|
|
FOREWORD
Jan van der Marck
Direct as a road marker, "hip" as a folk song, flat as a corn field and colorful as a county fair, Robert Indiana's emblematic paintings, for all their detached elegance of execution, express a vigilant concern with what unites and separates Americans today. The artist is compassionately involved with the plight of the defenseless individual in a pluralistic society and with the survival of this society in a disaster-bound world. He speaks in a language borrowed, almost tongue-iii-cheek, from our contemporary communications network. This is the "Pop" aspect of Indiana's work. Its equally intentional autobiographic tinge facilitates our "reading" it in "Pop" terms. Beyond that, we should consider its formal honesty, bold but balanced use of color and flawless surface. In the artist's opinion this technical perfection, however basic and important, remains meaningless unless it buttresses an imagery that has symbolic significance on more than one level.
The X-shaped USA 666 in this exhibition is the "danger colors" black and yellow variant of the Sirtli American Dream. The latter painting is also called the Indianapolis Dream and the artist likes to refer to it as his father's dreaml for his father, who was born in Indianapolis, died at the time the painting reached its completion. The color pattern is derived, as Indiana explains, from the red and green of the original Phillips 66 sign against the blue of the Indianapolis sky. This company emblem that preceded the present one was the one dominant sign of Indiana's youth with, perhaps, the EAT sign of his mother's restaurant as a second. His father, as an employee of Phillips 66, wore a miiiiature version of the company emblem in his lapel. N"ile commemorating the year his father did not live to see, the Sirth American Dream, on another level, refers to U.S. route #66, much travelled by the artist during his days in the Air Force. [Editor's note: Indiana was, in fact, in the Army Air Corps.]
The theme of racial injustice, first hinted at in Rebecca (American Slave Company) of 1962, was brought into focus in the 1963 YieldBrother (one version the artist presented to the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation, another to CORE) and since 1964 given a serial treatment in the "Confederacy" paintings, Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana and Florida. The first three are painted in an "integrated" color sequence, ranging from black to brown to tan; in the last one Indiana uses his Sirth American Dream colors - red, blue and green. Their legend ("just as in the anatomy of man, every nation must have its hind part") has the spirited ring of Jeffersoiiian practicality. In it Indiana registers a Yankee protest against the dangers of bigotry and prejudice slanted toward an understanding of the incorrigibility of human nature.
Love is as dominant a theme in Indiana's philosophy as it is in his 1965-66 production, wherein he treats it as a four letter word, split in two with the VE forming the base and the L and tumbling 0 on the top, one variation of which became a Museum of Modern Art Christmas card. Since that time the instantly successful image, with its eye-catching colors derived from the Si-rth American Dream, has been used straight, inversed, reflected and reversed as though Indiana wanted to develop symbolic parallels to love given and love withheld, the illusion and the delusion of love.
The lettering in LOVE, not a component but the very subject of the printing, is more complex and coherent than in any of Indiana's works so far. In the earlier compositions letters were arranged in simple linear or circular formation, never touching one another, or merging into one "Gestalt." The degree to which the total configuration is perceived as solid rather than flat form - and therefore, quite naturally, could develop into sculpture - is proportional to its asymmetry, e.g. different sizes of angle, different length of line and different thickness of shape. Here the flatness of Indiana's painting has given way to an illusory depth dimension, based not on perspective but on color contrast and on optical reversibility of image and ground. The high-keyed and close-valued red, blue and green force the eye to shift for comfort from positive to negative and from actual to complementary form calling attention to the latter's cigar, clamp and arrowhead shapes. Thus, as no doubt will please Indiana, the elusiveness of love carries from idea to form and vice versa.
Numbers are an important part of Indiana's recent production - the "Cardinal" numbers from 1 through 9, plus the zero, and the "exploding" numbers in which size is stepped up in a regular progression. Their broad, over-blown shapes do not conform to the modish standards of contemporary design and are curiously reminiscent of those old-fashioned but eminently readable general store and government office calendars. The use of numbers in Indiana's work goes back to the 1960 marine assemblages. They were a happy accident; he found a stack of used copper stencils when be moved into his loft on Coenties Slip. Numbers became compositional rather than incidental and Indiana relied on them more and more for form and subject-matter. This may explain why the artist, concurrent with and in the margin of his larger and more important compositions, would treat numbers as stylistic exercises. Once these numbers are freed from their context and role to inform, they revert back to their previous "found object" state. A subject-matter that can be instantly recognized and readily accepted, it allows the artist to concentrate on color and form. In his "cardinal" numbers Indiana introduces an intentional ambiguity based on the principle of redundancy, by identifying each number with its letter equivalent.
With today's proliferation of numbers - on calendars, time tables, clocks, meters, dials, and road signs, to mention just a few - our senses have become so numbed that it takes a strong number-turned-image to hold the viewer's attention. It is a measure of Indiana's effectiveness that he enables us to abstract from the obvious and to concentrate on formal intentions. By exploiting the interdependency of form and color and of positive and negative volume in both his "love" and "number'" paintings, Indiana convincingly restates a never flagging interest in the premise of hard-edge painting.
Exhibition catalogue, Robert Indiana, Dayton's Gallery, Minneapolis, September 1966
|
|
|
|
|
|
