Bibliography

Preface

Billy Apple®: Life/Work is the first sustained study of the artist known as Billy Apple. Drawing extensively on Apple’s substantial archive, this book takes readers on a journey from New Zealand to England to the United States and back to New Zealand through six tumultuous decades to explore the artist’s unfolding practice. While this is a story about one artist, it offers insights into the larger history of art to which Apple contributed. Therefore, to read this account is to engage with the cosmopolitan scenes and major art movements that have shaped the second half of the twentieth and first quarter of the twenty-first centuries in three distinct but interconnected locations. Because of my focus, the book aims to complement and critique mainstream narratives that more generally survey the period. It does not simply insert Apple into their accounts, but offers its own eccentric path through the times. Thus, Apple’s contributions to the histories of pop and conceptual art are acknowledged, but the book offers a more complex version that situates these categories in relation to less-travelled territory, throwing light on lesser-known art movements, making unexpected connections between art scenes and cultural practices, and bringing art together with other disciplines, technologies and systems. Within this, I seek out threads and through-lines which tap the artist’s deeper motivations that are tied up with his decision to change his name and operate as a new kind of artistic subject.

Bracketing six chronological chapters, the book’s prologue and epilogue stand apart from and frame the trajectory of Apple’s story. The prologue examines his warehouse in Auckland as a key to understanding the artist and his modus operandi, but also to make transparent my own process as the artist’s chronicler. In counterpoint to the discreet scene of Apple’s warehouse, the epilogue takes his several public presentations in 2015 that define him as an artistic subject keenly tuned to the semiotics of display in myriad scenes of consumption across every niche of Auckland’s cultural ecosystem. I conclude with some reflections on his contribution to the history of art as I see it as a scholar based in New Zealand in the second decade of the twenty-first century. The publication is finally supplemented by a complete exhibition history and a select bibliography, both of which are intended to serve as authoritative resources for students and scholars.

This book has been years in the making. It is the culmination of a long working relationship with the artist since the mid-1980s, when I embarked on a master’s thesis documenting post-object art in New Zealand in the 1970s and discovered Billy Apple’s two tours of New Zealand in 1975 and 1979–80, which produced exemplary instances of the kinds of dematerialised and ephemeral practices I was then trying to document.¹ The fact that Apple was based in New York during this decade was one I understood at the time, but made little of, other than to align him with the ways in which post-object art created the conditions for a more open and permeable system whereby artists could move between locations unburdened by the ‘weight’ and preciousness of painting or sculpture, forming connections with like-minded artists in the late twentieth century’s first global art network. This global network I understood to be the first of many post-nationalist ventures. I did not know the artist then, but came to his practice through the advice of my supervisor Tony Green, and via the rich archival resources of the Elam School of Fine Arts Library at the University of Auckland and the E. H. McCormick Research Library at Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, and the surprisingly good published literature, most of it penned by Apple’s long-time collaborator Wystan Curnow.

I met the artist around 1990 and, as an assistant curator, I helped realise his touring exhibition As Good as Gold: Billy Apple Art Transactions 1981–1991 at Auckland City Art Gallery, which gave me insights into how the artist worked with people and spaces. By the early 2000s I was teaching art history at Victoria University of Wellington, and my accounts of the history of contemporary New Zealand art always included Apple as a crucial figure. A turning point came when Apple proposed that I curate an exhibition pairing his work with that of Frances Hodgkins, an idea spurred by his identification with Hodgkins as someone else, in an earlier period, who had left New Zealand for Britain to become a modern artist. The Expatriates: Frances Hodgkins and Barrie Bates (2005) was staged at the Adam Art Gallery Te Pātaka Toi, Victoria University of Wellington, and toured to the Gus Fisher Gallery at the University of Auckland. This exhibition presented the little-known work of Apple’s earliest period, after he left New Zealand in 1959 up to the moment he changed his name from Barrie Bates in 1962 to reinvent himself in London, and paired this with the better-known works by Hodgkins similarly produced after she left Dunedin in 1901 and up to 1913, when she decided not to return to her homeland. The exhibition explored the condition of expatriatism, seeking in the selected works traces of the traumatic effects of leaving home. It ended up also as a response to nationalist historians who had trouble accommodating artists who left the country or who would not fit the rubric they had made for the ‘New Zealand artist’.

