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Lot Essay
In Robert Gober’s Drain, the artist takes a ubiquitous piece of domestic plumbing, and by stripping it of its associated hardware and placing it in a location far removed from its usual environs, he turns what was previously a familiar and often ignored object into something fascinating and alien. The pewter fixture replicates the billions of similar mass-produced objects that are in use all over the world, yet in Gober’s hands this object is resolutely handmade, and revels in both its formal beauty and its unwavering homeliness.
Executed in 1989, Drain relates to an important series of works Gober completed in the 1980s in which the artist meditated on the nature of domesticity, in addition to wider socio-political themes. First unveiled in the mid-1980s, this group (which included renditions of kitchen and bathroom sinks, urinals, and other seemingly ubiquitous pieces of domestic plumbing) offered a whole new hypothesis for sculpture. With works such as the present lot, Gober is drawn to a vocabulary of functional forms (beds, chairs, playpens, drains, urinals, doors, conduits) that, in his hands, take on grave emotional beauty. Each of his sculptures, in its own way, is a portrait of an emotion or a human condition, whether it be the isolation of childhood or the seductive power of the reimagined fact.
Drain was executed at the height of the AIDS pandemic of the 1980s. For Gober, works such as this symbolize become the direct opposite of the objects which inspired them. Just like his Sink series, in which he subverted the porcelain receptacles’ that act as the modern repository for the elimination of dirt and waste, the artist poses questions far deeper than the works at first glance suggest. Along with his Sinks, Drain seems to issue forth from some nightmarish dream, in which the dirty body can never be cleansed, and may point to the inability of the body’s immune system to eradicate diseases like the AIDS virus from the body. Gober recalls: "It seemed that every other day someone I knew or someone that a friend of mine knew was getting severely sick, really fast and most of them were gay men. Young men were dying all around me from causes unknown and the world seemed to be either in denial or revulsion. … It was a situation that is very hard to recreate in words. So when I am asked to look back and 'explain' my sculptures of sinks, this situation reasserts itself. What do you do when you stand in front of a sink? You clean yourself. I seemed to be obsessed with making objects that embodied that broken promise." (R. Gober, quoted in T. Vischer (ed.), Robert Gober: Sculptures and Installations, 1979-2007, exh. cat., Schaulager Basel, 2007, p. 60).
Robert Gober's fascination with the domestic trappings of the family home began to emerge in the 1970s while he was building and selling miniature dollhouses. In 1983, he made his first sculpture of a sink, titled The Small Sink, which was a rather rough, unrefined version of the sinks he would begin in earnest in 1984. For the most part, Gober's objects are based on his childhood memories. He vividly recalled the porcelain washbasin from his grandparents' home and a nearly identical version that his father had installed in his basement workshop. Gober recalls: "One of my earliest memories is of standing in front of the counter that held our kitchen sink. The top of my head was much lower than the height of the sink, where I would watch my mother for countless hours. I remember thinking that life would be different when I could see for myself the interior of the sink." (R. Gober, quoted in T. Vischer, (ed.), ibid.).
Executed in 1989, Drain relates to an important series of works Gober completed in the 1980s in which the artist meditated on the nature of domesticity, in addition to wider socio-political themes. First unveiled in the mid-1980s, this group (which included renditions of kitchen and bathroom sinks, urinals, and other seemingly ubiquitous pieces of domestic plumbing) offered a whole new hypothesis for sculpture. With works such as the present lot, Gober is drawn to a vocabulary of functional forms (beds, chairs, playpens, drains, urinals, doors, conduits) that, in his hands, take on grave emotional beauty. Each of his sculptures, in its own way, is a portrait of an emotion or a human condition, whether it be the isolation of childhood or the seductive power of the reimagined fact.
Drain was executed at the height of the AIDS pandemic of the 1980s. For Gober, works such as this symbolize become the direct opposite of the objects which inspired them. Just like his Sink series, in which he subverted the porcelain receptacles’ that act as the modern repository for the elimination of dirt and waste, the artist poses questions far deeper than the works at first glance suggest. Along with his Sinks, Drain seems to issue forth from some nightmarish dream, in which the dirty body can never be cleansed, and may point to the inability of the body’s immune system to eradicate diseases like the AIDS virus from the body. Gober recalls: "It seemed that every other day someone I knew or someone that a friend of mine knew was getting severely sick, really fast and most of them were gay men. Young men were dying all around me from causes unknown and the world seemed to be either in denial or revulsion. … It was a situation that is very hard to recreate in words. So when I am asked to look back and 'explain' my sculptures of sinks, this situation reasserts itself. What do you do when you stand in front of a sink? You clean yourself. I seemed to be obsessed with making objects that embodied that broken promise." (R. Gober, quoted in T. Vischer (ed.), Robert Gober: Sculptures and Installations, 1979-2007, exh. cat., Schaulager Basel, 2007, p. 60).
Robert Gober's fascination with the domestic trappings of the family home began to emerge in the 1970s while he was building and selling miniature dollhouses. In 1983, he made his first sculpture of a sink, titled The Small Sink, which was a rather rough, unrefined version of the sinks he would begin in earnest in 1984. For the most part, Gober's objects are based on his childhood memories. He vividly recalled the porcelain washbasin from his grandparents' home and a nearly identical version that his father had installed in his basement workshop. Gober recalls: "One of my earliest memories is of standing in front of the counter that held our kitchen sink. The top of my head was much lower than the height of the sink, where I would watch my mother for countless hours. I remember thinking that life would be different when I could see for myself the interior of the sink." (R. Gober, quoted in T. Vischer, (ed.), ibid.).