Depth in Venice

ROBERT GOBER ELEVATES THE EVERYDAY

Robert Gober is an artist's artist, among the most influential of his generation. "One of the great poets of our national psyche," Gober, 47, is the United States representative to the 2001 Venice Biennale. His sculptural installations are enigmatic extractions of objects from the everyday, an idiosyncratic brand of psychological archaeology that removes the familiar from its context, remakes it, and offers it back as a repository for memory and history. "His pieces are always ciphers of memory and loss, mystery and regret, humor and pathos," says James Rondeau, associate curator at the Art Institute of Chicago and co-commissioner, with the Hirshhom Museum and Sculpture Garden's Olga Viso, of the United States Pavilion at the Biennale. The Venice installation will feature a variety of media, including bronze sculptures cast from a piece of Styrofoam the artist found washed up on the shore of Long Island, and an artist's book, 1978-2000. Water is a recurrent theme in Gober's work, a metaphor for what flows beneath the surface, what washes up. "The show has to do with detritus—I wouldn't say garbage actually, because that connotes fetid stuff, but things that are discarded because they're plastic, so they don't break, disintegrate, or degrade. It's about a kind of indomitable trash," says Robert Gober. At once playful and profoundly serious, Gober's uncanny transformations of the familiar are haunting fragments—dark and deeply optimistic.

A. M. H.