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Thursday 6 February

The Sacred Metamorphoses of Robert Gober

Listen to me carefully, you bunch of snobs. You think you know everything about contemporary art with your abstruse theories and your fashionable openings, but today I’m going to talk to you about Robert Gober. Born in 1954 in Wallingford, Connecticut, this American artist transforms the most ordinary objects of our daily lives into true totems of our collective existence. In his disturbing and singular work, sinks become altars, wax legs become relics, and the most disconcerting installations confront us with our own demons with a rare intensity in contemporary art.

Gober is a magician of metamorphosis, an alchemist who transmutes plaster into porcelain, beeswax into human flesh. His sculptures are inhabited by a spectral presence that haunts us long after contemplating them. There is something profoundly Nietzschean in his way of sublimating the ordinary, of transforming domestic objects into manifestations of eternal return. For his sinks, these immaculate receptacles that have dotted his work since the 1980s, are not simple reproductions. They are incarnations of the Nietzschean concept of the transmutation of values, where the banal becomes sacred, where the utilitarian becomes metaphysical.

Take these sinks, emblematic creations that have made his reputation. Meticulously handcrafted in plaster and covered with semi-glossy enamel, they are systematically devoid of faucets and plumbing. These absences are not trivial. They transform these functional objects into monuments to the impossibility of purification, into silent testimonies of our perpetual quest for redemption. In an America marked by the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s, these waterless sinks become poignant symbols of a society obsessed with cleanliness but unable to face its own prejudices. Each sink is like a modern funeral stele, a memorial to the victims of an epidemic that society preferred to ignore.

The Hegelian philosophy of determinate negation finds a striking echo here. Gober’s sink is not simply a sink that doesn’t work, it is the very negation of its function that gives it its evocative power. It is no longer a utilitarian object but a portal to the collective unconscious, a mute witness to our daily purification rituals. The artist thus forces us to confront the dialectic between the pure and impure, the sacred and profane, in a society that desperately seeks to compartmentalize these opposites. The sinks, placed at different heights on the walls, create a spatial choreography that evokes at times baptismal fonts, at times urinals, deliberately blurring the boundaries between the sacred and profane.

Gober’s obsession with the manual fabrication of his works is not simply a technical choice. It is an act of resistance against mass production, an affirmation of the value of craftsmanship in an increasingly mechanized world. Each object bears the tiny traces of its fabrication, like scars testifying to the process of its creation. This maniacal attention to detail transforms each sculpture into a sort of contemporary relic, where the apparent perfection of the surface hides countless hours of patient and meticulous work.

Gober’s monumental installations transform entire spaces into theaters of the collective unconscious. His striking 1989 installation at Paula Cooper Gallery remains a perfect example of his ability to create environments that confront us with our social demons. The wallpaper, repeating the image of a sleeping white man juxtaposed with that of a hanged black man, created a chilling dialogue about racial violence in America. At the center of the space stood an immaculate, empty wedding dress, like an accusing ghost of lost innocence. This complex work plunges us into a deep reflection on collective guilt and historical memory, evoking Walter Benjamin’s thought on history as an accumulation of catastrophes.

Gober’s wax legs perhaps represent the most disturbing aspect of his work. These body fragments emerging from walls like fossils of an apocalyptic future remind us of our own mortality with disturbing acuity. Molded with troubling anatomical precision, covered with real human hair, they embody the fragility of our carnal existence. These bodily fragments evoke medieval relics while diverting their original sacred meaning. It is here that Georges Bataille’s thought on the formless finds particular resonance, in this tension between the sacred and the abject, between veneration and repulsion. The presence of real human hair on these wax sculptures creates an effect of hyperrealism that deeply destabilizes us, forcing us to confront our own corporality in all its vulnerability.

The artist manipulates matter with an almost monastic obsession that transforms each creation into an act of profane devotion. This maniacal attention to detail is reminiscent of the ascetic practices of medieval copyist monks. Repetition becomes here a ritual of transformation, where each sink, each leg, each installation becomes a station in a contemporary way of the cross. The manufacturing process itself becomes a form of active meditation, a way of transcending raw materiality to reach a spiritual dimension.

