ROBER GOBER DRAWING
by Ann Temkin

A dish drainer filled with drying dishes sits alone on a countertop. It is a modern, modest take on what might have been an academician's rendering of intertwined bodies in combat: a way for a draftsman to flaunt his virtuosity in handling illusionistic space and form. The drawing addresses a sculptural problem: the daily after-dinner chal-lenge to stack the pans and dishes so that the whole arrangement resists collapse. Here a thin pencil outline calls the objects into being and position, relying very little on shadow or relief. There is a shyness to the drawing and at the same time a real intensity, conveying the sense of fragile balance that the draftsman has translated to paper.

This drawing was made in 1975, when Robert Gober was twenty-one and a senior at Middlebury College in Vermont. It belongs to a handful of related works he saved from that and the following year, when he moved to New York to become an artist. Gober loved to draw in elementary school, knew he was good at it, and liked being recognized for his talent. He enjoyed the basic satisfac-tion of rendering a three-dimensional object in two dimensions, and before long he decided that he would grow up to be a painter. He took art classes in high school and, as a college freshman, enrolled in a life-drawing class. He remembers that mastering the technical skill of good eye-hand coordination was both difficult and invaluable. During a junior year abroad in Rome, what delighted him most were his visits to museum study rooms for private audiences with master drawings. 1.

Soon after Gober moved from Vermont to Manhattan in 1976, his efforts at realistic drawing came to an end. The poverty and ugliness of New York City at one of its worst moments seemed to him to defy graphic trans-lation. He turned instead to the camera, which seemed more truthful to the struggles of the city and less apt than the pencil to romanticize its subjects. He supported himself by working as a carpenter for other artists. In 1982 Gober undertook the yearlong project that became Slides of a Changing Painting. Just prior to that, he had made a few small paintings and objects in plaster, includ-ing a rudimentary sink, which he eventually retired to a shelf. Almost two years later he took the sink down because "it was still interesting to me." He wanted to see if he could make another one‹and make the form and the proportions right. "And I started drawing when I started making the sinks."

The sink must be a work sink, given its tall back and generous breadth. A three-quarters view reveals the rather squarish dimensions of its shallow basin. Rough pencil shading indicates the uneven surface of the underside, but details are scarce; no drain is visible. Small in relation to its field, the sink hovers not quite in the center of the horizontally oriented page. There are no surround-ing indications to locate it in real space. The two holes near the top of the sink have an inevitably anthropomorphic effect.

