Robert Gober - Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, California

ArtForum, Dec, 1997 by Libby Lumpkin

Robert Gober took four years to make his new untitled installation at the Geffen Contemporary, two to think it, two to craft it. The result doesn't so much exceed expectations as it utterly defeats them. Nothing here is quite what you would expect - of Robert Gober, or of contemporary art.

Just to begin, Gober's piece reinstitutes the tradition of the grand narrative summation. Such summations rarely constitute an artist's best work, strained, as they often are, under the weight of definitive answers, defensive posturing, or high purpose: Gustave Courbet's The Artist's Studio, Paul Gauguin's Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?, and Marcel Duchamp's The Large Glass, and its later three-dimensional version, Etant donnes, I think, make this point. Gober's version combines aspects of all these works - along with bits and pieces of myriad others. But if his theatrical tableau reaches a bit too far and wide, it does not reach too high. It's grand, but not grandiose.

Throughout his career, it seems, Gober has been allegorizing the everyday travails of his life as gay man in straight culture - from the tilted crib of his infancy, through years of domestic dysfunction, to time spent in the jailhouse of culture's normative nature. But if in his early career he was lost, at mid-career he is found! Gober, it seems, would bring his psychodrama to a conclusion - in the form of a simple quasi-biblical story of redemption.

If Gober's tale is simple, however, his telling of it is not; the work's multilayered iconography would give Panofsky pause. The unusual vertically bipartite composition - the upper level separated from the lower by the museum's floor - is indebted to medieval and Renaissance paintings of apotheosic themes, such as the Assumption of the Virgin, in which the hierarchy of heaven and earth is embodied in the design. It is also indebted, of course, to Duchamp's commentary on that tradition in The Large Glass, in which a "fourth-dimensional" shadow realm rests above the three-dimensional realm of the "bachelors" and the real.

The discretely treated sculptural components inside the installation, the traditional domain of ready-made conceptualism, are elaborately handcrafted, a harmony of thought and practice that sets the devotional tone. Just as Netherlandish artists cloaked Catholic narratives in meticulously detailed renderings of the natural world, sacrificing pictorial logic in order to saturate each discrete configuration with symbolic meaning (sometimes to surrealist effect), Gober cloaks his personal narrative inside meticulously crafted public symbols of art and religion, in layers of memory and erudition too dense to be pried apart, whose meanings are inseparable from the idea of artisanal practice.

As you descend from the platform of the Geffen's reception area, you see a dimly lit proscenium that fills the museum's cavernous main gallery. The walls and floor are painted a uniform gray, creating a vast, mildly gloomy color field sparsely inhabited by a six-foot-tall domestic-grotto-style Virgin Mary, two identical oversized suitcases, and a stairway that has been transformed into a fountain, all arranged to suggest the floor plan of a cathedral.

At center stage, the Virgin Mary rests atop a storm drain where the baldachino would be. The Virgin is cast in rough-surfaced concrete, from Gober's original in clay, and with seeming indifference to political consequence, he has intersected its midsection with a six-foot-length of standard screw-ribbed culvert pipe, cast in bronze. Despite the contemporary tendency to read this configuration, with its Surrealist gestalt, as a violation of woman or Catholicism, it is perfectly articulate within the tradition of medieval Catholicism as a personification of the Church. Just as Jan van Eyck's oversized Mary in his Madonna in a Church, with columnated robe, personifies the basilica in which she stands, the ribs of Gober's culvert pipe reprise the vaults of late medieval cathedrals, which themselves were meant to symbolically transform the interior of the church into Mary's womb (or the body of Christ, depending on the particular exegetic source).

The suitcases that flank the Virgin, whose open lids reveal two more storm drains, establish the transept. Thus, the culvert pipe becomes a metaphorical nave that leads the eye directly toward Gober's stunning approximation of an apse: a staircase whose steeply ascending cedar steps are inundated by a rapidly descending cascade of water - 180 gallons a minute noisily tripping downward, then pooling on the floor before dramatically plunging through a fourth storm dram at the foot of the stairs. This ingenious design embodies the structural simplicity of clapboard Puritanism even as it exploits the theatrical excitement of the baroque. Thus, it inverts the hierarchy of heaven and hell by replacing the supernatural streams of light, symbolized and embodied in the apses of cathedrals, with a naturally embodied earthbound source of redemption.