Robert Indiana’s “The American Dream” at Pace, New York
Author: Jonathan Goodman
In this excellent show overseeing the career of the painter and sculptor Robert Indiana is explored, who was born in Indiana, then made his way to downtown New York City, where he was helped by monochromatic painter Ellsworth Kelly. After years in New York, he moved to Mine to live, but it is his work in New York City that distinguishes him as an artist of intelligence and originality.
In particular, Indiana's iconic Love, the sculpture, and also the painting of the same name, made in the early 1970s, both set luminous examples of interaction between words and image, as well as summing up, in a single concept, the feeling supporting why we do the things that we do. Throughout the show, Indiana plays with the connection between language and image in powerfully original ways. By tracing a path between words as they mean conventionally and words as they figure in the visual life of the art objects, Indiana did not jumble so much as merge cultural genres. This required sensitivity to writing and, of course, also to its imagistic effects, something that became a central stratagem of the artist's methodology.
Part of the sculpture is Pop art, and part of it relies on the treatment of language, so that the work's permanence is maintained by making sure it remains something physical rather than merely visual or literary. This applies to the sculpture rather than the painting, although both intimate the compelling aspect of Love as an object independent of conceptual orientation. The combination of the figurative representation of a word like "love," coupled with its transcendent meaning, makes the sculpture and the painting indicative of the way words embody themselves, both as carriers of feelings and ideas and both inevitably embody physical things. In this way, they make the meaning they contain. Words are indeed objects, even if they are only considered patterns on a page. At the same time, in the painting Love, the four individual letters that the world consists of frame the dark blue quadrants backing them. Here, the letters nearly become abstract, in the sense that they are so stretched out as to lose their expected form and convention. We can say that the art trumps the word's condition.
This also happens in other bodies of work by Indiana. In the four paintings shown that belong to the series, mirroring the title of the show, called “The American Dream,” Indiana again uses words, determined to emphasize visual embellishment. Love is so strong a principle that its very mention introduces more than a moment of luminous invention. Perhaps this is the artist's intention: the resurrection of love as transformed by a physical context. The particularly notable yellow painting, worked out in an "X" format, also uses words: "USA" stands on top of words such as "Eat" and "Die." How these words relate to each other or to the American dream is not easily clear. But what is clear is found in Indiana's consistent use of words to expand the meaning, visual, and thematic, of letters used in unusual ways. For a writer such as myself, the temptation is to overinterpret, but that doesn't do justice to the words' ability to occur on a more or less abstract level. Indiana is gone from us now, but perhaps he was prescient in seeing how words might well be used outside their literary context--but effectively nonetheless. These issues need to be considered fairly closely as the work is to be seen more than it is to be read.
The last set of objects to be noted is located on the Pace building's sixth-floor terrace and forms a body of work not directly related to the overview on the first floor. The large set of Cor-Ten steel numbers, covering null to nine, overlooks the city from the terrace's open space, presenting visitors with a fine view of the city’s Chelsea neighborhood. The numbers, some seven feet high, are made of rusted Cor-Ten steel. Each object stands like a sentinel covering numeric specificity. So, in one sense, the numbers are what they are, without an interpretation hanging over them. As a group, the numbers challenge the viewer to make sense of an apparently random but specific compilation of digits, here in their monumental aspect, important in both everyday life and as art. The works serve as a reminder that scientific, numerical systems lie deeply embedded in the technological workings of each day, while the decision to render their physical existence as art is a way of transforming, quite beautifully, a scientific concept into an artistic one.
Indiana's gifts, as Pop art and slightly conceptual extensions of his creativity, adhered to the spirit of his time. Words on canvas are always demanding in highly interesting ways; they not only expand the context of our experience, suggesting quite rightfully that words can be stripped of their intention in favor of their appearance. But that truth also works the other way round: words resist simplification because they mediate emotion and ideas. The opposites are forcibly joined. Perhaps we can say the same of the show's title, "The American Dream."
More than likely, Indiana made this clear through his astute merging of the words' intentions and functions. Very good art always plays out in various ways, asking that we direct our attention toward a particular cultural diversity. Indiana, who represents the spirit of his time very well, looked toward a fine art eclecticism that never fully left the origins of the objects he dealt with. This made his work both a language based on real things and a direct treatment of the way they are used in life. The combination is excellent and enhances our speculation.
Robert Indiana: The American Dream at Pace, NY, on view through August 15, 2025
About the author: Jonathan Goodman is a writer in New York who has written for Artcritical, Artery, and the Brooklyn Rail, among other publications.
Notes on the images: Installation views courtesy of Pace Gallery, New York.
Still from documentary now on view at PACE, New York. Image courtesy of the gallery.