Susan Elizabeth Ryan – Robert Indiana: Insurgent Formalist
Excerpt from the publication “Robert Indiana – From Russia with Love”, fully illustrated catalogue published on the occasion of Robert Indiana’s first monographic survey in Russia at the State Russian Musuem – The Marble Palace, Saint Petersburg.
Excerpt from the publication “Robert Indiana – From Russia with Love”, fully illustrated catalogue published on the occasion of Robert Indiana’s first monographic survey in Russia at the State Russian Musuem – The Marble Palace, Saint Petersburg.
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R U S S I A N M U S E U M<br />
G A L E R I E G M U R Z Y N S K A
ROBERT INDIANA:<br />
INSURGENT FORMALIST<br />
In 1991, while writing my dissertation on the art of Robert <strong>Indiana</strong>, I wrote to art critic Clement Greenberg for a comment, since I had<br />
never found, in any of his writings, reference to <strong>Indiana</strong>’s work. The infamous octogenarian replied:<br />
I don’t remember writing about <strong>Indiana</strong>, but I do remember what I felt about his art: that it had more “body” to it than the run of Pop, that<br />
it hit my eye more, was more “plastic,” i.e., more “formalist,” to use that word of opprobrium. I could see that in his “Love” in the postage<br />
stamp. He filled out more, worked more with the medium as it were, against the schematicism or stunting of a lot of Pop.” 1<br />
Although Greenberg mentioned no examples other than the stamp — and he loathed Pop art in general (the movement to which <strong>Indiana</strong> has<br />
been most tied) — the comments indicate admiration for <strong>Indiana</strong>’s formal force. 2 This is what is best known about the artist’s work: its<br />
punch — the optical shimmer and formal mastery. But it is also known for its rhetorical spirit and even its fun. Greenberg’s formalism dominated<br />
the New York art world in the late 1950s when <strong>Indiana</strong> began his career working in derelict lofts on Coenties Slip in Lower Manhattan.<br />
All young artists of <strong>Indiana</strong>’s generation had to grapple, one way or the other, with Greenberg’s dictums in favor of flat, nonobjective canvases<br />
— and his directive to purify painting.<br />
But <strong>Indiana</strong> would be an insurgent formalist. Optical purity is something his work exceeds (via strong, even axial symmetries and highly saturated<br />
colors) but also defies. Born Robert Clark and raised in the State of <strong>Indiana</strong>, in New York he met Ellsworth Kelly, a mentor and<br />
neighbor and briefly a lover, and Clark studied Kelly’s minimalist, hard-edge abstractions inspired by French modernism. But as the younger<br />
artist began to develop precise compositions of abstract Ginkgo leaves and fields of circles he called orbs, he combined them with found<br />
materials like old wood from the Slip (as in Sixth State) and other objects. Soon short words and numbers appeared on constructions that<br />
reflect a new fever for found objects in the late 1950s, led by artists like Rauschenberg and Nevelson. Flying in the face of Kelly’s nonobjective<br />
paintings and sculptures, Clark (renaming himself Robert <strong>Indiana</strong>) rebelled by adding words and numbers, not only to his wood assemblages,<br />
but then also to the orb paintings, initiating a habit of repainting — adjusting meaning and form — that would continue throughout his career.<br />
Unlike any formalist, <strong>Indiana</strong> was drawn to words and numbers, an attraction rooted in his earlier study of literature at the University of<br />
Edinburgh, where he wrote and typeset his own poetry and prose — and he continued writing poetry for many years afterwards. <strong>Indiana</strong><br />
also has maintained a practice of combining words and images in large folio diaries that include sketches, notes about influences, impressions,<br />
and comments on current political events, sometimes attaching newspaper clippings. As Barbara Haskell recently opined, <strong>Indiana</strong>’s work<br />
often carried a social message, commenting “on the politics and ethics of contemporary American life.” 3 The artist has called his fusion of<br />
words and images “verbal-visual,” but his diaries also bring other terms to bear, like “binocular vision” and “two-faced truth” — the latter<br />
referencing words vs. images, but also ironies of meaning within the works. 4 For example, “EAT,” one of <strong>Indiana</strong>’s simple three-letter<br />
words, at once references mother, sex, and overindulgence. Combined with the image of a fork in one of his bi-level, word-image paintings<br />
(Eat with Fork), it suggests not just culinary flatware but, in the hot red and yellow tones “below,” a reference to Hell or the devil — a pitchfork.<br />
The little painting utters a moral about consumption.<br />
Coenties Slip, where both Kelly and <strong>Indiana</strong> lived, was once among the oldest harbors of Manhattan. In those years before massive redevelopment,<br />
it retained an aspect of the scenery described in early American poetry and literature — Herman Melville’s Moby Dick and other<br />
stories and historical accounts. They were <strong>Indiana</strong>’s subjects in paintings and upright constructions he called herms. 5 Those almost-anthropomorphic<br />
constructions, with their words, numbers, and (often) pairs of unblinking orbs, “stare” and “speak,” evoking the voice of the<br />
poet, an effect made more explicit in word-wheel paintings that were often reminders of injustices. For example, The Rebecca (1962) names<br />
