Study#10 Ida Applebroog

STUDY #10
INDEPENDENCE PLAZA
IDA APPLEBROOG
STUDY IS THE GENERIC NAME for a series of focused case-studies of works from the David Roberts
Collection. It involves a single work, displayed in a gallery. The work is studied in depth, from its
techniques, origin and history, to its position in the artist’s practice and the contemporary debates.
The study is made available, in a folder on the bench.
AN ARTWORK IS A SYSTEM that cannot be reduced only to an object or an index (certificate,
instructions, etc.). It also includes the histories (material and conceptual), the trajectories (physical
or virtual) and the narratives (past or to come) generated by the artwork: this is what this programme
will research.
TO STUDY IS TO DEVOTE TIME and attention to a particular subject, to acquire knowledge. It can also
refer to a piece of work done for practice or an experiment. It is this sense that we would like to
pursue – not the transmission of knowledge or the act of contemplation, but rather an invitation to
act.
STUDY IS NOT AN ATTEMPT to capture or seize but a methodology of encounter and the insistence on
the provisionality as both form and content within the process of research. It is an exercise to respond
to the infinite demand of the work. Not to bring forth any historical truth but to enter into a dialogue
with the work.
IN THIS SENSE THE STUDY IS NOT FINITE, but demands the reader to take up multiple positions and
viewpoints. More than anything, it asks the viewer to engage with the artwork by, at least, spending
some time with it.
INTRODUCTION
INDEPENDENCE PLAZA, from 1979-80, is one of the earliest diptyches by IDA APPLEBROOG
(b.1929, in New York, USA). It is made with ink and rhoplex (an acrylic coating material) on
vellum, a parchment made from calfskin. The measurements of each of the two panels are 220 x
160 cm. The work was acquired for the David Roberts Collection in September 2013 from Richard
Saltoun, London, where the work was presented in the group exhibition Poetry & Performance: Ida
Applebroog, Henri Chopin and Gina Pane (18 July – 16 August 2013).
THE WORK WAS FIRST EXHIBITED in 1980 at Printed Matter. The two panels fitted exactly within the
frames of the space’s windows, as part of an exhibition titled Co-op City, curated by Lucy Lippard. The
work was subsequently exhibited at Galleria del Cavallino, Venice in 1981.
THESE TWO LARGE FORMAT WORKS correspond to Applebroog’s Dyspepsia Works (1979), a series
of eleven small, twelve-page books of images and text that Applebroog would post to her friends and
colleagues. The image on left hand panel of a man sitting on a chair appears in the booklet titled
Now Then. The image on right hand panel with a man taking off his jacket in front of a woman in bed
appears in the booklet titled Sure I’m Sure.
ALSO EXHIBITED IN THIS GALLERY is Applebroog’s work Trinity Towers from 1982. Trinity Towers
is a diptych from a series of ‘Window Pieces’, large wall-based works in which voyeuristic dramas
take place behind windows. This staging, in ink and rhoplex on vellum, makes reference to a trend
observed by the artist in New York in the late 1970s: young high school boys, in the midst of sexual
discovery, would practise erotic auto-asphyxiation, sometimes dying as a result. Trinity Towers
was exhibited in a 2011 solo exhibition at Hauser & Wirth, London, from which it was acquired for
the David Roberts Collection, together with a group of Applebroog’s performances from 1977. The
piece was also part of the inaugural exhibition at DRAF’s Camden space, A House Of Leaves. First
Movement (29 September – 10 November 2012).
TWO ADDITIONAL WORKS have been lent from Hauser & Wirth, London, for the exhibition Albert the
Kid is Ghosting. Untitled (woman lying in bed) and the diptych Mercy Hospital, both from 1982 are
respectively ink and acrylic and rhoplex on vellum.
STUDY
THE BLINDS PULLED HALFWAY DOWN appear as two blocks of white space – no – the two blocks of
white space appear as blinds pulled halfway down. They could be screens for projection, the classroom
kind that the teacher pulls down over the writing-board. They dominate the diptych. It’s a diptych of
two white rectangles with some incidental figures.
THERE HAS TO BE A SKY for everything to happen under: the men, the women, the mother and the
father, the hospitals and bus stops, the journeys and text messages. There has to be some blank, high
place for the conditions to emerge from, the weather system and the gender system, the racial system
and the transport system.
