robert gober at the schaulager

Last night, the summer exhibition at the Schaulager in Basel opened. This year, the honor goes to Rober Gober, whose Untitled (1995-97, above) is permanently installed on the lower level of this storage facility, designed by Herzog & de Meuron for the contemporary art collection of the Emanuel Hoffmann Stiftung . The collection is committed to new art that uses materials in unorthodox ways, and while scholars or museum professionals can make appointments to view select works year-round, the space is only open to the public in the summer – and then only those parts of two floors reserved for special (typically monographic) exhibitions. Save for the Gober installation and Katharina Fritsch’s Rat King, works in the collection remain hidden from view in luxuriant bays that make up the majority of the building, one of the Basel-based firm’s best.

Perhaps it is the fault of looking at exhibitions at openings or my existing indifference to Gober’s work, but this show is agonizingly dull - and this was a sorry disappointment given that the Tacita Dean exhibition last year, after repeated and intense visits, left me with an unbound enthusiasm for the work of a heretofore unfamiliar artist, and that the Jeff Wall exhibition two years ago allowed me to warm to work for which I had originally deep reservations.

The first work I ever saw by Gober was one of his sinks at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art when I was a teenager. I was with my father, who had apparently encountered his work before. He gestured to it saying, “What’s the deal with the sinks?” That question haunted me again as I wandered through the ground floor, seeing a litany of loving replicas of non-functional old-timey porcelain utility sinks – as well as equally repetitious examples of other favorite motifs (wax legs sporting children’s sandals and socks, baby cribs, household products). The most intriguing work in the show was one of the four large-scale installations, Newspaper, Rat Bait, Functioning Sink, Prison Window, and I guess it kind of answered my dad’s question for me. I had seen it reproduced many times before but could never get a sense of what was going on: as in Untitled, the sound of running water is crucial. Water runs into a series of sinks affixed to walls painted with a forest scene. The forest is so obviously a painting (it even looks like it was attacked by some blight that makes everything look like army camouflage), and though the sinks that intrude into your space continue to interrupt the illusion in an even more obvious way, you nevertheless want to imagine yourself in a real forest with the sounds of a real stream rushing in the distance. Puncturing the walls high above your head are barred windows that look out onto blue skies: you cannot see these skies without keeping in sight the top of the makeshift walls that form the room in which you stand and the lighting fixtures on the gallery’s ceiling. Again, you know that the space behind the window is shallow and illusory, and yet you want to see it as real, as deeper than the manifest stage set would allow. Despite our desire for imaginative distance (the space of fantasy? the breeding ground of ideology?), we are insistently locked into a physical proximity that coerces us to acknowledge that what we want to assume is fake is, actually, real and what we wish were real is, sadly, a sham. And thus we are all the more forcefully aware that we are in the Prison House of the Image, I guess. Scattered around are bundles of old newspapers and boxes of rat poison (all fabricated meticulously by the artist and his assistants); there is another door across from the entrance into the installation space, which leads you to a dead-end in the actual gallery and where you see the backside of the painted walls and more stacks of papers and poison, softly spotlit here and there.

Maybe Gober’s work is just too fussy and involved for my taste given the rather basic things he seems to be ruminating – and his excesses lack the kind of gripping, unpredictable supplemental payoff that would make me want to stick around in the wake of his puritanical, almost schoolmasterish lessons about the seduction of illusion. But I’m willing to hear a compelling argument why I should change my mind. The closest thing to get me to think twice came at the reception, although it was given in the spirit of a damning judgment: one of the art historians doing damage to the wine bar replied to the query as to how he found the exhibition with, “Totally humorless. He’s such a moralist. He’s a moralist and a pederast at the same time.” Now that could be interesting.