From there, Apple became a constant companion in my thinking and in my work. I developed my ideas about the implications of his name change and tracked its effect on the works he produced in London and New York in essays for journals and exhibition catalogues, and offered my services in the organisation of his extensive archive, with the longer view of preparing a monograph and retrospective. This was in about 2002. Since then, it has been a pleasure to see Apple’s work slowly achieve some of the recognition it deserves under new global conditions. International curators have begun to pay attention, showcasing his work in solo projects and including him in major surveys of pop and conceptual art. Apple has secured an established dealer in London to broker the return of his early works to the centres where they were produced, and the substantial exhibition at Auckland Art Gallery in 2015 was one of the culminating achievements of our long relationship and an opportunity to present the full panoply of his practice to audiences in the town where he was born.

I began writing this book in 2011. I am grateful to Victoria University of Wellington for study leave and research grants as I have worked towards its completion. I am even more grateful to the artist and his partner, Mary Morrison. They have been both patient and helpful, providing information and images, correcting me when I have got the story wrong, letting me come up with my own insights and conclusions, and, literally, giving me the keys to the warehouse, where I have spent many happy hours working to the backdrop of the workaday goings-on in the industrial complex where Apple’s archive is housed. I must also thank two crucial mentors. Tony Green, my art-history professor and active participant in the evolution of post-object art in Auckland, who put me on the track of the research that has become the foundation of my work as an art historian and curator. And Wystan Curnow, himself an expert on Billy Apple and much else that informs my thinking about contemporary art, who graciously gave me the space to come up with my own version of the artist’s history, and provided many hours of conversation, without which I would be far more ignorant of the times he and Apple have lived through, which I have had to reconstruct as a historian.

Beyond this the list of acknowledgements is extensive. If I have not named you personally, this is only because of my own faulty processes. Thanks to my art-history colleagues at Victoria University and my workmates at the Adam Art Gallery for hosting Billy and Mary on their many visits, taking the artist’s calls, letting him use the photocopier, and listening to me as my thinking evolved. I am grateful, too, for research assistance from several students: Laura Campbell, Mia Gaudin, Robin Murphy, Matt Plummer and Millie Singh, and especially Emma Fenton who assisted with reproduction requests and copyright. Thanks to Creative New Zealand Toi Aotearoa and to Fulbright New Zealand for providing funds for projects and for travel. I am very grateful to the staff of libraries, archives, museums, galleries and journals where I have accessed information and sourced images: Auckland Art Gallery, Elam School of Fine Arts, Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, Andy Warhol Museum, Archives of American Art (Washington), Museum of Modern Art, New Museum (New York), Whitney Museum of American Art, Archives of the Arts Council of Great Britain, Royal College of Art (London), Tate Britain, Art New Zealand and Hamish McKay (Wellington), among others. I have made every endeavour to contact copyright holders. If any have slipped my net I hope they will reach out to the publisher so they can be acknowledged in future reprints or editions of this book.

I am grateful to many individuals who have provided support, advice, information and images, either directly to me, or indirectly by offering assistance to the artist: Catherine Ambury, Jim Barr, Mary Barr, Ben Birillo Jr, René Block, Jeanette Budgett, Gregory Burke, Rex Butler, Anthony Byrt, Erl Chesterman, Trish Clark, Stephen Cleland, Sue Crockford, David Cross, Thomas Crow, Rhana Devenport, Tom Dignan, Claire Doherty, Daniel Du Bern, Dominic Feuchs, Blair French, Jennifer French, Zoë Gray, Catherine Hammond, Ross Jenner, Paul Johns, Christopher Kelly, Robert Leonard, Jeanne Macaskill, Caroline McBride, John McCormack, Terry Maitland, Richard Maloy, John Maynard, James Mayor, Marcus Moore, Ryan Moore, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Leanne Pooley, Francis Pound, Nicolaus Schafhausen, Sara Seagull, Terry Smith, Zara Stanhope, Robert Thomson, Robyn Tisman, Jenny Todd, Jill Trevelyan, Ian Wedde, Misal Adnan Yıldız, and others who should be listed here but I have simply not remembered.

To the anonymous readers who endorsed my writing, and the several individuals who read early versions, I thank you for your advice and feedback. I am enormously grateful to Auckland University Press for agreeing to publish this book, especially to Sam Elworthy for his enthusiasm and patience. I acknowledge the professionalism of the team at AUP, and am grateful for the support and assistance of Katharina Bauer, Sophia Broom, Matt Turner and Mike Wagg, for the beautiful design by Arch MacDonnell and Alexandra Turner at Inhouse, and the additional photography by Jennifer French and Mary Morrison.

