THE LAW OF INDIRECTIONS
by Richard Flood

It is almost impossible to discuss Robert Gober's work without moving through it chronologically. It has been riveting to watch him assemble his cast of characters and deploy them, over time, in an ongoing drama that is at once autobiography and social history. Objects that initially appear opaque are gradually enlisted to serve in a larger drama that is revelatory in its psychological clarity. The topics he is drawn to‹birth, infancy, adolescence, sex, death, loss, spirituality‹are all scented with the smoke of Freud's cigar, and immersing oneself in a Gober installation can be as analytically trying as an hour on a therapist's couch. Gober is after much more, however, than therapeutic catharsis. Increasingly, he has involved himself in the creation of a mise-en-scène that invites viewers to become participants. It is as if it is no longer enough for him to have an audience see what he is presenting; they have to feel what he is feeling.

More than any other American artist, Gober reminds me of Walt Whitman. Like Whitman, he apprenticed in his field (Whitman began as a printer and editor; Gober was an assistant to the painter Elizabeth Murray). Like Whitman, he was devastated by the death toll of the young men around him (Whitman tended to the wounded during the Civil War; Gober was committed to AIDS activism). Like Whitman, he is enamored of the natural world and the careless, sensual grace of those who inhabit it. Like Whitman, he is a moral crusader with a very strong utopian bent and a definite point of view as to the nature of right and wrong. And, also like Whitman, he has a judgmental sternness and eroticized self-awareness that, in their coexistence, are particularly American, male attributes. I also associate Gober with Alfred Hitchcock and his uncanny ability to tap into a very American kind of paranoia. They are both curiously outsiders, and their particular view of America is distinctively gothic. Like Hitchcock, Gober understands the seductive morbidity of the commonplace and carries into his work an awareness that innocence exists only to be tested. Then too, in addition to a dyspeptic relationship with Catholicism, Gober and Hitchcock share an understanding that, always and everywhere, there is a terrifying abyss lurking in what we perceive to be the normal. They know that the land of the normal can be as dangerous as it gets.

All must have references to the ensemble of the world, and the compact truth of the world,
There shall be no subject too pronounced - all works shall illustrate the divine law of indirections. 1.

There is a dogged tenacity in the development of Robert Gober's sculptural practice. Once imagined, nothing ever completely departs. Instead it is tweaked and nudged into a version of its original self, which, while subliminally similar, is inevitably other. Observing its permutations is almost like watching a child being persistently stalked by the shadow of the adult he will become. Some things seemingly consigned to the past‹a tantrum, a bad dream, an injury‹never really go away; they lurk, awaiting artistic materialization.
The liquidity of Gober's visual vocabulary is paralleled by the pervasiveness of his references to water, both literal and implied. One of his earliest realized pieces, Prayers Are Answered (1980­1981), is a scale model of a graffiti-covered Lower East Side church with a removable roof. The interior of the church is engulfed by a plaster-modeled deluge that swirls apocalyptically over the floor. The church was the last in a series of meticulously detailed architectural models of houses that Gober began in 1978 and completed in 1980. Today he refers to this body of work as "oddly naïve," 2. but in retrospect it establishes, formally and thematically, a number of issues that he continues to explore. The very process of moving from a domestic space to a religious space was dramatically summarized in 1997 with the realization of his installation for the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, in which the two domains were conflated with a vengeance.

In a little house keep I pictures suspended, it is not a fix'd house, It is round, it is only a few inches from one side to the other; Yet behold, it has room for all the shows of the world, all memories! Here the tableaus of life, and here the groupings of death . . . 3.

The drowning pool of a church was followed by Slides of a Changing Painting (1982­1983), which documents the permutations of a single painting that Gober endlessly added to and subtracted from, photographing each stage of its creation/destruction. When I first saw Slides projected, I could barely take in the profligacy of images, let alone what they depicted. Hyperbolically, I was reminded of the narrator in Edgar Allan Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher" and his description of his host's art: "From the paintings over which his elaborate fancy brooded, and which grew, touch by touch, into vagueness at which I shuddered knowing not why;‹from these paintings (vivid as their images are now before me) I would in vain endeavor to educe more than a small portion which should lie within the compass of merely written words. By the utter simplicity, by the nakedness of his designs, he arrested and overawed attention." 4.

Seen today, Slides appears to be a Rosetta Stone for Gober's work, literally providing a key to the sculpture that would follow it. Image after transformative image predicts much of what would, over the succeeding years, become a substantial body of work. Of no small importance, the imagery in Slides is suffused with the relentless flow of water. It bursts from culverts, cascades down a mountain, eddies around a storm drain, cuts through a forest, comes to rest in a wading pond. The paths it describes are myriad, and nothing is safe in its course, least of all the human body, which it splits and swallows like a twig in a deluge. Although Gober would not use water itself as a sculptural medium until 1992 in his installation for the Dia Center for the Arts, the absence of water was a major theme in his work from 1983 onward. It was almost as if, after the cataclysm that overtook the church and threatened to inundate the world in Slides, the awesome promise of water had to be contained.

I do not doubt interiors have their interiors, and exteriors have their exteriors, and that the eyesight has another eyesight, and the hearing another hearing, and the voice another voice,
I do not doubt that the passionately wept deaths of young men are provided for. 5.

In 1983 Gober began a serial body of work that would, intermittently, occupy more of his time than any other sculptural subject. The target of his investigation was a simple, old-fashioned domestic sink, and he kept exploring its possible permutations until 1992. Made of plaster over wire lath and finished with semigloss enamel paint, the sinks came with no faucets or drains; they are as mute and leeched of fluids as a body on a mortuary slab. Scores of preparatory drawings led to the production of some forty sinks. Many were simply untitled; others bore deadpan catalogue modifiers such as Long, Double, Deep Basin, and Corner. Still others came with anthropomorphic adjectives like Sad, Silly, and Scary, or psychological encumbrances such as Subconscious, Split-Up Conflicted, or just plain Mixed-Up. When the sinks were first shown in 1984, they were a startling revelation, reminiscent of Minimalism in their insistent variation on a theme, but this was Minimalism encoded with a haunting emotional resonance. While overtly mimetic of their source, they were also hieratic objects being offered up for contemplation‹but contemplation of what? Drudgery, domestic order, women's work, purification, deification of the everyday? In the endlessness of possibilities lay the inherent strength of the object.

In 1984 Gober's first urinal appeared, and this motif would continue to put in an occasional appearance through 1988. In a way, the urinal was easier to assimilate, particularly in Gober's dysfunctional rendering, with its implicit reference to Duchamp's iconic readymade, Foun-tain of 1917. It was an ideal interpretive object for Gober insofar as it opened the sluice for a Surrealist/Dada critique while being crisply up-to-date in its strategy of appropriation, which mirrored that of immediate predecessors such as Louise Lawler, Sherrie Levine, and Richard Prince. Unlike the appropriationists, however, Gober was involved in a labor-intensive process that eschewed the cult of the readymade in favor of the adamantly handmade. So, while he was playing the prevailing intellectual game, he was also distancing himself from it and the criticism surrounding it. There was also the issue of content. Manhattan, in 1984, felt like the AIDS capital of the world, and an unplumbed urinal, often installed in groupings of two and three, conjured up much more than Duchamp. Not for the first time, the issue of surrogacy became manifest in Gober's objects. The politics of a sink are oblique; the politics of a urinal are not. Not for the last time in his sculpture, art history took a backseat to his story.

