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Eat

1962

Images

Eat, a 60 by 15 1/2 by 17 inch sculpture consisting of a wooden beam with a haunched tenon, standing on a wooden base. An iron and wooden wheel is affixed to the right and left sides at the bottom of the sculpture. In between a red number 25 has been painted. A wooden peg protrudes from the center of the sculpture, and at the top of the sculpture is a red circle containing the word "eat" painted in green stenciled letters.

Eat

1962

Gesso, oil, wood, and iron and wooden wheels on wood

60 × 15 1/2 × 17 in. (152.4 × 39.4 × 43.2 cm)

 

Photo: Bruce C. Jones; Artwork: © Morgan Art Foundation Ltd./Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY

Robert Indiana's journal entry for September 22, 1962 featuring a sketch of the herm Eat

Robert Indiana's journal entry for September 22, 1962

 

Courtesy Star of Hope Foundation, Vinalhaven, Maine

Description

The fact that those beams come very, very close to the width of a tombstone and that I should have been early preoccupied with ‘Eat’ and ‘Die’ in that context isn’t so unusual. And neither is it irrelevant that as a child I was fascinated with graveyards . . . tombstones to me were absolutely fascinating. My early steles and herms were the exact proportions of tombstones.

— Robert Indiana

 

Donald B. Goodall, “Conversations with Robert Indiana,” in Robert L. B. Tobin, William Katz, and Donald B. Goodall, Robert Indiana (Austin: University of Texas, 1977), pp. 33, 36.