Revamping, revitalising stock

From The Stockroom
Sue Crockford
1 April - 27 April 2010

This stock show presents seventeen works from ten artists. It includes some surprises and some revitalisations within a new group context.

The Billy Apples haven’t been displayed before, three small Xeroxes (from 1966) on coloured canvas that looks like gingham tablecloth patterns. The smudgy photocopied ink shows a grinning apple positioned alongside an inert Idaho spud, while the title ‘Apple in Idaho’ refers to the (now) proper names of people, vegetables, and of course, North American states.

Next to Apple are three Ava Seymour framed photographed collages with super finely-tweaked edges. The outer contours of her paper shapes you need to examine closely to grasp the nuanced precision with which her scalpel has moved. From a cutting virtuoso.

Peter Robinson’s two large calligraphic paintings look better in a group show than in a solo display where they don’t stand out as black and white statements, with so much white around them. Here with some colourful Mrkusichs nearby, they seem activated spatially and become highly energised grotesque landforms - quoting earlier, non-landscape, ‘quantum’ Peter Robinsons.

Julian Dashper’s solitary illuminated neon tube on a white wall with hanging wires on either side presents itself as a delicate – but glowing - linear drawing. The wires could almost be pencil lines within a calculatedly 'minimal' statement.

Opposite the gallery entrance is an early Gordon Walters koru painting from 1965. It intrigues because of the awkward top and bottom edges which explain the title, Black on White. It is definitely not vice versa, like the more resolved and spatially ambiguous works he later arrived at.

Of the two very different Mrkusich works, the smaller single-panelled blue painting (as opposed to the three panelled, three coloured one) has an intriguing tension by virtue of a symmetry at the top and an asymmetry at the bottom. It oddly twists the central field.

In the back room a mid-seventies Albrecht is a gorgeous stack of floating, horizontal stains, oddly divided into two halves, one placed above the other, while nearby a big black Hotere of shiny corrugated steel has its two panels spaced apart to form the vertical beam of a cross. Its arms consist of horizontally cut slots peeled away to reveal bright orange painted on the back.

There is also an oddly sinister Boyd Webb, with the clustered stamens of an ochry brown fabric flower in a shadow - exuding menace.

In thinking about shows like this, I tend to prefer solo exhibitions over group displays, and of the latter, thematically tight presentations over promotion of unsold stock. Yet the latter often allow us to spot things we might have originally missed, a chance to stumble on new connections – especially with more historic work that may be owned by an artist’s family, not an institution. A good opportunity.

Billy Apple ® paperback

Billy Apple ® : Source Book 7/2009
Edited by Zoë Gray, Nicolaus Schafhausen and Monika Szewczyk
Essays by Christina Barton, William Wood, Michelle Menzies and Bénédicte Ramade
Designed by Kummer and Herrman
112 pp, coloured illustrations
Witte de With Center For Contemporary Art, Rotterdam, 2009
$49.95 (Parsons)

It looks like 2010 is going to be a bumper year for exciting Billy Apple publications. Top of the list will be a sizable monograph from Christina Barton; then a selection of other authors in another Apple tome, and finally an anthology of Wystan Curnow essays on Apple and other artists.

In the meantime, just out in Auckland last month but published a few months earlier in the Netherlands, this small paperback - in English. It is a much needed addition to Wellington City Gallery’s As Good As Gold (ed. by Burke and Curnow, 1991), Tina Barton’s The Expatriates (2005), Leanne Pooley’s remarkable video documentary Being Billy Apple, and various assorted periodicals and catalogues. It is small - but crammed with detailed discussion - and fascinating for Apple enthusiasts because three of the four writers are new to New Zealand readers. And like Barton (the Director of the Adam Art Gallery at Victoria University) they all are exceptionally knowledgeable. The book was designed to accompany last June's two part Apple survey at Witte de With, The History of The Brand, and Revealed /Concealed.

For her contribution Christina Barton has taken nineteen crucial years from the lives of Barrie Bates (b.1935) and his 1962 creation Billy Apple to present a chronology that contextualises for a European audience Apple’s career so far. Each of the selected years has been chosen from within a span of seventy-four years and used to elaborate on various key projects within his conceptual development, drawing out the historical and social contexts within New Zealand, London and New York. Barton’s grasp of Apple’s early life (as Bates) is formidable and her experience as a tertiary educator and curator comes through in the clarity and depth of her writing.

