Help me

Robert Gober’s Help Me is composed by the frame of a window and a group of mundane objects: curtains, a grease can, a pencil, all of them handmade by the artist. If the inside of the window is visible, the opening only get us access to the wall behind, thus creating a suffocating feeling. The calm beauty of the wind blowing inside the window, the household aspect of the assemblage, which creates the impression of standing in front of a common American house or farm as the grease can suggests, paradoxically reinforces the enigmatic, if not harrowing, feeling about the scene, sentiment heightened by the title. Numbers of Gober’s works establish a tension between the inside and the outside – the artist frequently uses the visual artifice of bars – giving the sensation that some things are kept buried, under the weight of social constraints, of shame, of injunctions. Help Me, while letting outcrop existential and biographic questions, also roams about art history: the frame of the window could also be the one of a canvas, interrogating the illusionist dimension of an artistic image.