Diane Arbus

Robert Gober’s engrossing selection of Diane Arbus’s photographs may bear his imprint, but besides two contextualizing admissions of influence—his 1976 drawing of her 1972 monograph and a wall text––in this exhibition he uses pictures culled from uncommon access to the Arbus archives to honor the artist and reroute the mythology of troubled psyches and exploitation into something that courses with humanistic subtext. The forty-five works, oddly enough, celebrate life—there’s a notable number of baby photographs; one uncharacteristically bright image from 1968 depicts an ebullient infant—as much as soberly acknowledge mortality: Arbus’s father, David Nemerov, on his 1963 deathbed; a dead dog; a murder scene constructed in a wax museum.

In between, Gober finds photographs of lively wonder and melancholy, including two stunning, nearly abstract images of blurry windblown newspapers on expanses of black asphalt, or the descriptively titled Girl Watching a Soap Bubble, Central Park, N.Y.C., 1960, and Boy Beneath a Falling Leaf, 1956. Gober brings a queer eye to images of musclemen, butch lesbians, and a heavily tattooed man that from a current perspective seem full of comfort, rather than of the freakishness so often attributed to Arbus’s work. Even the morbidly obese woman in Circus Fat Lady with Her Dog Troubles, MD, 1964, has an unfettered grin that’s the antithesis of sideshow tragedy.

Like “Heat Waves in a Swamp,” the survey of paintings by Charles Burchfield that Gober curated for the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles last fall, his Arbus show points to ambivalent undercurrents of twentieth-century American art and life, its political and social inequities, real lives and fever dreams—the same mixture that makes Gober’s own work so memorable.