Alone on the page, the sink conveys to the viewer a sense of waiting, even expectation. The sense of incompletion is specific in that this sink awaits its faucets and plumbing. More generally, the sink anticipates the meanings that viewers will bring to it. Silently available to references that may be art historical, sociocultural, or personal, it is stronger than any of them. Interpretations will arrive, will course through, and the sink will re-main‹a stalwart, immobile vehicle for a circu- lating system of meaning. Perhaps the sink is a metaphor for a work of art, any work of art at all.
The drawings started and did not stop for three years, a marathon of sinks. These constitute by far the largest proportion of Gober's total body of drawings‹almost half‹numbering close to one hundred. They parallel a total output of forty-some sculptures of sinks, and in most cases the drawn sink corresponds to a specific sculpture. With few exceptions, all the drawings are done in pencil on ordinary writing or sketch paper, 8 by 10 or 11 by 14 inches. They range from rapid sketches to carefully rendered compositions, from a wavering line to a clear and assertive one. Some are the products of concentrated focus; others were made while talking on the telephone. The sink drawings functioned in a very practical way for Gober. He points out that the fabrication of the sculptures was very laborious for a person working without assistance. They required the construction of a bulky armature of wire lath, wood, and steel, followed by time-consuming rounds of plastering and painting. The drawings provided a way to explore the possibilities before the commitment of beginning a sculpture. Many of them were made to figure something out as Gober wondered about which variations to pursue. Would a particular distortion prove interesting or fall flat? What would a certain shape look like when viewed from a different angle? What are the right proportions between a basin and its rim? The metamorphoses of Gober's sinks are pure inventions, and as basic and familiar as each sculpture may seem, chances are small that one would be able to find any such sink in real life.
Gober's expedient approach to drawing the sinks is one that has not left him since. He insists that, except in childhood, he has not drawn simply for the pleasure of drawing, although indeed many of these works are a pleasure to look at and seem to have been one to make. Naturally pragmatic, Gober draws when "he needs to see something." The sculptures are conceived in his mind's eye, and then (although not always) he needs to see them outside himself and to test the ideas on paper. Without exception, none of the sink drawings was made after the related sculpture was finished; if a sink already existed as a sculpture, there was no need to see it in two dimensions.
In addition to the drawings that portray individual sinks, there exists a large group of works that experiment with the position of the sculpture in space. These drawings address what Gober sees as the fundamental problem of sculpture: "where does it start and where does it stop." In these drawings the sink is almost a mere sign, free of detail. A straight line marks the meeting of a floor and a wall; sometimes three will indicate a corner. Up to ten sinks might flirt together on a sheet, as they are flipped this way or that, sprout extra backs, shrink and expand in proportion. But these are by no means real technical drawings; they are still just imaginings, now rendered in bird's-eye view. Occasionally the sinks are adjoined by telephone numbers, calculations, or Gober's favorite doodle, a straight line that makes progressive right angles, turning in on itself to produce a 1950s-style design of overlapping parallelograms.
The construction of the sinks involved a second phase, in between the drawing on a sheet of paper and the final sculpture. After deciding that a certain sink was ready to be made, Gober would draw it directly on the studio wall at actual size. Whereas his initial drawing embodied an idea, on the wall he set out to establish the physical relationship of body to object. As the sculpture developed, it gradually superceded the drawing; Gober would overpaint any pentimenti with the white wall paint. Gober does not draw any more than he finds neces-sary, and accordingly, there is not a drawing for each and every sink. Once he had worked out, in an extensive run of drawings, an untitled sink with two pairs of holes and an untitled sink with three pairs of holes, Long Sink (1985), with four pairs of holes, was self-evident. Conversely, the large quantity of drawings for those first long sinks indicate that drawing loomed large when Gober had a new idea. It required at least four drawings for him to experiment with what would become an untitled sculpture of two sinks side by side. And it is not surprising to learn that more than five drawings puzzled over the first sink in which the back bifurcates, The Subconscious Sink (1985).
There are several drawings of sinks that retain integ-rity as drawings but that did not ever become sculptures. A 1984 double drawing for a low, square sink without a back remained unrealized in three dimensions. The same holds true for a rounded double sink, its two bowls intersecting like a Venn diagram, and a corner sink that has a hole for a faucet on each of its two right-angled backs.
Gober sustained this project, and it him, for three years. In retrospect, his single-mindedness seems almost unfathomable. Critics have often commented on the loneliness and the implied sadness of the sinks, but in another sense, the sinks provoke a celebratory reading. They represent the point at which Gober realized, after six years in New York, that he was an artist instead of "going to be" one, as Jasper Johns once expressed it. Gober vividly recalls the youthful energy that drove the making of the sinks. They demonstrate, in their number and conviction, the exhilaration of finding a métier. He knew he had found a way to make potent objects that generate investments of meaning without proscribing it themselves. Having become an artist, he showed us, again and again, what he was doing.
As series often do, this phase of work announced its own ending to the artist. Sinks started edging themselves into corners or up through ceilings, losing their basins or their backs. Finally they were buried, as a sculpture in which the backs of two sinks rise as tombstones out of a Connecticut lawn. Gober used a drawing for this idea as the card for his final exhibition of sinks, scratching his name and the words "new work" onto a buried sink's back .The paradox presented by one's own gravestone with such an epitaph is grimly funny. It also presents a quintessential example of Gober's uncanny confrontations of Eros and Thanatos.