THE BLANKS OR BLINDS DOMINATE THE EYE. They present back to the eye its blindness. Did you
think there was something to see here? The blinds are trompe-l’oeil nothings, fake pauses. They throw
back upon the eye the very small scandal of the eye’s desire to see. They are gluey surfaces that kill
flies by trapping them.
ALL BREAKS OR SWERVES IN THE LINEAR UNFOLDING OF TIME – all images – can be
overwritten by the will of a different time, as I am doing here, writing myself into the diptych. An
image is itself a kind of weird bunching-up of time, like a scab forming on a scratch. I am writing at
a time that names itself ‘crisis’. When I read the news online, the word repeats almost as densely as
it did around 2008. Illiquid markets had to be supplemented by infusions of black-market money, of
the informal and criminalised trades that subtend the legal, sanctioned appearance of exchange. The
outside, which structures the inside, or delimits what inside is, flowed in to reassert the distinguishing
boundaries. The man in suit and tie takes off his suit after a tough day administering disaster. The
trivia of his evening and weekend life – ‘family’ or ‘household’ or ‘sex’ – is the pretext for the disaster’s
continuance, and the grand disaster of The World is made a pretext for the necessity of this smaller
error, of the woman lying and the man standing, of the window in a window in a window.
THE TWO SHEETS OF VELLUM PRESS on this weird distinction between outside/inside, first displayed
in 1980 in the window at Printed Matter in New York, that hideously thrilling city where it felt like
a person could fall forever into a shiny new abyss – “a hellhole with sparkles,” said my friend the
artist Devin Kenny1. It is claiming too much for the image of a man in a single instance of the act of
shrugging off his jacket, that he has come home from tilling the market, from coaxing evil out of the
arid ground – but images are illiquid too and have to be made wet with illegal operations.
1
Kevin Denny (b.1987, Chicago) is an interdisciplinary artist, writer, musician and independent curator based in New York.
IN THE RHETORIC OF THIS NEW CRISIS, people and water become one, the flood of ‘too much’,
the Ark of whiteness. This crisis, rhetorically, reportedly, becomes entangled with claims and
counterclaims on empathy – with failures of empathy, with the limits of empathy, with the triumph of
empathy, with the mechanisms of empathy: feeling sad for someone else’s sadness. Why not as much
joy for the triumphant global hustler as sadness for the drowned? Where does desire or pleasure
go, in this taxonomy of misery? What passes for empathy is often more like voyeurism, but perhaps
the voyeur is a better model for solidarity than the empath, because the voyeur knows how to take
pleasure in pleasure that isn’t hers. Empathy is sodden and heavy, but the voyeur can surf lightly
on the desire of others, can wear the gap between self and other like a crown. The photojournalist
reproduces relations of power under the guise of only representing them; the pornographer, on the
other hand, aims to implicate, to leave no neutral position. The artist looks for the impasse, I think, of
her own desire.
A MAN SITS HEAVILY IN A CHAIR, and another man stands and takes off his jacket. A woman lies
down and looks up at him. These are the archetypes. Their class position is implied by the redundant
curtains. Their racial position is implied by everything. Beyond that, anything can be imagined.
And yet both the blank screen or blind or space or gap and the man/woman resist projections; any
imaginative power is arrested by the crude lines, which, like the blankness of the blind, seem to want
to mock or shame the effort to find something within the image, to dig into the shiny banality of the
vellum. The suited man and the woman under a blanket who turns her head to talk to him – they are
50% made up of blankness, the blankness of archetype, into which gender is at all times threatening
to dissolve.
IF THE VOYEUR IS AMORAL, it is because looking is amoral, and if looking is amoral it is because the
regulative function of morality is more demonstrative than real. “Thou shalt not” describes what
happens more than it indicates what should not happen: if it’s forbidden to look, it’s because people
are looking. If an image charges us with voyeurism then it also invites us to enjoy.
AND YET IT’S THE GAPS THAT DRAW THE EYE, that become the eye’s own blankness, slightly awry
twins, imperfect copies. The small melodrama of seeing is less interesting here than the image’s selfreproach. The blinds impugn not the eye’s sight but the artist’s will; they ironise the images’ libidinal
investment/disinvestment/reinvestment in the dry-as-dust figures of Man and Woman, of Ordinary
Citizens. The outside invades as a flood, and the gaze as a creeping wetness, because the inside is bone
dry.
