Updates, Live: Robert Indiana: The Meaning of Iconic

Robert Indiana, FIVE
Lincoln Gallery, American Art Museum

FIVE, the painting and the sculptural ensemble of wood and metal are exposed together at the Lincoln Gallery in the American Art Museum.

Robert Indiana, Five, 1984
painted wood ceiling beam, metalwood dowel, wood block

Robert Indiana considers himself a sign painter. He's more than that: like Jasper Johns, he starts from signs to discover the iconic.

We live in a world of signs: road signs, and traffic lights, and initials, and all kind of indicators, in buildings, on the streets, on the stadiums, in street cars and in railroad stations, everywhere.

Words and numbers are important for Robert Indiana, because they are also signs. For Jasper Johns, there are the numbers, and the targets, and the objects. For Warhol, the objects. Take a real object, and glue it on a canvas, as Johns and Warhol did: the object shows now his sign potency. Pop artists reversed the relation between image and object: it's no more about the image pretending to represent an object, it's about the object pretending to represent an image.

Robert Indiana, The Figure Five, 1963
oil on canvas

So, Indiana and Johns created a language of signs: not only obvious signs, also numbers and words belong to this language; Pop artists include in this language of signs real objects and comics with human figures (Lichtenstein and all his followers).

Signs (and numbers, and words, and real objects, and human figures) are icons: each one tells us something essential, beyond its appearance.

Numbers are not just empty numbers; they are icons. FIVE is an icon: USA, ERR, DIE, HUG, EAT.

LOVE is not just a word, an empty word; it's an icon: the icon of all words from all languages.

Some people like to paint trees, Indiana says, and he goes on, I like to paint love. I find it more meaningful than painting trees.