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Lot Essay
One of Robert Gober’s most striking works, his wax sculpture of part of a man’s body imprinted with a musical score, might at first seem to be an unusual combination of two seemingly unrelated motifs. Yet in Gober’s hands, Untitled is a carefully composed work that connects to one of the most recognizable paintings in the history of art. Gober looked to Hieronymus Bosch’s masterpiece The Garden of Earthly Delights (Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid) to find inspiration for this work. Located within the third panel of this Northern Renaissance triptych (the panel that depicts Hell) is what appears to be a cello combined with a harp crushing a human figure; the naked bottom half of a man sticks out from beneath, his rear bearing a musical score. That Gober found this particular detail, a tiny passage amongst a swirly cloud of bizarre and otherworldly imagery, speaks to his attentiveness as an astute observer and connoisseur of art. A highly symbolic treatise on morality, Bosch’s imagery can be interpreted as the punishment that awaits those who overly partake in the momentary pleasures of the world and the body—including an indulgence in music, drink and sex—at the expense of nurturing their soul. Untitled was executed in 1990, at the height of the AIDS crisis, at a time when moral rhetoric parallelled the moralism of Bosch’s painting. However, Gober chose this imagery not to participate in the damnation, but as a recuperative measure, as “a song to be sung to the image of a man, or it was the expression of music emanating or humming from inside a man’s body’’ (R. Gober, quoted in T. Vischer, Robert Gober: Sculptures and Installations, 1979-2007, exh. cat. Basel, 2007, p. 278).
As is common with much of Gober’s sculpture, the process of its execution is a long and painstaking one. “Months before, I had picked up out of the gutter on East 8th Street a discarded piece of sheet music,” he says. “I liked it because it was groups of notes ascending the scale. It looked like full, optimistic music. I didn’t transcribe the music as it was written on to the man, I took pieces and collaged it” (Ibid.). After using a friend to carefully make a cast of the buttocks, he casts the sculpture in wax, giving it a soft, flesh-like texture. Individual lengths of human hair have been embedded into the surface one-by-one to give the fragmented figure a life-like appearance. In this way, Gober connects Untitled to a long history of the figurative sculpture; beginning with Greek statuary that has been fragmented over time to commercial mannequins used to display clothes, wax figures in museum dioramas, and Marcel Duchamp’s Étant donnés, 1946–1966 (Philadelphia Museum of Art)—itself a kind of diorama that displays a life-sized replica of a woman’s body, abandoned in an overrun field that is viewable only through a peephole. Robert Gober spoke to his decisions to engage with the wax figure: “I got the idea while flying in a small plane in Europe. I had been in Bern and gone to see the Natural History Museum and it struck me as odd that contemporary people were omitted from the dioramas. Then, I’m on a small tightly packed commuter plane and across the aisle from me is this handsome business man with his legs crossed. His sock didn’t meet his pants on his crossed leg and I was transfixed by this hairy bit of leg. It seemed so vulnerable and exposed but an odd moment to make sculpture of” (R. Gober, ibid., p. 255).
Gober’s Untitled relates to another work, one that replicates Bosch’s image in full by including the entire lower half of the body. Like Duchamp’s Étant donnés, Gober situated the work in a diorama-like setting that placed the half-figure abutting a wall, papered with an image of a tense thicket of trees as if the fragmented body were lost in this imaginary forest, which, in turn, heightened the traumatic aspects of the sculpture. The eminent art historian Hal Foster elaborates on Gober’s relationship to Duchamp: “In terms of precedents one thinks first of Duchamp, but Gober queers his reception in significant ways. Unlike many contemporaries, Gober does not focus on the model of the readymade, which can query the relation between artwork and commodity. In fact, he almost opposes this model, not only because he fabricates his objects, but because Duchamp intended ‘complete anaesthesia,’ while Gober explores traumatic affect. Instead, Gober adapts another Duchampian model, the cast body part, which can query the relation between artwork and sexual drive. Like Duchamp, he sees cognition as sensual ... but this cognition is different for Gober because the desires are different. Hence, instead of the “female fig leafs” and “wedges of chastity” of Duchamp, Gober offers casts of musical male butts and colossal butter sticks … [and] offers such homoerotic relics as his candle seeded with human hair. Nevertheless, the affinity with Duchamp and Giacometti is clear, and it rests in a shared fascination with enigma and desire-with the enigma of desire, the desire in enigma” (H. Foster, “An Art of Missing Parts,” October 92, Spring 2000, p. 141).
As is common with much of Gober’s sculpture, the process of its execution is a long and painstaking one. “Months before, I had picked up out of the gutter on East 8th Street a discarded piece of sheet music,” he says. “I liked it because it was groups of notes ascending the scale. It looked like full, optimistic music. I didn’t transcribe the music as it was written on to the man, I took pieces and collaged it” (Ibid.). After using a friend to carefully make a cast of the buttocks, he casts the sculpture in wax, giving it a soft, flesh-like texture. Individual lengths of human hair have been embedded into the surface one-by-one to give the fragmented figure a life-like appearance. In this way, Gober connects Untitled to a long history of the figurative sculpture; beginning with Greek statuary that has been fragmented over time to commercial mannequins used to display clothes, wax figures in museum dioramas, and Marcel Duchamp’s Étant donnés, 1946–1966 (Philadelphia Museum of Art)—itself a kind of diorama that displays a life-sized replica of a woman’s body, abandoned in an overrun field that is viewable only through a peephole. Robert Gober spoke to his decisions to engage with the wax figure: “I got the idea while flying in a small plane in Europe. I had been in Bern and gone to see the Natural History Museum and it struck me as odd that contemporary people were omitted from the dioramas. Then, I’m on a small tightly packed commuter plane and across the aisle from me is this handsome business man with his legs crossed. His sock didn’t meet his pants on his crossed leg and I was transfixed by this hairy bit of leg. It seemed so vulnerable and exposed but an odd moment to make sculpture of” (R. Gober, ibid., p. 255).
Gober’s Untitled relates to another work, one that replicates Bosch’s image in full by including the entire lower half of the body. Like Duchamp’s Étant donnés, Gober situated the work in a diorama-like setting that placed the half-figure abutting a wall, papered with an image of a tense thicket of trees as if the fragmented body were lost in this imaginary forest, which, in turn, heightened the traumatic aspects of the sculpture. The eminent art historian Hal Foster elaborates on Gober’s relationship to Duchamp: “In terms of precedents one thinks first of Duchamp, but Gober queers his reception in significant ways. Unlike many contemporaries, Gober does not focus on the model of the readymade, which can query the relation between artwork and commodity. In fact, he almost opposes this model, not only because he fabricates his objects, but because Duchamp intended ‘complete anaesthesia,’ while Gober explores traumatic affect. Instead, Gober adapts another Duchampian model, the cast body part, which can query the relation between artwork and sexual drive. Like Duchamp, he sees cognition as sensual ... but this cognition is different for Gober because the desires are different. Hence, instead of the “female fig leafs” and “wedges of chastity” of Duchamp, Gober offers casts of musical male butts and colossal butter sticks … [and] offers such homoerotic relics as his candle seeded with human hair. Nevertheless, the affinity with Duchamp and Giacometti is clear, and it rests in a shared fascination with enigma and desire-with the enigma of desire, the desire in enigma” (H. Foster, “An Art of Missing Parts,” October 92, Spring 2000, p. 141).