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Lot Essay
‘All you need is love, love is all you need.’ JOHN LENNON, 1967
‘My goal is that LOVE should cover the world.’ ROBERT INDIANA
One of modern visual language’s most iconic statements, Robert Indiana’s Love series is recognised and cherished across the globe for its aspirational universality. The current work is an exquisite example of Indiana’s sculptural variants on this ubiquitous theme, with the letters LO gracefully surmounting the VO beneath. Uniformly executed in a rich, cherry-red (a logoed homage to his father’s employment at a Phillips gas station during the Great Depression), this typographic quartet is a classic reprisal of that most positive emotional idealism. In particular, the three-dimensionality of the work propels the language into a sphere of sculptural geometry, with an almost sensual dichotomy between positive and negative space. Channelling the accessible and communicative sensibilities of 1960s pop art, Indiana succeeded in creating an imaged slogan that binds language with a visual concept to accomplish a unifying totality. ‘What I am thinking about’, Indiana mused, ‘is the very elementary part that language plays in man’s thinking processes and this includes his identification of anything visual. And that is… that the word, the object, and the idea are almost inextricably locked in the mind, and to divide them and to break them down doesn’t have to be done. The artist has usually done it in the past. I prefer not to’ (R. Indiana, quoted in Robert Indiana: The American Painter of Signs, exh. cat., Museum Kurhaus Kleve, Kleve, 2007, p. 21).
Indiana’s initial exploration of the theme was sparked by his spiritual life. Attending a Christian Science church when younger, he was frequently exposed to a sole embellishment on an otherwise ascetic interior; the legend ‘God is Love’. This laconic phrase complied with the Christian Science doctrine, founded by Mary Baker Eddy in 1879 and adopted by many Americans in the twentieth century. As Indiana explains, ‘the reason that I became so involved in [LOVE] is that it is so much a part of the peculiar American environment, particularly in my own background which was Christian Scientist. ‘God is Love’ is spelled out in every church’ (ibid, p. 26). After receiving a commission from Larry Aldrich for the opening of a renovated museum dedicated to Christian Science, in which Indiana subverted this traditional phrase by reversing the nouns, he deducted the theological implications and started to work on the word LOVE alone. The classic and current version of the work was realised in print in 1966, after initial interpretations included a design for the Museum of Modern Art’s Christmas card. In addition to his indebtedness to logo and signage design, the final scheme reflects Indiana’s nurtured passion for poetry. Well-versed in the works of the great American poets, from Edgar Allan Poe and Walt Whitman to Hart Crane, Indiana’s Love, like other works in his artistic œuvre, revels in a poetic textual enthrallment, establishing an interpenetration of word and image.
This textual thematization has made Love an accessible vehicle for universal reappropriation, alteration and parody. At first, the image unwittingly anticipated the 1967 Summer of Love, whilst reacting against the threat of nuclear war and the Space Race. Since then, it has been repurposed, reinterpreted and reprised for diverse functions, borrowed by Google, the 2008 Barack Obama Presidential Campaign (in which Indiana himself wittily transformed LOVE into HOPE), and the rap-metal band Rage Against the Machine, propelling Indiana’s visual statement to even higher realms of popular culture’s pantheon. Furthermore, Love’s charming simplicity and pervasiveness provides a tonic to shed light and happiness over dark, troubling times; this indispensable vitality ensures its continued relevance and essentialness as an emblem for contemporary visual life.
‘My goal is that LOVE should cover the world.’ ROBERT INDIANA
One of modern visual language’s most iconic statements, Robert Indiana’s Love series is recognised and cherished across the globe for its aspirational universality. The current work is an exquisite example of Indiana’s sculptural variants on this ubiquitous theme, with the letters LO gracefully surmounting the VO beneath. Uniformly executed in a rich, cherry-red (a logoed homage to his father’s employment at a Phillips gas station during the Great Depression), this typographic quartet is a classic reprisal of that most positive emotional idealism. In particular, the three-dimensionality of the work propels the language into a sphere of sculptural geometry, with an almost sensual dichotomy between positive and negative space. Channelling the accessible and communicative sensibilities of 1960s pop art, Indiana succeeded in creating an imaged slogan that binds language with a visual concept to accomplish a unifying totality. ‘What I am thinking about’, Indiana mused, ‘is the very elementary part that language plays in man’s thinking processes and this includes his identification of anything visual. And that is… that the word, the object, and the idea are almost inextricably locked in the mind, and to divide them and to break them down doesn’t have to be done. The artist has usually done it in the past. I prefer not to’ (R. Indiana, quoted in Robert Indiana: The American Painter of Signs, exh. cat., Museum Kurhaus Kleve, Kleve, 2007, p. 21).
Indiana’s initial exploration of the theme was sparked by his spiritual life. Attending a Christian Science church when younger, he was frequently exposed to a sole embellishment on an otherwise ascetic interior; the legend ‘God is Love’. This laconic phrase complied with the Christian Science doctrine, founded by Mary Baker Eddy in 1879 and adopted by many Americans in the twentieth century. As Indiana explains, ‘the reason that I became so involved in [LOVE] is that it is so much a part of the peculiar American environment, particularly in my own background which was Christian Scientist. ‘God is Love’ is spelled out in every church’ (ibid, p. 26). After receiving a commission from Larry Aldrich for the opening of a renovated museum dedicated to Christian Science, in which Indiana subverted this traditional phrase by reversing the nouns, he deducted the theological implications and started to work on the word LOVE alone. The classic and current version of the work was realised in print in 1966, after initial interpretations included a design for the Museum of Modern Art’s Christmas card. In addition to his indebtedness to logo and signage design, the final scheme reflects Indiana’s nurtured passion for poetry. Well-versed in the works of the great American poets, from Edgar Allan Poe and Walt Whitman to Hart Crane, Indiana’s Love, like other works in his artistic œuvre, revels in a poetic textual enthrallment, establishing an interpenetration of word and image.
This textual thematization has made Love an accessible vehicle for universal reappropriation, alteration and parody. At first, the image unwittingly anticipated the 1967 Summer of Love, whilst reacting against the threat of nuclear war and the Space Race. Since then, it has been repurposed, reinterpreted and reprised for diverse functions, borrowed by Google, the 2008 Barack Obama Presidential Campaign (in which Indiana himself wittily transformed LOVE into HOPE), and the rap-metal band Rage Against the Machine, propelling Indiana’s visual statement to even higher realms of popular culture’s pantheon. Furthermore, Love’s charming simplicity and pervasiveness provides a tonic to shed light and happiness over dark, troubling times; this indispensable vitality ensures its continued relevance and essentialness as an emblem for contemporary visual life.