I loved the MoMA show and I had a deep and visceral reaction to it. I actually began to cry in the galleries. This surprised me a great deal, mostly because I know the work and I sort of knew what to expect. It is overwhelming for me to think about the ideas and reactions I have to the work and to the entire show, which I think is beautifully installed.

The first time I saw a Gober installation was the work he had at Dia in 1993 and I confess, I actually had no idea that it was fabricated artwork. As I walked through the same piece at MoMA, I became acutely aware of all of the things that I missed when I saw the piece all those years ago.

It’s impossible for me to separate the imagery in Gober’s work from the massive loss of life to AIDS and how that is manifested on the body. When I walked into the re-creations of the installations from Dia and also the installation from the Jeu de Paume, this was manifestly present. The landscape as a prison, the promise of healing waters, the denial of the intact body, and poisons for the elimination of pests all brought this into overwhelming focus for me.

I am someone who is deeply and equally in love with Formalism and with Duchamp, but it’s important for me to foreground the significance of the meanings that can be derived from forms. Gober isn’t using readymades — he is making sculptures. When I first saw one of those sinks I immediately understood it as one of the weirdest still-life subjects I’d ever seen. I asked myself, “Why would someone make a sculpture of a sink?” Particularly in that moment where people were terrified of infection, immigrants, and diversity, it seemed like a vision yanked out of the nation’s unconscious.

I think readings of the sinks as the body are apt. To push it forward, the sculptures at MoMA have an agency. They move, they are buried (like headstones, in one of the most amazing parts of the show), they are obdurate, and they float, they expand, they contract. They spew. They develop growths. In these ways they are subjects, not bodies. That is part of their thrill for me. They are related to Duchamp in form, certainly, but they have none of his dandiness or humor. They are accusations. They bear a kind of witness.

I don’t think that AIDS is the only lens through which the work can be understood, not by a longshot. (And it must be said that while everyone now laments the tragedy of the epidemic, at the time very few people gave very much of a damn that certain undesirables were dying at an alarming rate.) I saw the Dia show and the images of the Jeu de Paume show at a particular time. You can look at Picasso’s Guernica as an example of a moment where an artist’s work transformed our understanding of war. The shattered warrior monument at the bottom of that painting was an indication that mechanized violence and aerial bombardment marked the end of the image of noble soldier. I think of Gober as the artist who transformed our understanding of mourning. He takes this on with the work that deals with September 11th as well. So his work is about witnessing and marking history writ large and small.

Also, I will say that there are tropes and imagery in the work (closets for example) that speak to a particular queer experience and these coded images can become sites for queer people to find themselves in the work. AIDS was acted out (in this country) on queer male bodies that were disappearing at an alarming rate. The notion of elimination is born out in the sinks and drains and even the donuts. The body returns to art in this work as a site of contention — and also of political action. It’s not just as a re-presentation, it’s now under duress, attack and penetration. I would never say that the work is about being gay, but I will say that only the aware, engaged, political sensibility of a gay person could have made the connections and leaps that Gober makes. I would also say that the missed opportunities to see things (if you don’t look at the right side of the suitcase sculpture, you don’t see the legs, for example) also relate to whether or not you want to pay attention. The opportunity to overlook and dismiss or treat as garbage (the newspapers) is a privilege. Closer investigation rewards the viewer. Care and concern are foregrounded as a viewing strategy parallel to the care in fabrication.

There is something very direct about Gober’s paintings and it is significant that he has paintings open and close the show. The painting at the beginning is about looking at a place that is pregnant with meaning for him — the house that his father built, that his mother still lives in, and where he grew up. It is coupled with his most recent sculpture, and this got me thinking about the connection between his paintings and the activation of surfaces (and thus content) throughout the show with its various materials. I find myself getting really attached and interested in the way he uses paint to reveal histories. The layers of paint on the doors, the cribs and all of the sinks, which at once make them succeed as illusions and at the same time assert themselves at painted objects, stuns me. He uses paint to reveal things more than cover them, even though the act of painting is to cover. I think about this especially in the door jambs and cribs which are not so much painted as coated with the material.

The painting that closes the show is a painting within a painting of an observed motif. I don’t think that they are about making a beautiful painting and they owe more to R.B. Kitaj than anyone else. For me it is the immediacy of his graphic and painted work that resonates because they seem objective and at the same time deeply interior. All of the wallpaper that has its origins in paintings (and motifs that are born in Scenes of a Changing Painting, which is a masterwork) has the effect of making the galleries feel like you are inside of a separate consciousness. They are drawings that one senses you would never show anyone. I feel that they are private and somewhat shameful. Seeing that hanged man/sleeping man image as an environment was jarring. It’s no longer an image: it’s turned, through decoration, into the situation for the rest of the objects, and the viewer, in the room.

