And now unprotected by their wrappers, Gober's butter sticks seem as vulnerable as life itself. Butter, being fat, is organic, and once lived inside a body, before being funnelled into the realm of the outside, of the dead. His butter sculptures bring to mind stale jokes too, but the immediacy of the work quickly turns away from that banter to lay bare its other side. But it also glowed with the threat of disease, gently radiating the kind of cancer Freud suffered. I think back to Gober's Cigar (1991), which troped those visual jokes that wander endlessly around received caricatures of manhood. Let's not be coy: on the one hand, this is a visual joke. Peeled and sitting at some distance from one another on the gallery floor, they are laid open in the extreme. There are two, nearly body-sized, sticks of butter, resting on their open wax wrappers. The alternative is to repent.' The well-known sculpture of the hairy leg, clothed in trouser, sock and shoe was never severed by the wall, but resolutely pronounced what it meant to be not inside - not where we comfortably stood, contemplating this leg, or that phantasm secluded beneath the gutter. As Harold Bloom writes of Lucifer's arrival in Hell: 'There and then, in this bad, he finds his good he chooses the heroic, to know damnation and to explore the limits of the possible within it. Thinking through last year's majestic exhibition at New York's DIA Foundation, it becomes clear that Gober is in the midst of exploring the psychological dimension of what it means to be without. When I was in the gallery, the runoff flowed right around the two nipples which straddled the sickened yellowed torso meaning that but for these lively pink male nipples, useless for sustenance, the body was corpsed. (He turns the telescope on the without, looks, lowers the telescope, turns toward Hamm.) Corpsed. HAMM: (violently) Wait until you're spoken to! (normal voice) All is.all is.all is what?ĬLOV: What all is? In a word? Is that what you want to know? Just a moment.
A scene from Samuel Beckett's Endgame arose in my mind: Clov is peering into the without though his lens. Like a flawless lens the water punctuated what was destined to be overlooked. Strangely, it was clear sewer water that washed over the torso and swirled into the stainless steel sink drain that punctured the heart of the hairy chest. My feet at its edge, I peered over the fouled grate and into the without to see a male torso lying at the bottom of a brick shaft. Inserted into the floor of the gallery was a gutter.
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