I can’t say the same for Michelle Menzies whose text on occasion is dryly academic and obtuse. Yet the approach she takes, the structure she uses, is clever and very interesting – using Gertrude Stein’s accounts of a masterpiece and selfhood to analyse Barrie Bate’s transformation, and most of it engages. Mixed in is Menzies’ account of her own friendship with Apple, expressing surprise that older artists would be curious about younger ones, as if such transgenerational conversations and bonding were rare for the art community.

What is intriguing about Menzies’ analysis is her discussion of Apple’s tenacity in parallel with Stein’s obdurateness. She compares these two resilient purists, their obsessive excavation and reconstruction of personhood and their very different use of repetition. Her description of Bates’ reification as ‘fossilized’ in the form of Apple is a wonderful foil to Barton’s nineteen ‘slices’ and Stein’s notion of ongoing-ness.

French curator Bénédicte Ramade provides a discussion of one aspect of Apple’s practice, focussing on his gallery critiques and what he calls ‘activities’ - actions maintaining gallery and community spaces and the Apple body as artwork. She gives a detailed account of his Witte de With gallery transformation and then discusses many of the seventies New York works Tina Barton included in the recent Adam show. Ramade’s footnotes, based on her conversations with Apple in Europe, are particularly lively - especially when Apple denounces (other artists') performance and narrative works as the product of failed actors or writers, or when he describes a drive to clean or tidy as a public need or community service. She doesn’t see Apple’s activities here as obsessive compulsive behaviour (which others do, as indicated on Being Billy Apple). Rather it is the result of a partnership with the spectator where “the ethics of his role as an artist are at the heart of this formal research.” A surprising (and I think unconvincing) take on this period of his work.

William Wood - a Vancouver-based art historian - provides essential discussion of Apple’s development of himself as a brand, and his fixation on art’s ubiquitous commercial underpinnings. As a non-New Zealand writer Wood’s take on Apple is highly illuminating, starting with an examination of the artist/patron relationship, Kant’s account of art with his ‘free’ versus ‘mercenary’ distinction, and moving on to Apple’s remarkable Transaction series of the early eighties, his related use of apples cast in solid gold, and his planned use of cultivated fruit to be marketed within the Billy Apple brand (a now registered trademark) – what Thomas Crow calls ‘a service economy’.

Wood's essay discusses the most crucial component of Apple's career in my view, even more important than his creation of himself as Artwork. Apple’s art about procedures of fiscal and other types of exchange is particularly fascinating because it gained acceptance in New Zealand long before anywhere else, and is I think his most unique contribution to Conceptual Art. Apple's desire to baldly present aestheticised receipts or contracts showcasing the commercial machinery of the dealer system (and mechanisms outside it) was too radical to initially gain acceptance with his northern hemisphere dealers. They were reluctant to present them – scared off possibly by the confrontational nature of his 1979 ‘The Given as an Art-Political Statement’ New Zealand tour.

This suggests something interesting about New Zealand in the early eighties, that an art climate had evolved where the Art For Sale and Transaction works could flourish. It might perhaps have been Apple's long friendship with Wystan Curnow that enabled this to occur (their collaborative text and design work in Art New Zealand 15 having positive influence here), or it could have been his friendship with then dealer Peter Webb – or both. Either way, that it happened is quite remarkable. Something extraordinarily special.

Apple's farewell to Dashper

Billy Apple: Julian Dashper tribute
Sue Crockford’s K’ Rd window
Until the end of August


We have here a classic Billy Apple installation, one that opened on the day of Julian Dashper's funeral service in Epsom. The work is more emotionally stirring than usual, being about loss, the pain and grief of losing a colleague. A salute to their life’s work – their achievements.

Death is represented by a narrow handleless door at the back of the window space, tucked into the righthand side of the rear wall. It is painted a deep shiny black. It is an oblong that could be a coffin.

The symbolism of the door means departure. A permanent leaving. Apple’s white Futura letters glow.

All the nuances that we expect from a class act like Apple are there. Look closely at the arrangement of the three rows: two of letters above one of numbers. Nothing is formulaic. Subtly tweaked adjustments prevail.

