SLIDES OF A CHANGING PAINTING
by Gary Garrels

Between 1982 and 1983 much of Robert Gober's attention was focused on a single project, that of painting and repainting a small board, about 11 by 14 inches, with a constantly shifting succession of images. A camera and lights were mounted over the table on which he worked, and as he painted on the board‹adding paint, scraping it off, the image constantly mutating‹he would frequently stop and photograph the painting in its current incarnation. Interested not in the painting as a physical object, but in the process and imagery of painting, Gober had from the outset intended to make what he has called "a memoir of a painting." 1.

From the thousands of slides that were taken, Gober selected eighty-nine images, clustered in three groupings, to be shown on two slide projectors so that one image would dissolve into the next. The work, called Slides of a Changing Painting, was first presented on five evenings in early May 1984 at the Paula Cooper Gallery in New York. The event was announced by a postcard mailing and word of mouth, and a relatively small number of people, for the most part friends and associates of the artist and the gallery, saw the piece at that time. Joan Simon, writing in the catalogue for Gober's 1991 exhibition at the Galerie nationale du Jeu de Paume in Paris, recollected that she was most struck at the time by "a sense of intimacy and curiosity" about both the work itself and the experience of seeing it. 2.

In style and subject matter, Gober's work had affinities with that of other artists represented by the Paula Cooper Gallery: Jonathan Borofsky, Michael Hurson, Joel Shapiro, and Elizabeth Murray (for whom Gober had worked as a studio assistant). At a time when many artists were making large, bold, expressionistic paintings, however, the slide piece was idiosyncratic and uncommercial. In fact, it was a self-conscious reaction against the hype that surrounded painting in the marketplace at the time and against the treatment of artists as celebrities in the American and European media. 3. Because of the work's ephemeral nature, Simon, along with almost everyone else, including Gober, "forgot about the project." 4.

When he moved to New York in 1976, Gober's intention was to be a painter, but to support himself, he, like many other young artists, turned to building stretchers for other artists' paintings and to construction work. He also began to make dollhouses (about three feet high) that could be sold commercially. It was through these projects that he "'physically and symbolically stumbled' on the imagery for his first sculptures," 5. culminating in Prayers Are Answered (1980­1981), a highly personal and stylized scale model of an urban church. At the same time, not completely relinquishing his early aspiration to be a painter, Gober hand-printed wallpaper patterns on the interior of Burnt House (1980). He also made miniature paintings for niches in the interior of the church model and covered a portion of its exterior with a surrealistic, dreamlike image. For a short period his work as a sculptor and painter followed parallel tracks. In 1982, at the time he was embarking on making Slides of a Changing Painting, Gober made a handful of sculptures‹including a seashell, a dog lying on its back, a crouching man, a pair of brains, and an ear‹from plaster over wood and wire lath, using materials and methods familiar from construction work. The subjects of two of the sculptures, the spiraling shell and the ear, appear among the painted images in the final slide piece.

After the completion and public presentation of the slide work, Gober stopped painting images and created the first of an extended series of objects in the form of sinks, his first fully mature body of sculpture, which he would pursue from 1984 to 1987. By the time he finished that series, Gober had secured enough recognition within the art world that he was considered one of the most visible and interesting of an emerging group of young sculptors. For the next two years he would concentrate on a series of domestic objects: beds, cribs, playpens, a chair, a hassock, and dog beds. With Slip Covered Armchair (1986­1987) and Dog Bed (1986­1987), Gober introduced a new, pictorial element into his sculpture, transferring delicately rendered drawings onto fabric, adding color and pattern, disrupting the hieratic and self-contained character of the work. By the time of his 1989 exhibition at the Paula Cooper Gallery, Gober's work had expanded in complexity and ambition, and he transformed the entire gallery into an environmental mise-en-scène consisting of objects set within two wallpaper-covered interiors that evoked trancelike dream states.