To realise this ambitious project we have also sought and received financial assistance from a number of generous donors. I am extremely grateful to Jennie Hu, Rob Gardiner and Sue Gardiner, James Mayor, Fabio Rossi, John McCormack and Dominic Feuchs, and Christopher Swasbrook.

Finally, thank you to my family for letting Billy become part of the furniture.

1 Post-object art is the term now widely used in New Zealand to describe the often ephemeral, temporary and site-specific practices that evolved as a new, expanded field for contemporary art in the 1960s and 1970s. Though surviving as texts, photographs and videotapes, this mode of working was considered ‘post-object’ in that emphasis was placed on the idea rather than the object, and on processes rather than products. The modernist idea of art’s ‘autonomy’ was replaced with a new awareness of the role of context in the production of meaning. For further explanation of this term in a New Zealand context see Christina Barton, ‘Post-object and Contemporary Art’, Te Ara – the Encyclopedia of New Zealand, https://teara.govt.nz/en/post-object-and-conceptual-art, accessed November 2019.

Matter Transformation: Glass, Earth, Stone, 1971, process-piece with Geoffrey Hendricks and Jerry Vis, Pomona, New York, 35 mm colour slide (photo: Jerry Vis), Billy Apple® Archive

Prologue

Unpacking the Warehouse

Unpacking the Warehouse

The analysis of the archive, then, involves a privileged region: at once close to us, and different from our present existence, it is the border of time that surrounds our presence, which overhangs it, and which indicates it in its otherness; it is that which, outside ourselves, delimits us.¹

—Michel Foucault

What you should do is get a box for a month, and drop everything in it and at the end of the month lock it up. Then date it and send it over to New Jersey. You should try to keep track of it, but if you lose it, that’s fine, because it’s one less thing to think about, another load off your mind.²

—Andy Warhol

But my other outlook is that I really want to save things so they can be used again someday.³

—Andy Warhol

I must make of him not a spectacle but a pair of spectacles.⁴

—C. S. Lewis

Billy Apple’s warehouse in Auckland is where he stores his art works and everything related to them. Because he never throws anything away this is a crucial repository; its contents constitute his life’s work. I have spent many hours there, drawing on its resources as the raw material from which this account has been reconstructed. The obdurate bulk and the sheer comprehensiveness of this archive-in-waiting speak volumes of the extent and seriousness of Apple’s project, while its organisation reveals much about the nature of his working methods. It is the fitting starting point for this narrative, as the material ground from which my story unfolds, but also as the source and destination of all that goes into and comes out of Apple’s work. The nature of this space and the way the artist uses it provide vital clues to the structures that condition and define his practice and to the deeper drives that motivate him. The warehouse is a private site, the hidden ‘other’ to the subject the world knows as ‘Billy Apple’. All the more reason to unpack it.

Apple’s warehouse is in a complex of light-industrial buildings on a commercial cul-de-sac in the shadow of Mount Wellington in east Auckland. The unit is a simple concrete-block box with high stud, steel-beamed ceiling pierced by three long skylights, and large roller door giving onto a forecourt shared with neighbouring tenants. Visitors enter through a door that opens into a short corridor leading past a small room that would normally serve as a front office (now piled with materials and possessions), through a second door into the main space, where the bulk of Apple’s effects are variously arranged. This area is bisected lengthwise by a single row of filing cabinets. On the right side of these, running the full length of the building, is an assortment of racing cars and Grand Prix motorbikes, together with all the paraphernalia needed for their maintenance; testament to a lifelong passion for motorsport, a whole other social, professional and technical world in which he has immersed himself. To the left of the filing cabinets, and taking up nearly two-thirds of the interior, is the area devoted to Apple’s art production. This is subdivided by two rows of shelving placed across the space towards the back of the building. On each of these are stacked assorted boxes, folders, cardboard tubes, piled sheets of outsized paper and rolled canvases. To the immediate left of the inner door there is a kitchen bench, stove and fridge. These line the outer edge of the ceilinged ‘box’ beside which one enters, the top of which serves as further storage space for empty containers and household belongings. Between the ‘kitchen’ and the first set of shelves the floor is piled with containers: plastic bins and bags, cartons, file boxes and bundled papers. These are lined on one side by a row of trestle tables that runs parallel to the filing cabinets and on the other by two sets of plan chests that are placed against the wall. Between the first set of shelves and the second is an area filled with large wooden crates and cartons, many of which still sport the labels they wore when Apple brought all his possessions back from America. Two of the largest crates have never been properly unpacked; when I first visited, one was completely covered with jars, tubes, tools, and various other items gathered over the years. Three of the four walls are lined with stretchers leaning two or three deep, and stacked crates, mostly covered in old sheets; those that have not been disturbed for some time (especially along the end wall) are coated in fine, powdery dust. Every flat surface has items carefully laid out on it: piles of paper (newspapers, correspondence, art gallery notices, photocopies, magazines and articles), neatly arranged tools, art works in transit, material samples, and packages that have been delivered but which have not yet found a place on the shelves or in the cabinets. When no one is in the warehouse these surfaces are also draped in sheets, so that the interior seems both full and still, a scene of waiting and accumulation rather than an active workplace.