The outside edges of the three rows are not flush. The top and bottom lines match edges, but not the middle one. Top and bottom lean just a whisper to the left, middle leans to the right: a faint hollow in the middle on the left and a slight middle protrusion on the right. These are subtle details that keep the eye lingering. Particulars that if he were with us still, Julian Dashper’s eyes would linger on most of all.

The big Apple: New Zealand's conceptual pioneer in 70s New York

Billy Apple: New York 1969 – 1973
Adam Art Gallery, Wellington
Curated by Christina Barton
28 March - 17 May 2009

Held in Victoria University of Wellington’s Adam Art Gallery, Tina Barton's unusual survey examined Billy Apple’s New York years: between his leaving of London for the States and the period leading up to the first of his two New Zealand tours in the mid-seventies. It looked closely at the preoccupations of his practice and the various activities of his non-profit Apple gallery, fitting in between the period discussed in Barton’s earlier The Expatriates show and the works discussed in Wystan Curnow’s now online (Auckland Art Gallery Quarterly) article on Apple’s 1975 tour.

It also partially overlapped with the 1974 Serpentine exhibition From Barrie Bates to Billy Apple 1960 - 1974 - if any of you are lucky enough to own that catalogue.

This Adam exhibition finished last Saturday, and was an understated warm up to new two exhibitions curated by Nicolaus Schafhausen and Zoe Gray about to open at Witte de With in Rotterdam. As one would expect from either Apple or Barton, the Wellington show was meticulously presented. Wall labels were kept to an absolute minimum, there were no distracting catalogue numbers beside the work, and the free photocopied pamphlet that listed works by name, indicated their positions via three maps. As the floor levels and stairwells at the Adam are quite complicated, you had to be on your toes to figure out the identity of the pieces.

What came through in Barton’s selection (from Apple’s extraordinarily extensive archives) was how the seemingly disparate transitive verbs that formed a basis for various art actions (like clearing, collecting, vacuuming or scrubbing) ended up being closely connected. The physical movements and byproducts from cleaning a room’s floor, or sweeping the roof of an apartment, suddenly acquired similarities to wiping a living human body. Terms like ‘gaseous discharge’ when applied to neon tubes became applicable as names for ‘residues’ for a nominated human body that was an artwork too.

These things regularly found parallels. Sometimes sustained, sometimes not. On one occasion a cotton bud or toilet tissue might be kept as art (by virtue of presenting a secretion from a larger and previous artwork such as Apple’s body, in another a soiled cloth from wiping windows would be thrown out in the rubbish; although they too could be an artwork’s byproduct – in terms of animated action, but not in bodily substance.

In the 2005 Expatriates catalogue Barton investigated the implications of Barrie Bates’ name change, and the consistency of his long interest in marketing and commerce. This recent show however was more about the other side of the coin - social relations and the body of the individual within those. There were some tensions that Barton might perhaps discuss in the planned publication, like the role of Apple in group activities when he (and only he) is a living art object. Though communal in context, his actions took on a different meaning from those of non-artworks like his then wife Jacki Apple, or friends like Jerry Vis or Geoff Hendricks.

Even for those reasonably familiar with Apple’s early work there were many unexpected surprises. One was a gorgeous 1968 film of flickering flames within differently coloured tubes of neon, exploring various linear configurations and close ups – with a soundtrack by Nam June Paik. Another was a project which showed Apple’s interest in going beyond his own personality, to do uncharacteristic things as instructed by an astrologer - like buying lottery tickets.

One of the highlights related to this was a video of his visit to a fortune teller who read his cards. In the unfolding discussion after her procedural analysis, we see Apple become confused and distressed because it is unclear whom the reading with its specific details pertains to – Billy Apple (b. 1962) or Barrie Bates (b.1935). He doesn’t like being filmed and asks for the camera to be turned off.

This very focussed assortment of elegant black and white photos, videos, film, coloured slides, used tissue collections and inventories of glowing neon tubes effectively documented Apple’s (the artist and the gallery) projects, making an exceptionally rivetting show, a display far too good (and significant) to be exposed to Wellington audiences only. One can only hope an Auckland venue like Te Tuhi, ARTSPACE, or AAG will slot it into their programme, and that the up and coming Witte de With shows will also return to Aotearoa to tour – just as the Stedelijk A Question of Faith McCahon exhibition did in 2003.

Putting it on, taking it off

Callum Innes
Jensen Gallery
26 August - 20 September 2008

In this country the additive and subtractive processes of using materials to create artworks haven’t received the analytical attention as you might suppose they deserve, but in recent years ‘subtraction’ has been increasing its profile, in painting as well as sculpture.

