Misinterpreting Robert Gober
Robert Gober, 1989-90. Beeswax, cotton, wood, leather, and human hair,
11 3/8 x 7 3/4 x 20" (28.9 x 19.7 x 50.8 cm).
Gift of the Dannheisser Foundation. © 2011 Robert Gober
Fleshy waxen skin, hairy leg clothed in trouser, sock and oxford shoe. The sculpture rests on the floor, extended from the wall. This is the object we have to consider. It is disconcerting. Is this sculptural limb attached to a sculptural body on the other side of the wall? Has it been severed from the body? It is this the leg of a sculptural dead man? Did the wall itself bisect the limb, guillotine style? Etc.
I am reminded of the rat infestation that took place within a gallery I once worked. The disgusting creatures made their way from the restaurant next door to the bottom of my loft office space. The landlord invested in those inhumane snap traps. I would hear the traps alarm and the cringing murder that ensued. On one occasion, I was confronted by a trap that was activated with only a rodent leg captured. In an effort to free itself from the clutches, the creature gnawed off his own limb from the hip down. I am trying to draw a metaphor here regarding interpretation.
Harold Bloom said, “misinterpretation is the first step toward finding artistic freedom.” The most significant provocation of Gober’s iconic piece, Untitled [Leg], is it’s ability to suspend our readings of the work. As one in a long series of fabricated legs, it’s interesting to think about Gober’s attempts to maintain each as a liberated individual.
In Louise Lawler's photograph titled “Sentimental”, she reassociates the form and object nature of Gober’s leg. We are given a photographic image of the leg in an auction house, alongside a Damien Hirst painting and a Cindy Sherman photograph. Gober’s sculpture is no longer a conceptual metaphor. It regains its sculptural qualities as a marketable work of art on the chopping block*. It becomes especially lonely in this context. Excessively isolated. Understanding that the work is on view primarily to be carried off to a collectors house or more tragic, a collector’s storage unit. Besides eliciting sympathy, or sentimentality (as Lawler articulates), the leg once again becomes a single object through rendered alienation. The leg is free from the interpretive glue that is usually affixed by contextual readings. It is impossible to pare down the suggestive equations of A = death, or XY is really a penis. Again, the genius of Gober is the inexplicable identifications with the work. I only talk through the Lawler photograph to exhibit the transcendent nature of a clothed castrated leg.
My primary argument is to prove that Robert Gober severed the limb, like the rat in the trap, in a metaphorical attempt to resist interpretation or more precisely, detached himself from himself in a resistance to, as Focault puts it, “being governed…” or more specifically, trapped. The limb is a protest and an answer to Susan Sontag’s call for an “erotics of art instead of hermeneutics”. Gober’s leg can return to the uncanny encounter of a bloodless leg liberated from a body (standing upright somewhere else).