At this point Gober was firmly identified as a sculptor, and a large survey exhibition of his sculpture, to be shown at the Museum Boymans-van Beuningen in Rotterdam and the Kunsthalle Bern, was then being planned for the following year, 1990. In making preparations for the catalogue, Gober rediscovered Slides of a Changing Painting, reviewing it for the first time in five years. The original board, never intended to be a work of art, had long been lost. One group of slides, forty-two images, were reproduced in the catalogue for the first time, bringing this extraordinary work to public notice. Gober, seeing the work again, was reminded of images that he had forgotten, and he recognized other images that he had unconsciously reused in subsequent works. The drain, for example, which he had first cast as a sculptural object in 1989 (at the time he thought he was copying it from his kitchen sink), actually appeared first in one of the slides. 6. A woman's dress hanging in a tree, seen in a photograph made in collaboration with Christopher Wool in 1988, can also be traced to Slides, just as a painted image of a brown door preceded his white door sculptures.

Rather than being unsettled by the discovery, Gober was absorbed by this repertory of images from his past. An untitled sculpture of 1991 was inspired directly by one of the slides. Included in the installation at the Paula Cooper Gallery were several small sculptures cast in plaster from ten-pound bags of cat litter and painted to resemble the original packaging. The next year Gober decided to cast a hundred-pound bag of cat litter in plaster but was unsure of how to proceed until he realized that it could take the form of the hermaphroditic torso from Slides. The forest landscape that serves as the backdrop in the photograph of the hanging dress appears in Slides as a mutating pattern. This shifting image inspired Gober to create the forest wallpaper that was incorporated into his exhibition at the Jeu de Paume in 1991. In this rendition the image is no longer a stable frame within which the object resides, but a kaleidoscopic phantasm out of which the sculptures have emerged.

At that time it was difficult for observers standing outside Gober's process to immediately digest the implications of the slide piece within his work. The 1990 European survey in fact reinforced the understanding of the sculptures as autonomous objects and the character-ization of Gober as a sculptor. That exhibition made apparent the preciseness of his formal decisions. The materials, surfaces and textures, colors and tones of the sculptures were evident as finely calibrated, nuanced, and extremely coherent choices. Issues of weight, suspension, balance, and scale, traditionally the essential elements of sculpture, were clearly as important to the impact and success of the work as were subject, image, allusion, and the psychological and cultural issues implied by them. Moreover, the 1989 installation at the Paula Cooper Gallery had already made it clear that Gober had an extraordinary capacity to extend the formal and psychological qualities of his sculpture to command an entire space. More than ever, Gober's reputation as one of the most inventive and serious of a new generation of sculptors seemed warranted.

Slides of a Changing Painting, however, invited a more searching reappraisal of Gober's work as a whole. For example, one could begin to view the sinks less as static objects and more as moments of crystallized observation, one sink mentally morphing into the next. In her 1991 essay Simon not only noted the specific one-to-one correspondences between the slides and other works but also identified more general, abstract relationships: "From the dots, holes, doors in the chest/walls of the paintings came the holes in the plumbing fixtures (1984­1986) . . . a closet, and whole room constructions (1988)." 7. Slides of a Changing Painting now began to take on a fundamental importance and place within Gober's work, worthy of close attention. The work itself, however, simply because of the physical requirements for viewing it, is difficult to study. Following the initial presentation, it was not shown publicly again until the 1993 exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery, London, and the Tate Gallery, Liverpool. Even upon seeing it, the structure cannot be immediately parsed. The unfolding narrative is oblique, with uncertain echoes and turns that do not lead where one might expect to go. The succession of images is too rapid and their dissolving appearance and breakdown are too tenuous to provide a coherent or stable experience. Only successive viewings begin to reveal Gober's deliberate but ambi-guous construction.

There are three distinct groups of slides in the work. In the first sequence the opening image appears to be an abstract painting, a brown rectangle suspended within an irregular white oval, which in turn is set within or erased from a larger brown rectangle, the frame of the painting. The image dissolves as if the brown background had been erased further, now revealing the brown square to be a window set within an interior. The window lightens, suggesting an exterior beyond it. Then a large orange leaf alights on the floor, the outside coming into the room. It is joined by a second leaf, as if the room itself had been pulled back to reveal the world beyond it. The leaves are in motion, a mated dance. A tree intrudes, the exterior more defined. Then a lake or a finger of the sea with hills in the background opens and further defines the landscape. The water projects, recedes, disappearing as a lawn or floor of the forest, dissolving, leaving a single, large, conchlike shell, a still life that recalls the opening abstraction. The shell is located within grass, discovered by a hand, reaching, lifting, holding it, turning its interior toward us as if we might listen and hear the sounds of the lost sea. The shell is replaced by a human ear, which gives way to a waterfall, as if the source of the sound of rushing water had been located, until it almost subsumes the image, the last slide of this group.

