ROBERT GOBER,   b. 1954, Wallingford, CT

Review Panel, 2005
David Cohen, 2005
Amelia Rina, 2014
Steve Locke, 2014
Dennis Kardon, 2014
Lee Ann Norman, 2014

More information on the artist can be found at Matthew Marks

Full index entry for “Gober” at artcritical

“HUBS” gathers together links on artists and subjects discussed multiple times at artcritical 

The post Robert Gober Special: Dennis Kardon, Steve Locke and Lee Ann Norman appeared first on artcritical.

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.

The post The Body Manifest: Steve Locke on Robert Gober appeared first on artcritical.

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.

The post Nixed Metaphors: Lee Ann Norman on Robert Gober appeared first on artcritical.

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.

The post Pictorial Baggage: Dennis Kardon on Robert Gober appeared first on artcritical.

Roberta Smith begins her review of “The Production Line of Happiness,” the Christopher Williams retrospective at The Museum of Modern Art, by describing one of Williams’ photographs as an “act of elegant iconoclasm.” Based on her explanation and the exhibition itself, though, Williams more accurately represents a smug iconophilia. The photograph in question features a sliced-open wide-angle lens made by the renowned German manufacturer, Carl Zeiss AG. In the image, we see the lens’ “guts,” as Smith calls them, laid out in a pristine description of the device’s inner workings. Smith continues that, “Mr. Williams produced a big color close-up of a cross section that is as formal as an official oil portrait, as alluring as a high-end fashion shot and yet as startlingly exotic as an image from National Geographic.” This statement is problematic for a couple reasons. First, I like to think that we are past the knee-jerk reaction to compare photography to painting, as though photography still doesn’t have its own history of highly skilled execution, as exemplified by Williams’ impressive craftsmanship (or at least the craftsmanship of the studios he employs). Secondly, the exoticism and fetishization that Smith notes amplify the contrived perfection Williams supposedly undermines. He does include a few details that negate the shiny rhetoric of advertisements: an ill-fitting shirt, the dirty soles of a model’s bare feet, the naturally pendulous breasts of a Netherlands Playboy Playmate of the Year. But these slight indiscretions hardly count as subversions of commercial realism.

One reason for the images’ conceptual opacity is Williams’s highly considered use of the visual language of advertising, and what he, in the wall text outside the main exhibition galleries, called a “semiotic reduction” and the “strategic use of ambivalence.” The issue I have with this approach is that, at least in Williams’s case, his ambivalence begets the audience’s ambivalence, whether it is aimed at Williams as an artist, or at the exhibition’s subject matter. In Richard Woodward’s review of the exhibition for the Wall Street Journal, he questions Williams’s claim that the work critiques late capitalist society: “Don’t they actually function here more as promotional ads for the artist himself, proof of his cleverness, such as it is?” Woodward generally writes off Williams as an uninteresting photographer trying too hard to appear smart, and whom he doesn’t feel the need to consider further. This attitude would be fine if there weren’t a dearth of attention given to Williams’s elitist approach to complex issues, for which he offers no real alternative. As such, critics’ tepid dismissal or giddy celebration creates a volatile credulity.

Something I haven’t seen mentioned in the writing on “The Production Line of Happiness,” is the relationship between white masculinity and the otherness of females and non-white males. The only portraits in the gallery are of women (often in “domestic” situations especially those involving bathing) and black men, while white, male fingers hold the camera — the power — both literally in the photographs, and figuratively in the authorship of Williams, a white male. He might say, Of course the images objectify women and “exotic” races, because that’s what advertising does — and that’s what he criticizes in his gesture to mock Capitalism. But the elitism of the exhibition’s presentation contrasted with the pedantic style of the catalog makes his commentary largely inaccessible. The irony would not be so troubling if it weren’t receiving such grand support: “The Production Line of Happiness” occupies half of the 6th floor of the MoMA, which he shares with the exhibition of Henri Matisse’s seminal cutouts, placing him temporarily at the top of the institutional art world. Has the urgency of socially and politically responsible artworks dissolved so much that the curators see no problem in celebrating Williams’s impertinent banalities? Or perhaps they were satisfied that he sits comfortably within the art-historical lineage of his predecessors such as Institutional Critique all-star Michael Asher. How he utilizes this pedigree to contribute to art or culture today is unclear. Just four floors below the Williams spectacle however, I found works that actually do something.