Apple bought the building in 1990 with the lease rebate he received from the owners of his loft at 311 Church Street in Tribeca, New York. Given the range and extent of his possessions (his art and advertising work and his car and motorcycle collection) it was necessary to have something larger than a domestic dwelling, a place that was affordable, secure, discreet and close to the mechanics, tradespeople and suppliers he works with. Over the years, the warehouse’s contents have swelled, not only as his production of art works has advanced, but also as his personal circumstances have changed. Now household possessions, an extensive collection of ceramics acquired with Mary Morrison (his partner since 1998), and all manner of paperwork associated with his day-to-day affairs butt up against art works and their material supports. There was a time when Apple contemplated living here and even had architect Ross Jenner draw up plans to create a living area. But that prospect has faded and now he visits the place only as he needs to, usually to extract something to be re-presented or referred to in the ongoing evolution of and reflection upon his practice. The warehouse is some distance – especially in Auckland’s traffic – from where he lives in the inner-city suburb of Mount Eden, its tree-lined streets, volcanic rock walls and renovated Victorian villas a world away from the industrial hinterlands, encroaching ‘new towns’ and commercial bustle of the spreading city.

The artist’s warehouse, Saint Johns, Auckland, 2020 (photos: Jennifer French)

Despite the seeming disorder, Apple has an intimate knowledge of what the warehouse contains; it might be his lock-up, where he can safely put things out of his mind (as Andy Warhol would have it), but it is also a living resource constantly being rifled through, rearranged and reissued. Its organisation – at least until recently – follows a personal logic that does not conform to any structured archival system. A desire to preserve is obvious (the building is watertight; a vacuum cleaner, broom and cleaning agents are visible presences; items are wrapped and safely stowed; and at least some works have been placed in archival boxes). Even so, a make-do attitude prevails, in which a host of materials are recommissioned for storage purposes: the file cabinets and the shelves were salvaged from other workplaces, and packaging (Kodak, Agfa, Fuji and Ricoh photographic paper boxes; waxed cardboard pallets used to transport fresh fish; boxes for wine and ROH racing-car wheels; even polystyrene containers used by hospitals) is repurposed to house Apple’s records. No plastic bag, envelope, slide box, carton, packing material or crate is ever discarded; meanwhile, design proofs, product samples, stationery, art supplies, test pots and the like are carefully accumulated. There is even a rich array of what the artist calls ‘research material’, which consists of all manner of apples: three-dimensional (fake and ornamental) and pictorial (images used in advertising, on packaging and in publications). And this is quite beside the actual works of art and all the materials that go into their making, presentation, documentation and reception.

In addition to the idiosyncratic order imposed by the artist through his methods of collection, storage and arrangement, there are signs of more systematic efforts to organise the space: boxes are labelled by hand and grouped by size, there has been some attempt to organise areas chronologically and to separate personal possessions from art-related matter, photographs and slides have been assembled together, and in some cases vintage items have been wrapped in acid-free tissue. Most especially the drawers of the filing cabinets have each been assigned a year, with the sequence starting in 1960, inside which can be found assorted materials documenting Apple’s output, including newspapers, magazines and art journals in which reviews or commentary have been published; catalogues and correspondence relating to exhibitions; photographs documenting work; working notes; and other sundry items, now arranged chronologically. The contents of these cabinets were first sorted and inventoried by Erl Chesterman, who made contact with Apple in the mid-1990s while researching his master’s thesis on Apple’s advertising work, and offered, after completing his art-history degree in 1999, to help the artist sort his possessions into some more coherent arrangement.