Before I get to Innes I’m gong to meander a little. The links between the three artists I discuss here are obvious.

I first came upon the notion of ‘subtraction’ in the first Billy Apple work I ever experienced, a print room in Christchurch’s CSA which Billy had emptied out in 1975 as one stop on his national tour – all light fittings, switches, drawing pins – every superfluous item removed. Not only was the natural light and austerity very beautiful, but I was particularly impressed by Wystan Curnow’s wall statement:

The result of subtraction is absence. But absence cannot be defined as the result of subtraction. The reason being that absence does not necessarily imply there was anything there to begin with.

I really like this statement because it deals with what is visually evident. It insists that you think about what is before you – and what might be missing.

Judy Millar is another artist who employs subtraction, not as sculpture (like Apple) but as part of a painting process that is meant to exemplify irony. In her 2003 catalogue How to Paint Backwards, Anthony Byrt in an essay discussing the wiping off processes claims that her paintings ‘carry that sense of the viewer being able to penetrate the fluid surface with relative ease and it’s this fluidity that creates a desire for immersion rather than just surface contact.(p.5)’

So what is the significance of this ‘immersion’? I'm probably over simplifying but Byrt talks about the ‘weird spatial relationships between gesture and ground’ that cause underlying blocks of colour to ‘appear to be overpainting above her marks (p.6).’ The ‘painting backwards’ process is intended to deconstruct any expressionist connotations by acting out the role of making gestures ‘of expressive self’ instead of making marks that functioned sincerely as ‘an expressive act of self (p.3)’.

Yet in Millar’s work, like Apple’s, the process is not readily apparent. Though talked about as ‘looking back’ and embodying ‘inside–out-ness’, the material evidence is hard to perceive. The viewer needs a textual or verbal guide to understand a method that is so subtle it would reveal itself more by touch than by eye.

Not so for the related processes in Scottish painter Callum Innes’ production. The principles involved are comparatively detectable, though the number of turpentine washes needed to remove brushed on paint would be impossible to ascertain from the smudgy exhibited traces. Sometimes he leaves no traces at all so that some once paint-covered surface areas look completely untouched.

On Jensen's ground floor there are 15 works. If we analyse there are basically five sorts of painting:

(1.) The well known Exposed Painting series where the stretcher is divided up so that one rectangle of horizontally brushed on oil paint is left untouched. Some areas of white gesso look totally virgin, while the rectangle below shows traces of repeated vertical dribbles and thin stains of diluted pigment. Sometimes plummeting down from the bottom righthand corner of the painted rectangle is a solitary, smoky, curving, linear lick of dissolved pigment. Enigmatic and gorgeous.
Often there are varied treatments of oblong edges too.

(2.) The diptyches. Each is a stretcher divided in half; one side painted and left intact, the other with partially paint removed, so that the canvas looks smudged with faintly blurry traces. Sometimes the sides of the stretcher reveal paint remnants.

(3.) Two metre high works on paper that are framed and under glass. These look like bark patterns, like some sixties Australian ‘tree-based’ abstractions. Dramatic vertical rectangles, they have rows of repeated negative ‘brush’ lines erased into the paint.

(4.) Large smoky canvases covered with vertical lines that are sometimes so fine they even look scraped. They are powerfully evocative, beautifully composed with large portions of stained, ’removed’ canvas. The angular shapes make them vaguely reminiscent of the American artist Clyfford Still. They could initially be mistaken for charcoal drawings.

(5.) These speckled canvases have painted on shellac that has then been dissolved to leave specks and little crumbling islands of solid matter. They (the islands) seem thrown onto the canvas but are not. The surface has been painted first and then a solvent thrown on, I suspect, to leave eventually untouched grains of residue.

Innes’ trademark rivulets, stains and trickles are very seductive, especially when he combines his processes with careful placement of solid or semi-dissolved rectangles. Like those of Bernard Frize and Alexis Harding, Innes’s shows are a treat. It is always a pleasure to engage with the pigment application processes and procedural logics such innovative painters invent.

Registering Billy

Billy Apple
Sue Crockford
19 August - 13 September 2008

The Artist is now officially a brand, with a little circle enclosing a wee ‘R’ alongside his name. What that means legally I’m not sure, but the polyester cast fruit here on display in a solitary vitrine certainly looks tasty.