“Robert Gober: The Heart is Not a Metaphor,” organized by Gober and the MoMA’s Anne Tempkin, has room upon room filled with evocative and politically charged works that do not let you turn away from the issues he addresses. Gober’s silk-screened wallpapers of a sleeping white man and a lynched black man stand as a prime antithesis to Williams’s startling combination of sugar coating and ostracizing. Gober plastered the walls of one of the galleries with the repeating pattern of racial injustice to remind us that our history contains the same pattern, regardless of whether or not we want to acknowledge it. Throughout the exhibit, he balances the straightforwardness of his chosen subject matter — sexuality, religion, politics, and the indelible scars they leave on American culture — with the bizarre lyricism of his objects and the materials he used to make them. Gober also embedded within the retrospective a smaller show he curated of works by artists Anni Albers, Joan Semmel, Nancy Shaver, Robert Beck, and Caty Noland. The humility of this gesture — in addition to his numerous curations of other artists’ works in the past — acts as a reminder that we are in this together, and that ambivalence is not an option.

One main difference between Gober and Williams is in the ways they communicate with their audiences. Gober invites empathy and dialogue. Williams delivers a message, which only after complex decoding reveals what he’s really getting at: an often-anticlimactic endeavor. Furthermore, Williams relieves himself of his responsibility as an artist to effectively convey his idea, saying: “Everything is interesting, and if it isn’t interesting, it’s more your inability to activate it.” If that isn’t an emperor exulting his new clothes, then I don’t know what is. Art need not be obvious or definite, but it should be generous in the way it engages its audience. Even if ambivalence is ironic, it perpetuates apathy instead of acting against it. In today’s tumultuous social and political environments, we can’t afford not to care.

The post The Production Line of Credulity: The Rhetoric of Christopher Williams appeared first on artcritical.

Heatwaves in a Swamp: The Paintings of Charles Burchfield at the Whitney Museum of American Art

June 24 to October 17, 2010
945 Madison Avenue at 75th Street
New York City, 212 570 3600

The sight of a cypress tree can suddenly flood our consciousness with Van Gogh’s stylizations.  Charles Burchfield may not have the sheer transformative force of Van Gogh, but when I exited the Burchfield exhibition at the Whitney Museum and walked across 75^th street, I was surprised when some foliage touching a wrought iron gate suddenly announced itself as a Burchfield arrangement poised for his trademark enhancements.  Although he was the first American to have a solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, Burchfield’s visionary, and at times, treacly, modernism has kept his achievement by the wayside.  I first saw Burchfield’s watercolors in a group show at Kennedy gallery around 1980 and didn’t know whether to be more astonished by his paintings or by his marginal standing.  Perhaps the success of pop infused and neo-romantic landscapes by such artists as Laura Owen and Peter Doig has softened the ground for a reassessment of the mannered achievements of Burchfield during classic modernism.  The smartly structured retrospective of his watercolors at the Whitney Museum, curated by sculptor Robert Gober, makes an eloquent case on Burchfield’s behalf.

Burchfield’s astonishing early watercolors of 1917-18 kick off the show.  Most evocative here are the sparely composed, ominous and brooding compositions such as The Night Wind (1918). Burchfield’s flattened construction of space and bold composition employ the lessons of Ryder and Dove, as ominous clouds and blustery winds bear down on a modest human dwelling braced for a rough winter’s night.  By linking specificity of locale with existential dread and alienation, Burchfield tackled themes later explored by such luminaries as George Ault and Edward Hopper.  In Church Bells Ringing, Rainy Winter Night (1917), Burchfield further heightens the state of fear and dread, with visualizations of sound.  One senses the impact of avant-garde treatises such as Kandinsky’s Concerning the Spiritual in Art and Besant’s Thought Forms.  Bells peal from the totemic church tower, and clouds vibrate, ushering forth a plague of menacing black rain on the miserably enchanted houses below.  Burchfield transforms doors into owls, and windows into grimaces by utilizing a set of self-styled forms he called “Conventions” that symbolize and summon states such as imbecility, evil, insanity and morbidity.  The net effect of the “Conventions” is one of emotional heightening in which elements of landscape anthropomorphize and attain an animist status.  A small drawing series of the “Conventions,” comprised of symbolic linear motifs and visual abbreviations, receives its own room within the exhibition.  This vital, working set of motifs is deftly encoded and nearly concealed within the paintings.

