Billy Apple New York 1969–1973
Billy Apple confounds genre. I would like to say he is a conceptual artist. Or a pop artist. A pop-conceptualist? A performance artist? Perhaps his works are institutional critique? Working during epoch-defining moments of pop and conceptual art Apple can be read through all these modes of practice, but cannot be fully articulated within them.
Partly to manage this multiplicity, curator Christina Barton’s recent exhibition at the Adam Art Gallery, ‘Billy Apple New York 1969–1973’ concentrates on a relatively brief slice of Apple’s career. We are dealing with specifics here. Apple left New Zealand in 1959 when he moved to London to study design at the Royal College of Art. In 1964 he relocated to New York where, from 1969, he operated one of the first artist run spaces in the city, his own not-for-profit gallery, simply entitled ‘Apple’. In this space he executed numerous works, many of which remain only as slides or small collections of debris. Their re-presentation at the Adam not only elucidates Apple’s work from this little-known period, but also highlights the complexities of curating and exhibiting conceptual or performance practice, a prevalent concern as galleries the world over continue to explore the legacy of the 1960s and ’70s.
The bulk of the exhibition is made up of re-printed photographs and slides of Apple’s everyday activities: cleaning windows, painting the floor, sweeping the courtyard, collecting glass, piling and sifting dirt and removing varnish from floorboards. These prosaic actions have been documented by the artist as art works which incrementally negotiate the boundary between art and life and evidence the artist’s increasing consciousness of his own body as vehicle and site of experimentation.
Also exhibited are stacks