Robert Gober’s retrospective “The Heart Is Not A Metaphor,” which opens on October 4 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, is a strange and moving survey of domestic unease, seemingly pointless labor, and creeping horror, among other things. You enter the exhibition past a pair of very different works: “X Pipe Playpen,” 2013-14, a sculpture of a child’s crib bisected by an industrial pipe; and an untitled painting from 1975 depicting a suburban house, its lawn criss-crossed with ragged shadows of barren trees. The two pieces feed each other — the fairly straightforward, even bucolic scene can’t help but emit sinister vibes next to the modified baby furniture, a symbol of security gone awry. You carry that feeling of molested comfort through the rest of the show, with its sinks and legs and re-contextualized slices of mundane architecture.
In the following room, for instance: A closet from 1989, shallow and empty, its baseboard a bit dingy. Like many of the objects in Gober’s oeuvre, it’s an emptiness, a void, a lack (unless you walk inside it — then you’re the content). MoMA’s wall text describes another work in the show — a wedding dress, sans human inhabitant — as a “vessel” waiting for the “hopes and dreams of marriage.” A series of sinks from 1984 — all of them modeled on sinks that he had personal experience with, Gober clarified during a Q&A session at yesterday’s press preview — are mounted a bit too low on the wall. As the exhibition progresses we see the artist taking more liberties with those sinks — hanging them in stacks or, most successfully, burying a pair like tombstones in a patch of grass outside the gallery’s window. Along with those signature sinks, the exhibition is dotted with another of Gober’s most recognizable tropes: beeswax limbs augmented with actual human hair. (The artist didn’t make any sculptures of human anatomy until 1989, but during the Q&A alluded to the partial roots of his fascination with such forms, which often incorporate candles into the physiognomy: He was raised Catholic, a faith that had “this array of body-rich symbols.”)
One of the strangest elements of Gober’s practice is the sheer number of lovingly recreated, ordinary objects — paint cans, cat litter bags, store receipts, gin bottles — that, while impressive, never seem to fully justify the amount of intricate labor that must have gone into producing them. Why conjure an exact replica of a Table Talk brand apple pie using cast hot glass, cast plastic, and paint? Why make a wood engraving and subsequent prints simply to memorialize a urology appointment-reminder card for some guy named Keith? These items either have a buried, opaque significance, or they’re arbitrary challenges, a self-imposed mimetic assignment: The work was pointless in many ways but the thing is real, and has weight, in a way that an apple pie box sealed in a vitrine would not. These skillful, perverse objects are scattered throughout the show, often in rooms with artist-designed wallpaper (depicting a lynched man, or forest scenes, or sketches of male and female genitalia, or the river-veined outlines of states).
“The Heart Is Not A Metaphor” is also noteworthy for its inclusion of large installations, like one (with sinks, newspapers, wallpaper, and windows) that Gober made for Dia’s space in Chelsea in 1992, and another, made in response to the 9/11 attacks and featuring a statue of Jesus that spews water from his nipples into a hole in the ground (MoMA acquired the piece itself). There’s a room that focuses on Gober’s role as curator — he’s responsible for two spectacular retrospectives at the Whitney, of Charles Burchfield and Forrest Bess — and includes a show-within-the-show with work by Cady Noland and others. Not everything is pitch-perfect; the weirder or more grotesque certain later works get, the less effective they can be — like a stool sporting beeswax breasts and dangling a child’s leg. But most of the time Gober pushes adeptly against kitsch and mere stagecraft. Consider a 1997 sculpture of a suitcase that contains a grate, which opens onto a chimney burrowed into the floor, which terminates in a submerged pool of water with some sort of genuflecting marine plants. In the wrong hands, something like that could be corny as hell, but Gober nails it; the subterranean universe is so transfixing that you might even forget to Instagram it.
The small, early graphite drawings and paintings here could constitute a show of their own, from depictions of dish racks and other household products to one tiny canvas that belies Gober’s allegiance to Bess: an undefined orifice, populated by bats hanging from nails, being pried open by strange, green hands. The latter work hangs next to a sculpture of a petite bed, child- or monk-sized, neatly made. That juxtaposition is a nice summary of Gober’s retrospective in general: An invitation to relax, swiftly pierced by a jab of terror.
