Linwood Rudolph Williams: If you’re busy, working and all that, then you don’t really know where you are.
Robert Gober: Oh, how interesting. (pause) How do you translate it in formal terms?
Williams: You got to kill me before I tell you some bullshit like that.
Gober: I wish it were that simple.
Williams: I handwrite everything.
***
Gober: What I cull is more of an emotional feeling, and to me it’s not important to put that into words.
Williams: People still dying out there, probably more so.
Gober: Mmmm-hmmm. Oh, I envy people who do.
***
Williams: Yeah, I sold out, man. You got to draw a line somewhere.
Gober: What do you mean? With the sink, only after I was making it as a series did I realize that I had had, years before, a recurring dream about finding a room within my home that I didn’t know existed. That room was full of sinks, but it was very different—there was sunlight pouring in the room, and there was water running in all the sinks.
Williams: You’re hypocritical, you didn’t care back then.
Gober: The Church that I knew was an extremely hypocritical institution.
***
Williams: But, it’s funny, they don’t know how many lives I’ve saved.
Gober: Humor, to me, is very important.
Williams: No, no. It’s opportunism.
Gober: You make it sound pejorative.
Williams: Depends on what you eat. But you can’t get the American Dream doing that.
***
Gober: They say it preoccupies me, but to me what’s interesting is that it seems to be preoccupying them.
Williams: If society don’t create no outlet for that, they going to keep doing it, no matter what.