Divine Interventions

It's hard not to be jealous of Catholics - especially lapsed ones. Their work is stoked by all that guilt and gilt. Protestant, Jewish, Islamic and Hindi kids have their own awakenings into the hypocrisy of organised religion, but somehow the iconographic oomph of variously chopped martyrs, incense-scented brocade and stern nuns with rulers seems to spark former Catholic visual artists such as Andres Serrano, Robert Mapplethorpe, Mike Kelley and Kiki Smith with especially vehement energy. That energy, however, must be harnessed - otherwise it can overwhelm a mere work of art. The new Robert Gober installation at the Museum of Contemporary Art is a particularly elaborate and eccentric case in point.

Taking two years of work, with undisclosed fabrication costs estimated at over $500,000, the installation includes a waterfall running down a full flight of stairs and four small but lavishly decorated dioramas of tide pools dug eight feet into the museum's foundations. At its centre stands a life-size concrete statue of the Virgin Mary, boldly eviscerated with a six foot sewer pipe hollowing out her womb. Eyes downcast, she poses with palms faced out in the traditional stance of welcome. The surface of the crudely modelled sculpture has been sandblasted to achieve the aged patina of garden statuary. Her bland features and slightly pug nose somewhat resemble those of Gober himself.

With their open-ended suggestiveness, Gober's drains, sinks, legs, cigars and cribs invite far-flung readings. This willful opacity led MoCA catalogue essayist Hal Foster to state that for Gober 'the work of his work' is 'to sustain enigma'. As the mostly woolly writing about his art attests, Gober has done a great job of it. Eager for hints into the elusive works' intended meanings, critics have latched onto the few known biographical tidbits - Gober's mother's job as an operating room nurse, his emotional devastation by the AIDS pandemic - with a fervour reminiscent of that given to the little known biography of another austere, close-mouthed, gay artist: Jasper Johns. Both artists hint at autobiography in their works, while at the same time disallowing any confessions or specificities. Just as one may wonder, for example, what to make of a recent Johns painting named for his step-grandmother, one speculates on the importance of an item in one of Gober's mock newspaper prints reporting the implication of a mother in the drowning of a six year-old boy named Robert Gober. Confident of their formal skills, both artists presume audiences who are willing to expend considerable energy in deciphering their heavily coded art.

With its cascading water and fantasy pools containing sculptures of a submerged man and infant, Gober's new installation presents a complicated inversion of traditional notions of spiritual rebirth, one ripe for speculative exegesis and psychoanalytic theory. But the violation of Mary - the symbolic intermediary between God and Mankind and one of the greatest subjects of Renaissance art - disrupts Gober's private, rarefied cosmology. His stated, youthful dissatisfaction with Catholicism as a 'sick and hypocritical institution' asserts itself as a kind of reductive, bottom-line 'explanation' of the work. The evisceration of Mary clearly signals the installation as the work of an angry lapsed Catholic. Although Gober's complex, sophisticated installation clearly offers more than a one-note reading, one almost sympathises with the rep from the local archdiocese who complained in the LA Times that with this installation Gober has 'gained entry into the pantheon of vulgar artists who traffic in abusing sacred symbols and offending religious believers'.

In 1990 Gober's work also faced controversy when African-American museum guards at the Hirshhorn Museum vehemently objected to his use of the image of a lynched black man as part of a wallpaper pattern. Although Gober intended the image as a condemnation of racism, it was perceived as an endorsement. Gober's slippery art best operates with open-ended symbols such as the sinks and the drains, ones devoid of specific cultural referents. Culturally loaded images disrupt and obstruct enigmas.

As an eye-opening contrast to Gober's remote, deeply sceptical work, it is fascinating to look again at the disarmingly engaged, low-budget, silkscreen prints from the mid-60s by Sister Mary Corita (1918-1986), recently featured alongside the ACT UP graphics of Donald Moffett in an exhibition curated by Julie Ault for the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut. A teacher at Immaculate Heart College in LA and a civil rights, feminist, and anti-war activist, Corita (who resigned from her religious order in 1968) was one of the most popular American graphic artists of the 60s and 70s, making hundreds of editioned prints espousing her humanist causes.

Creating her own liberal Catholic version of Pop in 1964, Sister Corita mixed swatches of bright, saturated colour with fragments of graphics appropriated from commercial supermarket items. With a deadpan literalism and ear for language rivalling that of Ed Ruscha, she confirmed her upbeat theology in advertising phrases like 'The big G stands for goodness' (General Mills) and 'Put a tiger in your tank' (Esso gasoline). Logos and slogans promoting 'Wonder' bread, 'Humble' oil, 'Sunkist' lemons, 'Safeway' supermarkets, and even 'Lark' cigarettes become visual and verbal puns endorsing her all-embracing humanitarianism.

As complements to these graphics, choice texts taken from writings by Gertrude Stein, Samuel Beckett, Camus, e.e. cummings, John Lennon and Ugo Betti are scrawled alongside in a style that prefigures that of Raymond Pettibon. Corita's playful use of block letters, word fragments, mirrored writing and warped and morphed texts variously conjure and compare favourably with contemporary works by Larry Johnson, Karen Carson, Lari Pittman, Christopher Wool and Barbara Kruger. Mike Kelley's felt banners from the late 80s were directly spun off from her work, offering their own twisted celebration of the abject.

With their upfront, socio-religious agenda, Corita's pop appropriations interact directly with a 60s consumerist culture that had just tapped into the power of youth-cult. She embraced brand-name commodities as a gesture of pure populism, discovering in advertising slogans a kind of home-spun poetry, one that seems impossible today in the age of mega-buck product endorsements and ad-men auteurs. It is difficult not to be nostalgic for a time in which the notion of 'Wonder' could be extrapolated from an eponymous sandwich bread renowned for its bland tastelessness. Corita's series of 'Wonder Bread' prints are, however, among her best, appropriating the thick, multi-coloured polka-dots of the product's packaging as hip, deconstructed versions of Eucharist wafers.

To experience Corita's version of Pop is to reinhabit a childhood world that believes in the redemptive power of breakfast cereals and supermarket aisles. Finding blessings in Kellogg's Corn Flakes ('The best to you each morning') and surreal miracles in Hunt's Tomato Sauce ('Makes meatballs sing'), Corita discovers universal affirmations in the most mundane goods. That these products today stink of corporate conglomerates and consumer exploitation seems besides the point. Corita embued her uniquely specific Pop appropriations with simple real-life content that lay beyond the art-world jokes of Lichtenstein, the formal exuberances of Oldenburg, and the serialist experiments of Warhol. They are a special kind of agit-prop, intended as poetic epiphanies and spiritual candy.

Nothing seems further from the rarefied atmosphere of Gober's MoCA installation than a Sister Corita print. One of her 1964 silkscreens offers a border of cut-off letters spelling out fragments of the words 'tomato' and 'hamburger', which surround part of the logo of a supermarket called 'Market Basket'. Across the middle of the print she scrawls a fragment of poetry by Marcia Petty: 'Mary does laugh and she sings and runs and wears bright orange. Today she'd probably do her shopping at the market basket'. I myself am not Catholic but the notion of this Mary with a sewer pipe running through her womb seems a grim idea indeed.