Robert Gober
1954–

Elisabeth Sherman: At first glance, this work by Daniel Lefcourt may appear to be a painting from another era. A minimalist canvas of simply black stripes on a white ground.

Upon closer inspection, however, you can see that this is actually almost a sculptural object. It's acrylic on board, cut into this shape and hung directly on the wall. Rather than being all about its form as much as of minimalist painting was, and containing absolutely no content, this work is actually very specifically an absence.

Lefcourt found the mockups from a newspaper's print production, where they had redacted information about a scandalous story that they were covering, leaving only Xs where the images should be, and black lines where all of the text should have been. Lefcourt was drawn to the shapes and forms created by these redacted bands of information, and even more so interested, as he said, in the signs of their absence, that the form itself was very directly reflecting to something that should be there, but isn't quite there.

While not necessarily about our surveillance culture or the hiding or revealing of information by the government, in the contemporary moment this work very much points to all that is around us that we know we cannot see.

Narrator: This photograph is a collaboration between Robert Gober and Christopher Wool. They included it in a joint exhibition in 1988. Curator Elisabeth Sussman.

Elisabeth Sussman: The woman's dress is a summer dress, which is interesting. Because it's a dress that has no sleeves, no neckline, it's not a, it's a very vulnerable dress. It's there in this kind of wintry landscape. That's interesting, to me. The dress is, looks like a white dress, but it has a printing on it of a repetitive black and white pattern, and that black and white pattern is by Christopher Wool, and resembles the kinds of paintings he was doing at the time.

The other thing that is striking about the photograph is that the tree that it's hanging on, is a three‑pronged tree. For some reason or another, this dress hanging on the tree reminds you slightly of a crucifix, there's just a slight idea that this could be a stand in for a body. But it's really, there's no body there, there's just a dress.

To me, it was very much about kind of establishing this, a sort of mood. Yeah, a feeling of walking into a gallery space that wasn't a neutral space, and that was trying to tell you something that you were going to be emotionally vulnerable to. 

Elisabeth Sussman: The reason it needs two of them, probably, is because Gober is coming after the minimalist Donald Judd. Donald Judd would make these completely non‑objective objects and stack them up the wall. They were simply boxes inside. It was a different color from the outside, and there were maybe one or two of them or maybe one, two, three, four, five, six, and they would go up a wall like that.

Gober is sort of, in a way, he's saying, "This is a sculptural object," by replicating it and stacking it on the wall like this. I think maybe that's why there are two. Because he wants to kind of, push back on this idea that this is a single sink—which is all about washing and cleaning and so on, whatever you, other meanings you want to bring to it. But it's also about the history of sculpture.

What it then also says to me, if you get on that wavelength of why is it about the history of sculpture, I think what's really interesting about it is that he takes this kind of non‑objective box of Donald Judd stacked on the wall as his model prototype, and he gives it meaning.

Narrator: Robert Gober made this sculpture in 1988.

Elisabeth Sussman: What they are, are the facsimiles of two laundry sinks that are mounted on a wall, one above the other. They are absolutely not functioning. The object that we're looking at doesn't really add up to anything. You have to project onto this what you think it means.

What's always been very interesting to me is that Gober saw such sinks as these laundry sinks in his studio. For some reason, he was fascinated by the shape and by the look of this thing. So, rather than go to the hardware store and buy them, he decided he would make them. And he would make them to look exactly like the sinks.

He reacts to the sink, he takes it out of its ordinary life and through this meticulous fabrication, he knows it, in a way. He lets the meaning of it, the original attraction to it, kind of filter into his unconscious mind through the process of making it. That's, in itself, profound to me.

Beyond that, what does it mean? I mean, then you can start speculating, about what do you do with the sink. Do you wash your hands? Do you wash your tools? The one thing that comes out of it seems to be that you are just washing, cleaning, cleaning, cleaning.

Then you say to yourself, "OK, but who needs two of them? One on top of the other exactly alike." You could say everything I just said to you about one sink. Why do you need two of them?

That's a good question, I mean, I'm asking myself that question. But it—that boils down to maybe requiring an art historical answer.

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