Two identical sheets of ivory-colored vellum, placed side by side. On the left is a penciled image of a black man hanging from a craggy tree; on the right, a white man asleep in a broad swath of bed linens. The translucent support suggests that the drawings are traced. The disjunct line, the crude filling in of dark areas, and the implication of missing details confirm this hypothesis; the touch of the graphite implies a process less of giving than of receiving. The duality of the drawing's formal structure‹two halves of a diptych‹corresponds to the evident dualities of the images: vertical/ horizontal, black/white, outdoors/indoors. But the strength of the drawing derives from the con-founding of this apparent dichotomy. The two halves are not purely opposite; they have something forcefully compelling to do with each other and refuse to stay separate.
Gober has been candid about the sources for this pair of tracings. The sleeping man derives from a photo-graph in a 1988 advertisement for Bloomingdale's bed and bath department. The hanging man originated in an image filed under "lynching" in the New York Public Library Picture Collection, a gold mine for artists and historians since it was established in 1915. Like any tracings, Gober's adaptations of the two images inevitably became interpretative. While Bloomingdale's smooth-skinned, muscular, half-smiling man is evidently enjoying the peaceful sleep promised by his luxurious bedding, Gober's hatched pencil lines argue against sweet dreams. The original image of the hanged man is rendered in the stiff strokes of the engraver; Gober gave up that feeling and modified the image considerably. The man's pants turned into shorts, open at the top; his facial features disappeared, as did the bird atop his head.
This drawing has many cousins, both on vellum and on fabric. Gober drew and redrew the two images, sometimes separately and sometimes together, making slight modifications, going from graphite to color, pairing them and massing them. Just as no two people could have traced these sources identically, no two of Gober's individual tracings are alike. Beyond the small differences in touch, he reversed the juxtaposition, adjusted the colors, and reconsidered detail. The expression on the sleeping man's face went from relative neutrality to a dark scowl; the hanged man's hat, dropped on the ground, was eliminated. At a decisive moment the sleeping man's white pillow disappeared altogether, and his head is left suspended in a blue (or darkly hatched) field, isolating him in space much like the hanged man. Stylistically, these loaded images‹all the more so in counterpoint to each other‹have been made to appear as neutral, at first glance, as the usual patterns on the flannel or wallpaper they ultimately became.
Excepting the sinks, there are more drawings of this subject than of any other in Gober's oeuvre, all made over a span of several months in 1988. The nature of the repetitions, however, and the motivations behind them, differed profoundly from those of the sinks. In the latter case, the different drawings represent inventions and metamorphoses of sculptures. With these two images, the repetition was obsessional in a more purely emotional sense. Gober's "need to see" the image‹his reason to make a drawing‹was in this instance an internal one. Having envisaged the pair, and having chosen the images from which they would develop, one drawing was not enough.
At a personal level the repetition performed for Gober the dual functions of processing grief and articula-ting protest. The grief was for a dear friend, and count- less others, dying of AIDS; the protest decried the weak response of government, research, and health-care agencies. As it happens, the repetitive action that proved useful for Gober's own processing of the situation was metaphorically correct for the subject. "The repeating imagery was like a working metaphor for the reality of it, or felt reality." That metaphor presents racism as a con-stant droning presence, permeating society so fully as to be invisible. The fear was that the AIDS crisis was equally invisible to society as a whole, and especially to those with the power to do something about it. Gober extended his own act of repetition to the ultimate deployment of the image. He originally conceived it as a pattern for the flannel yardage employed in his third dog-bed sculpture, then converted it into a six-page sequence for the Paris Review, and, finally, produced it as wallpaper, in an unlimited edition. In each case the motif provided for the viewer the same mesmerizing repetition that Gober's redrawing provided for himself.
The image of the hanging man/sleeping man emerged during the period when Gober turned from sinks to domestic furniture. He began with a bed, then a series of wooden cribs and playpens, which, like the sinks, evolved from straightforward configurations to fantastic ones. Gober points out that these sculptures were essentially drawings in space, and the freehand drawings for them were ideograms that plot the contortions to which he submitted the vertical rows of wooden rods. The uphol-stered furniture‹footstools, armchairs, dog beds‹ presented an entirely new role for drawing, one that was strictly about two-dimensional imagery. It was these works that first led him to recognize the advantages of tracing.
The floral upholstery for Gober's first armchair needed to be handmade, as are the elements of all of his sculptures. But he knew that its success depended on its proximity to ordinary commercial fabric. Deciding that this stylized look was too difficult to achieve freehand, he realized that he could trace it. That insight initiated a shopping spree for picture books of flowers, all unsatis-factory. Finally he had the idea of using an embroidery book, whose contour line patterns offered their tracer the generic look he was after.
Gober's tracing and coloring of the flowers he chose for his upholstery gave rise to a suite of drawings on linen directly related to the sculptures of furniture. While painting the upholstery for the sculpture, Gober realized that the effect depended entirely on how the flowers were cropped, juxtaposed, and oriented on the fabric. The drawings elaborate these possibilities. The linen for the drawings, like that of the sculptures, was made to look old by dyeing it with coffee and washing it. Some of the supports are actual remnants of the fabric for the sculp-ture, while others are simply cut to seem that way. These drawings were made for an exhibition at Galerie Gisela Capitain in Cologne in 1988, staged jointly with a show of the sculptures at Galerie Max Hetzler. This occasion provides the one instance in which Gober made drawings for an exhibition; it was because, as he says, he "was still interested" after the sculptures were made.

