Rotten Apple

Given the mileage Andy Warhol and his peers (including Billy Apple) got out of advertising, it’s probably reasonable to expect some blow back from the agencies. In Billy Apple’s case, however, you might have expected it to come from somewhere other than New Zealand Trade & Enterprise. Its promotional materials for the 2016 International Business Awards celebrate the successes of the Apple and Pear Marketing Board with a gold apple and a gold pear.  Not only that, they are also placed on a plinth, complete with an art museum label detailing dimensions and media, we’re in lookalike copycat territory, as in the clear reference back to Billy Apple’s 1983 apple made of 103 ounces of pure gold (unlike the Apple effort the somewhat cheesy copycat is only plated).  

So why shouldn’t T&E liberate Apple’s gold apple idea? Well maybe because one of the stated goals of the Awards is that it, ‘recognises success in developing and commercialising innovation in international markets; incorporating intellectual property strategy, processes and monitoring’. And protecting Billy Apple’s innovation and IP? ….um….we’ll get back to you on that.

Images: left New Zealand Trade & Enterprise's copycat apple and right Billy's apple.

12 cool things Kiwi (visual) artists have achieved in the past year

The other day a headline in the NZ Herald caught the attention: '12 cool things artists have achieved this year'. Of course when you clicked through the artists involved were musicians and not of the installation, photographic, painting or sculpture variety. So here’s a 12 cool things they have achieved in the past year.
 
Billy Apple at 80 finally got his long overdue survey show at the Auckland Art Gallery. Did that mean he'd then sit back and take it easy? Not a chance. Apple is always ticking off items on a list of shows and projects that stretches into the future as well as getting to most of the key art events in the city.
 
Ruth Buchanan turned artist/ curator in Berlin with a series of thoughtful and witty interventions into a private collection being exhibited at the Hamburger Bahnhof. In the overall project A-Z The Marzona Collection Buchanan made changes and additions to the sections J, L and K in the alphabet-based show.

Simon Denny has to be included. He had a very good year but who’d have thought that MoMA, having purchased his sculptures last year, would make another large purchase from his Venice show.  As they say, the first purchase is representation, but if they come back for more, it’s serious attention.

Lisa Reihana proved that history can pull crowds with her large-scale video installation in Pursuit of Venus [infected] based on nineteenth century wallpaper. It got her the Venice gig, it's in contention for the Walters Prize and already some significant art museums have shelled out big bucks to buy their very own copy of the work.
 
Michael Parekowhai certainly kept his cool over the last 12 months. And that despite the politicians of Hamilton and some vociferous people in Auckland ranting on about how his public sculptures were a waste of money no matter who pays for them. They'll be the same people in a few years doting on their grandkids playing in the waterfall of the Hamilton one and looking through the windows in the Auckland one.

Judy Millar who somehow manages to live in Europe and New Zealand at the same time also seems to be able to work at both a major and intimate scale. Not only did she produce the huge architectural scale sculpture The Model World at Te Uru, she also managed to illustrated a kids' pop-up book of the same name.

Dick Frizzell continues to be the whirlwind of New Zealand art marketing. He's always there in some media release or other weighing in on a contentious issue, launching a product or gifting works to this charity or that. Is this cool? Maybe not exactly, but it is impressive.

Len Lye continues to be the only artist in NZ ever to reach out from beyond the grave and continue to ghostwrite new works via a ouija board of governors. If that’s not cool, nothing is.

Li-Ming Hu used DIY cut-out masks and Vimeo to shift a few boundaries and crack us up at the same time. Her take on the team who ran Gambia Castle was a knowing mix of hilarity and edge.
 
Francis Upritchard’s exhibition at Monash University (MUMA) in Australia was a remarkable survey of her work from art school days to the present. Some of the museum based work of the early 2000s looks as fresh as the day it was made (and the poster is beautiful too). The exhibition is now showing at the City Gallery in Wellington. And Auckland, will it be showing in Auckland where all the people are? Er, no.

