Here is a post from one of my summer interns, Lucie Alig, that speaks for itself.
My desk in the conservation lab was situated amongst Renaissance sculptures, ornately painted vases, African artifacts, and yet I was there to devote myself to one specific artwork far too large for any lab: Robert Indiana’s 1970 sculpture, LOVE. Needless to say, it is a piece that prompts a nod of recognition. Whether identifiable from its centralized positioning on the grounds of the IMA, or through its plastic incarnation as a dangling, mass-produced key chain, most everyone seems familiar with the trademark tilt of LOVE’s “O,” as it has been so hopefully interpreted to symbolize a movement forward or—in the case of my research of LOVE’s conservation history—a rather complicated stepping back.
Lucie Alig considers LOVE
At first, Richard seemed surprised when I agreed to become the museum’s “LOVE intern” this summer. The task at hand was to extract succinct meaning from the stacks upon stacks of treatment proposals, condition reports, photo negatives, correspondence, digital files, as well as the many yellowing newspaper articles through which the “love” puns (“What We Need is LOVE,” “Three Tons of LOVE”) were, of course, endless. Honestly, I surprised myself a little, too, with my enthusiasm for the job (and the joy in the puns). Never before had I considered that the sculpture—which had always held a kind of iconic status throughout Indianapolis and, consequently, my Indianapolis childhood—would be in need of labored research. Regardless, I gladly took on the job, and it was not long before I knew all about the weathering tendencies of Cor-ten steel, the varying protectiveness of different landscape designs, the underlying concepts of Pop Art. Or so I thought.
One day, as I drove past LOVE on my way into work, I was compelled to pull over. Though this very drive-by had become ritual—a check-in on the beast as I made my way to tame it—today the piece had attracted an atypical crowd. Though often prone to attention from love-struck couples, or children in search of a forbidden jungle gym (please, please, please stay off!), today the sculpture’s admirers seemed much more settled into their viewing positions. As I approached the sculpture, it soon became clear that these were art students, and that in addition to observing LOVE, they were painting its very form.
Encircling the sculpture were nine completely personalized interpretations of it. Not only was each painter incorporating LOVE’s setting—the museum’s contemporary façade, ambling visitors, the well-tamed summer turf—to a different extent, but each composition had its own sense of scale, of coloration, each “O” was angled to a different degree. In fact, the only trait the paintings seemed to share was a disregard for the very issues to which I’d become so concerned: the streaky discoloration of the exterior rust, the particular height of its mount, the Jesus fish that had been scratched inside the “V.” Instead of reflecting the many qualities that conservation sought to fix, these re-interpretations completely overlooked the sculpture’s material flaws, treating it instead like an icon, as intangible and fleeting as love itself.
As I sat down to my desk later that day, it was harder than ever to feel in control of my project. The particular treatment of a particular bolt, for example, no longer felt like a pressing matter; instead, it was just a small, simple detail that was sure to go unnoticed. Furthermore, LOVE’s many offshoots around Indianapolis—those SALE signs (with their otherwise arbitrarily italicized “A”), the mini-LOVE paperweights that seemed to rest on the desks of all my grade-school teachers—were now constant reminders of the inevitability of art’s reinterpretation.
Set-backs aside, I persisted in organizing the “LOVE files.” and did my best to turn the conservation staff’s many obstacles and victories into an easily referenced narrative. LOVE may seem, at times, like a painfully simplistic work of art—the perfect subject for a beginners’ painting workshop—yet its very candor is reliant on a complicated history of tweaking and mends. Though I learned a lot about the crucial role of conservation, I try to remind myself of what else I learned: that the document I produced—clarity and thoroughness aside—is prone to change in the eyes of someone else, to someone with their own idea of love in mind.
