“They [Indiana’s words] are short and isolated and thus assertive as abstract shapes. More important, they possess the kind of power that words have in commercial graphics, where they both imply object narrative and also float free of it and point subjectively, directively, toward the viewer. The mystique of such words resides in their economy. . . .
. . . FOR offers an interpretive journey from word to picture, guided by the preposition’s implication of direction (“toward” a prepositional object), and the image of a fork posed as an arrow. It has an artistic precedent in the puns in cubist paintings that are based on fragmented words (for/fork).”
Susan Elizabeth Ryan, Robert Indiana: Figures of Speech (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), pp. 112–13.