Fiona Connor has been based in LA for a while now and for the last year has been running her own apartment gallery featuring a strong showing of artists from New Zealand. Laurel Doody has now wound up its gallery phase but not before getting some serious critical attention in the city.

Luke Willis Thompson took a whole lot of people for a ride in New York City, well a walk in fact. His contribution to the New Museum’s 2015 Triennial was to invite visitors to step out into the city on a choreographed walk. Often unsettling, it continued Thompson’s investigation into cultural relationships, power and space.

What a concept

In April the next big show at Tate Britain focuses on conceptual art of the sixties and seventies. It should be the highlight of Billy Apple’s career as he was making conceptual art at the Royal Collage as early as 1960 (Body cleaning : extraction/subtraction) and changed his name to Billy Apple as an artwork in 1962. Although we don't yet have a complete list of the artists to be included in Conceptual art in Britain: 1964-1979, from the promotional material released so far, Apple is unlikely to be even included far less showcased. What does an artist have to do? Tate owns two conceptual pieces by Apple from the earliest days of conceptual art in Britain, both dated 1962. It might not happen often but maybe this is an artist who picked up on an idea too early! A frequent writer on Apple’s work once talked about, 'a general forgetfulness that dogs Apple’s career' but this time it feels like fate itself is against him. There is a small ray of hope, the exhibition’s research brief asked for, ‘analysis of the course of conceptual art in Britain from its genesis in the early and mid-1960s until the late 1970s’ so maybe the 'early' word will allow Apple to slip in. The possibility that Apple heading for New York (the center of contemporary art) in August 1964 might mean he forfeits his chance for the recognition he deserves as a pioneer conceptualist would be well beyond ironic. We’ll keep you posted

Images: conceptual art by Billy Apple in the Tate collection. Left Relation of Aesthetic Choice to Life Activity (Function) 1961–2  and right Self Portraits (Apple Sees Red on Green) 1962

A is for Apple

The Walker Museum based in Minneapolis recently mounted the exhibition International Pop. It's showing in Dallas at the moment and Apple is a member of the cast. OK, maybe not core cast but, given his significant place in Pop’s coming of age, it’s great to see him get some credit where credit has been kind of overdue.

It’s taken a long time for Billy Apple to get written into the Pop Art story. There's been some recognition, of course, but maybe because Apple was so focused on the conceptual, work that could be fitted into the history of Pop was somewhat obscured. For instance in the catalogue for International Pop Apple’s 1962 canvas, a reproduction of the 1962 Young Contemporaries exhibition label, is featured as an early example of Pop Art. But, given its date it could also be put forward as an even more impressive example of conceptual art. In art history, dates matter. 

And how about Apple’s neon work A for Apple being considered in the same breath as Joseph Kosuth’s iconic One and three Chairs (a chair, a photograph of the chair and enlarged pic of the dictionary definition of chair)? What a concept.

Images: Top Billy Apple with David Hockney in New York and bottom left, Billy Apple's A is for Apple

Close shave

Not sure if it's official yet but it seems common knowledge, well common among a pretty large group of people anyway, that Billy Apple has a solo exhibition at the Serpentine in London lined up for 2016. So some solace there for missing out with Misal Adnan Yıldız on the Venice thing. As it is he'll be the second NZer to show at the Serpentine within a year with Simon Denny opening in November. 

You can figure (not that he’ll be complaining) that Apple would have dearly loved this exhibition to have been slated for April 2014. That would have been exactly 40 years after his last Serpentine exhibition that showed 14 years of his work. Realistically though Billy Apple’s not going to wait another eight years just to land the 50th anniversary and it's pretty damn cool to be able to do a show like this at 81. Typically Apple’s birthday is said to be the last day of each year - all very tidy as you'd expect. 

