Robert Gober at Matthew Marks

Robert Gober's first New York exhibition in 11 years was full of Goberisms, among them the meticulous re-creation of quotidian objects out of unexpected materials, bodies mutating between human and animal (or in this case forest) forms, ordinary domestic items infused with symbolic content and references to Catholicism.

Available for $40 at the show was A Lexicon of Robert Gober, by Brenda Richardson, a volume that traces the artist's symbolism. Its existence suggests that the objects here are meant to associate syntactically to create larger statements, and indeed, they often do. The most effective arrangement appeared at the far end of the gallery, which was dominated by a headless Jesus on a crucifix spurting water from his nipples like a garden fountain. This figure presided over various objects referencing gardening and suburban patios and was flanked by a pair of partially opened doors through which visitors, one at a time, could glimpse two bathtubs, each with a bather (male visible through one door, female through the other), their legs drawn up and on the floor nearby a newspaper imprinted with the Starr Report. Together these individual elements wove a larger narrative about sin, purification, redemption and rebirth.

The relationship of other elements in the show to this larger theme was often more perplexing. Sketches of embracing couples drawn over pages of the New York Times from Sept. 11, 2001, make a rather banal statement about the coexistence of love and death (while also recalling Adrian Piper's "Vanilla Nightmare" series from the late '80s, in which she drew racial imagery on real newspaper pages). Individual sculptures on low pedestals, among them replicas of diaper packages, bowls of fruit and bronze re-creations of wooden boards sagging over the pedestals like wet spaghetti, were arrayed around the gallery like offerings. They were not always resonant in themselves. More successful as independent works was a pair of flour-sack-shaped beeswax torsos, placed in corners of the gallery, bearing male and female characteristics. Protruding from the front of each is one of Gober's trademark legs. In addition, lengths of tree trunk emerge from the wax torsos and anchor them to the walls. These sculptures managed to encapsulate a whole range of dualities: culture/nature, male/female, soft/hard, animate/inanimate.

In the end, the installation didn't really gel as a totality, which is disappointing, given the memory of some of Gober's earlier full-scale environments. His 1992 Dia installation created a prison interior which simultaneously and mysteriously also became a boundless forest. His chapel installation at L.A. MoCA in 1997 used the language of Catholic ritual to suggest the contradiction between sterile expressions of spirituality and the fertility of nature. Here, by contrast, the viewer was left with too many pieces to a puzzle that just didn't seem to fit together in any fluid way.

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