Gober, 46, is understandably prickly while making last-minute preparations for his most important show to date. And it’s not only the pressure of Venice. He’s a little fearful that a critic–who’s come to find out what his exhibition will be like–might portray him in the role it’s easiest for the public to latch on to, “gay artist,” when he is also becoming a bona fide contemporary master. In fact, right after I enter his spacious, sunny workroom/office in Manhattan’s East Village, Gober–beefy, balding, bearded and very intense–says in a mock cheerfulness that fails to mask the tension, “If you’re here to out me, you’re about 17 years too late.” But if the Venice show is a success, Gober may find himself in a league where the only G word ever stuck in front of “artist” is “great.”
As a dutiful assistant brings in a foam-core maquette of the pavilion with tiny models of sculpture placed in it, one to a room, Gober spreads his hands on the table and exhales, resigned to an interview. For Venice, he says, “I broke my own rule that an installation is a collection of objects that cannot be separated.” Which means that he’s putting together a sequence of individual sculptures–a piece of beached Styrofoam debris cast in bronze and painted white, a bronze butter churn with barnacles attached, a toilet plunger replicated in ceramic and oak, a gin bottle cast in solid glass with a hand-drawn label–and a few prints that share a narrative thread. It’s a risk–this trying to combine the sweep of installation art and the attention to detail of individual works–that only an artist at the top of his game would take.
The sculptures themselves are deceptive objects that make you wonder about the whole nature of reality. “When the piece of Styrofoam was originally cast in bronze,” says Gober, “it looked fake. So I had to work on the little pits in it. It took three people working three months to rearticulate the holes.” And take, for instance, the little untitled cat-sitter ad print. Gober obtained the model for it taped to a phone booth in New York and, at first glance, it looks like nothing more. But it’s actually a delicate etching on handmade paper simulating ordinary copy-machine stock. It even has that homely, errant vertical line caused by the edge of the original’s being copied onto larger sheets of paper. Obsessive and silly? Sure–although it’s what Gober wants you to think before you realize that’s part of the nature of art, in general, and before you notice that the print is a small island of coziness in a sea of alienation.
The “theme” of the officially untitled Venice installation, Gober proclaims, is “the persistence of the promise of democracy.” But Gober is far more sardonic than that. He’s placed a tattered American flag (also found on the beach near his Long Island home) over the entrance to the pavilion, and the plunger is an obvious reference to the Abner Louima case of police torture in New York. Together with a small book of gritty photographs–including an image of a newspaper clipping about the Matthew Shepard murder in Wyoming–Gober’s show continues his angry response to homophobia and his ongoing elegy for its victims. It also expands the sculptor’s repertoire of elegantly ominous objects which, like the wrestling nude men of Francis Bacon, allude powerfully to something bigger, something everybody can relate to. Like, say, mortality.
Gober was raised a Roman Catholic in Wallingford, Conn., where his father, a factory worker, built the family house. He attended art school for two years and, after getting a literature degree from Middlebury College in Vermont, headed straight for New York to be a painter. Gober soon turned to sculpture, and began to exhibit a series of faucetless sinks whose hard white porcelain surfaces and conspicuous drains referred abstractly but poignantly to the toll of the AIDS epidemic.
Gober’s sculpture, while always quirky, eventually began to speak more broadly. On a commuter jet in Switzerland in 1988, Gober happened to notice a startlingly naked strip of flesh above the sock and below the trouser cuff of the businessman he was seated next to. He turned that tiny epiphany into his almost-signature life-size sculpture of a male lower leg, pant, sock and shoe sticking out of a wall, down near the floor. Yes, the work has a strong sexual connotation. But it also recalls a story Gober’s mother, an operating-room nurse, told him when he was a child: her first surgery was an amputation, at which someone simply handed her the severed leg. Even if you haven’t heard the anecdote, the piece’s waxy spookiness itself conveys the same kind of fascinating dread. In a 1997 installation in Los Angeles, Gober’s use of a concrete figure of the Virgin Mary (custom-made for him by a garden-statuary company), abdominally pierced by a bronze replica of a culvert pipe, won him critical praise for wrestling with his lapsed faith, and a perhaps predictable condemnation by a spokesman for the L.A. Archdiocese.
Gober nevertheless insists that he wants viewers to ponder his work visually for a while and not “leap so fast to meaning.” But admiring art-world insiders haven’t hesitated. They’ve jumped to such phrases as “a Proustian re-creation of a long-vanished world [of childhood memory]” and “purgatorial suburbia”; they’ve compared him to everyone from James Joyce to Francisco Goya, from Kate Chopin to Marcel Duchamp. That’s a pretty heavy load to bear, even if it’s the kind of resume the folks at the Pantheon expect an artist to be carrying when he finally arrives. The hype is not wholly undeserved, however, and if everything goes right in Venice, Gober just might be asked to stop in on his way home. We hear that quite a few prickly artists have been welcomed there.