We begin again. The first image is a nude male upper torso, a body that might have connected the hand and ear from before. The color and forms echo the opening room. We are inside. Hair appears on the chest, spreads, is erased by an abstract swath of paint, crossed by a ribbon of blue paint. It appears that a stream is now running under a road, and a landscape begins to define itself on the body, only to dissolve. The chest has been transformed into a female torso with two full breasts. A coffee cup appears between the breasts, disappears. The male torso now fuses with the female, a hermaphroditic pair of breasts on which hair again begins to grow. Now, in place of the road and stream, a culvert pipe floats between the breasts, water rises toward it, then gushes out of it. The male torso reappears, a brown streak down its center sprouts into a telephone pole and wires. It fades, a door appears, and brown frames grow from it, forming the corner of a room. We have returned to the first interior, but now the window is twinned, replacing the breasts; the body has become a dwelling. One window gives way to stairs, rising into the wall, then mirrored by a second set. They recede like a picture set into the chest, which has reappeared. It progressively flattens out, again a brown rectangle floating in an almost abstract space. The female breasts emerge, a waterfall running between them, cleansing. They fade, brown spots appear, then a treasure chest between the breasts. (Are the brown spots spores or lesions?) A tree and landscape overgrow the body, returning it to nature.

The third sequence opens with a pair of poles or legs surrounded by a pool of water, then a drain, which turns into a coffee cup. A single tree appears, and then, as if we have been brought up into its branches, an empty bird's nest is seen, orange and red autumn leaves around it. The autumnal bird's nest is transformed into a springtime nest filled with two blue eggs. 8. The nest gives way to a window offering a view of the city, a car crossing under a bridge, lit windows above it. The window dissolves into a storm drain, a red can caught at its edge. The drain disappears under an open book, a second closed book on top. It recedes; the pages blur; an empty white dress seems caught in the wind, then on a tree; a flow of blue water increases, subsumes it. The deluge flows between brown poles, turning to pink pipes, bands of water weaving between them. The pipes expand into human limbs‹one male, covered with hair‹and then simply a lattice, again an abstract painting balanced against the veils of preceding illusions.

In style the images are relatively flat, with minor shading. Dark and light tones and contrasting colors, generally fairly muted in hue, are used to define the images. The brushwork is subdued, and although the surfaces show some texture, they are carefully modulated. Simple shapes predominate. Symmetry, although not overly rigid, with a central focus characterizes the structure of each image. All of these qualities are characteristic of Gober's sculptures as well.

It is the structure and experience of the work as a whole that is most singular and remarkable. The overall effect of one image overtaking another is of a seamless but sometimes irrational blending. The transformations and disjunctions of this work re-create a dream state; one has the feeling of being caught within partial consciousness or waking, then slipping back into sleep, repeating but altering the experience. Belying this constant movement, however, is the sensation of being caught, trapped and unable to move, vulnerable, powerless. One can see but cannot reach a destination. Sight is vivid, but there is no sound. It is the retelling of a dream only partially retrieved upon waking.

Discussing Gober's work in general after seeing Slides of a Changing Painting in 1991, Nancy Spector noted that the artist "recuperates and re-presents the past as a diorama. . . . In Gober's uncanny art, the phenomenon of repression is evoked through allusions to the body and the house in which it is contained and restrained. The house and its furnishings become analogues for the human body. One is reminded of Freud's conviction that dream images of the house and its attributes‹specific rooms, staircases, windows, and doors‹represent, in highly veiled form, libidinal desires and individual body parts." 9. The nature of art, the creative act, is examined, molded, excavated by Gober in the slide work. In sum, his art is not a product, but a process, uncertain and exploratory, reflecting the contingencies of the body, of identity, and of places seen and occupied. A more essential understanding of the specific character of Gober's work emerges, a layered reading of mutating transformation, in which object and image, space and time, experience and memory fuse.

