Tuesday, August 18, 2009

Art & The Body - Robert Gober

If bodies are objects or things, they are like no others, for they are the centres of perspective, insight, reflection, desire, agency. - Elizabeth Grosz

American sculptor, Robert Gober, explores the psychological implications of the human body through hybrid anatomical forms, fragmented bodies, and architectural and domestic spaces in which the body is absent yet implicit. Gober's language is one of duplicities – male and female, interior and exterior, public and private, animate and inanimate, present and absent. Commenting on Gober's 2007 retrospective at the Schaulager Museum in Switzerland, Roberta Smith notes the artist's ability to combine that which is personal and political, mysterious and accessible.1 Gober, who draws upon a composite of childhood memories and current experiences, describes his work as “formally rigorous but emotionally messy”.2 Gober often sites a composite of personal memories and current experience as a source for his practice, with this reflected in the hybridity and fracture of the objects he creates.


Figure 1: Robert Gober , Untitled Leg, 1989, beeswax, cotton, wood, leather, human hair

In 1989, Gober began what would become a series of disembodied partial limbs with Untitled Leg (Figure 1). The wax “amputation” is a cast of the artist's own leg, embedded with human hairs and dressed with a man's shoe, sock, and partial trouser. The body fragment speaks of absence, of detachment, of loss; the object is loaded with all that is not there. Gober did not place the limb on a pedestal; rather it was installed as if emerging from the gallery wall, describing an uneasy balance between interior and exterior states. Gober's disembodied limbs and appendages imply a psychological fracture. Julia Kristeva writes that in a state of abjection, borders between object and subject cannot be maintained.3 Rooted within the tradition of Freud's uncanny, Untitled Leg is difficult and unsettling because it provokes a reaction in which there is a hesitation in recognising the object as animate or inanimate.4


Figure 2: Robert Gober, Untitled (Candle), 1991, beeswax, human hair, yarn

Gober has spoken of his work as it is informed both by his catholic upbringing and by his homosexuality. In Untitled (Candle) (Figure 2), human hairs embedded in a wax base, provide an ordinary candle with overt phallic connotations. Gober's use of wax in the construction of his body fragments mirrors the transience and impermenance of the human body, with Smithson noting that Gober's objects are imbued with a vulnerability that defines real bodies. The sense of vulnerability is heightened in Untitled (Candle), a work in which a symbol of masculinity and virility is reduced to that which is destined to disintegrate. Gober has written of the impact of the AIDS epidemic, and the struggle that artists faced in expressing that impact within their work.5 Here the hybrid object of the candle/phallus suggests a painful memorial, while simultaneously referring to the corporeality of the symbolism of the Catholic faith, and Gober's uneasy place as a homosexual raised within the Church.


Figure 3: Robert Gober, Untitled, 1991-1993, wood, beeswax, human hair, fabric, paint and shoes

Untitled (Figure 3) takes the form of a lower half of a male body, violently protruding from the gallery wall to impose itself within the space. Arranged facedown, the partial figure evokes a disquieting sense of powerlessness and unease. The surface of the wax figure is punctured with a number of ulcer-like drains. The drain motif is recurring in much of Gober's practice. In this instance it serves to suggest a body that is leaking, the separation between inner and outer broken down, and emphasises the dual nature of the body as both private and public.




1 Roberta Smith, Against Delusion: Robert Gober's Nuts-and-Bolts Americana, The New York Times, August 23 2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/23/arts/design/23gobe.html?_r=1, (accessed August 10 2009)

2 Frances Morris, “Robert Gober” in Rites of Passage: Art at the End of the Century, 96, London: Tate Gallery Publications, 1995

3 Charles Penwarden, “Of Word and Flesh: An interview with Julia Kristeva” in Rites of Passage: Art at the End of the Century, 22, London: Tate Gallery Publications, 1995

4 Ruth Ronen, Aesthetics of Anxiety, 42, New York: SUNY Press, 2009

5 Neal Benezra, “Plumbing Robert Gober” in Distemper: Dissonant Themes in the art of the 1990s, 46, Washington: Smithsonian Institution, 1996

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