Gober's final evocation of the absence of water in the 1980s was an edition of pewter sink drains (an image that first appeared in Slides of a Changing Painting), which he insinuated into an enormously ambitious and provocative 1989 installation at the Paula Cooper Gallery in New York. The drains (41Ž4 in. diam., 3 in. deep) were installed in the gallery walls at the height of the artist's breastbone. Here, at last, were drains for the sinks and the urinals, but naturally they were useless. Again, the sculptural authority of the work was one with its denial of function. The drains, like the sinks and urinals, are evocations of the memory of water, and their strange, passive power is very much dependent on the viewer's instant comprehension of what they are and what they represent. They are not what they appear to be, but become part of the artist's dolorous game of bait and switch.

It is tempting to see the sinks, urinals, and drains cumulatively as surrogate portraits of gay men in the 1980s. Certainly they all looked exactly like what they were modeled after, but perversely they did not do what they were supposed to do. They were definitely queer in the most homespun sense of the word. When the sinks were begun in 1984, the gay community was already being sorely tested by the growing stigmatization of gay men as carriers of the AIDS virus, as pariahs being visited by a plague tailored to their heedless otherness. The Pentecostal fervor that sought to isolate the gay community, when combined with the community's own uncertainty as to how to cope with the politics of polarization, resulted in a schizophrenic program of psychological empowerment and physical denial. Across America, bathhouses and gay bars began to be closed by local governments, while organizations like Act Up (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) and collectives like Gran Fury emerged to fight back against repression and federal indifference to medical initiatives. It was a time when the sweetly archaic, inherently passive term gay gave way to the more ambiguously differentiated term queer. The pink triangle of Nazi Germany was revived by activists and armored with the phrase "Silence = Death." In this context, Gober's inventory of muted, dysfunctional receptacles became an elegiac analogue to an era in which hope and anger were as one, and neither had an outlet. A sculpture from 1985, The Sink Inside of Me, with its bifurcated backsplash and basin, was designed to fail in its function; it simply could not of its nature contain what utility would demand of it. In a universally expanded catalogue of sinks, it is "queer." Nonetheless, it is what it is: complex, unique, one of many, and beautiful in its otherness.

And I say that clean-shaped children can be jetted and conceived only where natural forms pervail in public, and the human face and form are never caricatured. 6.

In 1986 the absence of the body began to be apparent in Gober's sculpture. Playpens, cribs, beds (three for dogs, three for their masters), and a chair came into being. The playpens and cribs were singularly ominous in their evocation of the isolated child trapped in a cage imbued with its own Skinnerian agenda. These pieces mark the first appearance of what would become an ongoing theme in Gober's chilling evocation of childhood; they are also particularly naked in their equation of infancy with imprisonment. The compound word playpen is itself rife with contradiction; each half of the word seems hell-bent on nullifying the other. Each of these little cages‹whether it is Pitched, Slanted, Distorted, Tilted, or con- torted into an X‹is an indictment in three dimensions. Here, that which was intended to protect the child is retrofitted into an arena for penitential modification. Nurturing and punishment coalesce into a regimen of denial. Even the potentially hopeful Open Playpen (with one quadrant of bars missing) became, at best, possible evidence of parental carelessness rather than liberation. As emblems of the realm of infancy, the crib and the playpen are absolute, and the normalcy of their function is unquestioned. Yet, in Gober's analytic lexicon, they are as bent on redemptive brutalization as the hellish arsenal of Victorian child-taming inventions meant to cure everything from bed-wetting to bad posture. Clearly, to be young is to be a victim.

Whereas the cribs are as loaded as land mines, the three beds that Gober made between 1986 and 1988 are insistently lacking in overt emotional inflection. Each is a basic, generic design, and each is made for a single occupant. All three have undersheets and blankets. The first has one pillow, the second has two, and the third has none. They have the simplicity of storybook illustrations, perfect for each of the three little pigs (or Mama, Papa, and Baby Bear). Yet their chronological proximity to the cribs and playpens chafes. One begins to inspect their orderly rightness for a psychic wrongness. Are these beds intended for the adolescents who were once confined to the cribs? Do the vertical rungs that make up the backboard and footrest of the third allude to a hospital bed? Does its whiteness? Is that an indentation of a body on the blanket? Was the pillow removed after the body?

Is this what the beds looked like in the Darling family nursery after the children had fled with Peter Pan to join the Lost Boys? 7. A sobering melancholy suffuses the empty beds, which remind us of all those things that were never truly ours to possess: our youth, our innocence, our lovers, the dependency of our children, the mortal continuum of our friends. (In 1991 Felix Gonzalez-Torres generated a billboard project that occupied a number of sites in and around Manhattan. The image was a black-and-white photograph of a rumpled, white-sheeted double bed bearing the imprint of two now- absent bodies. Seeing it, one could not help remembering Gober's more sober single beds and realizing that an empty bed had, through the 1980s, become much more than an empty bed, that the continuing toll of the AIDS virus was changing the way we in the queer community front-loaded our collective image bank.)
The dog beds, of which there are also three, are probably best known for the fact that Gober taught himself basketry to construct them. They are also fascinating for the hand-painted pillows they contain. Two have the kind of repeat patterns (painted on flannel) that one associates with the lining of sleeping bags. One shows vignettes of geese; the other, stags. In the American wilderness both are most often seen at the other end of a gun barrel, and their relationship to a dog is that of prey to predator. Yet here the predator is invited to curl into a blameless doggy sleep while perhaps subliminally absorbing the images of that which it has been taught to stalk and retrieve.

The dog beds are oddly disquieting in their bland recognition of our domestic accommodation of the feral and our complicity in channeling that which is most base into that which we invest with so much surrogate affection. It is the last dog bed, however, dated 1988, which stands as one of Gober's most troubling works and which would, in 1990, occasion a contained, yet serious, controversy. 8. In this dog bed the repeat pattern alternates between two images: one of a sleeping white man and one of a lynched black man. Both were appropriated, the former from a Bloomingdale's print advertisement, the latter from a 1920s cartoon found in the New York Public Library . The combination of the dead and the dreaming appears to be a horrific three-dimensional paraphrase of the old adage "Lie down with dogs and wake up with fleas." The resultant sculpture is not a dog bed; it is an incident. This is Goya territory, where the sleep of reason begets monsters. The allocation of guilt is not the point. The fact that the dreamer possesses the image of the dead is enough; the guilt is implicit.

Contemporaneous with the children's furniture was the first of Gober's chair sculptures, Slip Covered Armchair (1986­198). The painted linen slipcover is cloying in its dense patterning of pastel pansies and daffodils, lilac sprigs and robins, dragonflies and redbirds, water lilies and ferns. The pastoral riot is almost too abundant, particularly juxtaposed with the spartan meanness of the beds. One looks in vain for the rot in this domestic arcadia, but none is there. That it is mother's chair is unquestioned. Only a wild child fresh from the forest would not be alert to the aggressive female encoding of the slipcover's pattern and trim of schoolgirl pleats. The chair is a child's safe harbor for a lullaby or a fairy tale‹except for the fact that it is as hard as a rock and as abrasive as sandpaper. Its niceness is all feint and parry. Its nurturing promise is denied both parent and child. Yet, in the "please do not touch" environment of an art gallery, it is an unambiguously tender object.

