R.I.P. Robert Indiana, 1929 - 2018

Robert Indiana

I was saddened to read of the recent death, aged 89, of the American Artist, Robert Indiana.  Pop Art continues to hold a significant influential sway over my own creative thinking, and (setting the two monuments of Johns and Rauschenberg aside - who I think of more as ‘proto-Pop’) Indiana is one of my favourite of the genre’s exponents.  In reality, Indiana himself (real name – Robert Clark) was ambivalent about the label.  However, I think it’s impossible to disassociate his work, with it’s emblematic graphic qualities, and relentless exploration of the links between text and image, with many of the defining characteristics of Pop.

Robert Indiana, 'Beware-Danger American Dream No.4', Oil On Four Canvases,  1963

Perhaps where he differed from the high celebrants of consumer culture, or the deadpan hipsters, was in the strand of sincere social conscience running through his imagery – for all its stylistic verve.  He may have adopted the quasi-commercial aesthetic language of the American Dream, but his real impulse seems to have been to question it, rather than to simplistically promote it.

Robert Indiana, 'The Figure Five', Oil On Canvas, 1963

An adoptee, with an apparently disturbed early life, Indiana appears to have presented as a somewhat disillusioned figure throughout his life - indeed, becoming increasingly reclusive and withdrawn in later life.  Perhaps it was this that led him to explore the disjuncture between societal fantasy and the underlying realities - as in, for example, in the mid 60s ‘Confederacy’ series, with its clear critical stance towards the racism of America’s southern states.

Robert Indiana, 'The Confederacy: Alabama', Oil On Canvas, 1965

Indiana’s most famous image is also one of the most over-familiar in 20^th Century Art – namely, the four-square ‘Love’ logo, which first came to prominence as a MOMA Christmas card in 1964.  It’s been co-opted and reproduced to the point of tired cliché over the years, (largely due to Indiana’s initial failure to copyright it) - and is often reduced to little more than a lazy shorthand for 60s Hippy culture.  And yet, when one wipes a way the cheese, it remains, I think – a properly resonant icon.

Robert Indiana, 'Love', Painted Aluminium, (New York City), 1966 - 1999

This is particularly true when rendered in its oft-replicated sculptural form.  There’s something just ‘right’ about the choice of Times-like font, and the formal stacking of the characters - whilst the jaunty angling of the ‘O’ was an inspired strategy, in terms of graphic communication.  Most of all, I enjoy its semiotic potential in making a simple, but incredibly resonant term solid, and thus exposing the tricky relationships between a word as object, as symbol, and as meaning.  I don’t know if Indiana was trying to make love solid in the world, after a start in life in which it may have seemed somewhat allusive – but he actually created one of the most popular (and, in my view - one of the few properly successful) examples of public art.

Robert Indiana, 'Four', Oil On Gesso, On Wood With Wire & Metal Wheels, 1962

Ultimately, there's far more to Indiana's work than just 'Love', and no shortage of more complex and sophisticated images in his oeuvre.  Indeed, my own current concerns remind me that I should really reinvestigate his totemic columnar sculptures with some urgency.  Nevertheless, if spreading 'Love' around the world were to be chiefly what he was remembered for - it's not such a bad legacy, I suppose.