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Robert Gober’s work calls for spare words to match its minimalist form, quiet contemplation to match its understated yet striking affect. “The Heart is Not a Metaphor” is the artist’s first large-scale career survey in the U.S. It includes about 130 objects spanning mediums, including drawing and photography, and features a small selection of work by artists with whom he has worked or collaborated with as a curator. The exhibition is loosely chronological, following Gober’s development of ideas around home, the quotidian, violence and sex, faith, purification and ritual. And like the work, the exhibition design is didactically understated — there is only one panel in each gallery for general context — while the walls are unpainted, and in some cases unfinished, with panel beams exposed on one side making everything look and feel generic, like a television playing mindlessly in the background.

Gober’s meticulously crafted sculptures of common objects like paint cans, ice skates, or cribs are familiar, even though something is always a little bit off about them. These are things we use, things we have, things that are a part of us. But his limbs never seem to connect to complete bodies: they jut out from walls, contain odd protrusions and indentations, or end up where they normally would not be, such as a fireplace. The cribs are dangerously slanted, oddly shaped, and “butter” sometimes “sleeps” in them; the sinks cannot function, and closets are surprisingly shallow. He places us in the familiarity of the home — our private spaces, places where we cleanse, rejuvenate, define and refine ourselves. Through his work, Gober wants us to learn about the places where our hearts truly live.

Well, maybe not our hearts, but certainly his. The sculptures and environments as signifiers of origin and daily living are meant to be familiar, but too much of it feels willfully insular and self-focused. In Gober’s world, everything looks like a neutral, but not too much seems to match.

Gober came to prominence in New York during the 1980s when the city was being ravaged by the AIDS crisis. Much of his work responds to and comments on that moment. Two of his wallpaper installations are on view, and Untitled (1989 – 1996) still unsettles me years later upon viewing it in person again. A sketch of a sleeping man with brown hair alternates with the image of a man with dark brown skin and white knee-length pants hanging from a tree by a noose, over and over again from floor to ceiling. A white wedding gown hanging on a chicken-wire-frame seamstress’s mannequin in the middle of the room would seem to signify purity, promise, hope, passion, and violence. Sculptures of bags of cat litter are placed here and there against the walls. Gober has talked about this installation being inspired by the collision of our country’s shadowy past and present: the domestic terrorism of lynching and the denial of rights to same sex marriage. The work highlights the lengths to which we go to sanitize situations and make something undesirable tolerable and tame.

But I find it difficult to take these juxtapositions seriously as provocation. It feels like a curious “default” representation of queer history, which is often depicted through the experience of white gay men. I was much too young to really understand what was happening socially then, but I imagine that in the mid-1980s and early ’90s — the height of the American AIDS crisis — the right to marry was not the most pressing issue on anyone’s LGBTQ agenda, although it appears the issue was important for Gober. His environments created for the Dia Chelsea in 1992 that featured sinks with working plumbing, sculptures of rat poison boxes also included bundled stacks of photolithograph print newspapers interspersed with advertisements of him wearing a wedding dress. But while too many people were unable to share their last moments with their loved ones at this time, to compare the ban on same-sex marriage to the terrorism of lynchings doesn’t feel right. In fact it feels like privileged, self-referential navel gazing.

A response to the September 11, 2001 World Trade Center attacks, Untitled (2003-2005) features a headless Jesus-like fountain from which cleansing water flows from the nipples into a gaping hole in the floor. Framed photolithographs of the September 12, 2001 edition of The New York Times line the walls, the pages having been overlaid with pastel drawings of humans embracing, and pallets aligned to recall church pews complete the space. If we are to seek comfort in times of sorrow, be washed by the holy water, and covered and cleansed by the blood of the lamb, why does this installation feel so cheeky? Gober was raised Catholic, but later left the church, disillusioned. Nonetheless he says he created this environment as a place for contemplation in a time of tragedy. This installation doesn’t offer comfort, however, but seems to provoke. This work isn’t about a collective spiritual crisis of “we,” but about something very specific to Gober’s experience.

As I wandered through the exhibition studying the early paintings, reference drawings, sinks, and other sculpted objects, I sighed deeply and repeatedly. Gober’s visual insistence on bland universal definitions of roots, home, values and mores, and even faith is exhausting. I can sense that the work is about him, that it is specific, but everything I see tries so hard to fade into the proverbial woodwork while coyly inviting me to acknowledge and congratulate its difference.

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The introductory galleries to the Robert Gober retrospective contain a curious rebus of well-chosen objects laying out major themes of his career. But it’s not until the third gallery that we find the sinks. For those that saw them in the mid 1980s, the sinks will always remain the real introduction to Gober’s work.

According to MoMA, the sinks’ “uselessness spoke to the impossibility of cleansing oneself,” in the midst of the AIDS crisis. A sensible metaphor in hindsight, but in 1984 and ’85, when he made them, the sinks had only a vague relationship to the AIDS crisis that was just beginning. Intimations of fear and confusion and a sudden consciousness of bodily vulnerability were intensifying dynamically, but the sinks addressed these feelings only subliminally.