The curator of the Serpentine exhibition is Hans Ulrich Obrist who has previously included Apple into one of his Museum in Agency of Unrealized Projects and has also interviewed him as part of his Interview-everyone-in-the-entire-world project a few years back. As far as we know the only other New Zealander to have had a solo exhibition at the Serpentine was the sculptor John Panting in 1975. And all this to let us get away with a dodgy lookalike between Barry Bates (pre-Apple) Lathering, Alicante Spain, April 1960 and Philip Larkin just having a shave in 1957 (from the Independent)

Images: Left, Philip Larkin, right, Barry Bates

Golden rule

Billy Apple is not going to be too pleased with the biz magazine Fast Company this month. It's putting the boot into his go-to aesthetic benchmark the Fibonacci ratio which gives us the magic golden rectangle (ok it is in fact a square, but stay with us). FC argues that the world’s most loveable shape is an urban legend albeit one invented before urbanisation kicked in. 

It was in the mid-nineteenth century that German psychologist Adolf Zeising kicked off the PR blitz that put the golden rectangle as the number one shape. He claimed (rather off the top of his head) that the golden rectangle was part of a 'universal law in which is contained the ground-principle of all formative striving for beauty and completeness in the realms of both nature and art, and which permeates, as a paramount spiritual ideal, all structures, forms and proportions, whether cosmic or individual, organic or inorganic, acoustic or optical; which finds its fullest realization, however, in the human form.' Who’s going to argue with that? Just Fast Company so far. But, not only does it debunk the 'ancient' origins of the Golden Sector’s mythic status, it's rounded up a professor or two who claim that people don’t even find the golden sector particularly more beautiful than other shapes that closely resemble it. Some guys at Berkeley found that, on average, consumers prefer rectangles that are in the range of 1.414 and 1.732 which contains the golden rectangle but the actual golden measurement wasn’t a clear favourite. 

So maybe not such a big deal for Apple after all who is pretty relaxed about his proportions after the first decimal point. And he does use use the Fibonacci ratio for more than just aesthetics in things like his coffee bean proportions etc.  Anyway, you can read the FC article here.
Images: top, Fibonacci does Fibonacci and bottom Apple does Fibonacci

By the numbers

1   the average number of statements per month the Minister for Arts, Culture and Heritage has released relating to the arts so far this year

3  the amount in millions of dollars per year that Te Papa gets from the Government for ‘collection development’

6  the number of Billy Apple reviews in EyeContact since his survey exhibition opened at the Auckland Art Gallery

10  the number in thousands of visitors who attended the last Auckland Art Fair

12.5  the percentage of male exhibition attendants at the Simon Denny Venice Biennale exhibition

58   the percentage of women selected as finalists for the Waikato National Contemporary Art Award by Aaron Kreisler, Head of the Ilam School of Fine Arts in Christchurch

70  the percentage of Creative NZ funding that comes from money New Zealander's lose gambling

77.5  the amount in thousands of dollars that the Govett-Brewster paid Saatchi & Saatchi to deliver its new brand

143  the number in thousands of visitors to the exhibition Gottfried Lindauer. The Māori portraits at the Alte Nationalgalerie in Berlin this year

700 the value in thousands of dollars of the sales and commissions disputed in the Bambury / Jensen court case

1585  the number of exhibitions held at the Auckland Art Gallery since it opened on 23 June, 1927

Going public (not)

By now, many of you (six copies have come to OTN for a start!) will have read the critical letter Christina Barton sent to EyeContact about John Hurrell’s recent review of her exhibition Billy Apple: the artist has to live like everybody else, currently on view at the Auckland Art Gallery. The copies we received showed that the letter had been sent to at least 11 people including Creative NZ,  a dealer gallery and the senior staff of public museums. In her opening paragraph, however, Barton makes it clear that her letter is personal and that she does not feel it is ‘appropriate for a curator to respond to a critique of their own exhibition’. The result is that a topic one of our senior academics feels is worth a dense and passionately argued two-page letter is removed from open debate. To date John Hurrell has followed Barton’s instructions and not published.

Barton makes a number of contentious assertions:

Conflict of interest. Serving as EyeContact’s founder, editor, commissioner and regular contributor all at the same time is a conflict of interest for John Hurrell.

