EAT, LOVE and other (small) stories

Abstract

Robert Indiana, one of the foremost representatives of the 1960s New York Pop Art movement, is best known for his hard edge, ‘sign-like’ word paintings and sculptures executed in capital letters. Some of the words that recur most often in Indiana’s work include ‘love’, ‘eat’, and ‘die’. Rather than framing Indiana as a painter of signs, this chapter makes a case for considering him as a painter of stories. Drawing on the ‘small stories’ model for narrative analysis, it argues that his word pieces in the LOVE, EAT, and EAT/DIE cycles constitute episodic narratives adding up to his own life story, or artist mythology. Once entextualized as part of the artist’s oeuvre, these works are subsequently recontextualized in exhibitions, criticism, reproductions, other artists’ appropriations and the public’s responses, connecting them to previous and future events, developing new indexical associations. As part of this process, the works become a vehicle for the artist’s voice and his individual artistic style that can be repurposed by others to project and narrate their own life stories.