In an interview that took place in 1990, at the time Gober was reappraising Slides, he discussed his way of working: "It's more a nursing of an image that haunts me and letting it sit and breed in my mind, and then, if it's resonant, then I'll try to figure out formally, could this be an interesting sculpture to look at?" 10. The sources of an image, however, can be manifold. The first of Gober's sculptures to be based on a fragment of the human body, Untitled Leg (1989­1990), is prefigured in one of the last images in the slide work, a hairy male limb intertwined within a lattice of blue cascading water. Yet the immediate stimulus for the work was a trip to Bern, Switzerland. Traveling on a small, tight commuter plane, Gober sat next to a businessman whose trouser leg was pulled up just slightly above his sock, revealing a small bit of flesh, a tiny window of nakedness. 11. The experience left an indelible memory and image. In another interview, Gober traced the source of the sculpture to a childhood memory: "I remembered that my mother, before she had children, used to work as a nurse in an operating room, and she used to entertain us as kids by telling stories about the hospital. One of her first operations was an amputation. They cut off a leg and handed it to her. Stories like that made a big impact." 12.

While Slides of a Changing Painting added yet another layer of potential reference, they, too, would be merged and melded with other images in the artist's mind. Gober's practice would be to recall and transform images as they resonated within other contexts, not simply to go back to the slides literally as an image bank. Thus, some images inform single sculptures or become integrated into a larger installation, while others have not yet reappeared.

In 1989 I invited Gober to make a large-scale instal-lation for the Dia Center for the Arts on one floor of its massive renovated loft building in the Chelsea section of Manhattan. Initially planned for 1991, the exhibition was postponed for a year because of the intensive demands on his schedule created by the European exhibitions and did not open until the fall of 1992. The interval gave him enough time to fully absorb the implications of Slides of a Changing Painting, and the Dia installation brought into sharp focus the shifting, subconscious fusion of architecture, landscape, and objects first explored in the painted images. One image from the slides‹the small, simple window cut into the wall, revealing blue sky‹became the direct basis for a three-dimensional object, but at Dia prison bars were added, evoking a more ominous mood. Gober had initially considered transforming one of the building's back staircases into a flight of wooden stairs up which a visitor might peer without being able to enter, an image that appears in Slides, but he eventually abandoned the idea, at least for the moment. 13. That image would later be used for his installation at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles in 1997. The forest landscape again reappears, but now painted directly on the wall in a more naturalistic style than the wallpaper from the Jeu de Paume exhibition, repeating in a less discernible and more dreamlike manner, closer in mood to the slide images. As Richard Flood notes in his essay in this volume, the insistent evocation of running water found in Slides is for the first time given physical presence in the Dia installation.

Probably the most profound link to Slides of a Chang-ing Painting was the shifting character of the architectural spaces that Gober created at Dia. Not only the grand, central salon of the Dia installation, with its luminous physical and visual presence, but also the subtle way in which he orchestrated the visitor's progress through the entire cavernous space brought to life the experience of Slides. In his essay for the catalogue that accompanied the Dia installation, the critic Dave Hickey acutely evokes this process of exploration and discovery:

So step off the elevator with me now into this large, twilit commercial space. Its atmosphere, like that of the city surrounding it, is one of postindustrial despair. Over to the left, a red lightbulb glows above a closed door. Bundles of old newspapers are stacked on either side of it‹as if in preparation for being taken out‹but if we were to try this door, we would find its promise of escape to be no more than that. But we do not. We are drawn toward the dry white light and shushing pink noise that spills into the hallway off to our right, and following it, we find ourselves standing in a tall portal, gazing the length of a large, bright, rectangular room. . . . We stand "inside" a room that puts us "outside," where we are "inside" Nature through which we gaze at an "outside" beyond that. At every stage, the mind is invited to go where the body cannot follow‹and we are relentlessly reminded that it cannot, with the implication that the mind should probably stay at home. . . . As I exited Gober's ballroom, turning left into its crepuscular aftercourt . . . [it] turns out to be a cul-de-sac; so now, like Christ, we have been denied three times. 14.

