Robert Gober

Paula Cooper Gallery, New York
Galería Marga Paz, Madrid
Tubacex Collection, Bilbao
Christie's London, June 24, 1993, Lot 98
Klinger Foundation, London
Bukan Properties, New York
Paula Cooper Gallery, New York
Acquired by the present owner from the above in 1996

Madrid, Galería Marga Paz, Robert Gober, November – December 1990
Berlin, Martin Gropius-Bau, Metropolis: Internationale Kunstausstellung Berlin, April – July 1991, cat. no. 56 (titled Untitled (Buttocks)), p. 137  (a different work incorrectly illustrated as this work)
Paris, Galerie nationale du Jeu de Paume; Madrid, Museo Nacional, Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Robert Gober, October 1991 – March 1992, cat. no. 10, p. 61, illustrated in color; pp. 8 and 77, illustrated in color (installation shot), and illustrated in color on the inside front cover (installation shot)
Cambridge, MIT List Visual Arts Center, Corporal Politics [Louise Bourgeois, Robert Gober, Lilla LoCurto and William Outcault, Annette Messager, Rona Pondick, Kiki Smith, David Wojnarowicz], December 1992 – February 1993, p. 42, illustrated in color
London, Serpentine Gallery; Liverpool, Tate Gallery Liverpool, Robert Gober, March – August 1993, pp. 13 and 24
New York, C&M Arts, Naked Since 1950, October – December 2001, cat. no. 31, illustrated in color

Simon Taylor, "The Phobic Object: Abjection in Contemporary Art" in Exh. Cat., New York, Whitney Museum of American Art, Abject Art: Repulsion and Desire in American Art: Selections from the Permanent Collection, 1993, p. 72
Zlatko Gall, "Life as Illness or Illness as Metaphor" in Exh. Cat., Umag, Galerija Dante Marino Cettina, Robert Gober, 1995, p. 36 (text reference)
Joan Simon, "Robert Gober" in Exh. Cat., Pittsburgh, The Carnegie Museum of Art, Carnegie International 1995, 1995, p. 86
Müller-Tam, "Robert Gober: Ohne title (tissue box)" in Exh. Cat., Düsseldorf, Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, René Magritte: Die Kunst der Konversation: Marcel Broodthaers, Joseph Kosuth, Barbara Bloom, Robert Gober, Sturtevant, 1996, pp. 224-225
Hal Foster, "The Art of the Missing Part" in Exh. Cat., Los Angeles, The Geffen Contemporary, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Robert Gober, 1997, p. 63, illustrated in color (Galerie nationale du Jeu de Paume installation shot)
Robert Gober and Richard Flood Interview and Richard Flood, "The Law of Indirections" in Exh. Cat., Minneapolis, Walker Art Center (and travelling), Robert Gober Sculpture + Drawing, 1999, p. 20, illustrated in color (Flood) (Galerie nationale du Jeu de Paume installation shot) and pp. 125 – 126 (Gober and Flood interview) (text reference)
Hal Foster, "An Art of Missing Parts", October, no. 92, Spring 2000, pp. 149-150
Hal Foster, Prosthetic Gods, Cambridge, 2004, p. 331, illustrated (Galerie nationale du Jeu de Paume installation shot), p. 306 (text reference)
Theodora Vischer, Robert Gober Sculptures and Installations 1979-2007, Basel, 2007, cat. no. S 1990.21, p. 281, illustrated in color and p. 297, illustrated in color (Galerie nationale du Jeu de Paume installation shot)

The critical intelligence and formalist restraint of Robert Gober's work is evident in Untitled 1990, one of the unorthodox and mysterious objects in the artist's 1991 installation at the Galerie national du Jeu de Paume in Paris. Amidst a gallery covered in wallpaper of a surrealist forest design, the artist used context as a transformative element with just as much eloquence as the manipulation of the human form witnessed in the individual sculptures.  The overall effect was Gober at his essential best, inspiring a degree of dislocation and discomfort that ultimately liberates the viewer to interpret the work for oneself.

This cast wax sculpture of an abbreviated male torso is one of two nude works, both covered with musical notations. The present work hung on the wall at the Jeu de Paume, while the other, Untitled (1990, Collection Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam), extended from the wall and included the man's entire legs donned with shoes and socks. Both were inspired by a similar fragmented figure in Hieronymus Bosch's great triptych, The Garden of Earthly Delights (or The Millenium) from the early 1500s. This ambitious masterpiece is crowded with vivid imagery that has led to a variety of interpretations of the large central panel which is populated by a delirium of sexually engaged figures, over-ripe fruit and fanciful animals. Sandwiched between panels on the Creation of man and Hell's torments, this central panorama appears, on the most obvious level, to be an erotic fantasia meant to illustrate the temptations of humanity, but other scholars, argue a deeper meaning – one of a lost paradise of voyeuristic, intoxicating liberty.  Depicted between innocence and damnation, the moral, political and social overtones of Bosch's central panel can find sympathetic parallels to the cultural excesses of the 1980s and the tragedies of the AIDS epidemic.

However, Gober's direct inspiration came from the depiction of a single detail in the right panel depicting Hell, which he found in an art book about symbols, and his end result is less polemical. In the Bosch painting, a prone male figure is visible from the waist down, obscured by a large musical instrument, with his buttocks inscribed with the notes of a musical passage. The image struck the artist because it resonated with another earlier instance of happenstance. As Gober relates, ``Months before, I had picked up out of the gutter on East 8^th Street a discarded piece of sheet music. ...I liked it because it was groups of notes ascending the scale. It looked like full, optimistic music. I didn't transcribe the music as it was written on to the man, I took pieces and collaged it.''  (Theodora Vischer ed., Robert Gober: Sculptures and Installations, 1979-2007, Basel, 2007, p. 278)  In the great Modernist manner of Marcel Duchamp, both a found object and found imagery are combined, but in a manner that proves provocative and wholly original. In Duchamp's last years, when the world thought he had abandoned art to pursue chess, he worked on Etant donnés (1946-66, Philadelphia Museum of Art), an installation, to be glimpsed through a peephole in a door, that depicted a reclining woman in a wooded landscape with her head hidden from the viewer.  In comparison to Gober's Untitled (1990) and its tableau presentation at the Jeu de Paume, both Duchamp and Gober have created enigmatic human dioramas of environment and object. In similar fashion, Gober combined the literal (casting from human models and embedding human hair as details) with metaphorical elements such as music to convey a subversive sense of distant `otherness' that is meditative rather than confrontational.

In these works and other sculptures of body parts, Gober expresses both the pathos of human frailty as well as the time-honored glorification of the beauty of the human body from classical Greek sculpture to the more haunting and abstracted present. The fragmentation of a torso or leg and its isolation highlights the vulnerability of the physical body in extraordinarily human terms, just as his use of human hair recalls the earlier tradition of preserving it as a memento of the dead. Gober plays with such corporal symbolism while simultaneously stripping it of any latent nostalgia – his metaphysical connotations are more cool, subtle and cerebral. Yet ultimately, on its own or within the repetitive and rich imagery of the Jeu de Paume installation, an intimacy is unavoidable in Gober's work, who described his use of musical imagery in the two 1990 sculptures as ``a song to be sung to the image of a man, or it was the expression of music emanating or humming from inside a man's body.'' (Ibid., p. 278)