The Floating Sink hails from Robert Gober’s seminal corpus of sink sculptures executed between 1984 and 1986, a series of works that are at once iconic and instantly recognisable. Ambiguous and unsettling, the domestic sinks interrogate notions of the body, sexuality, politics, and religion, and serve as the ultimate embodiment of Gober’s singular oeuvre. Marking the artist’s first comprehensive group of sculptural objects, the sinks have been described as “unabashedly anthropomorphous” (Theodora Vischer, “Liaisons Dangereuses”, in: Exh. Cat., Basel, Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Robert Gober, 1995-96, p. 17). Indeed, the present work – and much of Gober’s wider output – is defined by the stark presence or absence of the human body. While the sinks represent in a literal sense the physical absence of the corporeal, they stand alongside Gober’s eerie sculptures of cast body parts, and evoke the intimate bodily process of everyday personal hygiene. The Floating Sink debuted at Daniel Weinberg Gallery in one of the artist’s earliest solo exhibitions between June and July in 1986 and has also been included in exhibitions at The Wexner Center for the Arts, Colombus (Part Object, Part Sculpture, 2005-06) and Schaulager Basel, Basel (Robert Gober: Sculpture and Installation 1979-2007, 2007). Testament to this series’ significance within the artist’s sculptural practice, the sinks reside in over twenty prestigious museum collections, including The Museum of Modern Art, New York (Untitled, 1985), The Art Institute Chicago (Double Sink, 1984); Los Angeles County Museum of Art (Single Basin Sink, 1985); and The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (The Ascending Sink, 1985).
Robert Gober’s Sinks in Museum Collections
While the sink sculptures are a permutation of the old-fashioned, domestic sinks that populated his childhood in Wallingford, Connecticut, Gober’s realisation of these relics lack the pipes, faucets, and drains that a sink needs to function as such, rendering them humorous and pitiful in their utter futility. Indeed, the sculptures are not comprised of vintage sinks but rather painstakingly handmade renderings of these white porcelain utilities. Gober’s desired placement of The Floating Sink – installed comically close to the ceiling – further emphasises the artist’s surreal and ludicrous manipulation of an ordinary domestic object. The fact that the sinks are not functional directly evokes and embodies the psychological conflict and opposing dualities that define the artist’s visual practice. These strange domestic objects symoblise the dialectical opposition of purification and bodily pollution, a duality that is especially pertinent for a gay male artist raised in the strict doctrine of the Catholic Church, and who later witnessed the ravaging effect of the AIDS pandemic in New York of the 1980s and 1990s.
Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia
Image: © The Philadelphia Museum of Art/Art Resource/Scala, Florence
Artwork: © Marcel Duchamp 2022/DACS, London
In his 2014 review of Gober’s retrospective at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, critic Peter Schjeldahl wrote that the sinks symbolise “the daily human war on dirt. They are anthropomorphic, with holes (where the taps should be) like empty eyes. Begun in 1984, the sink series appeared during the darkest period of the AIDS epidemic. Gober, who is gay, responded to the tragedy with poetic indirection: the sink’s cold air of hygiene… The fact that the content must be intuited by the viewer, who is free to regard the sinks as just cleverly manufactured found objects, typifies Gober’s circumspection. His works are enigmatic but not coy, morally driven but not aggrieved. They radiate a quality that is as rare in life as in art: Character” (Peter Schjeldahl, “Found Meanings”, The New Yorker, 6 October 2014 (online)). The sinks are especially redolent considering the early years of the AIDS crisis, during which the disease was both poorly understood and its spread highly stigmatised. As incredibly suggestive objects, the sinks thus evoke a sense of bodily anxiety or angst. Stripped of its capacity to cleanse, The Floating Sink offers no promise of purification; instead, its empty basin becomes a repository for filth and waste, a poignant metaphor for the inability of those affected at the time to rid their bodies of this disease and the societal denunciation that it provoked.
Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles
Image: © Museum Associates/LACMA/Art Resource NY/Scala, Florence
Artwork: © Rene Magritte 2022/DACS, London
Gober’s sinks draw upon a clear binary between clean and dirty, presence and absence, yet the sculptures also operate in the space between public and private. Sinks are usually confined to the private sphere of bathrooms or kitchens, affixed to the wall. Gober transcends the domesticity of this object by elevating it to the wall of the gallery or museum. Therefore Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain from 1917 is an obvious pre-curser, and Gober adapts the Duchampian model for the contemporary era: “In effect Duchamp brings the bathroom to the museum, with a provocation (beyond scandal) that is both epistemological (what counts as art?) and institutional (who determines it?), while Gober brings the museum to the bathroom… with an additional provocation: What is it to have an experience usually deemed private – the call of art, the call of nature – in a space usually deemed public?” (Hal Foster, “The Art of the Missing Part” in: Exh. Cat., Los Angeles, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Robert Gober, 1997, p. 63). The nonsensical, ambiguous and unsettling qualities of Gober’s sculptural output also recall the Surrealists, not least Rene Magritte and his 1929 work The Treachery of Images which revolutionarily interrogated the nature of appearances and the dualities between truth and fiction, reality and surreality, image and object.
Mounted amusingly high on the wall, The Floating Sink sanctifies its environment as an eerily sacred yet unsettling space, inviting the viewer into a realm in which the objects of our everyday lives have been tampered with and made strange, imbued with a psychological and symbolic power. The sink is at once familiar and unfamiliar, real and fake, challenging our traditional visual vocabulary and our very understanding of reality. The Floating Sink is an outstanding exemplar of Gober’s early sculptural practice and ranks among the most intriguing works from this pivotal series.