9
a slave ship, one of many that sailed into New York harbors in the Civil War era. 6 But — according to the artist — it also represents Daphne<br />
du Maurier’s 1938 novel Rebecca and Alfred Hitchcock’s film of the same name — both set at a great manor house named Manderley, one<br />
of numerous references to houses in <strong>Indiana</strong>’s oeuvre. His parents, Earl and Carmen Clark, had been casualties of the Great Depression<br />
and Carmen, who was obsessed with great houses, moved the family restlessly from one inadequate bungalow to another. The figure “8”<br />
in the painting references her (born in the eighth month, August).<br />
Complication of content that spans multiple meanings and mingles political messages, literary references, and personal memories marks <strong>Indiana</strong>’s<br />
verbal-visual style. In his first successful painting, The American Dream #1 (1961, in the Museum of Modern Art, NYC), words and<br />
numbers circulate and issue forth from four circles or “orbs,” portraying the Dream as a kind of game of chance. In other paintings, layers<br />
of signification circulate in central, floating wheels of words and numbers, often above a “title” below — what I have termed his mandala format.<br />
7 The circle was a fundamental figure for the artist and he once traced it to a Christian Science class he attended as a child. 8 Spinning<br />
words hover high in portrait rectangles, canvases that call forth speech or veiled talking heads, even when the wheels encircle figures, as<br />
with the Marilyns. Parrot is a playful painting referencing an uncle who had such a bird, but also the notion of vision as revelation. The parrot<br />
stares back at us before a wordless mandala, calling out EYPHKA, the artist’s rendition of the Greek for “Eureka.” The mandala format<br />
even appeared in 1963 as a redesign of the American flag (New Glory Banner). It has remained a touchstone for his art ever since.<br />
Alongside short words like EAT, FOR, ERR, and HUG are the numbers, the earliest expression of which were his countings of circles or<br />
“orbs” in 1959. <strong>Indiana</strong>’s autobiographical narrative incorporates a chronicling voice that counts events or stages of life. For example, Twenty-First<br />
State, begun when he worked on Coenties Slip using salvaged wood from the neighborhood, commemorates his 21 childhood homes<br />
and his mother’s incessant search. Six is his father’s number (his father’s birth month, June, and his employment at Philips 66), and six is an<br />
integer connoting conflict. Both two and four reference love. When <strong>Indiana</strong> designed numerals as pictorial characters a few years later, he<br />
had come across Gertrude Stein’s Alphabets and Birthdays (1957) and the artist shared Stein’s portrayal of numbers as concrete things.<br />
Then came the polygon mandalas like Undecagon. Later, isolated cardinal numbers (e.g., Three, Nine) appear as portraits of numbers in<br />
several series of paintings in color and in black and white, and, later, as sculptures — variations on a theme. The numerals are enlarged to<br />
fill their fields, bulging with muscular energy, resonating with signification.<br />
LOVE entered <strong>Indiana</strong>’s pictorial lexicon in the early 1960s though the word had figured in his poetry much earlier. 9 LOVE appeared on<br />
herms and embellished wooden columns, in drawings and greeting cards, and in a 1964 painting that referenced a childhood Sunday school<br />
class. 10 Then came the Museum of Modern Art Christmas Card commissioned in 1965, and, on its heels, the classic LOVE paintings. These<br />
are grid-based, each letter filling a quadrant of a square. This four-square LOVE for which <strong>Indiana</strong> became world famous is built with Stanley<br />
Morison’s 1932 Times Roman font and the exclamatory italic “O” that charges the image with illocutionary force — rendering it like speech,<br />
in line with <strong>Indiana</strong>’s verbal-visual style and his evocation of painting-poems (a single-word poem in this case). Over the years, the artist explored<br />
(he might say “multiplied”) LOVE in a range of media and expanded it in multi-panel walls and crosses, even a U.S. postage stamp,<br />
and translated it into several languages including Hebrew, Spanish (AMOR), and Chinese (AI). The more LOVE, the better.<br />
Always the autobiographer, in 1971 <strong>Indiana</strong> began his Decade: Autoportraits, chronicling each year of the 1960s intermingled with other historical<br />
moments. The paintings share the square format of the LOVEs and, like them, exist in multiple series. Thus related to the LOVEs, the<br />
Autoportraits are nevertheless more complex, incorporating word-wheels and again recalling portraiture, specifically American artist Charles<br />
Demuth’s modernist symbolic portraits of the 1920s — and the Autoportraits draw upon the cubism of that period. Thematically they expand<br />
the idea of the American Dream as a complicated concept. The Autoportraits graphically map attachment both to order and consistency<br />
(the use of the star, circle or mandala, and number one throughout), and to fragmentation and change (faceting, the decagon, the interplay<br />
of symbolic words like ERR and longer place names like BOUWERIE). The LOVEs formal simplicity is answered in the Autoportraits by a<br />
wide-ranging, sometimes riotous color palette and kaleidoscopic arrangements of words and numbers: narratives fractured by time and<br />
memory.
