Robert Gober: Sculpture + Drawing at SF MoMA


			Robert Gober: Sculpture + Drawing at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
	X Playpen, 1987, wood & enamel paint, 27 x 37 x 37 in.
	This first retrospective exhibition of Robert Gober"s work shows that his limited vocabulary from the past quarter-century generates sentences, especially when one approaches the groupings in his oeuvre. The question that remains, however, is whether the results are truly legible. Gober has effectively managed, though compulsively rendered, an economy of signs: culver pipes, drains, sewer grates, sinks, wallpaper patterns, newspaper, furniture, playpens, doorways, windows, legs and torsos. These images and objects subvert the psychoanalytic overdetermination that reduces myriad signs to a few distinct meanings. For Gober, a thrift of symbols proliferates significance through indeterminacy, especially as many of his objects remain inscrutable. Gober"s works have an obvious relationship to psychoanalysis, but the juxtaposed symbols fail to follow the expected unconscious logic. The 1998-99 Untitled ambivasexual willow basket pierced by a culver pipe (a void-phallus rupturing a void-womb"s object walls) is a Freudian conundrum. 1990s Untitled wax bag-torso with its female breasted side and its male chest haired half is a more literal hermaphroditic work, as is the lithographed newspaper image from 1992 of Gober in a wedding dress. Gober has characterized his work as being about transitions. Indeed, his sculptures are Winnicottian transitional objects that assuage our anxieties about their displacement with their familiarity. Gober"s homely orifice-drains, grates, pipes, and doors present the unpresentable unconscious sublime; they are the indirect manifestations of the imperceptible psyche. An early painting endeavor turned projection show, Slides of a Changing Painting, 1982-83, demonstrates the unconscious stream of thought that presaged most of Gober"s future images. Gober"s numerous drawings point to an underlying psychodynamic, and their role in this exhibition is to demonstrate the process of turning fantasy concepts into realized sculptural forms. Unfortunately, many of the renderings come across as pointless doodles or pragmatic construction diagrams. As a group, Gober"s most engaging works on paper illustrate monomaniacal tendencies in the endless permutations of his trademark sinks. Correlative to this latent psychology is Gober"s evocation of childhood. 1987's X Playpen emphasizes this domestic space's claustrotraumatic quality. In a 1991 photolithograph Gober juxtaposes news clippings, including a story about a girl forced to live in a closet, a fictional story regarding his own drowning death at age six, and numerous wedding announcements. Another collage of 1992 combines "George Bush" and "Family Values" with another closet incident and "Baby Left in Brooklyn Trash." Do "family values" include the latent violence of the home? How can a society condone a playpen devised to confine and alienate like a closet? Can childhood sexuality possibly fit into these Republican mores, especially with youngsters coming out of the closet? Gober's unreachable barred window and locked door both indicate sunny worlds beyond, but thwart the viewers' desires to enter these works' mysterious landscapes. Likewise, the treats of 1989's Bag of Donuts are inviting, but hellishly inedible with poisonous resin replacing the grease. Following so many sucker punches, these works communicate Gober's moral—that absolute meanings, though they, too, are desired, are ultimately unattainable. William V. Ganis Robert Gober: Sculpture + Drawing is at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, California, May 26 - September 5, 2000.

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