It’s a bluish ‘candy’ red, like a toffee apple but not so brown. The word ‘Billy’ is negatively embossed into its surface, which looks like a reddish varnish – thick and translucent with a silver undercoat shining though. Gorgeous! Asymmetrical, it is curvaceous too. A unique form peculiar to the special edible variety Apple intends to market.

The funny part is the precision of the price and the way it is displayed. On the handout it is $71,518.50 with the cents put in a font point that is half the height of the rest. It is as if the .50 is an embarrassment, which of course, it is. It looks ridiculous. There should be a whole row of zeros after the seventy-one. The artist should have (ahem) registered that it would look so ugly. He should have allowed for GST and lessened his own cut when he calculated the price.

Billy's tribute

Billy Apple: The Bruce and Denny Show
Two Rooms, Auckland
10 April - 10 May 2008

It is well known that the relationship between art and life was a major preoccupation of Pop Art and of many of the later conceptualists, especially – as in Billy Apple’s case – when ‘life’ involved the marketplace and advertising. This Apple exhibition blends together the autobiographical (the artist is telling us about his passion for racing cars) and the museological.

Instead of a show in a gallery where, say, a printmaker might display in a vitrine his burin, acid and zinc plates, and books of referenced Old Master reproductions, Apple’s support material for his paintings and prints consists of a legendary McLaren car being installed in the gallery, a film of a famous Canadian race featuring interviews with NZ heroes Bruce McLaren and Denny Hulme, and if you ask in the office, a recent purchasable DVD doco on the artist’s career and life.

One curious observation is that the support material tends to overwhelm if not totally upstage Apple’s art on the walls. The presence of Denny Hulme’s M8A-2 Chevrolet as a sensual, sculptural object –whether static in the gallery or kinetic on film – dominates the exhibition. Apple’s conceptual project, gorgeous though it may be with its construction by several carefully supervised artisans, despite its many references to the car, can’t compete. However in his very fine catalogue essay Wystan Curnow makes some apt observations about Apple’s project, tying it in with Bataille’s concept of the gift, exchange and sacrifice. Apple seems to want to give something here to his audience. He is introducing them to another world beyond art galleries. And in recent years, particularly since the early 2000s, Apple’s work has been more about his own mental states, alluding to his innermost fears (like the possibility of death at sea in Severe Tropical Storm Irma 9301) and recreational passions, as in this show.

There is one problem though: Apple’s history as an in situ installation artist. With the two site specific tours of galleries in the seventies, and many other projects since, he is famous for treating each venue’s architectural fittings and political history as subject matter. When he ignores those achievements simply to present in the gallery space something that looks like an Apple installation but isn’t, there is a dilemma. After all the McLaren car is not for sale – nor was it made by Apple. Nor is it a readymade. Nor has it been raced as an Apple artwork. It is merely a footnote for Apple’s paintings. Nothing wrong with that approach for another artist, but because of this particular artist’s context it seems a letdown.

The paintings and the prints however are pretty interesting. As tributes to two dynamic personalities Apple has long admired, they fall into a lineage of symbolic portraiture that includes Francis Picabia and Marsden Hartley. Apple’s portraits are of the two drivers, their respective cars, and the racetracks where they won. Three subject matters that overlap.

These images use fonts and proportions Apple has been passionate about most of his working life, like Futura and The Golden Section rectangle. His branding aesthetic is mixed with the cadmium yellow of McLaren’s brilliantly designed car, each driver’s personal number and number colour choice, the shape and alignment of the racing tracks, and the conventions of the chequered flag.

In some ways the upstairs presentation of the paper works is more successful than the downstairs gallery. Apple has organised the near identical material differently, bracketing for each driver important (green) racetracks between their respective yellow car and driver portraits. Most of the seven racing venues Apple showcases here had Hulme and McLaren taking first and second places but Apple’s track configurations draw out subtle distinctions between 1967 and 1968.

One looks forward to see what painted tributes Apple plans to make in the future, and how he encodes those stories. It is not so much his taste that is of interest but how his ideas test the confines of the painted canvas. What is fascinating is the function of his artworks, in particular the sociology around – and not within - the language. What the stretched canvas becomes before it is hung on the wall – though what happens to them after that is amazingly interesting too.