CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 12/15/2014

The Heart Is Not a Metaphor: Robert Gober and Ann Temkin at the NYPL

"I don't remember which came first, the sinks or the dream. But I remember having a dream in which I found a room in my home that I had never known existed. It was full of daylight streaming in through open windows, and there were white porcelain sinks hung on all of the walls with their taps running... It seemed that every other day someone I knew or someone that a friend of mine knew was getting severely sick, really fast, and most of them were gay men. Young men were dying all around me, from causes unknown, and the world seemed to be either in denial or revulsion. The government lied to the people and shrank from its duty. Families abandoned 'loved ones.' Even the church abdicated its responsibility to life. Gay men were left, more often than not, to take care of their own. It was a situation that is very hard to create in words. So when I am asked to look back and to 'explain' my sculptures of sinks, this situation reasserts itself. What do you do when you stand in front of a sink? You clean yourself. I seemed to be obsessed with making objects that embodied that broken promise." Join artist Robert Gober, quoted above, in conversation with MoMA Chief Curator of Painting and Sculpture Ann Temkin at the New York Public Library Tuesday, December 16 from 6-8PM. Featured image, "Two Partially Buried Sinks" (1986-87), is reproduced from Robert Gober: The Heart Is Not a Metaphor, which Gober will sign after the talk.