Zig, 1960–62. Photo: Courtesy of Museum Ludwig, Cologne, Germany;
Artwork: © Morgan Art Foundation Ltd./Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY.
If you want to make your work look up to date, put some stenciled lettering into it.
—Bas Jan Ader, 1969
The artist responsible for this pronouncement—or words to the same effect—belongs to a category in recent art history far from the one occupied by Robert Indiana. Bas Jan Ader, at the time that he offered this maxim, was a young Dutch expatriate in southern California. He was in the process of showing to a group of students (including the present author) a group of disarming drawings that he had grouped into a spiral bound book, each image matched by a facing page of text in a looping cursive hand. In the drawings, stenciled word fragments function with the same degree of concreteness as the pictorial motifs adjacent to them.
No artist prior to Ader had made stenciled typography as salient to his entire project as had Robert Indiana. Jasper Johns, to name his obvious counterpart, is likely to have used everyday packaged stencils (punched into stiff fiberboard by the Stenso company of Baltimore) to trace his cutout letters and numerals; but he suppressed until 1959 the telltale internal breaks within each character that keep the template intact. At virtually the same moment, Indiana made these crisp demarcations a defining feature of his work, a commitment from which he would seldom subsequently waver.
In their origin, however, Indiana’s letterforms recall a world far from the contemporary scene evoked by Ader. As in so much of his formative work, Indiana was drawing upon the detritus of his working environment in and around his studio at the lower tip of Manhattan. The neglected complex at Coenties Slip offered a palimpsest of layered discards from its history in maritime commerce, out of which arose the letters that would define his artistic identity. As he has written: “The brass stencils that I found in the loft—numbers, names of boats and companies from the nineteenth century—became the matrices and materials for my work . . .”
Tracing the letter openings in such objects, Indiana began inscribing compact and resonant titles—ZIG, SOUL, AHAB, HUB, PAIR—onto his totemic wooden sculptures, the so-called Herms that he began fashioning from distressed wooden beams in 1960. In his embellishment of a founding example like Zig, not only did he deploy large stencil forms in plain sans-serif capitals, he went back with white borders against the black body of the type, implying either that the letters stand out like applied forms in relief or that they represent depressed areas sunk into the wood like the voids in the original brass pattern. The archaic substrate of such works has frequently been compared, following Indiana’s own indications, to Ishmael’s vision in Moby Dick’s opening lines of New York’s forlorn landsmen posted along the docks: “thousands of mortal men fixed in ocean reveries . . . like silent sentinels all around the town . . .” But references of this kind by no means precluded connotation of the latest developments in a streamlined late Modernism. The emphatic correlation between the row of three letters in the lower register and the routed-in band at the slab’s midsection aligns the found stencils with a row of symmetrical chevrons that demand comparison with the uniform stripes with which Frank Stella was just then shaking up the New York art world.