What is a two word poem

International artist Mia Florentine Weiss lives and works in the conflicted world of Goethe’s Faust and the ambivalence of opposing feelings. Her art is based on the balancing act between pairs of complementary opposites: 

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! 

We know all too well that love and hate are closely linked. Why that is and what that means, however, is not immediately clear. In cases where intuition prevails with no rational explanation, artistic minds typically tend to give the problem a suitable form first. So the irritating reversal from love to hate led the artist to set out the written forms of the words «Love» and «Hate» in such a way that each of them appears as a reflection of the other.

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.

It is truly impressive that we can recognize the words «Love» and «Hate» in this continuous line with no major issue—the way in which the individual letters are written is sometimes far removed from typical and standard writing styles.

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.

The work passed the initial test with its opening debut in Frankfurt. It could even be said that it toured the globe, as it was now accessible and available to the whole world—at least virtually—on the Internet. The work only appeared again in its material form in autumn 2018, when two physically identical versions were set up to the north and south of the Siegestor in Munich. Here it yet again proved to be a huge «Instagram hit.»  Due to the work’s popularity, the sculpture was built in numerous other locations, including in Brussels and Wrocław, in Munich, Goslar, Moscow and Prague, on Arcachon beach, and in front of the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin.

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.

Those in love feel irresistibly drawn to one—and typically only one—person. This feeling is often so strong that everything else seems irrelevant. Omnia vincit amor. Caravaggio spread this message in an allegorical painting that can be viewed today in the Berlin Gemäldegalerie. 

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. 

In addition to its individual-emotional and social-ethical meanings, the term «love» has yet another use which should be mentioned—one that could be deemed ontological. 2,500 years ago, Empedocles developed the theory that our cosmos consists of four elements: earth, air, fire, and water. And everything is created and maintained by just two opposing forces: attraction and repulsion. 

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. 

This expands the conflict between love and hate that we are all first familiar with from the human relationships we experience into a universal constellation of forces binding the whole universe together at its core. It is amazing how much those speculations from ancient times still resonate in current mechanics and modern nuclear physics. 

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.»

This explanation seems plausible, highlighting again that the public sphere is indispensable for the existence of an artwork such as this. But there’s more to it than that. We only get the full picture when we consider the profound restructuring of society created by the onslaught of electronic media over the last few decades.

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.

But this is also a work based on lettering. It had already become one of the best-known Pop Art works and a symbol of the hippie movement when it was also made into a sculpture for the first time in 1970. While Indiana’s love sculpture exhibits a carefree self-confidence through its strong colors alone, the love-hate sculpture by Mia Florentine Weiss is far more prudent and reflective. 

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.

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