Photographic access. As the Auckland Art Gallery doesn’t publish photographs of its exhibitions, search engines will feature EyeContact as a key point of access to the exhibition along with Hurrell’s review.

The record. EyeContact serves as ‘the record’ so Hurrell is in a privileged position. That also gives him the responsibility to exercise ‘some level of editorial judgment’ and to consider his larger responsibilities to the culture.

Public responsibility. As EyeContact is funded through Creative NZ, it operates in the public sphere with public money. What larger responsibilities, if any, does this entail?

The role of EyeContact. Barton asserts Hurrell doesn’t understand that his role is to ‘perform at a high level’ and ‘lift debate’ and ‘set an example’ and ‘develop talent’ and  ‘shape the discourse’.

So a puzzle within a puzzle. If John Hurrell wants EyeContact to encourage ‘spirited discussion on art and visual culture in Aotearoa New Zealand’ (as he says on the site’s front page), why hasn’t he published Barton’s less-than-private letter? That would be a surefire way to get some spirited discussion going. And, if Barton feels her harsh critique is worth sending widely enough to ensure that at least a 100 people will get to read it, why not take on one of the duties she asserts EyeContact has and lift the debate?

McLeavey sat here

A big crowd turned up at the Matterhorn in Wellington last night. They were there to be with Peter McLeavey for the launch of Jill Trevelyan’s biography of New Zealand’s longest serving art dealer published by Te Papa Press. McLeavey who started selling art in 1966 has put 47 years into the business a stretch that is unmatched in Australasia.

Trevelyan told the crowd that McLeavey had given her free rein and did not ask her to change anything substantive. This is McLeavey’s story as shaped by his relationships with artists and elaborated by Trevelyan’s meticulous research in letters and interviews. The list of artists touched by McLeavey is remarkable. Richard Killeen is there being wonderfully florid describing the artist Merit Gröting painting McLeavey’s chaise longue white as “one of those mafia type, horse-head-in-the-bed sort of situations.” The chaise longue is something of a leitmotif with many people photographed on it from McLeavey himself (both sitting and lying and standing by it with his wife Hilary) to Michael Smither and Derek Cowie.

The chaise longue also poked its nose into the artist dealer relationship when Billy Apple asked to use it in 1990. “I do not wish this piece of furniture to be touched at this stage” was McLeavey’s response. Later that year he wrote again to Apple abruptly terminating their 11-year relationship. The book is full of beginnings and endings, emotions and commitment, supreme confidence and paralysing uncertainty. Colin McCahon is there in his full emotional glory and so too are Toss Wollaston and Gordon Walters and many others.   

Peter McLeavey: the life and times of a New Zealand art dealer is not a hagiography, and more power to McLeavey for letting the cracks show and to Trevelyan for not papering them over. But enough of this, we’ve got some reading to do.

Image: Peter McLeavey and the chaise longue sometime prior to Saturday 20 June, 1922

Waving the flag

Changing countries used to be pretty punishing for artists but nowadays you can live, say, in Germany and still retain interest and maybe even a reputation back home (even a market!). It wasn’t always so. Artists like Jeffrey Harris paid a big price for relocating to Australia for a while and so too did Billy Apple when he moved to the United States in 1964 from London. In the time it took to cross the Atlantic Apple went from being a critical figure in the development of British Pop and particularly conceptual art to being virtually forgotten. For someone who was leading the UK charge for conceptual art Apple is simply not represented in British institutions (in its online catalogue the Tate has nothing) or in the British story.

All that may be changing as the UK starts to re-look at the late fifties and sixties giving the opportunity for neglected figures to be reassessed. Apple already has some serious support from the Mayor Gallery in London and now has been included in the recent Christie's show When Britain Went Pop! a curatorial/commercial mash-up designed to bootstrap UK Pop art into that rarefied 'museum-quality' air. So will Apple be sucked along in the jet stream of this promotional foray? At the moment it's still all Hockney, Blake, Hamilton and Jones in the media but Apple’s dramatic American flag featuring JFK is also attracting attention. There's another sign that Apple is being drawn back into the UK fold: he's just been interviewed by the indefatigable Hans Ulrich Obrist at the Serpentine Gallery.

