It is a blessing, then, for Mr. Indiana and for New York art fans that the shockingly exciting exhibition “Robert Indiana: Beyond Love,” at the Whitney Museum of American Art, puts his love works in a broader perspective. Organized by Barbara Haskell, a Whitney curator, the beautifully installed show presents several versions, including one of the original 1966 love paintings and a recent re-creation of a six-foot, three-dimensional example from 1966, studded by electric bulbs that light up in diverse patterns. But the bulk of the exhibition is devoted to nonlove paintings and sculptures from the ’60s. It will be a revelation even for viewers who think they know something about Mr. Indiana.
The paintings, most of which involve words integrated into centered, geometrical compositions, are terrifically punchy, both graphically and semantically. Many are also morally fraught. Among the simplest are those that have the words “Eat” and “Die” in monumental block letters within bold circles; they’re like signs for a greasy-spoon diner in an existentialist film noir.
More complex compositions play on the designs of pinball machines, jukeboxes and gambling devices. “The Red Diamond American Dream #3” (1962) has the word “Tilt” surrounded by a roulette-wheel circle of numbers on one side and, on the other, “Take,” encircled by the repeated word “All,” each done in capital letters. As a commentary on the American ethos of winning by any means whatever, it has as much relevance today as it did then.
“The Sixth American Dream” (1964-66) is an assemblage of five square canvases arranged in a big X. Painted entirely in yellow and charcoal gray, it gives the impression of a mid-20th-century railroad warning sign. Its textual components add to its alarming impact. Each outer panel has the letters U, S and A above a different word: “Eat,” “Die,” “Hug” and “Err,” in capital letters. In the center, “USA” appears above “666,” the beast from the sea’s number in the Book of Revelation. While it’s not explicitly topical — unlike, say, James Rosenquist’s “F-111” or Andy Warhol’s paintings of racial conflict in the South — it prophetically embodies the apocalyptic feeling looming over the United States in that decade of sociopolitical and spiritual tumult.
While viewing contemporary American society through glasses darkly, Mr. Indiana also has looked to the past for uplift. A series of paintings features stenciled quotations from Whitman, Melville and Longfellow. There are numerous variations on Charles Demuth’s great, emblematic portrait of William Carlos Williams, “I Saw the Figure 5 in Gold” (1928). Among more recent works are renderings from the late ’80s and ’90s of Marsden Hartley’s eulogy for a dead loved one, “Portrait of a German Officer” (1914). Same-sex love is a more or less overt theme for Mr. Indiana throughout.
Images of people are rare. There’s a lovely portrait of Marilyn Monroe called “The Metamorphosis of Norma Jean Mortenson” (1967), which speaks to ideas of shifting identities. Note that Mr. Indiana changed his last name from Clark in 1958.
The exhibition welcomes viewers at the start with a psychoanalytically striking diptych, “Mother and Father” (1963-66). One panel pictures a woman in a scarlet cloak, with one breast exposed, standing next to a Model T Ford; the other, all in shades of gray, portrays a man in a knee-length coat, a shirt and a tie and a homburg hat. Otherwise shoeless, sockless and evidently pantsless, he also poses with a Model T. It’s hard to think of something by any other American artist so blatantly, albeit enigmatically, Oedipal.
Mr. Indiana is not as compelling in three dimensions as he is in two, but his upright, totem like sculptures have a significance within his oeuvre. They are made from old, thick wooden boards and outfitted with rusty wheels and other pieces of hardware scavenged from around Coenties Slip, the New York area where he lived and worked, along with Ellsworth Kelly, Agnes Martin and other post-Abstract Expressionists in the late ’50s and early ’60s. Bearing colorful, stenciled words in all capitals, like “Chief” and “Cuba,” along with circles and stars, they resemble works of folk art.
Many sport a distinctly phallic projection below midlevel, which relates to a type of sculpture common in ancient Greece and Rome called the herm, which is what Mr. Indiana calls his sculptures. Herms were stone markers in the shape of heads, placed atop pillars with representations of male genitalia, often erect. They were placed along roads, at boundaries and near entrances dedicated to Hermes, the god of travel, border-crossing and language.
It makes sense that Hermes would be the psychic divinity animating Mr. Indiana’s creative imagination. His paintings are gateways between the visual and the verbal, the private and the public, the physical and the metaphysical, and the conscious and the unconscious. Richly ambiguous, they unsettle fixed categories. And they are ravishing to behold.
By KEN JOHNSON
+++++++++++++
La icónica imagen de la palabra LOVE o AMOR hilvanada con letras de molde escalonadas en colores brillantes fue uno de los estandartes de la era de ‘amor y paz’ de los años 60 y desde entonces se volvió un símbolo mundialmente
popular. Sin embargo muy pocas personas saben quién es su autor.
El artista es Robert Clark que se cambió el apellido por el de Indiana en 1958. Indiana es uno de los grandes exponentes del arte pop de los años 60 junto con Andy Warhol, James Rosenquist y Roy Lichestein. Nació en 1928 en Indianápolis y se crió con padres adoptivos que se divorciaron cuando él tenía 8 años. Debido a la inestabilidad económica de la familia Indiana, Robert vivió en 21 casas de niño y adolescente. Se enroló en la fuerza aérea, logro estudiar arte en Chicago, Maine y Edimburgo y después se estableció en Nueva York, donde edificó fama y reputación con enorme esfuerzo y mínimos recursos.
Indiana tiene hoy 85 años y por primera vez un museo, en este caso el Whitney de Nueva York, le dedica una retrospectiva titulada: “Robert Indiana: Beyond LOVE”. Y esto para celebrar con 95 obras, 6 décadas de trayectoria artística. Trayectoria que quedó trágicamente opacada por la popularidad colosal que adquirió su serie de pinturas y esculturas en 1966, que llevaban la imagen de la palabra LOVE la que fue usada sin el permiso del artista en camisetas, vasos y una serie de objetos.
La obra de Robert Indiana si bien enraizada en el movimiento pop y cuyo poder reside en las palabras está inmersa también en la tradición folclórica estadounidense. Las promesas y desencantos del Sueño Americano, la identidad nacional y la influencia de artistas 100% estadounidenses como Hopper, Homer, y Marsh están presentes en su obra.
En los años 70 Robert Indiana, decepcionado por el mundo del arte, se exilio al estado de Maine, sin embargo acudió a la inauguración de esta primera retrospectiva de su obra que le dedica el Museo Whitney.
+diStRito47+ 