The Two-Word Poem

The push and pull between obedience and rebellion, calm and panic, helplessness and proactiveness, creation and acceptance, reality and dreams, light and shadow, life and death, love and hate. This duality inspired the Berlin-based artist to create an ambigram back in 1999, which was turned into a sculpture and the first of its kind worldwide: LOVE HATE! 

A difficult endeavor, as some of the shapes of the letters in both words differ greatly. After countless attempts inspired by all possible iterations, Mia Florentine Weiss finally managed to create a continuous line.

The fact that both words can be universally read may seem trivial and hardly worthy of mention. However, it is fundamental for understanding this work. The calligraphic discovery has had an affinity for attracting huge amounts of publicity from the very beginning. It can and must escape the hermetic environment in which it was created. It cannot be hidden away in the exclusive confines of an art gallery. It wants to be out in the world where we find it today. Only there does it make its impact.

Love and hate are phenomena. You can find them everywhere you look. For Mia Florentine Weiss, her preoccupation with the relationship between love and hate inevitably stemmed from her investigation into complementary opposites wrestling exclusively with one another. But in the end, the result was something universal and abstract. The work accordingly takes on a form that cannot be any more general or more abstract. No story is told. No image is shown. Not even a phrase is spoken. All we see is one word—a narrative that anyone can associate with.

The son of the goddess of love Venus, named Amor or Cupid by the Romans, is shown here as an adolescent street urchin in a provocative pose. At his feet lay notations and musical instruments, as well as a pair of compasses and a straight edge, but also pieces of a suit of armor. The boy, who holds in his right hand the arrows which he shoots into the hearts of men to awaken their desire, not only triumphs over the liberal arts but the art of war as well. The phrase "Make love not war" already held true in 1602. 

Empedocles named these forces φιλότης (philótēs) and νεῖκος (neíkos). In Ancient Greek, these two expressions are used to mean harmony and strife, friendship and hostility, love and hate. 

Einstein himself said the following about love: "This force explains everything and gives meaning to life. It is the invisible force that we have ignored for too long. Maybe because we are afraid of love because it is the only energy in the universe that man has not learned to drive at will."

The fundamental changes that have taken place can be most easily seen when compared to an artwork from the predigital age. The visualization of the word "love" is particularly suitable for this purpose. For this we can thank artist Robert Clark, who gave himself the artist pseudonym "Robert Indiana." His most famous work originally came from a Christmas card design which he created for the New York Museum of Modern Art in 1965.

Despite its substantial scale, its unpainted rust-brown steel plates appear fragile in comparison. The principles of the design of Indiana's work originate from information graphics and commodity esthetics. For this reason, his sculpture appears to be a cross between a road sign and a consumer product, greatly enlarged in size and with a focus on minimalist clarity. Indiana's sculpture therefore embodies the modern commodity.