"Robert gober: the heart is nota metaphor".
Molesworth, Helen
MUSEUM OF MODERN ART * October 4, 2014-January 18, 2015 * Curated
by Ann Temkin and Paulina Pobocha
Robert Gober's iconic wax legs and oblique domestic objects
possess the force of an eruption. They remain the most evocative
sculptural rendition I have seen of the unconscious making itself known.
That his work emerged during the plague years of HIV/AIDS only adds to
the pain that typically accompanies psychic discovery. Gober is also one
of our primary interlocutors with Marcel Duchamp--not the Conceptual,
institutional-critique Duchamp, but the more elusive and evocative
strain of Duchamp's oeuvre that concerns itself with the problems
of love, desire, and marriage. This retrospective of some 140 works from
the 1970s through the present includes the return of Gober's
magisterial Dia installation of 1992. The catalogue comes with an essay
by critic Hilton Als: Who could ask for a more affective and intelligent
pairing?
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