In the twenties, Burchfield abandoned this early breakthrough work and settled into a Regionalist scene-painting mode that provided some acclaim.  This fine but comparatively unremarkable period is included in the exhibition, boldly installed atop one of Burchfield’s own floral wallpaper designs

By the early forties Burchfield readjusted his course and faced the promise of his early watercolors.  Using a puzzle-piece strategy of associative-relational composition, he began to physically expand earlier paintings by attaching new sections of paper to them and by editing less effective areas.  Autumnal Fantasy (1916-44) is a clarion call heralding Burchfield’s rapidly developing mature phase.  His signature sun-star, a softly emanating light, appears fully formed.  Burchfield’s compositional inventions of echoing arches, receding diagonal boomerangs, and hazy atmospheric perspective of pale blues and yellows in this fifty-four inch watercolor crystallize this new period.  The saturated color and layered detail of the tree, foreground area, and squawking birds provide a counter focus to the commanding rough-hewn, painterly treatment and muted color elsewhere throughout.  Burchfield pushed watercolor conventions by dragging concentrated pigment, pummeling paper, and coaxing barely tinted dilutions into subtle form.  His declared affinity with Chinese painting is evident in the calligraphic strike-and-respond gestures.

The fifties and sixties are characterized by atmospheric paintings of domed forest cathedrals of transparent light and color.  Even Burchfield’s seemingly generic snow scene, The Constant Leaf, suddenly unfolds, captivates and transports the viewer as we eerily experience the silent atmospheric hum of the snowy environment. His occasional flirtations with magically kitchy, Shangri-la woodland settings must have strained cultivated modernist taste.  But this is the period in which Burchfield hit his stride, as he painted with a freedom and responsive touch reminiscent of John Marin.  Burchfield felt like “Don Quixote tilting at windmills” while executing a full seasonal cycle within a single painting in his Four Seasons (1960). But Robert Gober gets it exactly right when he writes Burchfield made “great art in old age.”  Burchfield’s prescience is noteworthy; Orion in December (1959) is in tune with some recent Chris Martin paintings.  And Dandelion Seed and the Moon (1965) is a standout for its large scale, pitch-perfect simplicity, soft luminosity and transcendent vantage point.   Upon close inspection, it is amazing how extraordinarily absent the surface is.  Using raw paper, muted grays, a few tiny strokes of green, the barest hint of yellow, and a tiny daub of orange, Burchfield summons a tremendously powerful image with great economy of means.  I’m hard pressed to think of a more poetic dismissal of the chasm between landscape and abstraction within American modernist painting.  Burchfield died two years later in December 1967, at the age of 75, having merged the streams of avant-garde, Chinese landscape, and American illustration into a current of his own.

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At the ecclesiastical-sounding Matthew Marks Gallery, everything is set up like a church. A nave of sepulchral objects leads the eye directly to a high altar, dominated by a crucifix. This is flanked by a pair of slightly open doors suggestive of chapels, or perhaps a vestry and sacristy. Images evenly paced along the walls recall stations of the cross, and a sculptural arrangement at the entrance to the exhibit functions rather like a baptismal font. You don’t have to be with the Inquisition, however, to detect unabashed blasphemy in the art of Robert Gober.

The Christ figure is decapitated and has been made to function as a fountain. Water squirts from his breasts and pours noisily into a latrine-like hole in the gallery’s concrete floor. Odd objects have been placed in proximity to the crucifix: a white, molded-plastic garden chair, a household rubber glove, a carton of oversized yellow lightbulbs. It is not clear whether they are to be read as altar furniture or witnesses at the Passion.

The tomblike slabs turn out to be a repeating piece of Styrofoam flotsam; these are surmounted by such objects as a bowl of plastic fruit, nailed-down driftwood, and a packet of diapers. The images on the walls are pages from the New York Times, chronicling the September 11 attacks, onto which fragmentary gouaches depicting sexual intimacy are rendered in a flimsy hand. It turns out that the tableaux on one wall are repeated in mirror image on the wall facing.