Gober returned to Slides of a Changing Painting for inspiration in 1988. Invited to participate in a show with Christopher Wool at 303 Gallery in New York, he attempted to realize a sculpture from the painted image of a woman's sleeveless dress hanging from the limbs of a tree. When he found it impossible to resolve the sculpture, he decided to make a photograph. Wool applied one of his stencils of intertwining tendrils to the dress, which was then hung from a tree in the woods and photographed. Other photographs (not exhibited at the time) show three similarly installed dresses receding into the depth of the forest. Either singly or in triplicate, the dress is an extremely unsettling image. The tree is almost identical to that in the hanged-man cartoon portrayed in the dog bed, but there is no overt evidence of violence, only the suggestion. The creepy, fetishized display of the dress or dresses suggests an intent to either warn or document. Either way, the image is unsavory in its evocation of an unseen perpetrator and an undiscovered act. Of all Gober's body stand-ins, the dress on the bleakly naked tree is the most overtly Grand Guignol but, naturally, in the most understated possible way.

The earth, restive, confronts a new era, perhaps a general divine war,
No one knows what will happen next, such portents fill the days and nights; Years prophetical! the space ahead as I walk,
as I vainly try to pierce it, is full of phantoms. 9.

Around this time Gober began another serial body of work that was in many ways another demonstration of his expertise in the kinds of radical permutation that informed the sinks. This time his subject was a door. It wasn't just any door, but an elegant, somewhat antiquated formal door defined by a central grid that articulated three pairs of inset panels (two square over four vertical). That the center of the organizing grid resembled a stacked cross was most congenially obvious in the artist's least-manipulated door, part of an untitled installation for the 1988 exhibition Utopia Post Utopia at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston. There he built a room, leaving the studs exposed on its exterior. One entered through a refined, fully painted doorframe, across from which, propped against the facing wall, was its missing door. The room was painted a misty blue and held three works of art selected by Gober. In the center of the floor, between the door frame and the door, lay Meg Webster's Moss Bed, a mattress-sized berm of earth covered in velvety moss. On one of the opposing walls was a small gilt-framed landscape by Albert Bierstadt; on the other was an aluminum-framed handwritten joke about a fireman and a drunk by Richard Prince.

Wryly, elegantly, simply, Gober summed up the exhibition's title while letting his own divided sculpture act as its hyphen. He also captured something more delicate: a sense of impalpable, late twentieth-century loss. When Bierstadt raced west in the 1860s to capture a utopian American landscape, the East was already industrialized, and the trains he took across the Great Plains passed through a landscape that was home to a growing number of hardscrabble farmers who were unknowingly on their way to the Dust Bowl, thanks to the government's fiction of dry-land cultivation. Bierstadt's Lake Tahoe, California (1867) wasn't an idyllic destination; it was a target waiting to be absorbed into the nation's metropolitan expansion. Webster's dreamy Moss Bed (1986­1988) was a further reminder of the promise of something perfect far beyond the gallery walls, but it was nature on a respirator and had the strange effect of turning the installation into an oddly serene trauma unit. Prince's Untitled (Joke) (1985­1987) was the sobering foil to Bierstadt and Webster. Distinctly unfunny, it read: "Fireman pulling a drunk out of a burning bed: You darned fool, that'll teach you to smoke in bed. Drunk: I wasn't smoking in bed, it was on fire when I laid down." It isn't too difficult a stretch to see Prince's "bed" as Gober's earlier hanging man/sleeping man dog bed or Webster's endangered Moss Bed and to understand what has always been America's dilemma: when the first immigrant lay down to take a nap, the bed was already smoldering, and by the time the first slave ship docked, it was aflame. In the Utopia Post Utopia installation Gober doesn't merely open the door to all of this, he literally removes it.

As fascinating as the Utopia Post Utopia installation proved to be, it did nothing to prepare anyone for the installation Gober would execute at the Paula Cooper Gallery in 1989, which was as tightly constructed and nakedly efficient as a noose. While he had been involved in curatorial-collaborative installations earlier in his career, 10. none of them was as rife with complexity as the one at Paula Cooper's, which felt like a perfectly, horribly apt end to the leveraged mess that was the 1980s. There were only six elements in the exhibition: two differently patterned wallpapers, a series of identical pewter drains, several cat-litter bags, a wedding dress, and a bag of donuts. In combination, they were as psychologically orchestrated as the dream casino Salvador Dali whipped up for Hitchcock's Freudian-driven Spellbound (1945).

The installation space was basically carved into two interconnecting areas, both defined by unfinished, framed walls. The first space was wallpapered with the hanging man/sleeping man motif, and in its center stood a wedding dress whose materials (silk, satin, muslin, linen, tulle, welded steel) are ominously descriptive. Leaning against the three walls were hand-painted bags of "Fine Fare Cat Litter." The second space was wallpapered with "graffitied" male and female genitalia printed in white on black. 11. In its center, on a pedestal, stood a bag of donuts. Pewter drains were embedded chest-high in the wall, spaced equidistantly around the room. For all the unoccupied space, a horrible claustrophobia hung in the air. No single object dominated this unwholesome ensemble. The wedding dress was a vacuum‹either an iron maiden in waiting or a muted destroyer that had already consumed the absent bride. It was as much a failed container as the sinks and urinals. (Gober would later have himself photographed in a facsimile of the dress in a conflation of Saks Fifth Avenue merchandising and Duchampian gender-bending, but for the time being, the dress was simply another kind of drain.)

In conversation, Gober has speculated about the relationship between the bride and the sleeping man in the wallpaper, suggesting that they could be viewed as husband and wife. 12. It is a provocative arena for interpretation, and I can't help but think back to Kate Chopin's much-anthologized short story "Désirée's Baby" (1897) or Jean Rhys' last novel, Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), two works in which the ambiguity of Creole bloodlines leads to death and degradation for the heroines. In both fictions the women are presumed by their husbands to carry the blood of slaves, and as a result, one is driven to suicide and the other is virtually buried alive. In "Désirée's Baby," the heroine, shunned by her husband, takes their mulatto baby and wanders away from his plantation, where "she disappeared among the reeds and willows that grew thick along the banks of the deep, sluggish bayou; and she did not come back again." 13.

While this overlay of fiction is surely to the left of Gober's intent, it is accurate insofar as it indicates the loaded relationship between Wedding Gown and the surrounding wallpaper. It also alludes to that which has been drained from the conduit of the wedding dress and the judgmental predetermination of blood in our culture. As for the cat litter, Gober has called it "a metaphor for a couple's intimacy‹that when you make a commitment to an intimate relationship, that involves taking care of that other person's body in sickness and in health." 14. Cat litter also absorbs and camouflages waste; it is the perfect medium for those who want to avoid confronting their own mess. It's no wonder that the dress is empty because, in Gober's configuration, it has a weight that cannot be borne; it is the "sluggish bayou" that drags down Chopin's Désirée.

