In conversation with Richard Flood

RF: I was obsessed by the cross in the bottom of the drain. That was what I went to immediately. I thought, "My God, I never realized a drain was Pentecostal."

RG: Actually, the cross was not cast from an existing drain, now that you bring that up. I couldn't find one with a cross. Old ones have them, like the one in my bathroom, but I couldn't find one now, so actually that was constructed before the casting.

RF: That's funny, because that was what I kept going willfully back to, how absolutely strange that in the end, as everything is sluicing down the drain, it's also sluicing over this major, major symbol.

RG: Yeah, exactly...I thought of the drains as metaphors functioning in the same way as traditional paintings, as a window into another world. However, the world that you enter into through the metaphor of the drain would be something darker and unknown, like an ecological unconscious. *

*Excerpted from "Interview: Richard Flood and Robert Gober" (January 21, 1990) in Robert Gober: Sculpture + Drawing (Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 1999), pp. 122-23.