Again two images, vertically aligned on a single page. Above, a square window with three bars, set in a wall rendered solid by a thick nest of graphite, slightly inflected by blue colored pencil. Thin perspectival lines at the top of the window indicate that the wall is very thick. Below it, drawn at far larger scale, is an upturned sink drain seen at a slight angle from above. The two images, square and circle, present neat formal inversions: the outdoor space beyond the window remains as blank white page, while the recessed space below the drain is darkly shaded. One need not know Gober's work to recognize an evident metaphorical connection in the idea of exit or escape, the possibility of passage between an inside and an outside.

This drawing juxtaposes two ideas that came together in the exhibition at the Dia Center for the Arts in New York in the autumn of 1992. There, for the first time, the eight sinks arranged along two long, facing walls included functioning drains, as they were equipped with plumbing and running water. The barred window in the drawing parallels the four that punctuate the thick green forest painted on the walls of the Dia installation. The pencil drawing also can be read as a joint portrayal of two indivi-dual sculptures. Gober made an edition of prison windows in 1992 and has made sculptures of drains on several occasions, the first being an edition of eight pewter casts in 1989. Gober knew that the two individual sculp-tures interrelate, and this drawing shows that they do. But that exposition is unique to the drawing, for it is a drawing that will not lead to a literal sculptural result. In a sense, it is a sculptural conception that works on the page but would not do so in space.

This conception gets to the heart of the elaborate installation that Gober staged at Dia. But that project also yielded a body of drawings directly relating to his efforts to picture the room that he wanted. He envisaged the installation at once and in toto, but he subsequently relied on drawing to figure out some of the particulars concerning the perimeter walls. How high should the prison bars be in relation to the sinks? At what point should the sinks intersect the trees? Gober wondered about these issues in a series of freehand drawings made during the course of the preceding year. Done with ordinary pencil and sky blue colored pencil, these drawings have a lush pictorial quality; their architectural context brings to mind theater design drawings. Their mood has none of the ominous tone of Gober's ultimate installation. This campaign of drawings, which included several that paired the window and the drain, commenced with some practical questions. But it became a series made expressly as works of art in their own right.

Gober has a rigorous aesthetic for his drawings. At a point in history when any note or jotting can pass as a work of art if the artist says so, Gober is his sole referee on what does or does not constitute a drawing. In terms of the Dia installation, he stresses the difference between the drawings he declared as such and, for example, the drawings that showed the workers how to construct the installation. The latter were communicating devices and needed to be as simple and clear as possible. Nevertheless, Gober's instinct decreed that a map of the sinks' spacing for the 1992 installation, faxed to Dia from his studio, had merit as a drawing. Its interest is due in large part to the grocery list that runs across the top of the page. To Gober's way of thinking, drawings are about "ambiguity of meaning, double meanings," and they must share the suggestive but open quality of his sculptures.