The second room‹with its black wallpaper covered in crude, chalk-white renderings of penises and vaginas‹offered no antidote to what preceded it. If anything, the air grew more miasmic. It was like being trapped and stalked in the awful suite of rooms described by Poe in "The Masque of the Red Death," where "there were much of the beautiful, much of the wanton, much of the bizarre, something of the terrible, and not a little of that which might have excited disgust." 15. Sunk into the wallpaper, the drains looked horribly at the ready to evacuate the myriad fluids that churn through our bodies. Punctuated by the drains, the wallpaper filled the room with the absence of sperm and blood and urine and tears and feces and sweat. It was like an abattoir for the yearning of the flesh.

Located at the center of it all was the insidious bag of donuts, which felt not at all nourishing, a sort of "let them eat cake" aside. The fact that it was simply a bag of donuts (deep-fried by the artist)‹or, as Gober has referred to it, "a sculpture of a bag of donuts" 16. ‹didn't alter the feeling it brought to the room. The white paper bag began to morph into the wedding dress, and the donuts began to resemble the drains. This totally innocuous object (a snack for the coffee break) felt tainted. Where had the donuts been? What had been done to them? I remember somebody at the exhibition's opening grabbing one out of the bag and, in the ensuing scramble to get it out of his hand, wondered if they were trying to protect the art or him. The bag of donuts was an essentially humorous object, an odd salute to American pop consumables. Still, spotlit on its pedestal, it was unlikable and as benignly menacing as the glass of milk that Cary Grant offers to Joan Fontaine in Hitchcock's Suspicion (1941).

The totality of the installation was emotionally numbing. You could almost hear a subliminal sound track monotonously intoning, "You're born, you do some shit, and you die." Prior to this installation Gober had certainly been a provocative artist with an often disturbing vision, but never had his anger and social intent been manifested so clearly. This was a portrait of an America that was wandering down the same lost highway taken by Janet Leigh in Hitchcock's Psycho (1960), a road trip that ended with her blood pouring down a bathtub drain. These rooms were Gober's very own Bates Motel, and that bag of donuts was all of us waiting to be consumed. The American Gothic undertow that had been in Gober's work since the early architectural models now surged to the surface. Serialist and Surrealist sources were still there (and would remain), but the artist's kinship with American film images and literary themes was now also clearly apparent.

Ribs, belly, backbone, joints of the backbone,
Hips, hip-sockets, hip-strength, inward and outward round,
man-balls, man-root,
Strong set of thighs, well carrying the trunk above, leg-fibres,
knee, knee-pan, upper-leg, under-leg,
Ankles, instep, foot-ball, toes, toe-joints, the heel;
All attitudes, all the shapeliness, all the belongings of my or your body. 17.

The first legs appeared in Gober's work in 1990. They protruded horizontally from walls, visible from the foot to the knee or mid-thigh. They were clothed in a cuffed pant leg, a sock, a shoe. A small expanse of hairy flesh showed between the sock and the cuff. In The Body in Pieces: The Fragment as a Metaphor of Modernity, Linda Nochlin takes a look at some late nineteenth-century legs. Her legs are specifically French, female, and male-imaged. Nochlin posits that her cut-off legs have three possible readings: fetish, metonym, and "signboards advertising commodities." While she takes pains to point out that "the male fragmented leg obviously signifies very differently from the female one," 18. my guess is that it is the nature of the artist that determines the meaning, and as Gober has stated, he saw the expanse of flesh between the sock and the cuff as an erogenous zone. 19.

It is important to note here that, in the mid-1960s, another American artist (one with whom Gober shares some biographical similarities) also explored the fragmented male body in a series of reliquaries containing wax legs and forearms. Unlike Gober, Paul Thek overtly and poetically heroized the limbs, often girding them in archaic or talismanic sheaths of leather and butterfly wings. Thek's reliquaries are widely acknowledged to be meditations on the sacrifice of America's young in Vietnam, but they also handily fulfill Nochlin's reading of the "cut-off." The fetishistic component is instantly apparent in the romantic costuming, which conjures up an eroticized gladiatorial arena where Spartans stand shoulder to shoulder with archangels. Metonymically, the limbs are not simply male indicators; they are male warriors who are poetically doomed to fulfill one's fantasy, be it Roland or Kilroy. As "signboards," they offer a commodity that is complicated. They indicate legions of valorous warriors and the solitary unknown; they also summon up a kind of erotic morbidity that reached its apogee early in this century through the poetry of British writers such as Rupert Brooke, A. E. Houseman, and Wilfred Owen, which eulogized the casualties of World War I (i.e., "Dead and divine and brother of all, and here again he lies"). 20.

Whitman, no stranger to the erotics of the fragmented body, wrote: The expression of a well-made man appears not only in his face,
It is in his limbs and joints also, it is curiously in the joints of his hips and wrists,
It is in his walk, the carriage of his neck, the flex of his waist and knees, dress does not hide him,
The strong sweet quality he has strikes through the cotton and broadcloth,
To see him pass conveys as much as the best poem, perhaps more,
You linger to see his back, and the back of his neck and shoulder-side. 21.

Gober's legs do not occupy the high dramatic ground claimed by Thek. They are commonplace, not heroic. Their very lack of glamorous costuming gives them an indeterminate status, which actually makes them scarier than Thek's blighted Olympians. The heroic is not really Gober's metier, but the nuance of the everyday is, and the everyday, as Whitman preached, is charged with the erotic. The vignetted body has powerful erotic connotations that are often greater than the sum of its various parts. Gober's nondescript limbs could belong to anyone, and in that fact, fantasy is nurtured. The vulnerability of the leg protruding from the wall lends it a sexual charge similar to that of the anonymous penis poking through a glory hole in a bathroom stall.

The leg could just as easily semaphore victim, how-ever, or mark the scene of a crime. Hitchcock memorably fetishized disembodied male legs in four very different ways. In Spellbound (1945), the viewer follows a pair as they speed down a balustrade and into the back of a child, who is summarily pitched to his death on a spiked rail. In Strangers on a Train (1951), two cabs pull up to a train station, and two pairs of legs get out. One is shod in decorative, two-tone oxfords; the other, in plain, sensible shoes. The camera moves with the shoes as they become temporarily aligned inside the station. Minutes later, it is established that the oxfords belong to the effete villain and the sensible shoes to the tennis-playing hero; masculinity and motive are handily signaled by footwear. In Rear Window (1954), Jimmy Stewart's plaster-cast leg precedes him everywhere, alternately an emblem of impotence and arousal. In The Trouble with Harry (1956), the title character starts dead and stays dead, but his body's presence is inevitably indicated by its legs protruding from a place where it has been temporarily stashed. For Hitchcock, as for Gober, the leg acts as a stand-in for the corpus and allows a certain willed distancing from psychological intent and viewer identification. It helps in telling the story, but you create the fiction.

