ROBERT GOBER (b. 1954) RAT BAIT cast plaster

Provenance
Paula Cooper Gallery, NEW YORK

Exhibited
NEW YORK, Dia Center for the Arts, ROBERT GOBER, September 24,1992-June 20, 1993 (another example exhibited)
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, INTO A NEW MUSEUM: RECENT GIFTS AND ACQUISITIONS OF CONTEMPORARY ART, PART II, May 25, 1995-March 1996 (another example exhibited)

THE CONFLATION OF INTERIOR AND EXTERIOR WAS PERFECT IN ITS RESOLUTE FATALISM, AS WERE THE REMINDERS OF YESTERDAY'S AND TODAY'S PREDATORS.
Robert Gober: Sculpture + Drawing, by Richard Flood Walker Art Center, p. 22

As is inherent in all of Robert Gober's evocative works, the staunch images of mortalityand coded clues provehaunting and indeed as suggested above, predatory. The predatory presence of Rat Bait stems from the original context of its installation. First exhibited at the Dia Center in New York in 1992, the viewer encountered the work as part of a multi-work room installation. In the semi-darkened room, Gober's trademark jutted out from the walls, punctuated with prison bar windows with a single box of Rat Bait peering out beneath each sink.

By altering implied prejudices about spaces and objects, Gober creates an experience that emphasized the convergence of the interior and the exterior, the bodily versus the artificial and projected universe. Rat Bait is the perfect example of the Duchampian "ready-made" created afresh for a modern sense of the uncanny an experience wholly Gober's.

This oddly pervasive nostalgia is what transforms this object from a humorous reproduction or commentary into a much more loaded image. Closed off in its representation in the installation, Gober seems to be presenting an object that is seemingly simple or innocent. But it is the very closed nature of this piece that makes its presence so aggressive, it vaults the viewer into the hinterland between internal and external, conscious and unconscious. Gober strives to place his viewer in a kind of trompe-l'oeil forest where familiar, perhaps even friendly themes of consumption and life mutate into something darker and more contemplative. This box serves as a set piece which transports us to the great stage and space where Gober plays out the greater themes of life, love and death.