The simultaneously eccentric and emblematic Americanness of Robert Indiana is on prismatic display in Venice, where a career-spanning survey titled “The Sweet Mystery” opened at the historic Procuratie Vecchie in Piazza San Marco as one of the collateral events around the Venice Biennale. dragonpoker

Born under the name Robert Clark to a mother who waited tables at a roadside diner and a father who worked for the energy company Phillips 66, the artist grew up in the American Midwest during the Great Depression and reinvented himself as a searching young man in post-war New York. In the latter half of the 1950s he moved to Coenties Slip—the storied Lower Manhattan loft land prospected by a group of artists including Ellsworth Kelly, Agnes Martin, James Rosenquist, Lenore Tawney, and Jack Youngerman—and changed his name in tribute to his home state. It was an act of reinvention, of a sort, and in line with the kind of shapeshifting that Indiana made part of his legacy before his death in 2018, at the age of 89.

That shapeshifting serves as a throughline in “The Sweet Mystery,” which was curated by Matthew Lyons (a longtime curator at the Kitchen in New York) and focuses on Indiana’s spiritual proclivities and poetic soul. The “LOVE” works for which he is best known—paintings and sculptures as ubiquitous as any artwork ever produced—figure in the show, but less as totems and more through their valence as a kind of collective one-word “concrete poem.” That’s a term that Indiana himself used to describe them and that Lyons evokes by emphasizing the artist’s interest and identification with the writerly likes of Gertrude Stein, Walt Whitman, and Hart Crane. A quotation from Hart Crane’s poem “The Bridge” (about the Brooklyn Bridge, which Indiana could see through his window in Coenties Slip) is displayed in the exhibition’s first room and, in reference to the iconic structure’s literary magnetism, a bit of wall text reads: “From the shared sense of spiritual possibility and significance about this site with its potent metaphors for the new age of American industry and infrastructure, Indiana wove these intersections into his own concatenation of artistic influence that remained with him throughout his career.” dragonpoker

The next room includes a standing sculpture titled Ahab (made with wood in 1962, and cast in bronze in 1991) and three canvases conjoined under the title The Melville Triptych (1962), both in reference to another writer who loomed large in Lower Manhattan lore. The paintings’ use of stenciled text—all of it sourced from phrases in Moby-Dick, such as “there is your insular city”—signals a sense of interconnectedness that was more prevalent in Indiana’s decades’ worth of work than cursory knowledge of his “LOVE” series might suggest. Indiana was a Pop artist, in a sense, but in a dark and multifaceted mode of Pop that accounted for his interests in different kinds of coding as well as esoteric pursuits like numerology. (For an example of his darkness, see a pair of canvases from 1962, one bearing the word “EAT” and the other “DIE”; as for numerology, see a quote from the artist himself printed on a wall in the exhibition: “Numbers fill my life. They fill my life even more than love.”)

A roomful of related works that resonate especially in Venice focuses on sculptures that Indiana made from wooden columns that once served as ship masts and then, after a fire laid waste to part of Lower Manhattan, were enlisted as structural supports in buildings in Coenties Slip. With stenciled text and segments given to gold paint, the works conceived in 1964 conjure romantic notions of nautical life as well as harsh realities of the land. Neither is harsher or more romantic than the other, but the way that they play both with and against type speaks to the ways that Indiana’s art can be apprehended and appreciated from different perspectives. The perspective favored by “The Sweet Mystery” offers an invitation to secret readings ready to be shared with anyone who might be interested in delving deeper, and for that it counts as a worthwhile addition to a current Venice Biennale–related circuit that has made a virtue of reevaluation across the board. dragonpoker