Viewed in this way, elements of his work are explorations of the disregard or punishment of homosexuals, critiques of the rituals of family and marriage and celebrations of, or memorials to, his homosexual world. The creation of cribs, the decoration of dog baskets, a wedding dress made for himself as the bride, and the reconstruction of newspapers ready for recycling with fictitious news stories representing himself, along with the washroom sinks, all contribute to an alternate world where values are realigned.
Gober realized that he could extend the power of his objects and create dioramas which incorporated these elements and which in turn heightened the reality of his position and its political argument. He created for example rooms whose walls were papered with provocative images, including one paper of male and female genitals (fig. 1). Within the wall he inserted the drain hole from a sink, elevating it to become a symbol of his situation.
He had recreated the drain for use in a number of sculptures and found that the image he wanted (and remembered) had a cross-shape in the center; unable to find one, he eventually made it himself. The cross becomes a symbol not only of the removal of dirt (cleanliness is next to godliness) but a potent reminder of his Catholicism. Gober began to apply it with the additional meaning of a stigmata, as in the present work.
The torso had been depicted by him in a long term painting project where a small image was repainted and photographed more than one thousand times. A sequence of images shows a culvert being inserted into a male torso and water flowing from it. (fig. 2). The iconography of the phallus and the drain have become interwoven. An extension to the drain hole here suggests a direct link between the stigmatized Christ and Gober's construction of the erotic.
Gober has entombed his torso, abased it in the most abject place, at the bottom of a drain, through which water flows. Only part of the body is visible which increases our sense of disquiet. But the work is equally an erotic icon through which Gober has succeeded in placing his normality in our consciousness.
The work is installed in a deliberately surreptitious manner--nothing impinges on the volume of the gallery, everything is below our gaze. (fig. 3) It combines both the despair of the abject and a subversive denial of the abasement of the fetishised male figure. Gober presents us with an image of extraordinary beauty whose meaning replaces our conventional definitions of the marginal and debased.
fig. 1: Male and Female Genital Wallpaper, 1989
fig. 2: Oil painting of a male torso from Gober's series entitled Chests of 1982-1983.
fig. 3: Installation shot of Untitled (Man in Drain).
"Most of my sculptures have been memories remade, recombined and filtered through my current experiences." (quoted in K. Schampers, 'Robert Gober' in Robert Gober, Rotterdam, Museum Boymans-van Beuningen, 1990, p. 33)
Gober was brought up as a Roman Catholic in rural Connecticut, the son of a factory-worker and a nurse, who was strongly affected by the objects around him and the associations that they had with particular experiences. For example, he remembers the sinks he saw at his grandmother's house and retained the image to become a potent symbol of his own rejections of the values of the bourgeois world. He talked of "a nursing of an image that haunts me...letting it sit and breed in my mind and then, if it's resonant, then I'll try to figure out formally, this could be an interesting sculpture." (quoted in R. Flood, "An Interview with Robert Gober", exh. cat. Robert Gober, London, Serpentine Gallery and Liverpool, Tate Gallery, 1993, p. 8) He acknowledged in another interview that his work embodied a personal narrative but that he wanted 'to place it into a larger consciousness...[to] try to place it within perhaps an historical perspective, a broader American view." ('Robert Gober interviewed by Craig Gholson,' Bomb, Fall 1989, p. 32)
This wider context, in Gober's case, concerns the politics of representing himself as a homosexual in mainstream American culture. His works have developed a critique of family values through the reconstruction and modification of everyday objects. Lynne Cooke writes, "If in these works the artist negatively mirrors the way the child socializes its attitudes towards the family by playing with miniaturised replicas, so his making by hand of the spaces, and later, the contents--sinks, beds, armchairs, etc.--of the familial house, bespeaks not only a deep-seated desire to master the home emotionally and psychologically but also to recreate it differently." (L. Cooke, 'Disputed Terrain,' exh. cat., Rober Gober, London, Serpentine Gallery and Liverpool, Tate Gallery, 1993, p. 19.)
Gober's "different" re-creation was grounded in his insistence that his "nature", a real homosexual nature, exists alongside the conventional family-oriented heterosexual hegemony. Viewed in this way, elements of his work are explorations of the disregard or punishment of homosexuals, critiques of the rituals of family and marriage and celebrations of, or memorials to, his homosexual world. The creation of cribs, the decoration of dog baskets, a wedding dress made for himself as the bride, and the reconstruction of newspapers ready for recycling with fictitious news stories representing himself, along with the washroom sinks, all contribute to an alternate world where values are realigned.
Gober realized that he could extend the power of his objects and create dioramas which incorporated these elements and which in turn heightened the reality of his position and its political argument. He created for example rooms whose walls were papered with provocative images, including one paper of male and female genitals (fig. 1). Within the wall he inserted the drain hole from a sink, elevating it to become a symbol of his situation.
He had recreated the drain for use in a number of sculptures and found that the image he wanted (and remembered) had a cross-shape in the center; unable to find one, he eventually made it himself. The cross becomes a symbol not only of the removal of dirt (cleanliness is next to godliness) but a potent reminder of his Catholicism. Gober began to apply it with the additional meaning of a stigmata, as in the present work.
The torso had been depicted by him in a long term painting project where a small image was repainted and photographed more than one thousand times. A sequence of images shows a culvert being inserted into a male torso and water flowing from it. (fig. 2). The iconography of the phallus and the drain have become interwoven. An extension to the drain hole here suggests a direct link between the stigmatized Christ and Gober's construction of the erotic.
Gober has entombed his torso, abased it in the most abject place, at the bottom of a drain, through which water flows. Only part of the body is visible which increases our sense of disquiet. But the work is equally an erotic icon through which Gober has succeeded in placing his normality in our consciousness.
The work is installed in a deliberately surreptitious manner--nothing impinges on the volume of the gallery, everything is below our gaze. (fig. 3) It combines both the despair of the abject and a subversive denial of the abasement of the fetishised male figure. Gober presents us with an image of extraordinary beauty whose meaning replaces our conventional definitions of the marginal and debased.
fig. 1: Male and Female Genital Wallpaper, 1989
fig. 2: Oil painting of a male torso from Gober's series entitled Chests of 1982-1983.
fig. 3: Installation shot of Untitled (Man in Drain).