It is difficult to imagine a more startling image‹or a more monstrous depiction of birth. Perhaps only Andrea Mantegna's unforgettable painting of the dead Christ could predict its shockingly foreshortened view. Gober drew three perspectival lines marking the corner of a room to convert the 81Ž2-by-11-inch sheet of paper into a ready site for sculpture. Protruding from this corner is what appears to be a woman's lower torso, rounded like a hill, joining two thick legs bluntly abbreviated at the knees. From a wide open-ing between her legs a foot and lower leg push forth. But they are clearly those of a grown man, outfitted in cuffed trouser leg, sock, and shoe. The appended leg provides a bizarre surrogate for the two missing lower legs of the woman. This appendage is literally that: a black-and-white photocopy glued onto the sheet of paper. The blunt juxtaposition of the paper cutout with the densely worked pencil and ink is entirely unnerving.

This drawing, made in 1993, is a study for a sculpture entitled Man Coming Out of the Woman (1993­1994). The drawing is unique in Gober's work for the pivotal role it played in what became an unexpectedly problematic construction process. The concept involved an already-existing work of art: Gober's untitled sculpture of his own leg, made in 1989­1990. But whereas the idea of a woman giving birth to a dressed man (foot first, half of him) was straightforward intellectually for Gober, the emotional and physical aspects of its realization were not. The implied relation of himself to the woman, her abrupt segmentation, and the stark focus on her private parts conspired to produce a powerful psychic resistance to his task. Practically, a persuasive relationship between the proportions of the adult leg and the wide-open vulva proved elusive. An obstetrics textbook and life casting from a model provided help during the long and difficult process of working it out. Gober used this drawing, with the photocopy as the constant, to decide on the proportions for the sculpture. The appropriate configuration of the woman's body and opening was rehearsed in lines drawn over and over one another, until finally the juxtaposition felt correct.

In no other instance, since the end of the 1980s, has Gober's sculpture demanded such an elaborate preparatory study in two dimensions. It is now quite rare that the artist needs to draw what he imagines; the journey from his mind's eye to sculptural experimentation is usually direct. There are no drawings at all for the sculpture of the leg that figures in this collage or for Gober's "butts" or torsos. A small number of sketches illustrate the sculptural concept of legs piled like logs in a fireplace or that of a man's chest lying beneath a grate. But these drawings are clearly quickly done, more like mnemonic devices recording an idea as it came to mind than graphic elaborations of that idea. An important reason for this lack of drawings in Gober's recent work is the picturing provided by Slides of a Changing Painting. Slides provides the image of a torso that is half-man, half-woman, for example, and the matter-of-fact intersection of a torso and a culvert pipe. Those slides provided Gober with adequate proof that the image could be made real.

At this point in Gober's career the intermediate stages in the making of his work tend to be sculptural ones, elaborated with the help of a team of assistants. The passage from idea to sculpture is, at the current level of complexity, a collaborative process. Indeed, a few drawings from the 1990s exist specifically to show an assistant an idea that is crystal-clear to Gober, but to nobody else, before it exists‹for example, an armchair penetrated by a culvert pipe.

At present, then, Gober's way of working is not one that offers a sizable role for drawing. As evocative as his drawings can be, their function for him is matter-of-fact and precise. A campaign of drawings occurs when there is a reason for it, whether motivated by personal circumstances or artistic contingencies. In Gober's case, the current absence of drawings suggests that, at this particular juncture, he knows himself and his work very well. There will be more drawings, one supposes, when there's some-thing he needs to see.
 

 
 

 Ann Temkin
 
Ann Temkins works as Curator at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
Text from the "Robert Gober: Sculpture + Drawing" catalogue
published by Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, 1999.