More than simply mining the iconography or motifs of Slides of a Changing Painting, Gober had for the first time created an experiential journey for the visitor into physical and psychic, idyllic and industrial spaces analogous to the shifting, dreamlike flow of images in the slide work.
Over the next five years Gober would repeatedly resuscitate images found in Slides of a Changing Painting, extending and transforming them in turn. Probably the most unsettling work in his 1994 exhibition at Paula Cooper Gallery was Untitled (1993­1994), a conflation of the storm drain set into the man's chest, seen separately in Slides. In late 1995 he completed a site-specific work for the Museum für Gegenwartskunst in Basel, Switzerland, Split Wall with Drains, in which two parallel walls set close together were each punctured with two paired and open door frames, which evoked the paired windows of Slides. A pair of storm grates set into the floor on either side of the wall, with water rushing under them, not only recalled the slide image but also echoed the running water of a stream diverted directly between the two buildings of the museum itself. The autumnal leaves introduced early in Slides were for the first time transformed into objects and could now be found in the water under the drains, also alluding to the fallen leaves caught in the waters outside. In other works presented in Basel, the culvert pipe suspended on a man's chest in Slides is given physical form, but now piercing an overscaled box of tissues and package of lard, as well as a stuffed armchair. The pattern for the slipcover on the chair is derived from the last sequence of slides, blue ribbon interwoven with the images of a man's hairy limbs. The objects, however, thanks to their scale and physical presence, are stranger and more unsettling than the slide images.

Gober's most recent installation‹presented in fall 1997 at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art's renovated warehouse space, the Geffen Contemporary ‹again incorporated motifs from Slides of a Changing Painting. The drains, the culvert pipe, the running water all reappear. The image in the first slide of the third sequence, a pair of posts or perhaps legs sunk into a pool of water, was almost surreptitiously recalled here for the first time in a sculptural work. On either side of the installation the viewer could peer through grates down into subterranean tide pools, where, with careful scrutiny, one could make out a man's legs standing in the water. Also for the first time, Gober was able to fabricate the brown wooden stairs set into the wall in Slides, but now at full architectural scale, grandly rising at the center of the installation. In the Los Angeles installation, however, the stairs are overlaid with a cascade of water, the waterfall that first appeared over a female chest in Slides now conflated with the stairs. In contrast to the shifting, exploratory character of the Dia installation, the formal organization of this presentation emphasized a prosceniumlike frame, not unlike the pictorial organization of Slides, in which a strong central image and paired and mirroring elements are symmetrically balanced.
The development of Gober's work throughout his career is characterized by a remarkable clarity, logic, and consistency. Decision-making can be followed, although not predicted. The physical act of making an object, the intellectual exercise of problem-solving, and the psychic engagement and release or catharsis at each stage carry the work forward with a sense of completeness and readiness to take the lessons learned and move on. Yet nothing is foreclosed.
In an early interview Gober suggested that his work precludes a single summary, for himself or the viewer: "I try to push it to the point where I don't know what I'm doing, because that's what I trust the most. I trust my own experience with a piece. Hopefully, the better the piece, the more multiplicity of responses it will engender. But people are on the whole afraid to be bewildered in front of a work of art. But it's a prerequisite that good art demands, that you wonder 'what the hell is this?' and you're bewildered by it. People are afraid to enter that state, so they come up really fast with reasons, equations for things." 15.

Looking back on Slides of a Changing Painting today, more than fifteen years after it was made, there is no question that this work lies at the heart of Gober's oeuvre. As an artist he has been most identified with his sculpture, but to define him simply as a sculptor would be to over- simplify his intent and practice and foreclose a richer understanding of his art. The sculptures and installations are stopping points, moments of crystallization in the process of thinking and imagining, of moving between art and life. Through Gober's work one becomes aware of the fluidity of experience; one sees that impressions and memories, personal history, and decisions made in the past are the substrata that support and inform the unconscious and conscious decisions of the present.
 

 
 

 Gary Garrels
 
Gary Garrels works as Curator of Painting and Sculpture at the San Francisco Museum of Art.
Text from the "Robert Gober: Sculpture + Drawing" catalogue
published by Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, 1999.