THE WOMAN COVERS HERSELF; the man uncovers. The woman is always uncovered, even when fully
clothed or lying beneath a blanket, she is always available to sight. Things that are always there are
hard to see. In New York I looked into my idea of my gender, as if through the window of a body; I
searched for the meaning or the impulse towards self-determination that I was supposed to find there,
under the rubble of socialisation, the rubble of the fantasised integral baby-self. But it turned out
there was no kernel of self – there was only the clichéd diptych of Man/Woman, the kitsch of Mother/
Father, the desert of White/Black. Images make this a commonplace: whatever seems a screen
obscuring truth is itself the truth, the truth of obscurity: there is nothing really ‘behind’ the blind, no
hidden genital presence, and beneath the blind is also a kind of blindness, the blindness of character.
THE IMPLICATION that the viewer might also be a voyeur invokes an extra erotic charge to the tableaux
depicted, a charge that it then denies: there is no revelation. Even knowing this, I allow myself to be
seduced so that I can later be rejected. I imagine someone else’s experience so that I can come back to
my own. These experiences are not sufficiently separate to be compared; they take place in the same
world and are linked by intricate processes of history, production, reproduction, domination...
I IMAGINE LEAVING with no hope of return. When events unfold in time, they seem ‘natural’ and
continuous; it’s only later, when you have left the lost city, that the things you experienced there
reveal themselves as a disjunctive mess, and then you understand, in a way, retrospectively, what you
have experienced. You understand that your experience, as it happened, was in some way lacking. It
was lacking its future reflexivity. It was lacking its own loss. Sometimes you cry, and other times you
laugh.
THE DIPTYCH ADMITS NO PROGRESS, no reciprocity. It draws associations into it – couple,
businessman, family, threat – like tarmac draws in heat. They lie flat, without movement. The woman
is fixed in a gesture of self-covering, or always absent, and the sky is fixed above her presence or
absence, starless and blank. When she looks back or in or through, she will not find herself.
Hannah Black
Hannah Black is an artist and writer from the UK. She lives in Berlin. She graduated from Goldsmiths in
2013 and was a studio participant on the Whitney ISP in New York from 2013 to 2014. Current and
recent exhibitions include Not You, opening at Arcadia Missa on 2 October 2015, and group shows at
Yarat in Baku, Azerbaijan and at Chateau Shatto in LA. She is working on a book for Martine Syms’
imprint Dominica, scheduled to be published in January 2016.
SELECTED IMAGES
Independence Plaza (diptych), 1979-80. David Roberts Collection, London.
Independence Plaza (diptych), 1979-80. Exhibition view, Poetry & Performance:
Ida Applebroog, Henri Chopin and Gina Pane Richard Saltoun Gallery, London.
7 Lispenard Street, Window installation by Ida Applebroog
(1980). Photo by Nancy Linn. Printed Matter.
Silent Stagings. Invite for exhibition, Ronald Feldman Fine Arts.
Sure I’m sure, Dyspepsia Works, 1979.
Trinity Towers, 1982. David Roberts Art Collection, London.
Installation View. Man Ray, Le Gant Perdu (The Lost Glove), 1967-1968; Ida Applebroog,
Trinity Towers, 1982. David Roberts Collection, London.
Untitled (woman lying in bed), 1982. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth, Zurich.
Mercy Hospital, 1982. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth, Zurich.
CONDITION REPORT
David Roberts Art Foundation
Symes Mews
London
NW1 7JE
Condition
Report
16th September 2015
Artwork
“1979-80, Independent Plaza” (Diptych)
Ink and Rhoplex on vellum, 220 x 160 cm, Framed
Condition
In general the paintings are in good condition. The paintings have been
unwrapped recently after having been in storage for a long time.
The packing materials were tissue paper and bubble wrap. (fig.1 painting 1
and 2).
The artist has used rich resinous medium and ink onto a vellum. The vellum
of both artworks have been given additional support by having had sailcloth
strip lining having been attached to the edges which in turn has been
attached to a panel of Rhoplex.
Around the edges of both artworks the undulation of the vellum surface is
clearly visible (fig.2). Numerous small residues of the wrapping paper are still
attached to the surface and can be seen throughout both artworks, except
on the central areas of white paint.