In two corners are what can be read as inverted gargoyles: Tree-trunks that give birth to the lower half of an adult male’s leg, wearing shoe and sock and exposing a hairy calf, or else a waswork of a hermaphrodite chest, the one breast sagging, the other hirsuteThe baptismal font, meanwhile, is a couple of oddly joined white, metal trash cans, closed off by a plank that supports a neatly folded black priest’s shirt, with its Roman collar. Upon this garment is a newspaper clipping of a Stetson-wearing, grinning woman at the 2004 Republican Party convention, who wears on her chin a Band-Aid that sports a purple heart. The article explains the symbol was worn in mockery of the military valor of Senator Kerry.

Politics keeps company with religiosity elsewhere in this enigmatic installation. Peek into the anterooms behind the altar, for instance, and you discover that the water source of the Christ-fountain is a pair of bathtubs in which the bathers’ legs can be viewed — hirsute in the one, smooth, hairless, and presumably female in the other. Whatever their genders, each has been reading a newspaper supplement carrying the Starr Report.

A sometime altar boy who left the Church in opposition to its stance on homosexuality, the openly gay Mr. Gober has always traded heavily on his rejected Catholic heritage. A 1997 installation at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, for instance, drew Christian anathema and artworld opprobrium in equal measure with its central motif of a giant Madonna penetrated by a supersized culvert.

From the plumbed Virgin it was a short step to the fountain Christ, but both are part of an ongoing preoccupation with drains. A number of sculptures and installations, dating back to the 1980s, feature sinks: alone, protruding from wallpaper depictions of forests, manipulated into the form of a gravestone. His obsession bridges what is anyway a narrow gulf in this confounding artist’s aesthetic between the sacred and the profane.

Mr. Gober belonged to a generation of artists who emerged in the 1980s to fuse personal identity politics and postmodernist theorizing about “the body.” His sink motif inevitably recalls Duchamp’s notorious “Fountain,” the up-ended urinal which is the “Desmoiselles D’Avignon” of appropriation art. This mixed pedigree goes some way to explaining the unsettling feature of Mr. Gober’s art: It is at once literal and arcane.

Much has been made of the fact that almost everything in Mr. Gober’s work is handmade by the artist and his studio. The flotsam, the driftwood, the trash cans, turn out to be bronze casts. The newspapers have been reprinted onto archival paper; the plastic chair and porcelain fixtures, hand-modeled in clay; the lightbulbs, hand-blown.

Sometimes this gives an enigmatic sheen to objects you’d otherwise quickly pass by. Things that at first seem appropriated turn out to have disconcertingly odd surfaces. They can be somewhat yucky, like the hairy wax legs of which he is so fond. But this shimmer of expressivity is illusory: It doesn’t arise from the act of depiction; rather, it is a theatrical effect.

The first, negative impressions turn out to have been sound: This is appropriation that just happens to be handmade, nihilism ex-nihilo. Craft is merely a means to convey obsessiveness, to wallow further in the banal, not to transcend it.

Similarly, the first impression of Mr. Gober’s work is of an anti-clerical gesture, someone out to parade a hatred of the Roman Catholic Church. But like the wobbly-edged literalism of the plastic chair that isn’t plastic, the art tries hard to unsettle such an extreme conclusion. There seems the possibility of some kind of meaningful interconnection between the personal, the political, the spiritual.

But however much Mr. Gober trades in dualities — personal and collective, sacred and profane, masculine and feminine, literal and transcendent — he’s ultimately a leveler: In the maelstrom of a sick, sad mind, ever focused on denigration, sacred images are detritus, trash is venerated. He is caught in his dualism: He oscillates between blantancy and obscurantism, without ever resolving into metaphor.

Mr. Gober grabs collective iconography greedily: Where angels fear to tread, he has taken on September 11. By juxtaposing it with the Starr Report, he equates, in a degrading way, the lethal intrusion of a gang of fanatics into the lives of thousands of innocent civilians and a fanatically censorious investigation of one public man’s private affairs. It is a banal, desperate grab at meaning.

Yet Mr. Gober’s art may be religious in ways its author never intended. I am a liberal, agnostic Jew, but wandering around this irritating yet enervating installation, with its devalued images and fruitless obsessiveness, I began to think: This is a convincing representation of Hell.

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Robert Storr, Gregory Volk, and Karen Wilkin joined David Cohen to review Shahzia Sikander at Brent Sikkema, Robert Gober at Matthew Marks, Harriet Shorr at Pelavin, Magnus von Plessen at Barbara Gladstone.

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