A curious portal in the wall | Thomas Huston | Playing Favorites

My name is Thomas Huston. I'm a technician in Architecture and Design and also Modern and Contemporary at the Art Institute of Chicago. And my favorite work in our collection is "Untitled" by Robert Gober from 1998/2004. The work would be easy to miss if it weren't for a label at one end of the wall. The object is a pewter cast made to resemble a sink drain like you might find in your bathroom, except that it's been sunk into the wall itself. The form is familiar, but it's removed from any functional context. I encountered an earlier version of one of Gober's sink drains from 1990, at an exhibition about magic and wonder at the Broad Museum in Lansing, Michigan. And I remember walking into the room.

You know, there are some other artworks there. And then eventually found myself standing in front of this portal, essentially in the wall, trying to understand how it had been sort of placed so perfectly, so flush to the wall. I put my ear up to it. Listen to see if there was any clue and felt and heard a sort of whoosh of air coming from inside of the wall. Changing my relationship to the room itself by creating this sort of void. this other interior space that I was now outside of. I think it just sort of left me with a sense of wonder. What I like about it is that it doesn't just rest on the wall like a painting, but actively transforms the wall in which it's installed. I've always really loved the work of Robert Gober. He's a sculptor, and he takes the familiar or the ordinary and transforms it into something strange.

And he handcrafts one-to-one representations of whatever object it is that he's chosen. And so they are also imbued with this really personal charge through their making. A few years after I saw this at the Broad, I actually had the opportunity at the Art Institute to install our drain from 1998/2004. And there's a whole process to installing the work. You have to cut a hole, you know, a specific diameter into the wall 53 inches from the floor to the center of the hole, and then you have to shape it so that the drain can sit flush to the wall. It's a long process, but ultimately really satisfying when you step away and see this drain floating in the middle of the wall as if it's been there forever. I think what's effective about this artwork is that it asks us as viewers to slow down and look more carefully at the things around us that might be familiar to us and allow them to show us the ways in which they are potentially full of wonder.