The sinks, shown in 1985 at Paula Cooper, the major SoHo gallery where Gober formerly worked as a preparator, launched his career. They were constructed of wood, wire lath, plaster, and several coats of semi-gloss enamel paint and had holes where faucets and drains would normally be. Abstract in form, but representational in content, Gober’s sinks were in dialogue with the work of other artists in the same roster, such as Joel Shapiro with his tiny bronze chairs. They invoked the immaculate simplicity of Minimalism, but with a younger generation’s interest in the handmade and a treasonous approach to representation. Evoking Magritte’s pipe, they seemed mysterious, provocative and absurd.

With two holes that could be read as eyes, and a belly like shape with a drain hole that implied excretion, it was not hard to see these variously shaped objects as body substitutes. Abject rather than high-tech (the popular style then), they had a hint of nostalgia, the kind of sinks found in the old industrial loft buildings artists had been renovating as studios over the past decade.

But in his first significant gallery show, Gober’s sinks were, like much work of that period, presented as a series, as variations on a theme. Viewers were unprepared for the widely disparate nature of the work to come.

It is problematic then, that we don’t encounter Slides of a Changing Painting (1982–83) until several rooms further, because when it was first shown for five days at Paula Cooper in 1984, a year before the sinks, few saw it. It is clearly a Rosetta Stone for understanding Gober, an index of ideas that generated much of his future work. In this projection of slides, a small painting on Masonite was continually reworked, scraped down, and repainted. Torsos morphed from male to female, then into rooms, and then into landscapes and back to torsos. Gober winnowed hundreds of the slides he took of this process to 89 whose images continually dissolve into each other. This piece illuminates the importance of painting ideas to the structure of Gober’s work, so much so that it becomes helpful to think of his pieces less as sculptures than as three-dimensional images.

In fact the very first thing in this retrospective is Hope Hill Road, a painting of Gober’s childhood home done in the style of Fairfield Porter that he painted at 21. Drawn and painted images make subtle but important appearances throughout the exhibition, from paintings of abject, violent, and quotidian episodes that line the walls of a handmade church model, to the famous pairing of the sleeping white man/hanging black man that is repeated as wallpaper; or a small, strange surreal/abstract painting that hangs near a handmade sculpture of a bed; and the painted mural of a forest in an installation. His painting has a direct, but unrefined, almost naïve style, which he uses to hint at things private or shameful. In direct contrast to the painstakingly controlled construction of the objects, they are like a repressed physical desire that keeps bubbling to the surface.

So much has been written about the coded gay subtext of Gober’s work, but his sexuality seems to me neither hidden nor celebrated, but merely factual. His objects are often sensuous, but with curiously little eroticism, either gay or straight. His best work is quite literal, like the closet without a door, and he leaves it to viewers to make their own connections.

In fact a major theme is the ubiquitous quotidian object — plywood sheet, closet, dog bed, used paint can, Table Talk apple pie box — all remade with total deadpan verisimilitude and in ever more complex materials. For instance, in carefully recreating a Table Top apple pie container (Untitled, 2008) in copper and glass, he conflates the cliché “American as apple pie” with a degraded container of mass-produced, tasteless fast food and turns the whole thing into a meditation on a ruined idea of wholesomeness.

Nor are these objects — so reminiscent of Duchamp’s readymades — simple art-historical invocations, but function as an implicit critique of Duchampian ideology. Gober, by remaking everyday objects by hand, infers that merely pointing to an object not intended as art, and calling it art, may no longer be sufficient for that object to become art.

Gober’s relation to Duchamp is elaborated upon further with Untitled (1997), a secret view through an open suitcase on the floor, a reference to Étant Donnés, Duchamp’s last work. Looking into the suitcase we see that the inside bottom contains an iron grate, which reveals, under the floor, a pool of water in a forest glade. Kneeling to peer further we can just glimpse a man’s hands holding a diapered baby whose bare legs dangle between his own naked ones. There have been suggestions of baptism or even pedophilia, or maybe just a childhood memory but it certainly is a heavy piece of baggage for anyone to carry around. This is Gober at his most complex, imploding ideas and feelings into a mysterious singularity.

Gober is most powerful when concentrating on how, within the boring facts of daily life, there lurk metaphors for larger experiences of grief, violence, obliviousness, narrow mindedness, aging, and death. When Gober transforms a banal object by emphasizing its subtle metaphorical possibilities, it feels intense. He is more problematic in big statements — either piousness (such as in his September 11th elegy) or Surrealism inevitably takes over. Images he might have pulled off as paintings — a flour sack as a hairy body with breasts, a piece of cheese with hair, a rifle melting on a crate of apples — in sculptures seem heavy handed, and Gober’s meticulous craftsmanship points more to the hokey Surrealism of Dali than the heady deconstruction of Magritte.

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