In a 1991 exhibition at the Galerie nationale du Jeu de Paume in Paris, Gober installed three new works that were surprisingly lyrical and unexpectedly emotive. Two consisted of trunkless bodies sprouting from the wall. Each body faced the floor and extended from the small of the back to the feet. One wore shoes, socks, and long black pants that had been cut away to reveal three candles growing up from the skin. One wore tennis shoes, white socks, and cotton briefs; it was perforated by five flesh-colored drains. The third was naked, legless, and mounted facing the wall; a musical score was transcribed across its buttocks and thighs (evolved from a vignette of a musically tattooed body in Heironymus Bosch's The Garden of Earthly Delights, 1500). 22. Gober has commented that the three works "seemed to present a trinity of possibilities‹from pleasure to disaster to resuscitation." 23. Obviously, "pleasure" is the property of the musical score, which can't help but be seen as the homoerotic counterpart of Man Ray's Le Violon d'Ingres (1924), which turns the naked back of Kiki of Montparnasse into the swelling volumes of a violin. Gober has never played the musical fragment inscribed on the body, but that is irrelevant; whatever the tune, it is clearly the music of desire. Even the decision to mount the piece on a bucolic forested wallpaper lends it a kind of Attic sweetness, as if Ganymede had extracted himself from a frieze in an antiquities museum and was heading back into the pansexual grove. The body with the drains, by contrast, is soberingly headed nowhere. It represents the epidemically informed end to the carnal. Even the clothing that covers the body‹white socks, sneakers, and underpants‹is a shortlist of fetishized locker-room souvenirs. This is everybody's son/lover/fantasy reduced to a humiliatingly vulnerable icon of submission and loss. The final body, with its sprouting candles, is as much an altar as a sculpture. In its merger of flesh and symbolized spirit, it suggests the kind of passive hope one expresses in lighting a votive candle. Mediating, as it does, between the joys and the sorrows of the flesh, the sculpture affords a measure of solemn promise. If it were to bear an inscription, these lines from Whitman might serve it well:

And if the body does not do fully as much as the soul? And if the body were not the soul, what is the soul? 24.

A fourth sculpture, also premiered at the Jeu de Paume, provides one of the few belly laughs in the artist's career. Simply and accurately titled Cigar (1991), it occupied the center of the gallery's floor like an enormous turd. The image was taken from René Magritte's 1959 painting The State of Grace, in which a bicycle sits atop a smoking, floating cigar. Gober's Cigar clocks in at a whopping, Brobdignagian six feet and is composed of tobacco leaves rolled over a wooden armature with a hand-painted cigar band circling its center. Much has been written about the work, alluding to its various connotations (masculinity, practical jokes, Groucho Marx, Sigmund Freud, celebratory token for the arrival of a baby, oral prosthetic for fat-cat artists and entrepreneurs), 25. but it also seems to have an inevitable relationship to Wedding Gown. Both are made essentially to the measure of the artist (six feet), and while the Gown is a vacuum, the Cigar is the properly engorged stopper to plug it. The likelihood of ever seeing the two works in a shared space is extremely remote, but, for a curatorial moment, imagine the possibility; it's a surrealistically brutish image equivalent to a satyr raping a dryad (or Popeye going at Temple Drake with a corncob in Faulkner's Sanctuary). The pieces exist on the same creative arc and within the same archetypal construct, and they are very gothic.

A 1991 edition of Parkett was devoted in part to a series of essays on Gober's work. 26. It is the magazine's custom to ask featured artists to do a limited edition to benefit the publication. For his contribution, Gober created a facsimile of a page from the "Metropolitan" section of the New York Times. 27. It was dated October 4, 1960, and, in the midst of wedding announcements and lottery results, carried a one-paragraph story with the headline "Boy Drowns in Pool." The article reports the death of a six-year-old boy named Robert Gober in Wallingford, Connecticut, going on to note that the boy's mother has been detained for questioning. Gober was indeed six in 1960 and lived in Wallingford with his mother. Obviously he was not the child in the pool, but what are we to make of this fabricated report? Certainly there is something of every lonely child's "you'll be sorry when I'm dead" lament contained within its starkly terse narrative. But does it go back to the water-engulfed church of Prayers Are Answered or the empty beds for those who have been disappeared? Was it a pre-AIDS Robert Gober, released from the specter of death? The obituary was, and remains, one of Gober's most curious self-references. At the time he was getting ready for the exhibition that essentially cemented his place among a handful of living American artists (along with Mike Kelley, Bruce Nauman, and Charles Ray) who were continuing a narrative sculptural tradition in ways that both advanced and consolidated the genre. The occasion of the exhibition was an invitation to do an installation at the Dia Center for the Arts in New York. The installation had been postponed once (to make time for the Jeu de Paume), and by the time it occurred, in mid-September 1992, Gober was ready to literally pull out the stops. He has stated: "I wanted the feeling of the show to be positive and mature. And I think I felt that making the sink functional wasn't only an internal imperative of expressing who I am, but maybe it was also a response to so much of the interpretation that had to do with the nonfunctioning sink and the epidemic and myself as a gay man. I think I felt a need to turn that around and to not have a gay artist represented as a nonfunctioning utilitarian object, but one functioning beautifully, almost in excess." 28.

What resulted at Dia was an exhibition by an artist working at the peak of his form. The merger of forest mural, plumbed and running sinks, stacks of bound newspapers, prison windows, fire exit, and boxes of rat bait all melded into an installation that was as emotionally liberating as it was dense. As he had done in previous projects, Gober left the exterior walls unfinished so that the forested interior space was like exiting a cave and emerging into a sylvan glade. The light felt dappled, and the sound of rushing water permeated the room. Only secondarily did one notice the gushing sinks and see the progression of prison windows high on the forest walls. The windows were barred, and beyond them were radiant, cloudless blue skies. On the floor, under the sinks, were boxes of "Enforcer Rat Bait" and, stacked throughout, orderly bales of New York's daily newspapers, their cover pages subversively collaged by Gober to reflect the interstices of art, gender, and politics. The conflation of interior and exterior was perfect in its resolute fatalism, as were the reminders of yesterday's news and today's predators. Soon the lavish artifice of the forest became more insistent and began to merge with the brilliantly maudlin, illusory cinematic ambiance of the prison windows. It was like being trapped on the set of an existential remake of Sam Fuller's Shock Corridor (1963), in which the psychotic episodes of asylum inmates turn their very prosaic institution into a fragmented environment where the real and the hallucinated are constantly in uneasy flux.

The chilliest element in the installation was a cul-de-sac that left you facing a locked metal door over which a red lightbulb was mounted; a band of incandescent white light, coming from behind, defined the lower margin of the door. Stacked around it were more news-paper bales. The door was, of course, locked, and if there was a way out, this certainly wasn't it. This exit was not an exit, but an emblem of the escape from which there is no escape. We've left the cinema of Sam Fuller and entered the theater of Jean-Paul Sartre.

Garcin: Open the door! Open, blast you! I'll endure anything, your red hot tongs and molten lead, your racks and prongs and garrotes‹all your fiendish gadgets, everything that burns and flays and tears‹I'll put up with any torture you impose. Anything, anything would be better than this agony of mind, this creeping pain that gnaws and fumbles and caresses one and never hurts quite enough.
[He grips the doorknob and rattles it.]
Now will you open?
[The door flies open with a jerk, and he just avoids falling.]
Ah! [A long silence.]
Inez: Well Garcin? You're free to go.
Garcin: [meditatively] Now I wonder why that door opened.
Inez: What are you waiting for? Hurry up and go.
Garcin: I shall not go.
Inez: And you, Estelle?
[Estelle does not move. Inez bursts out laughing.]
So what? Which shall it be? Which of the three of us will leave? The barrier's down, why are we waiting? . . . But what a situation! It's a scream! We're‹inseparables! 29.