On painting No.1 there is a horizontal area of flaking paint and varnish just
by the bottom left edge. This is stable and is not in danger of delaminating
(fig.3). There is a small hole on the bottom-left area (86 cm from the bottom
and 3 cm from the left side) and a loss of red paint, right hand side (170 cm
from the bottom and 7 cm from the right edge). There is an abrasion on the
left (138 cm from the bottom and 5 cm from the left edge).
On painting No.2 there is a loss of red paint, left hand side (16 cm from the
bottom and 14 cm from the left edge). Upper left corner there are two areas
of loss to the original surface through which one can see the sailcloth strip
lining (fig. 4).
Otherwise the paintings are generally in good condition.
Frame
VAT Number
The frames are box-like, matt white, and are in good condition.
Please make cheques payable to:
Simon Gillespie Ltd
For online payments, please use:
Simon Gillespie Studio Ltd
Account: 19 16 97 68
Sort code: 77 91 30
For international payments:
IBAN: GB53 LOYD 77 91 30 19 16 97 68
BIC: LOYDGB21J31
Simon Gillespie Studio
104 New Bond Street
London W1S 1SU
info@simongillespie.com
+44 (0)20 7493 3900
simongillespie.com
Treatment
The undulations of the Vellum are inherent to its nature. Vellum is extremely
sensitive to changes in Relative Humidity and will contract and expand as its
environment changes. We would not therefore be able to improve the
topography of the surface, however, we would recommend that to prevent
future cracking or excessive undulation that the work be kept in a stable
environment away from direct sunlight.
Further to testing the artworks in the studio, we would be able to remove the
paper remnants on the surface of the artworks left by the packaging and
retouch these areas to reduce the disturbance in the varnish layers. This
would greatly improve the surface of the work and prevent these raised
areas from collecting dust and dirt in the future.
The losses to the painted surface would be filled and retouched using a
conservation grade varnish and dry pigments. The small losses to the
vellum at the top left edge can be filled and retouched to hide the sailcloth
strip lining.
Cost
VAT Number
£1,200 + VAT and Transport
Please make cheques payable to:
Simon Gillespie Ltd
For online payments, please use:
Simon Gillespie Studio Ltd
Account: 19 16 97 68
Sort code: 77 91 30
For international payments:
IBAN: GB53 LOYD 77 91 30 19 16 97 68
BIC: LOYDGB21J31
Simon Gillespie Studio
104 New Bond Street
London W1S 1SU
info@simongillespie.com
+44 (0)20 7493 3900
simongillespie.com
Fig.1: Painting 1, painting 2
Fig.2
VAT Number
Please make cheques payable to:
Simon Gillespie Ltd
For online payments, please use:
Simon Gillespie Studio Ltd
Account: 19 16 97 68
Sort code: 77 91 30
For international payments:
IBAN: GB53 LOYD 77 91 30 19 16 97 68
BIC: LOYDGB21J31
Simon Gillespie Studio
104 New Bond Street
London W1S 1SU
info@simongillespie.com
+44 (0)20 7493 3900
simongillespie.com
Fig. 3
Fig.4
VAT Number
Please make cheques payable to:
Simon Gillespie Ltd
For online payments, please use:
Simon Gillespie Studio Ltd
Account: 19 16 97 68
Sort code: 77 91 30
For international payments:
IBAN: GB53 LOYD 77 91 30 19 16 97 68
BIC: LOYDGB21J31
Simon Gillespie Studio
104 New Bond Street
London W1S 1SU
info@simongillespie.com
+44 (0)20 7493 3900
simongillespie.com
ABOUT
DRAF (David Roberts Art Foundation) is an independent, non-profit space for contemporary art in London
founded in 2007. It is directed and curated by Vincent Honoré. DRAF presents an international programme
of exhibitions, commissions, live events, discussions and projects. DRAF is located at Symes Mews, 37
Camden High Street, Mornington Crescent, London NW1 7JE.
The David Roberts Art Foundation Limited is a registered charity in England and Wales (No.1119738). It is
proudly supported by the Edinburgh House Estates group of companies.
For more information see www.davidrobertsartfoundation.com
ADDRESS
DRAF
Symes Mews
London NW1 7JE
+44 (0)20 7383 3004
The nearest tube stations are Mornington Crescent and Camden Town.
DRAF is a 15 minute walk from Kings Cross St. Pancras.
Buses: 24, 27, 29, 88, 134, 168, 214, 253
OPENING TIMES
Thu - Sat, 12 - 6 pm
Tue - Wed by appointment
FREE ADMISSION