Image: Billy Apple’s Xerox on fabric work The Presidential Suite: JFK in the Christie's exhibition When Britain went Pop!

Sunnyside up

Anyone who's talked with Billy Apple will know of his struggles to get the Billy apple up and running - that’s a Billy Apple apple, grown on a tree and named Billy. Now we've come across a potential fast track: burning a Billy Apple Trademark directly onto a ripening apple via a photogram process. Another art association would be Dennis Oppenheim’s 1970 work Reading position for second degree burn. Oppenheim left a book on his chest as he lay in the sun to capture a pale book-shaped patch against red sunburnt skin. Everything you ever needed to know about Apple branding here.

Images: photograms printed on apples including top the Tsar of Russia and his wife made in the late nineteenth century.

Cardinals rule

This Saturday we’re offering the chance to kick back and make like a Cardinal.  Around 115 of them (plus a couple of doctors and a few attendant priests) will be locked up inside the Sistine chapel until they all agree on a new Pope, so tons of time to sit around and take in Michelangelo’s miraculous frescos unlike the rest of us who had to do the stand and shuffle thing. Or just buy the book of the show on TradeMe

Click on image to see the apple

Ain't that brand

Billy Apple headlines the latest Frieze magazine in a massive 5500 word interview with Anthony Byrt. The reason for all this? Barrie Bates became the brand Billy Apple 50 years ago. 

And the reason for the brand? “The brand was also a way to get away from the New Zealand connection. Suddenly, you’re from nowhere, you’re brand new. I became British – I was created there in 1962. I could say: ‘Billy Apple was born in London,’ and a lie detector wouldn’t twitch.” 

Apple and Byrt also talk about Apple’s advertising career and some of his key campaigns, his coming to New Zealand after his life in the UK and US and his quest for immortality. “Just like any true immortalisation process, the project is ongoing, and could go on forever. It has no perceivable end.” 

You can read it here

The artifact previously known as prints

If you look at a lot of art exhibitions something you will have noticed recently is how many reconstructions of sixties and seventies installations are being made. In New Zealand the Len Lye Foundation has been into this (and making new works from Lye’s sketches and notes) for a while now, Auckland artist Jim Allen has been reconstructing his own past over the last few years at Michael Lett, Billy Apple has a reconstruction on at Hamish McKay at the moment and there are a few seventies reconstructions in the Adam Gallery's latest Duchamp exhibition too. 

And here's a spectacular video of Gagosian staff in Los Angeles reconstructing a 1968 work by Barry Le Va. The title defines the installation Set I A placed B placed; Set II A dropped. B dropped.; Set III A placed. B dropped.; Set IV placed 1968. Le Va might have been at Gagosian when the work was installed in June but there was one big difference between when he made it in the sixties and this time round: the blue conservators gloves that everyone is wearing. 

 Did that affect the work? Sure it did. There wasn’t a finger print to be seen anywhere when we saw it. Each sheet of glass was polished clear and sparkling. It looked kind of creepy. All end result and no process.

Dog bites sculpture

There have been some dramatic images in the history of photography. The miracle of a bullet passing through a light bulb, the analysis of movement by Muybridge, the moon rising over Half Dome in Yosemite National Park. Now we add to that roster another decisive moment, this photograph of Billy Apple’s dog eating a piece of Peter Robinson’s sculpture at Sue Crockford's gallery. Fortunately dog Macintosh (spoiler alert – Apple connection) didn’t swallow the small cube so there will be no issues with coughing up felt balls. As there is the faint possiblity that the dog was tweaking the sculpture by moving the block we have also tagged this post Animal Art.