“Toys by Artists”, Betty Parsons Gallery, New York 1964<br />
Includes works by Robert <strong>Indiana</strong>, Lyonel Feininger, Alexander Calder, Dan Basen,<br />
Andy Warhol and Agnes Martin<br />
In a 1974 interview the artist said, “It’s always been a matter of impact, the relationship of color to color and word to shape and word to<br />
complete piece — both the literal and visual aspects. I’m most concerned with the force of its impact.” 11 His verbal-visual paintings go beyond<br />
color, flat surface, and precise execution, the aspects of formalist theory at which he excels and writers like Greenberg appreciated. <strong>Indiana</strong><br />
also deploys dynamics that the critics of his day missed. He activates our eyes as optical relays engaging the creative and linguistic capabilities<br />
of vision: how impulses volley between the retina and the brain — optics and ideas reverberate — and remind us of how we all construct our<br />
own self-images.<br />
<strong>Susan</strong> <strong>Elizabeth</strong> <strong>Ryan</strong><br />
1<br />
Postcard to the author, 2 October 1991.<br />
2<br />
The U.S. Postal Service commissioned a stamp in 1972, based on his LOVE paintings.<br />
3<br />
Haskell, “Robert <strong>Indiana</strong>: The American Dream,” in Robert <strong>Indiana</strong>: Beyond Love (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 2014), 99.<br />
4<br />
<strong>Indiana</strong> called his work “verbal-visual” in 1963: Richard Brown Baker (“Taped Interview with Robert <strong>Indiana</strong> (October-November 1963),” transcript (Robert <strong>Indiana</strong> Collection,<br />
Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution Washington, D. C.), 30. See also <strong>Susan</strong> <strong>Elizabeth</strong> <strong>Ryan</strong>, Robert <strong>Indiana</strong>: Figures of Speech (New Haven, Yale Univ. Press),<br />
Chap. 4.<br />
5<br />
After ancient stone columns (hermae) with heads and phalluses that served as road and boundary markers commemorating the Greek god Hermes who was, among other<br />
things, the protector of travelers.<br />
6<br />
<strong>Indiana</strong>, telephone interview with author 20 February 1992, and Richard Brown Baker “Taped Interview,” 28. <strong>Indiana</strong> says he read about the ship Rebecca in American Heritage<br />
magazine. See further <strong>Ryan</strong>, Robert <strong>Indiana</strong>, 142 and 284 n. 50.<br />
7<br />
<strong>Ryan</strong>, Robert <strong>Indiana</strong>, 122 and 164ff.<br />
8<br />
See <strong>Ryan</strong>, Robert <strong>Indiana</strong>, 199. However <strong>Indiana</strong> has associated the circle with many things including <strong>Indiana</strong> Circle in <strong>Indiana</strong>polis, and Gertrude Stein’s word circle, “A rose is a<br />
rose.”<br />
9<br />
<strong>Ryan</strong>, Robert <strong>Indiana</strong>, 163.<br />
10<br />
<strong>Ryan</strong>, Robert <strong>Indiana</strong>, 201. Rather than the Christian Science church’s ubiquitous “God is Love” <strong>Indiana</strong> painted “Love is God.”<br />
11<br />
Phyllis Tuchman, “Pop! Interviews with George Segal, Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, James Rosenquist, and Robert <strong>Indiana</strong>,” Art News 73 (May, 1974), 29.<br />
11