ARTIST RESEARCH Robert Gober

Rationale
Robert Gober is an artist that was recommended to me in my early stages of research. While I have not used him as an influence in this project he was an interesting artist for me to look at in regards to where I am not intending on heading within my own work. In the examples I have looked at he has used blatant christian iconography, that comes loaded with their own history, which strengthens his work. I have touched on using christian iconography previously in my own work but feel a resonance with it.

Installation View, Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, Madonna Detail, 1997. Troubling the Banal

(image source) http://www.transpositions.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/Robert-Gober-Installation-View-The-Los-Angeles-Museum-of-Contemporary-Art-19971.jpg

Matthew Marks Gallery Installation, Crucifix , 2005

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In his seminal essay ‘The Return of the Real’, Hal Foster explores the hidden aims within the broad, revived interest in realism and illusionism that characterizes Gober’s generation of artists. Alongside his discussion of ‘traumatic realism’ and ‘traumatic illusionism,’ Foster elaborates on the appropriation and explains that ‘appropriation art works to expose the illusions of representation, it can poke through the image-screen.’ Reflecting further on Gober and artists like him, Foster notes that ‘Here illusionism is employed not to cover up the real with simulacral surfaces but to uncover it in uncanny things.’ While the sheer accumulation of everyday objects rendered illusionary or abject by Gober’s practice would serve to arrest any viewer, it is his profound construction of quasi-religious and ominously spiritual spaces that represents his greatest effort at troubling the banality of our lives. Gober’s most remarkable spaces have involved the studied and precise transformation of near kitsch-y religious objects.

In September 1997, Robert Gober displayed his untitled, site-specific installation in the Geffen Contemporary gallery of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. Somewhere between a serenely empty home space and a calm chapel, the installation has at its center a sculpted Madonna pierced through with a culvert pipe. Loosely based on an almost kitsch-y garden sculpture of Mary and adapted with help from a live model, Gober crafted this Madonna with his own hands, and in the eerie space of the installation it retains none of its garden store familiarity.

Gober appropriated another piece of religious kitsch for a large-scale installation at the Matthew Marks gallery in New York City, which he described thus: ‘The exhibition, its contents, its themes, and its materials were in some deep way related to the events on September 11, 2001.’ The headless cement crucifix remains the pseudo-chapel’s focal point and encapsulates the grief-stricken mood of the space. Based on a family heirloom handed down to the artist by his grandmother, the crucifix assumes a strange scale, not a monument and yet not a miniature. Like the Madonna before it, Gober took great care in sculpting the crucifix himself and in his way has ensured its solemn presence and spiritual portent.

http://www.transpositions.co.uk/robert-gober-troubling-the-banal/