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My emotional response to Robert Gober's
sculptures is good and spontaneous.
It relates to the appearance of things. His
promotion of sanitation refers to Marcel Duchamp; although Gober's The
Subconscious Sink is an original design, it has less to do with surprise
than plausibility. Gober's objects look like ready-mades or industrially
manufactured products but the porous material with which his washbasin
is formed denies the object its assumed purpose. The same is true of the
cross structure ion his X-playpen, 1987. The theoretical transformation
of the familiar into a sober recollection of it is an ingenious formula.
His strategy originated partly from
Minimal art; this association Gober strengthens by making identical
elements into a serial order. Since 1980 he has produced about fifty
interpretations of The Sink, The Silly Sink, The Cut-Off Sink, The
Sad Sink, The Basinless Sinks, etc. Minimalist influence too is felt
in the concept behind his sculptures. His conceptual starting point is
the already discovered, (and in each work there is a direct knowledge of
), and relation with, Minimalist art. Ascending Sink, 1985,
reinterprets Donald Judd's Untitled from the 1960s, in which the
space between identical elements placed one above the other is reapplied
to the entire piece in its context with the room. Instead of Judd's
neutral forms, Gober creates, by means of connotive elements, a world of
memories and emotions. In spite of a formal regard for Minimal
Art, I think that Gober wants to ensure that he gets across the
emotionalism of daily life through warmth and touch. He speaks of
'taking the forms of a more minimal vocabulary and infusing them with an
emotional, biographical, hallucinatory quality.' Many of his objects are
based on childhood memories: a toy box, a crib, a playpen or a child's
bed which show the imprint of a body. These pictures can be seen as
witnesses of the irrevocable loss of the world of childhood. Gober has
accepted the (dis)advantage that we cannot be surprised, but he tilts
domestic familiarity towards his own subtle limits and gives the
commonplace a new identity.
In 1988 Robert Gober showed work at the
Boymans exhibition 'Het Meubel verbeelds.' In 1989 he exhibited at the
'Horn of Plenty' in the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. This large show in
Rotterdam is the first one-man exhibition Europe.
Timothy Foster
First published in Art Monthly, 1990 |
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