Gober’s installations are liminal spaces where daily reality dissolves to give way to something more disturbing, deeper. In his major installation at the Dia Art Foundation in 1992-93, functional sinks were installed in a hand-painted forest on the walls. The constantly flowing water created a hypnotic symphony, but the barred windows high up reminded us that we were in a gilded prison. This complex work can be read as a meditation on the very nature of freedom in our contemporary society, evoking Michel Foucault’s reflections on structures of power and surveillance. Water, the purifying element par excellence, becomes here the ambiguous symbol of an impossible purification, of an ever-deferred redemption.

Transformation is at the heart of Gober’s work. His familiar objects become strange, disturbing, carriers of an emotional and political charge that transcends their original banality. This metamorphosis is reminiscent of the Aristotelian concept of mimesis, but pushed to its most extreme limits. It is no longer a simple imitation of reality, but a transfiguration that reveals hidden truths beneath the surface of the everyday. Each object becomes a testimony where multiple layers of meaning overlap, creating a semantic density that resists any simplistic interpretation.

References to childhood are omnipresent in his work, but always tinged with an uncanny strangeness that brings us back to Freudian theories of the unheimlich. The deformed children’s beds, the doors that lead nowhere, the sinks placed too low, all these elements create a universe where innocence is perpetually threatened. This exploration of childhood traumas evokes Melanie Klein’s psychoanalytic theories about partial objects and primitive anxieties. Domestic objects, normally sources of comfort and security, become under his hands threatening presences that remind us of the fragility of our psychic constructions.

Gober’s work is deeply rooted in his personal experience as a gay man who grew up in conservative Catholic America, but it transcends these particularities to reach a universal dimension. His works speak of loss, desire, memory, and redemption in a way that touches the very essence of human experience. Perhaps this is where his greatest strength lies: in his ability to transform the personal into the universal, the specific into the archetypal. His art thus becomes a meeting place where individual experiences dissolve into a broader collective consciousness.

Gober’s art is an art of presence and absence, where each object exists simultaneously in these two contradictory states. His sculptures are both there and not there, familiar and strange, reassuring and deeply disturbing. This constant dialectic between presence and absence evokes Jacques Derrida’s thought on trace and différance, where meaning is always in motion, always deferred. The sinks without faucets, the empty beds, the doors that don’t open, all these elements create a network of meanings that constantly elude our total comprehension.

In his work on the very materiality of objects, the use of beeswax for his sculptures of human limbs is not an arbitrary choice. Wax, a traditional material of religious sculpture, possesses a translucency that evokes human flesh while maintaining a spectral quality. This material ambiguity contributes to creating a permanent tension between the real and artificial, the living and inert. The human hair implanted in the wax adds an additional dimension of disturbance, creating objects that are both artifacts and profane relics.

Gober’s more recent installations continue to explore these themes with renewed intensity. His work around the September 11, 2001 attacks, presented at MoMA, transforms national tragedy into personal meditation on loss and collective memory. Stacked newspapers, fragmented bodies, incessant water flows create a space of mourning and contemplation that transcends the simple memorial to become a place of spiritual transformation. The artist succeeds here in creating a subtle dialogue between personal and collective history, between individual and societal trauma.

The political dimension of his work cannot be ignored, but it always expresses itself obliquely, through metaphors and juxtapositions rather than direct statements. His installations create spaces for reflection where questions of gender, race, sexuality, and power are addressed with a subtlety that takes nothing away from their critical force. It is art that forces us to confront our own prejudices and blind spots, but does so with a formal elegance that makes this confrontation all the more effective.

The influence of Catholic religious art on his work is evident, but Gober constantly subverts its codes. His sinks can be seen as profane baptismal fonts, his wax legs as secular relics, his installations as chapels dedicated to unknown rituals. This appropriation and diversion of traditional religious forms create a productive tension between the sacred and profane, between tradition and subversion.

Robert Gober’s work is a constant reminder that the most powerful art often arises from the most ordinary objects, the most common experiences. But it is in his ability to transform these elements, to charge them with meaning that surpasses their initial banality, that his particular genius lies. He shows us that transcendence is not to be sought in some mythical elsewhere, but in the transfiguration of the everyday, in the sanctification of the ordinary.

Gober’s art reminds us that we are all beings of flesh and spirit, prisoners of our bodies but capable of transcendence. His waterless sinks, his wax legs, his labyrinthine installations are all mirrors that reflect back to us our own human condition, our deepest fears, and our wildest hopes. In an increasingly virtual and dehumanized world, his work constantly brings us back to the essential: our corporeality, our mortality, and our inextinguishable desire for redemption.

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