NOTICE!
The explicit depiction of racially motivated violence in the images in this room can have a hurtful effect on some visitors or trigger unpleasant feelings.The aim is not to reproduce racist depictions, but to critically scrutinize them. You can read about Robert Gober's position on this in the Q & A with the artist.
The pattern on Robert Gober’s wallpaper shows a far more provocative pattern, which only becomes recognizable on closer inspection. The American artist combined the motif of a hanging black man with a sleeping white man. Robert Gober designed the wallpaper titled Hanging Man / Sleeping Man in 1989 as a background for an exhibition at the Paula Cooper Gallery in New York, and later used it for a two person exhibition at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington. The motif of the hanged man is from a political cartoon, while the sleeping man was from an advertisement in a Sunday newspaper for the department store chain Bloomingdales.
With this unannotated juxtaposition, Robert Gober touched on deep-seated traumas in American society. In fact, some of the employees of African-American descent at the Hirshhorn Museum found the depiction racist and offensive. A discussion ensued about the context of the presentation of images and racism in the cultural sphere as well as about ways of confronting this part of American history.
Racism has a centuries-long history in the United States due to slavery. Until the 1960s, white Americans of European descent enjoyed exclusive social and political advantages. It was not until 1964 that a ban on racial discrimination based on skin color between the black and white population was incorporated into law. However, institutional and structural discrimination still exists today and leads to the black population living at a social disadvantage to a large extent. The "Black Lives Matter" movement was founded in 2013 after the deaths of people of color (POC) due to police violence increased. The killing of George Floyd by a police officer in 2020 attracted worldwide attention and triggered a wave of protest.
Q & A with Rober Gober
The work Hanging Man / Sleeping Man triggered fierce criticism for racism due to the serial depiction of a hanged black man. What is it all about and why did you choose the medium of wallpaper for this work?
The painful imagery depicted on the wallpaper was meant as a reminder of fact - the ugly and unforgettable reality of the United States' history. By putting this image onto endlessly repeating wallpaper, I made an attempt to say, metaphorically, that this was not an isolated event and that in ways it has become our background.