No Exit was first staged in 1944, and it caused a sensation in the nascent new theater of postwar Europe. It was the perfect, icily chic vehicle to popularize haute existential angst. Coming almost half a century later, Gober's manifestation of anxiety is far more complicated than Sartre's. If anything, the Surrealist impulse in Gober's work aligns it more closely with the work of the last great Surrealist, Luis Buñuel, whose film The Exterminating Angel (1961) both politicized and problematized Sartre's closed, existential formula. The guests whom Buñuel assembles for his cinematic house party simply won't leave, which is a subtly different dilemma than that of the characters in Sartre's play, who cannot leave. The passivity of the former remains more stunningly modern than the entrapment of the latter. I think Buñuel's Catholicism creates another essential difference, which Sartre's rigorous atheism wouldn't permit, and that is the tantalizing possibility of redemption (or condemnation). Buñuel's houseguests do eventually leave but, following a Mass celebrating their liberation, find themselves unable to exit the church.

Gober's mise-en-scène certainly genuflects, through the presence of its closed door, to Sartre's existential determinism, but the main room is invigorated by Buñuel's more complicated misanthropic humanism. In addition to those twentieth-century currents of existentialism and Surrealism, Gober's room also evokes the kind of sobering lyricism associated with Britain's nineteenth-century Romantic poets. I remember going home, after seeing the Dia installation, and sitting down to read William Wordsworth's "Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood." Indeed, Gober had created a visual analogue for the ode's fifth stanza:

Heaven lies about us in our infancy!
Shades of the prison house begin to close
Upon the growing Boy,
But he beholds the light, and whence it flows,
He sees it in his joy;
The youth, who daily farther from the east
Must travel, still is Nature's Priest,
And by the vision splendid
Is on his way attended;
At length the Man perceives it die away,
And fade into the light of common day. 30.

The notion of the pastoral that Gober created was clearly no more modeled on a nineteenth-century ideal than was the environment he created for Utopia Post Utopia. It was a Warholian paint-by-numbers mural that repeats itself endlessly and whose paths lead nowhere other than back to the foreground. Its illusionary status was reinforced by the prison windows, which were instantly familiar from dozens of Hollywood movies in which the hero gazes through the bars at a too-blue Technicolor sky waiting for release. Only, in Gober's universe, as in Wordsworth's, the prisoner is already on the other side; he's simply forgotten what it looks like. Even the sinks confounded expectations. Their collective gush was more primal than domestic, and then, too, they wouldn't stop. There was a belligerence to their functioning that was almost nightmarish. Positioned below them, the containers of rat bait were clearly a warning that there was something feral in this antinatural idyll. In the latent dampness of the plumbed forest, things were gathering underfoot, and those things were foul and pestilential. The piled newspapers, with their Gober-collaged contents mixing art news and obituaries and transgendered bridal advertisements, looked an awful lot like potential nests for whatever the rat poison was attempting to hold at bay. Curiously, it was as if there were two rooms hovering in parallel universes. One room, while cautionary, was essentially imbued with promise. The other, while engineered with alternatives, was filled with dire portents. Both held their truths.

I am a man who, sauntering along without fully stopping,
turns a casual look upon you and then averts his face,
Leaving it to you to prove and define it,
Expecting the main things from you. 31.

After Dia, Gober was the subject of a survey co-organized by the Serpentine Gallery, London, and the Tate Gallery, Liverpool, in 1993. No new work appeared until a show in 1994 at Paula Cooper Gallery. It wasn't exactly an installation, more a tersely edited selection of recent sculpture and one strange drawing. There were six pieces, and with one exception, each pointed the way to installations the artist would undertake in 1995 and 1997. Wedged in a corner, a truncated torso of a woman gave birth to a male leg accessorized with a shoe and sock. It was titled Man Coming Out of the Woman (1993­1994), so one knew that it wasn't "Man Going into the Woman," which was the horrible other possibility. (A later piece would depict a similar birth, only confined within a fireplace: a child's leg emerging from a man's anus.) The piece's direct, almost sophomoric rudeness begged a quick, tactical response. In the simplest of interpretive scenarios it would appear that a certain amount of predetermination takes place in the womb or that the process of gendering a child begins literally at birth. But there are two bodies involved, and the brutal violation of the female by that which she is delivering shouldn't be overlooked, because Gober would stage another, more ceremonial violation only three years later in Los Angeles.

Also on the floor of the gallery were two enormous sticks of butter lying naked on their open wrappers. Like the artist's earlier cigar, they were mostly strange because of their physical inflation. And, like the enormous helmet that crashes murderously out of the sky onto a young nobleman in the first chapter of Hugh Walpole's eighteenth-century howler The Castle of Otranto (1765), they are also gothic in their illogical scale. Walpole's clarification of his fictional impulses might well serve to contextualize Gober's butter sticks in that they released "the great resources of fancy dammed-up by common life."32 The same explanation might be further voiced by the character played by Marlon Brando when he introduces the century's most notorious stick of butter to Maria Schneider in Bernardo Bertolucci's Last Tango in Paris (1972). Appropriately, what Brando's character was looking for was less about sex than it was about the liberty achieved through anonymity. As a functional depressive, Brando's character, like Walpole's Prince of Otranto, "could know no happiness, but in the society of one with whom he could forever indulge the melancholy that had taken possession of his soul." 33. In Last Tango the melancholy was lubricated by the butter.

Another overscaled object included in the show‹an enormous box of Farina (Untitled, 1993­1994, 80 x 521Ž2 x 24 in.) with a deadpan re-creation of a smiling, spoon-fed moppet‹offered a somewhat sunnier presence, with its benign promise of nurture. Given the right parental presentation, a box of Farina might well assume such formidable proportions to the obediently receptive child. With its Norman Rockwellesque little boy and comfortably recognizable logo, the Farina box was like a homely, antidotal beacon for those who had been previously exposed to the artist's bags of kitty litter or containers of rat poison.

Perhaps the oddest entity in the show was an enormous work on paper. The fact that there was much more paper than drawing was somewhat perplexing. The overall dimensions of the work, 80 by 1383Ž4 inches, belie the tiny drawing of a cellar door contained on the vast whiteness of its field. As a subject in Gober's work, the cellar door had appeared in an early painting and in one of his architectural models. In and of itself, a cellar door is a thoroughly prosaic thing, a little functional wedge stuck onto millions of houses, great and small. But a cellar door is also mysterious, offering a descent into the submerged. It is the threshold to that unassigned area beneath the domestic. It is where things are not so easily fixed and more easily hidden. In popular entertainments, a descent into the cellar is rarely the equivalent of a walk in the park unless the park borders a cemetery and there is a full moon and something is howling in the darkness. Gober's tiny, somewhat tentative drawing sitting on all that unclaimed ground conjures up the enormity of what lies in wait once the cellar door has been opened; beneath all that white whispers an ocean of dark.

