Robert Indiana, All-American

The history of art is inherently revisionist. That is to say, it emerges from the constant individual and collective reappraisal of “things the mind already knows”—borrowing Jasper Johns’s famous phrase—or, at any rate, things the mind thinks it knows. Allow me, then, to start with a brief anecdote that brings home the significance of this claim.

Back in the early nineteen-nineties within the higher councils of the Museum of Modern Art, one of the senior members of the curatorial staff proposed the acquisition of a new work by the Canadian group, General Idea. The piece in question was one of a series of paintings, prints, sculptures, and objects that employed a pictorial device based on another such polymorphous series by the first generation Pop artist Robert Indiana. Indeed, it appropriated and redeployed the look of what was fated to be Indiana’s signature contribution to American art of the nineteen-sixties, namely his graphically consistent but multiform interpretation of the word “LOVE,” the ambiguously resonant slogan of an initially optimistic but exceptionally ill-starred era.