Uncanny in its presence and the multiplicity of its symbolism, Robert Gober’s Right Angle Sink from 1984 is emblematic of the artist’s celebrated series of sink sculptures. Begun in 1983, Gober’s Sinks represent one of the artist’s earliest and most important bodies of work. These sculptures reflect the culmination of the early religious influence in the artist’s life, the evolution of his own identity in relation to his family and society as a gay man, and the devastating onslaught of the AIDS epidemic. Within Gober’s corpus of sinks, Right Angle Sink is part of the first group that Gober created, which more closely resemble their referent. Fabricated by Gober’s hand out of everyday materials – wood, plaster, wire-lath, aluminum, watercolor and enamel paint – Right Angle Sink bears the mark of an art object relative to its manufactured, porcelain referent. Unlike the utilitarian sink, it is functionless – where faucets and fixtures would be, the surface of the sculpture bears holes in their place. This thoughtfully constructed shell of a quotidian appliance is a relic of the artist’s personal history, the collective history he sought to embody, and the human body itself. It is an intimate reimagination of the Duchampian readymade that moved beyond the abstract restraint of Minimalism and refreshed the ideation, exaltation and fetishization of the found object.
Gober had made an initial foray into the domestic space as an inspirational wellspring by building dollhouses as early 1979. The artist had moved to New York following his graduation from college in 1976 and was disenchanted with the several odd jobs he had found himself in. The allure of fabricating the small homes would anticipate the artist’s career-long exploration of metaphors of interiority, the human body and Gober’s fascination with the everyday objects and characteristics of the home. Begun in 1983 and continued through 1986, Gober’s sink sculptures began with quiet, uncomplicated preparatory drawings several years earlier which traced the curvilinear forms of the sink in various forms. In 1983, Gober made his first, roughly hewn sink, which was then relegated to a shelf in his studio for a year. The artist credits a cryptic dream the following year, in 1984, as the catalyst from his own unconscious for his return to and deep preoccupation with sinks for the years that followed. Gober recounted:
“…I remember having a dream in which I found a room in my home that I had never known existed. It was full of daylight streaming in through open windows and there were white porcelain sinks hung on all of the walls with their taps open full and water running. The sinks I ended up making differed from the dream. There was no water and no daylight. The promise that the dream implied was confounded, counterbalanced by the real-life nightmare of day-to-day life in New York.”
Robert Gober's Sink Sculptures in Institutional Collections
The real-life nightmare Gober contrasted to his own dream was, of course, the uncertainty, paranoia and unfolding despair of the AIDS epidemic, specifically in the epicenter of New York. The unsullied sanctity of Gober’s dream space – an untouched and unknown domain of purity and flowing water, a universal symbol of life – was rendered in his first sink sculptures as the obsolete antithesis of his dream at the nexus of the artist’s formative memories and the traumatic collective experience he was living as a gay man through the grim evolution of the AIDS crisis. As an artist and gay man working in New York City in the 1980s, Robert Gober witnessed and personally endured firsthand the devastation wrought by the HIV and AIDS crisis, especially during the early years in which the disease was poorly understood and its contamination stigmatized. The idea of hygiene in the queer community had been wholly undermined by the communal anxiety amidst widespread misinformation, rapid infection and the typecasting of queerness as taboo. Gober’s sinks subverted the object’s servitude of the human body as a source of cleanliness into dry wells with dubious allusion to their intended capacity. Gober’s sinks conflated the sink’s significance as a communal well with that of an artifact ageing into obsolescence, or a tombstone bearing the mark and memory of the bodies that had passed through its now ceased wellspring.
“It seemed that every other day someone I knew or someone that a friend of mine knew was getting severely sick, really fast, and most of them were gay men. Young men were dying all around me, from causes unknown, and the world seemed to be either in denial or revulsion. The government lied to the people and shrank from its duty. Families abandoned 'loved ones.' Even the church abdicated its responsibility to life. Gay men were left, more often than not, to take care of their own. It was a situation that is very hard to create in words. So when I am asked to look back and to 'explain' my sculptures of sinks, this situation reasserts itself. What do you do when you stand in front of a sink? You clean yourself. I seemed to be obsessed with making objects that embodied that broken promise.”
Gober’s sinks, while bearing resemblance to the objects they imitated, bear closer resemblance to Gober’s projection of the queer body’s sterilization and unavoidable mortality. They exist between the mimesis of the everyday object and their anthropomorphized dissonance as mannequins of the body itself. Curator and art critic Ulrich Loock describes Gober’s sinks as evoking the “…totality of the touching-touched body. They are nevertheless the places of the denial of the happy circulation in which the relationship to one’s own body merges with the relationship towards someone else’s, and the relationship towards the other person’s body merges with the relationship towards one’s own.” (Ulrich Loock in: Exh. Cat., Museum Boymans-van Beuningen Rotterdam (and travelling), Robert Gober, 1990, p. 15) Without faucets, drains, and pipes, Right Angle Sink resembles a torso, the two holes where the faucets would be recalling nipples, or even eyes. Simultaneously, the sculpture invokes the presence of the human body primarily through its silent, uncanny absence; a sink is really only a sink through its interaction and engagement with the person using it. The identification of one’s body with Gober’s sink begins and ends with its inept function between an art object, a referent to the mundane and human fallibility. It is layered and rife with dualities, a relic of human life and function which thwarts perception and perspective.
