John Jones: Could you talk a little about the words which you use. I mean the isolated words—”eat,” for example, recurs. Could you talk about the significance of these?
Robert Indiana: Well, most of this aspect . . . is from just my own private experience knowing, however, that it’s shared by everyone else in America. “Eat” is an obvious comment on the materialism. In my own life it’s autobiographical. My mother used to work in restaurants and had her own restaurants and somehow, growing up in Indiana, eating just seemed to be one of the most important activities. There didn’t seem to be very much more, and there’s a kind of obsession about it. And then again this comes into the American Dream—the preoccupation with our standard of living and how we’re continually made aware of how fortunate we are and how rich we are and how many good things there are to eat even when you’re poor and so on. The other words like “die”—I was raised part of my life as a Christian Scientistand in religion and other aspects of the American character there is this preoccupation with death in a different kind of way. And “hug” and “err” are a little bit more personal, mainly my own ideas about preoccupation spread in American life. I mean this erotic and this romantic business is so exaggerated in America. And “err” just refers I suppose to the Puritan situation. That is, we are so sure that we never make mistakes in this country and everything that America always does is always right and this is just again I suppose what you call ironic comment on the situation.
John Jones, Interview with Robert Indiana, October 14, 1965, Interviews with artists, 1965 Oct. 5–1965 Nov. 12, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, p. 2.