The play’s the thing

It’s mid-October last year and a performing arts school down the road from where Billy Apple lives is working on a kids' holiday drama programme. The production is billed as The apple. How does Billy know this? A brochure has been pushed through his letterbox by one of the neighbour’s kids. Billy and Mary decide to go and at 3pm they are seated in an audience of parents waiting for the performance by a group of 12-year olds to begin. 

The set turns out to be an art gallery with paintings on the walls and centre stage an empty plinth. A janitor wanders on stage sweeping. When he reaches the plinth he props up his broom, pulls an apple out of his dustcoat pocket and rubs it absentmindedly on his lapel. Resting the apple on the plinth he picks up the broom again and continues sweeping (exit stage right). A group of art enthusiasts enter and seeing the apple on the plinth begin what to Billy is probably a familiar critique. Eventually the janitor returns, grabs his apple and munches into it as he departs. Cue general critical confusion and recanting.

After the play the tutor Mark Clare approaches Billy who he recognises. As they talk Billy becomes aware of something behind him. It's a line of kids each holding a copy of the poster for the play. They want Billy to sign them, which he does. The circle completed they all go home.

Image: A signed poster. (Thanks M, thanks B)

Moorish

Forgot to mention that when we were in Los Angeles we ran into this old friend. It’s another cast of the Henry Moore we have in Wellington. You may remember that Billy Apple had a go at getting it a bit of love from the Wellington City Council. You can see what constant care looks like when you look at the Getty version. Very nice. Maybe the City Council could hit the Getty up for the restoration cost for our version, being cousins and all.

More Moore on OTN here and here.

Horse trading

Billy Apple and horses, horses and Billy Apple. You might recall we attached Billy Apple to a stolen horse story earlier in the year and now trademe is putting a Billy Apple rendering of the same sort of horse (artificial, fibre glass, life-sized) up for grabs (grabs worth more than $15,750 in this case. The shiny black horse that goes by the name of Billy is decked out in Apple red and green and sports an Apple logo. Billy is also in racing mode at the Dowse Art Museum where The Bruce and Denny Show is on display. You can bid on Billy at Trade Me here. 

As of now, the highest bid is $10,000 so only another $5,750 to meet the reserve and be in with a chance to snap up the beast for your collection or just to have hanging round the house. The perfect pet: immobile, silent, never under your feet begging for food, and happy to stay home alone when you're on holiday. 

You have until 12 March to get the funds together. Note most of the proceeds will go to the NZ Native Forests Restoration Trust.

And thanks for the heads W.

Spam: Sales Department

reckless guesswork, insinuations and possible inventions that have turned up in otn's email: in london, billy apple has had a work purchased by the tate (we understand it is young contemporaries 1962 and recently exhibited at the mayor gallery) • meanwhile across the atlantic simon denny has sold work to über collectors don and mera rubell at the miami art fair (the rubells collection is housed in miami and features artists as diverse as paul mccarthy, cindy sherman and luc tuymans) • any missing details, changes to outright lies, indignant denials or embellishments gratefully received and have been known to be lavishly rewarded.

Blackie’s hoofed it

Where do you go to read about animals, art, art theft and Billy Apple? Here on OTN. In this tale the perfect OTN storm takes place at the Kingsland end of New North Road where Horseland’s Chevalier store has been for around 30 years. The reason you knew Chevalier was in the horse business (apart from the name) was the presence of a horse standing on the top of the store's canopy three meters above the footpath. Not a real horse though, one of those fiberglass ones, a horse sculpture. 

These days finding Chevalier is not so easy as the horse - all 75 kg of it - has been nicked. The story has played out in the Auckland City Harbour News (front page six column header, full colur photo, above the fold etc) which tells us that the horse (painted black in 2001 and sensibly named Blackie) has not turned up. 

The Billy Apple angle? Blackie’s representative, store manager Mark Corner, was, “Flabbergasted… Mr Apple used the horse as inspiration when designing the company’s logo several years ago. It’s one of the icons of Kingsland. It’s sad to lose it.” 

Crimestoppers hotline: 0800-555-111

Image: The ghost of Blackie lives on in Billy Apple’s logo for Chevalier.