Billy Apple® | Progressives and Other Self-Portraits
31.08 - 12.10
The Billy Apple® Archive and Starkwhite bring together three bodies of work by leading conceptual artist Billy Apple (1935–2021). This is the first exhibition to be staged in Aotearoa New Zealand since the artist’s death on 6 September 2021.
Centrepiece to the exhibition is an extended series of Progressives: experimental self-portraits Apple made between 1963 and 1967. They unmask the process of offset photo-lithography using colour separation plates produced from the two 1962 Robert Freeman photographs taken on the artist’s instruction to document his newly-minted identity.
Working alongside Roy Crosset, master printer at the Royal College of Art in London, Apple used oil-based cyan, magenta, and yellow (CMY) inks to generate his self-portraits. These separate and subvert the CMYK subtractive printing process. He rejected black (K) because he felt it deadened the colours while making the image appear too life-like. In an interview with Nick James in London in 2012, Apple explained:
It was a flatbed proofing press… The plate was on the bed of the press – the steel base; you inked it up and the rollers would travel across, ink the plate and then proof on its return onto the paper or canvas – this was primed canvas, cotton duck. The press was super sharp; it was a proofing press that could have printed covers of Harper’s Bazaar.
In this suite of Progressives, Apple developed a system where he partially overlapped each of the CMY plates so that the images printed onto primed canvas were out of register. Thus his facial features are variously doubled and tripled horizontally and/or vertically, producing a range of natural to hallucinatory images.
Highly experimental in pushing the boundaries of this reproductive medium, Apple also tests the limits of painting, both in the name of self-portraiture, by transferring his image onto canvas by mechanical rather than manual means. The results are at once ghostly and persistent, and – when the images intersect so he has multiple eyes or we view the front and back of his head simultaneously – deeply unsettling.
Contemporary audiences in Auckland who know the trajectory of Apple’s career will be aware of the set of twelve repeated self-portraits (Apple Sees Red on Green) which were displayed “like magazines in a supermarket rack” in his break-out exhibition, Live Stills, at Gallery One in London in April 1963, individual canvases of which are now held in major museums (Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki and Tate Britain). But they will only have seen two examples of these Progressives, an extended series that was made prior to and after that body of work.¹ Now, for the first time, all the works in this series still housed in the Billy Apple® Archive are brought together, so the artist’s technical inventiveness and existential anxieties are on full display.
The self-portraits are part of a larger “self-documentation” project that occupied the artist from 1963 to 1974. Photographs of the artist commissioned by Apple from leading professional photographers (Frank Apthorp, Robert Freeman, Ira Mazer, and Hiro) were variously utilised over this period, always using the flatbed press at the Royal College of Art. Apple explains: “At significant points of marked alteration in my life and identity I did a new series of self-portraits documenting both physical and psychological changes.”² These always presented the artist at a life-size or 1:1 scale and were hung at his head height of 5ft 7½ ins. Despite the volume of works he produced, the series has only very selectively been exhibited, first in his Gallery One exhibition in 1963, then in his solo show at the Serpentine Gallery in London in 1974, again at Leo Castelli Gallery, New York in 1984, and at Artspace in Auckland in 1997.
The second body of work is Head Height, 1964/2020, newly installed in Starkwhite’s second-floor gallery. This consists of a 4B graphite line drawn around the perimeter of the space at exactly 5 ft 7½ ins (172cm), the artist’s height when he created the work at 134 Bowery in New York City in the loft he sub-let from Eva Hesse soon after he arrived from London. Apple has recalled this work (witnessed by fellow artists Sol Le Witt, Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg) on three subsequent occasions: at Hamish McKay, Wellington in 2012, Nadene Milne Gallery, Christchurch in 2020, and Hamish McKay again in 2021. In each instance the wall drawing has been brought into conversation with life-size ‘head-shots’ hung at his actual height.
For this presentation, the graphite line is aligned with two elements: his last formal photographic portrait, taken by Paul Johns in 2020 to mirror Freeman’s 1962 original, and a cut vinyl text work first installed in 2021. These update and recontextualise Apple’s original gesture. The framed photograph, which is adjusted by the addition of a black line demarcating his head height, now hangs at 5 ft 4 ins (163cm) (his height in 2020). The position of the black line demonstrates his 3½ ins (9cm) loss in height 45 years later. While establishing a link to the ephemeral work Apple made in New York in 1964, this work also poignantly tracks the ravages of time and gravity on the human body in a literally extended self-portrait.
Alongside the graphite line and the portrait, the cut vinyl text work explicitly sets out the artist’s height in 1964. This trenchantly conceptual ‘self-portrait’ can accompany the pencil line or stand alone as a numerical reference for the absent artist: we viewers imagine Apple standing taller against the wall.
In Starkwhite’s office on the ground level, a selection of Paids are included as the final component of the exhibition. These belong to an extended subset of Billy Apple’s Art Transactions. The Paid series was inaugurated in response to his concerns about the cost of living in 1987 and continues so long as there are printed invoices extant from Apple’s lifetime which document expenditure associated with his professional and private life.
The Paid series proves that “the artist has to live like everybody else,” the classic line Apple co-authored with collaborator and exegete, the art writer and curator Wystan Curnow. Collectively they amount to an extended portrait of the artist’s needs, interests and expenses. Just as the self-portraits and wall-drawing have an indexical relation to the artist through their contingent relation to the space in which they are presented, so Apple’s Paids link him, in an unmediated way, to the social, bureaucratic, and economic systems within which we are all enmeshed.
Together these three bodies of work prove the consistent way in which Billy Apple treated his own “life processes” as a key focus of his work.³
Christina Barton
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¹ Vertical Progressives (Yellow, Magenta, Cyan), 1963, and Horizontal Progressives (Magenta/Yellow, Cyan/Magenta, Cyan/Yellow) 1963 were included in Billy Apple® The Artist Has to Live Like Everybody Else, his retrospective at Auckland Art Gallery in 2015 (These works are not included in the current exhibition).
² Billy Apple, quoted in From Barrie Bates to Billy Apple, exhibition catalogue, Serpentine Gallery, London, 1974, p. 12.
³ Billy Apple, quoted in From Barrie Bates to Billy Apple, op. cit., p. 12.