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The shows title distills our self-cannibalizing and polarized time: Shut up.
But for me it was a very slow-burning, dont-miss show.
Laid out in five galleries are 22 works.
There are 13 found academic pencil-drawings of feet to which Gober has added barred prison windows.
Distributed throughout the show, these images form a kind of repeating visual choir aching, estranged.
Theyre a poignant book of hours where time moves barely at all and under inner pressure.
The barred windows made me think of Prousts observation, Theres no such thing as a beautiful prison.
We see cigarette butts, packing peanuts, police-athletic-association decals.
In these decals I saw the cracked visage of institutions disintegrating before our collective eyes.
Each of these Joseph CornellDonald Juddlike repositories resembles the closed windows of American working-class homes.
Time stops here or is in slow motion.
Together these windows anthropomorphized for me into American lives fortressed behind walls and glass.
I projected the inhabitants as white families.
Everything outside these windows is seen as a threat.
I saw how dark Ive become about America.
I laid in the grass exactly where Wyeth placed Christina.
All this comes to a head on the back wall of the final gallery in a modern masterpiece.
A floating Magritte, mannequin, or ghost.
An opening lets us peer inside.
Its strange entering another body this way in public, vulnerable, exposed, erotic, voyeuristic.
I thought of the artificial waterfall in DuchampsEtant donnes.I fell into a standing trance.
I stopped looking for meanings and surrendered to this island beyond reason.
I was freed, however temporarily, from everything.
For me,Waterfalltransformed into a kind of confessional.
I left the larger political world and inverted my gaze.
That much of what all of us think is true comes from errors about our suppositions.
It was me a person with half-drawn curtains, whod grown too sure about what was happening around me.
Inside this self-made world, I didnt know it, but some of my oldest demons spoke to me.
All this is a form of personal social death and collective trauma.
I feel a disconnected sense of loss, melancholia, and homesickness.
Such self-pity in the face of nearly a million dead Americans is off, disturbing.
Yet I think we all have similar feelings.
There is a free-floating low-level anxiety and deprivation.
All of us have ceased to exist in relation to one another.
This isnt fully human.
I think I, we, are in a simultaneous state of shock and mourning.
I see it when I go out now to openings, small dinners, and gatherings.
I am ecstatic, thrilled.
I bounce from person to person, giving and getting feedback.
I have made good people feel bad while telling myself this is okay because I knew the score.
I hear myself give orders to acquaintances, telling others how to do this or that.
I have become this bossy political-guru, cable-news-panelist, Twitter-speaking narrator in DostoyevskysNotes From Underground.
My social reflexes are shot.
I am the self I thought Id imprisoned all those years ago.
I tell myself that no one notices.
But I notice: I have transformed my beautiful art world aviary into a private nest.
I am an ostrich thinking I am invisible when everyone has a clear view of me.
Ive lost so much by being too happy in my solitude.
Pattern and habit set into my life.
My empathy, accountability, and flexibility have eroded.
For me, I know that beyond this, lies nothing.
Sartre was wrong: Hell is not other people.
Hell is being around only people exactly like yourself, or perhaps only yourself.