The most surprising piece in the exhibition was a storm drain installed flush with the floor. Peering down into the murk of the drain, one could just make out the naked torso of a man with a sink drain embedded in his chest. A steady stream of water washed over the blanched whiteness of the body. It was an incredibly sobering vision, particularly because it was so abjectly unobtrusive, with only a distant sound of water directing one to it.

The pierced chest and storm drain had both been previsioned in Slides of a Changing Painting, but not in this set of codependencies. (The sequence in Slides from which the chest was excerpted had previously resulted in an untitled sculpture from 1991 that depicted a hermaphroditic chest that had been cast from the volume used to create the cat-litter sacks from 1989.) The water that had nuanced the Dia installation never, for an instant, implied this kind of potential obliteration. Its properties in the forest were essentially those of cleansing and purification. Now the water turned ominous, and it was chafing against the illusion of flesh, not porcelain.

Caught in the drain, the body became another sluice as well as a kind of sacrificial offering. The storm drain itself is associated with loss; one thinks of the countless movies in which someone drops something essential into a drain (most viscerally imagined in Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train). The tension in the situation arises from our shared awareness that, once the object disappears, it's way beyond recovery. The pathos in Gober's sculpture is that the lost object is not only unrecoverable but is also lodged in plain view; it refuses to be swept away.

Gober's fresh mining of Slides of a Changing Painting continued into his installation for the Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Basel, in 1995. The centerpiece of this installation was Split Wall with Drains (1994­1995), a kind of Apollonian alternative to the man in the drain. Additionally, Split Wall drew on two other previous works: Slides of a Changing Painting and the door frame and exterior walls from the Utopia Post Utopia installation. It was a paean to harmonious recycling and one of the artist's most eloquently understated works. Standing slightly higher than 10 feet with a width of almost 18 feet, Split Wall was evenly pierced by two identical doorways, each with an elegantly modeled door frame. Between the doors, on either side of the wall, were two storm drains mounted in the floor; a violent current of water tore through the drains over a congestion of autumnal leaves and crumpled beer cans. In the drain from which the water initiates, an envelope is lodged and resists the current. Passing through the doorway, one notices that the wall has been cleft lengthwise so that the illusion of one gives way to the reality of two. The doubling of doors, walls, and drains turns what initially appears to be an elegantly simple structure into what is literally a house divided. That the multiple fractures are so surgically clean only adds to the disquieting psychology of the work's inherent bipolarity. The only element that is not mirrored on either side is the envelope, which functions somewhat like a failed neurological impulse that, once sent, is incapable of locating its receiver. The tension imparted by the envelope, in its prosaic recognizability, makes this installation more lambently melancholy than the more feverish man in the drain. The envelope also provides an implied narrative for the doubling and splitting that belie the piece's initial formal coherence.

The other three sculptures in the exhibition were variously penetrated by a culvert pipe, a motif that dominated Slides of a Changing Painting but had never previously assumed three-dimensional form. Unlike drains, which are fixed in place to deal with an existing system, culverts are more improvisational and tend to be utilized to accommodate seasonal spillways or to divert the kind of occasional flooding caused by beaver dams and wander-ing streams. Gober's use of the culvert takes into account its inherent interventionist properties. In an untitled work (1994­1995), a very large, flower-patterned tissue box is longitudinally speared by a bronze culvert. An oval aperture on the top of the box frames the pristine tissues inside. In Lard Box (1994­1995), a gargantuan replica of a box of "Armour Lard" is penetrated lengthwise and crosswise. The third work, Chair with Pipe (1994­1995), is a conventionally scaled, upholstered easy chair whose back has been pierced by a culvert, which is uneasily supported by its cushioned seat.

Each of the pieces is singularly strange, and the culvert's relationship with each is strangely singular. The box of tissues disassembles with the least interrogation, insofar as it is utilized for the shedding of tears or, tissues untouched, the repression of the same. In Gober's version the culvert gives permission for the manly sublimation of emotion (and, of course, the resultant psychological constipation). Lard Box, penetrated by its cruciform culvert, is less forthcoming. The odd marriage of Jewish taboo (rendered pig fat) and Christian icon (cross) provides a decidedly weird confrontation between Old and New Testament scriptural hierarchies. It is just as likely, however, that the Pop pull that Gober had previously experienced (from, for example, Farina) had resurfaced in the colorful (red, green, white) "Armour" box, with its promise of a "hydrogenated" product. It is worth noting that hydrogen, when oxidized, forms water, which implicitly turns the lard box into a suspension chamber for liquidity. Chair with Pipe is at once the simplest and most resonant of the three sculptures. It is very pure Gober in that the original model for the chair was salvaged from the streets of New York and the collision between the chair and the culvert has a narrative possibility that is denied by the enlargement of the tissue and lard boxes. The narrative is grotesquely available in the media at least once a week (i.e., "Load from tractor trailer narrowly avoids gutting toddler in Connecticut suburb"). Then, too, the upholstery for the chair was inspired by an apocalyptic sequence in Slides of a Changing Painting. The fabric's digitized pattern is a basket weave of waterfalls and human limbs, based on a collaged combination of blue ribbon and photographs of Gober's legs. There is also a kind of deus ex machina finality to the work, as evidenced by the lugubrious ease with which the culvert occupies the overfreighted easy chair. In Basel, Gober's variations on a theme were fast-forwarded and freeze-framed with singular clarity. One of the particular pleasures dominating the exhibition was the permission it gave to see Gober working out so many long-dormant issues in his never-latent image bank.

The female contains all qualities and tempers them, She is in her place and moves with perfect balance, She is all things duly veile'd, she is both passive and active, She is to conceive daughters as well as sons, and sons as well as daughters.

As I see my soul reflected in Nature,
As I see through a mist, One with inexpressible completeness,
sanity, beauty,
See the bent head and arms folded over the breast, the Female I see. 34.

After Basel, Gober began to work intensively to fulfill an invitation that he had received in 1993 from the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles to create an installation for its warehouse space, the Geffen Contemporary. The resultant work was an epic environment in which the devotional and the psychological achieved a ratio of harmony that was both anxiety-inducing and unaccountably serene. Echoing Buñuel's career-long attempts to reconcile who he was with what had formed him, Catholicism, Gober engaged in a psychic battle to reclaim that which he had been denied by virtue of his sexuality.35 Buñuel began his filmic assault in 1928 with the image of two priests tethered to a grand piano in Un chien andalou, made in collaboration with Dali, and achieved his masterpiece of pictorial reinterpretation in 1961 with Viridiana, a film whose depiction of the Last Supper as a beggar's banquet brought down the wrath of both the government of Spain and the Church of Rome.

What Gober created was essentially less pugnacious than Buñuel's work; he simply constructed a chapel in a secular environment. It wasn't architecture, but it was architectural in scale, at 56 by 56 by 23 feet. It wasn't designed for nondenominational meditation, like Houston's Rothko Chapel, but it was an inescapably meditative environment. Dominating the installation was a six-foot-high concrete Madonna standing on the grate of a storm drain. Driven through her midsection was a six-foot-long bronze culvert. Beneath the drain was a tide pool teeming with life and littered with oversized American coins, all inscribed with the year of Gober's birth. Behind the Madonna was a doorway framing a flight of wooden stairs, down which poured a torrent of water (180 gallons a minute) that emptied into another storm drain at its base. This drain was, with the exception of the frothing water, dark as a tomb. To the right and left of the Madonna were two open, silk-lined suitcases whose bottoms were, again, storm drains over identical tide pools of crystalline intensity. Wading in the tide pools were mimetic vignettes of a man holding a baby over the shimmering water. Only the legs of the man and the infant were visible, but the pose suggested nothing other than stability.

