“It takes a moment to see that the drain is embedded in the center of a ghostly male torso, like a supernating wound. And it takes less t.mes than that to feel the immense sense of loss that is so endemic to our t.mes s…If a contemporary crucifix is possible, this may be it.”
Submerged beneath a manmade grate, water quietly streams across the form of a headless male figure and into his chest in Robert Gober’s Untitled, unveiling the artist’s powerful visual metaphor for the harrowing despair of social stigmatization and loss. Executed in 1993-1994, the present work emerges from the tragedies of the AIDS epidemic that beset the American nation throughout the prior decade. Among the first of Gober's works to incorporate running water, Untitled is a poignant interrogation of sexuality and religion through the loci of the male body, drain, and sewage grate; amongst Gober’s most iconic and widely recognized sculptures, the present work represents the conceptual quintessence and pinnacle of his celebrated sculptural practice. Test.mes nt to its importance, the other two works from the edition are housed at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, having been donated by Norman and Irma Braman, and the other is the current auction record for the artist, having sold for $7.3m in 2018. Best known for his meticulously hand-made and inexplicable objects, such as his sculptures of isolated sinks and uncanny limbs, Gober here combines the most significant motifs of his sculptural repertoire to sharply invoke the psychological conflict and brooding realism that define his interdisciplinary practice. By compelling the viewer to bow to the present work in order inspect its subterranean contents, Gober invites a profoundly intimate viewing experience, one that recreates the physical experience of mourning a loved one as well as the ceremonial gestures of Catholic prayer. Shortly after debuting at Paula Cooper Gallery in New York in 1994 to critical acclaim, Untitled was prominently showcased at the Carnegie International of 1995, and it has since been included in some of Gober’s most pivotal international exhibitions, and is one of his best known and most celebrated works.
“The first t.mes that I used the image of an urban street drain, I sent two of my assistants out into the streets around my studio and home to make large black crayon rubbings s on white paper of different drains that had caught my eye. As usual, the drain that I ended up creating was a synthesis of all these various possibilities.”
Robert Gober is widely recognized as among the most important living American artists, distinguished for his conceptual rigor and disquieting facility to probe the essential binaries of function and dysfunction, presence and absence, art and life. In Gober’s practice, seemingly innocuous and recognizable everyday objects are imbued with latent sinister undertones. As a gay artist working in New York City during the AIDS crisis of the 1980s, Gober experienced the deep sense of loss that followed when close friends diagnosed with the disease would suddenly disappear: an experience represented here in his elegiac burial of a pure yet lifeless male figure beneath a sewage grate on the gallery floor. Speaking about Untitled, Gober attests to recreating a man-made drain that resembled “a synthesis of all various possibilities [of the object]” as “the first t.mes that [he] created a sculpture that pierced through the floor.” (The artist quoted in: Theodora Vischer, Robert Gober: Sculptures and Installations, 1979-2007, Basel 2007, p. 346)
By manually sculpting the headless body in wax, Gober endows the mannequin with a soft, flesh-like texture, while the human hairs he painstakingly embeds into the chest achieve an uncanny corporeality. The dismembered torso highlights the physical vulnerability of the male body in extraordinarily human terms, just as Gober’s use of human hair recalls the earlier tradition of preserving it as a memento of the dead. As such, Gober deftly plays with corporeal symbolism, creating metaphysical connotations that are at once hauntingly subtle, cerebral, and poignant. The present work further positions Gober’s sculptural practice in critical dialogue with an extended history of figurative sculpture—from Greek statuaries like Michelangelo’s David, in which the nude male figure is glorified, to Marcel Duchamp’s diorama-like assemblage Étant donnés (1946-66, Philadelphia Museum of Art), and even to the wax figures populating the dioramas found in museums of natural history.
“You have to kneel down to see what’s down inside the confined space—a pale, nude torso of a naked man… It’s a horrifying image, a human who has become part of a sewer. But the starkness of the bare room is also strangely beautiful.”
Beneath the sewage grate, which Gober delicately replicates in bronze cast – an uncanny contrast to its dirty utilitarian counterpart – the artist has engineered a mechanism by which running water streams across the figure’s pale body and empties into his punctured chest. The immediate shock upon discovering this surrealist spectacle further actualizes the despair of human loss, especially as one peers down into the drain, the aperture of which reveals a seemingly bottomless, black hole. While Gober’s seminal series of singular drain sculptures remained defunct – symbolizing the incapacity of AIDS victims to cleanse themselves of disease and stigma – Untitled loops through an endless cycle whereby water drains into its own stream, which reverberates with a soft and constant trickle throughout the interior space that echoes the effect of ghostly absence. By reifying the profound depths of unfathomable loss with such visceral disquietude and mystery, the present work occupies the liminal crevices between the categories of replica, relic, and refuse and testifies to Gober’s inimitable conceptual foray into the ontological unknown.
Full engagement with Untitled necessitates a close physical orientation by which the spectator must bow or crouch down in to examine the scene entombed under the grate. As one critic reflected upon encountering the present work at the Carnegie International in 1995, “You have to kneel down to see what’s down inside the confined space—a pale, nude torso of a naked man… It’s a horrifying image, a human who has become part of a sewer. But the starkness of the bare room is also strangely beautiful.” (Christine Temin, “Global Bounty,” Chicago Tribune, 17 December 1995, section 7, p. 13) This somatic experience of viewership at once alludes to a sense of voyeurism while resembling the physicality of mourning before a tombstone. Compounded by the cruciform design one sees emblazoned across the surface of the drain below, it additionally invokes the ritual gestures of religious prayer to recall memories of Gober’s devout Catholic upbringing, during which he often served as an altar boy during mass.
A seminal work, Untitled exemplifies the very best of Gober's poignant sculptural pathos, in which the objects and figures of our everyday lives have been transformed and made strange, imbued with mysterious psychological and symbolic power. By deftly harnessing the ambiguity between surrealism and realism, Gober elicits a peculiar beauty within moments of disquietude and despair: as critic Hal Foster astutely reflects about Gober’s practice, “It is mostly the illusionism of his materials that estranges his things, but this superimposition of the real and the imaginary contributes to other confusions Gober puts in play between the utilitarian and the aesthetic, the public and the private, the lived and the dreamed.” (Hal Foster, “Robert Gober: MoMA, The Museum of Modern Art,” ARTFORUM, 6 February 2018 (online))
