Untitled (Long Leg)

Childhood experience was the subject of many of Robert Gober's early works, which allude in an ambivalent way to such themes as vulnerability, sexual identity, and intimacy. Untitled, 1990-93, is a male leg, complete with pant, sock, shoe and hair, coming out from the wall at floor level. Gober noted: "I cast my own leg out of beeswax.. . . I remembered that my mother used to work as a nurse in an operating room and she used to entertain us as kids by telling stories about the hospital. One of her first operations was an amputation and they cut off the leg and handed it to her. Stories like that made a big impact. But I also realized, looking at this sculpture of a leg that's cut off just above the calf, that it's the sight you see if you glance under a stall in a men's room. You see that portion of a man's identity, and it's very highly charged for one reason or another." On another occasion he recollected: "I was in this tiny little plane, sitting next to this handsome businessman and his trousers were pulled above his socks and I was transfixed in this moment by his leg. I came home knowing that I wanted to make a sculpture of that part of the leg." Deliberately perceived as a phallic form, the leg, like Gober's other works, is also charged with autobiographical references to such an extent that it seduces us into seeing it as an artist's self-portrait. Fragments of a body coming out of a wall are more evocative of fear and death than of desire and pleasure ("punishment" for being homosexual). Alluding to the spread of AIDS, Gober said: "For me death has temporarily overtaken life in New York City. And most of the artists I know are fumbling for ways to express this."