Robert Gober: The Heart Is Not a Metaphor
The Museum of Modern Art, MoMA Highlights, New York: The Museum of Modern Art, revised 2004, originally published 1999
As a copy of a man's leg and foot, this work is strikingly real: its fleshy waxen skin, clad in leather shoe and in cotton pant and sock, sprouts actual human hair. Exactness like this slides over into the unsettling, a macabre tone amplified by the leg's placement, its owner having presumably collapsed to the floor—and then, too, he has only one leg, which issues from the wall, as if the architecture had eaten him. For some, it may also have a subtle fetishistic eroticism, inasmuch as it focuses on a narrow band of the body where men routinely and unselfconsciously show their nakedness.
Robert Gober
(American, born 1954)
Titled- Untitled Leg
Time- 1989–90
Materials- Beeswax, cotton, wood, leather, human hair
Size-11 3/8 x 7 3/4 x 20″ (28.9 x 19.7 x 50.8 cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of the Dannheiser Foundation. © 2014 Robert Gober
Robert Gober: The Heart Is Not a Metaphor
The Museum of Modern Art, October 4, 2014–January 18, 2015
Gober’s straightforward early sink sculptures gave way in 1985 to a group of distorted sinks whose bodies are variably stretched, bent, multiplied, and divided. The evolution of form registers in the works’ titles: self-evident descriptions become increasingly expressive (The Sink Inside of Me, for example). By the mid-1980s, the artist’s pre-occupation with domestic objects had expanded to include sculptures of furniture such as beds and playpens, as well as an armchair whose slipcover Gober sewed and painted with a floral pattern taken from an embroidery book. Gober’s insistence on and fascination with making sculptures by hand reaches an extreme in Plywood, which was built in the studio from sheets of laminated fir and particleboard.
ORIGINAL PHOTO
Title- Urology Appointment
Date- 2007
Materials- Wood engraving, polymer engraving and letterpress in artist's frame
Dimensions- Sheet: 2 x 3 1/2" (5.1 x 8.9 cm); frame: 11 x 12 3/16 x 1 1/2" (28 x 31 x 3.8 cm)
Title- Untitled
Dimensions- 13 1/4 x 16 1/2 x 46 1/8" (33.6 x 41.9 x 117.2 cm)
Materials- Wood, beeswax, leather, fabric, and human hair
Date- 1991
The Museum of Modern Art, MoMA Highlights since 1980, New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2007, p. 95
Gober is a contemporary heir of Surrealist artists such as René Magritte and Salvador Dalí, but his images, however bizarre, are quietly plainspoken. The individual components are ordinary, their combination is legible, and the details are precise. In this untitled work, the wax body, truncated at the waist, fits so flush against the wall that one imagines trunk, arms, and head on the other side. Gober has said that the group of body sculptures to which this belongs was inspired by animal dioramas in a natural-history museum—examples of figurative sculpture far removed from the Classical tradition. In them, reality (rather than the ideal) is the goal, as it is here—for example, in the hairs on the exposed skin and the well-worn soles of the figure’s shoes.
This sculpture was made for an installation at a museum in Paris, where it emerged from a wall papered with a forest scene. It was shown together with two similar sculptures, one with naked buttocks printed with a musical score and the other with clothed legs punctured by three drains—a trio of pleasure, disaster, and resuscitation, Gober has said. Removed from this theatrical setting, this sculpture is open to a wealth of diverse readings. Its realism is the departure point for broad avenues of symbolic and psychological meaning.
Citation- www.moma.org./collection/RobertGober
Observed- Museum of Modern Art