The figure of the Madonna was pitted and eroded like a weathered lawn ornament. Her pose, arms extended with palms up, is the most generic of all populist depictions of Mary, the one most often seen sheltered under upended bathtubs in the front yards of the defiantly pious. In that pose she is most often referred to as Our Lady of Peace, and her closest rival is Our Lady of the Rosary (painted yellow and turned into an unlimited edition by Katharina Fritsch). Made out of plaster (for the home) or plastic (for the dashboard), these images are ubiquitous totems for the disciples of Mariology. They exist to advertise one of the intrinsic articles of faith in Catholic dogma, the virgin birth of Jesus.

Gober's decision to core the Madonna with a culvert was, to say the least, confrontational. For a Catholic-schooled boy, however, it was also understandable, because to be raised a Catholic is to be raised with a heightened awareness of and carelessness toward wounds. Class-rooms are presided over by crucifixes, and one gets used to greeting the school day with an image of an almost-naked man frozen in aestheticized agony on a cross; blood streaks his face below a crown of thorns, and an open wound punctuates his side. One gets to know him well because the parish church holds the Stations of the Cross, a devotional aid depicting Jesus' progress from the court of Herod Antipas to Golgotha, ending with Mary holding the body of her executed son. Jesus and Mary are always the central players, but around them are a galaxy of secondary and tertiary characters, all of whom bear instructional wounds and often warrant side chapels of their own. They are missing breasts and eyes; they are crucified upside down and roasted on gridirons. Just when you think there are no more indignities left to be suffered, a new twist on martyrdom is introduced, and you're left slack-jawed at the infinite variety of it all.

In this context, two other standard classroom accessories are worth a mention: the framed depictions of the Sacred Heart of Jesus and the Immaculate Heart of Mary. Often hung side by side, they depict Jesus and his mother with their chests decorously opened to reveal their hearts, which are frequently surrounded by flames and topped by a cross. Gober's decision to turn Mary herself into a cross through the intervention of the culvert is no stranger than any of this. The oneness of the mother with the suffering of the son is brutally cohesive, and the analogy of the womb to a spillway for that which can no longer be con-tained or borne is dramatically encapsulated. Mary's positioning atop the sewer grate is itself a kind of poetic abbreviation insofar as gift-shop versions of Our Lady of Peace and Our Lady of the Rosary often portray Mary balanced atop a globe, one foot crushing the head of a serpent. In Gober's version, the serpent has been replaced by the sewer, and beneath the grate, in place of the globe, lies a glistening pool, strewn with the coins of those who wish for something more, something other. Framed by the conduit, the torrent of water descending the stairway becomes an analogous stand-in for her Immaculate Heart. It is as if all the domestic disorder semaphored by the water on the staircase were being contained by the culvert and redirected into the regenerative tide pool. Of course, it isn't, but such are the mysteries of faith in the modern age.

Because the installation is so adamantly biblical in the fulcrum of its imagery, it would be neglectful to over-look the religious symbolism of the abundant liquidity in Gober's environment. Water is, first and foremost, a baptismal fluid. It is also the prime element of Jesus' first public miracle, the Marriage at Cana, when he turned water into wine, and that which he walked upon when he chose to convince those he wished to follow him of his divinity. In the Old Testament it is the agent of the ultimate apocalyptic chastening of the earth and what buoyed Moses into the bosom of Pharaoh's family and later turned to blood as Pharaoh's warning.

Water had, from Slides of a Changing Painting forward, played a major role (absent and present) in Gober's work, and at the Geffen its potential to destroy and renew were finally brought into a balanced equation. The water that had originally wreaked havoc on the church in Prayers Are Answered in 1980 was, by 1997, contained and functioned as the focus of a series of liturgical markers in the installation. Behind the high altar designated by the Madonna, the stairway occupied that space often given over to a representation of the Last Judgment, and the torrential force of its disposition proved fully equivalent in impact to some very good frescoed versions of the same. The paired suitcases functioned as baptismal fonts. What, after all, is a suitcase other than the baggage you carry? In this case, Gober's baggage was Catholicism. Glimpsed through the grating, the infant's sponsoring elder was about to administer the sacrament of baptism, which is generally symbolic of regeneration and, specifically, in Catholic ritual, the cleansing of original sin. The tide pool did not contain simply water but, rather, baptismal water. The roiling maelstrom caught in the drain at the foot of the stairway had, in its passage under the Madonna, undergone a rite of purification as well. Its violence had been stilled and transformed into a dream of serene placidity. Here was where life began; here was where life was affirmed. In Los Angeles, Gober was the architect of a chapel that could accommodate him and the author of a religion that could sustain him.

I need no assurances, I am a man who is pre-occupied of his own soul . . . 36.

The most recent piece of sculpture I've seen by Gober is a generic child's chair positioned over a slop drain. A brightly colored, floral-patterned box of tissues occupies the seat. It is a portrait of the American child as an absent analysand, circa the millennium, and it is an indictment of a culture that has stopped listening to its children. Not present in the chair are the latest statistics for national analysis: Barry Loukaitis, aged fourteen when he killed three classmates in Moses Lake, Washington; Evan Ramsey, aged sixteen when he killed two in Bethel, Alaska; Luke Woodham, aged sixteen when he killed three in Pearl, Mississippi; Michael Carneal, aged fourteen when he killed three in West Paducah, Kentucky; Andrew Golden and Mitchell Johnson, aged eleven and thirteen, respectively, when they killed five in Jonesboro, Arkansas; and Kipland Kinkel, aged fifteen when he killed four in Springfield, Oregon. Lost boys all; all lost in America.

Gober's sculpture accompanies me throughout my America. It is the sink left behind in an abandoned Vermont homestead by the family living in a trailer down by the highway, or the urinal vacated by a biker in the fluorescence of a Wyoming roadhouse. It is the playpen in a day-care center in California, or the khaki-clad legs in the next stall at a prep school in Pennsylvania. It is the bed in a V.A. hospital in Minnesota, or the culvert diverting a clear stream of water before it reaches the cattle-fouled trough in Texas. It is a forest glade mural in a taco joint in the Nevada desert, or the salvaged mansion door in a county museum in Georgia. It is the breakfast cereal we eat, the products we use to sanitize the pets we keep, and the domestic poisons we employ to kill the predators we fear in the dark. It is the religion we practice and the primitive magic we use to guarantee that religion's efficacy. It is a paragraph buried deep in newspapers across the country until one day it erupts onto the front page. And then Barry or Evan or Luke or Michael or Andrew or Mitchell or Kipland tells us how much it hurts to grow up in America. Gober is listening to their voices and telling their stories‹our stories. That, after all, is what his art is about: America and its law of indirections.
 

 
 

 Richard Flood
 
Richard Flood works as Chief Curator at Walker Art Center, Minneapolis.
Text from the "Robert Gober: Sculpture + Drawing" catalogue
published by Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, 1999.