Thirty years ago, Robert Gober produced several dozen sculptures of sinks, built up of plaster, wood, wire lath, and metal, and covered at the top with semi-gloss enamel. He began the series in New York in 1983 with the inexpensive materials he could then afford. When Neo-Expressionist painting was all the rage, the sinks constituted a critical response both to painterly exuberance and to Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain (1917)—a white urinal that was a rebuttal not only of painting (most of which emphasized sensuousness, in Duchamp’s view, at the expense of ideas), but also of the banal, sparkling white figural sculptures then flooding the market.…see the entire article in the print version of July/August’s Sculpture magazine.
