(born in Wallingford/CT in 1954)
"Hanging Man/Sleeping Man", 1989, silkscreen in colour on a roll of wallpaper, with printed signature and title, example from an unlimited edition, dimensions 893 x 75.5 cm, self-published by the artist, (RAC)

Provenance:
: Private Collection Germany;
Galerie Gisela Capitain/Cologne;
Paula Cooper Gallery/New York

„When I see an image of a lynching, I see an image of a crime, a horrible American crime. And by putting the sleeping white man next to this image of a lynched black man, I felt that I was implicating him in that crime.

I thought it was an image of guilt, an image of troubled sleep, a dream of something horrible that had happened; but it was also multi-layered, there was a piece missing in that puzzle about the crime, about what happened and what the story was, and it was left up to the viewer. It was a Rorschach kind of image. Also, the sleeping man could have been dreaming, so there was the possibility that this was a racist fantasy or dream, which I felt gave the work its edge - but I think it brought up big problems too. I think the fact that the image was repeated to create a “pretty pattern” of wallpaper made it doubly offensive. The brutality becomes decoration. It lines your walls and goes on indefinitely. Perhaps if I hadn’t put the imagery into a debased medium, but had expressed the image in the traditional grandeur of a framed oil on canvas, I wouldn’t have offended so many people.“

Robert Gober in „Hanging Man / Sleeping Man“. A conversation between Teresia Bush, Robert Gober and Ned Rifkin, Parkett Artmagazin no. 27, Zurich/New York 1991, page 96