Mary Morrison has been instrumental in assisting this sorting process and her handwriting is evident on many of the boxes. She also maintains his digital archive and conducts all his correspondence, as well as ensuring that the more recent material is sorted and boxed at source, rather than retrospectively. I, too, have helped, since my work with the artist began in earnest in 2002 and the process of Apple’s historicisation began. This activity would suggest that the warehouse is no longer simply a storage space for Apple’s possessions, nor a packing house for goods received and awaiting despatch. It is part-way to becoming an archive, where the historical value of its contents is beginning to be acknowledged. This is a critical juncture, one ripe for interpretation as a means to document and understand the cycle (through conception, production, presentation, documentation and preservation) that structures the life of Apple’s art works, and as a lens on what drives the artist in practical, artistic and psychological terms. Access to this essentially private site is the art historian’s goldmine.⁵

In August 2011, as a means to understand this raw profusion, I opened a single box at random and compiled a preliminary inventory of its contents. The results were instructive. The ROH box labelled ‘Pie Charts and Bar Graphs + Apple’s Blend 1996–1997’ could be thought of as a synecdoche for the warehouse as a whole, its contents a tiny clue to the complex nature of Apple’s hoarding. In it I found a typical miscellany of items, carefully grouped together in used envelopes that were in turn nested in other envelopes or larger containers. As signalled by the writing on the box’s exterior, this arbitrary sample contained material relating to a set of projects the artist completed in 1996–97, notably various exhibitions of his Pie Charts and Bar Graphs, at Gregory Flint Gallery in Auckland and Hamish McKay Gallery in Wellington, and a particularly convivial project staged at 23A, a gallery off Queen Street in downtown Auckland, that invited an audience to share ‘free coffee and conversation’ with the artist and well-known café owner and coffee roaster Craig Miller, the coffee in question being made from a blend of beans selected by the artist in proportions based on the golden ratio, to be sold as ‘Apple’s Blend’.

Taking just this last project as a typical example, the box contains an A4 envelope (recycled from New Zealand Pension Plans Ltd) on which Apple has written three names: Craig Miller, Allan Smith (then curator at City Gallery Wellington) and John Collie. Inside this are other envelopes: a brown one with a handwritten inscription (‘5871E’); one from Telecom full of printed invitations to the 23A exhibition; another from Auckland city, this time addressed to Billy Apple, containing a fragment of yet another envelope (printed with a pale red stamp that presumably was made to brand the bags of coffee beans with Apple’s Blend: The Divine Proportion); and a handful of printed business cards with details of the blend and information about the gallery. Complementing these items that clearly document the exhibition, but located elsewhere in the box, are various materials relating to the golden ratio, that ‘divine’ proportion Apple has consistently used to structure his work. These are collated with another set of documents relating to an invitation from Jane Sanders at Artis Gallery for Apple to develop a design for a handcrafted rug to be produced by Dilana Rugs of Christchurch, a project that obviously consumed Apple for some time in 1995–96 (there is a raft of notes and drawings that show the artist toying with options devolving from geometrical variations of the golden section and ideas that play on the notion of sweeping something ‘under the rug’).⁶ Likewise, there is another bundle of documents that appear to relate to a barter with Craig Miller, which shows the artist developing the graphics for this transaction, calculating the proportions, and thinking about ways to represent the beans specific to his mix (here he experiments with the colours of the flags of the three countries – Colombia, Kenya and Papua New Guinea – from which the coffee is sourced), all written up in note form on various surfaces: envelopes, notepad pages, even paper napkins. But no project is clearly demarcated, for this box also contains other clues to Apple’s activities, including a notice for a two-day historic race meet at Pukekohe, a coloured drawing for a Pie Chart on the back of a flyer for a gold-plating firm, sketches for other transactions and business cards. And so on.

‘Pie Charts and Bar Graphs + Apple’s Blend 1996–1997’, ROH box in the artist’s warehouse, 2020, two views (photos: Jennifer French)

This one box contains more than the material pertaining to the exhibitions listed on its exterior. Indeed, on close examination it has items relating to projects dating back to 1992 (an envelope of photographs showing Apple wheeling one of his racing bikes into the Auckland City Art Gallery, with a film crew – the reporter Dylan Tait appears in one image – just prior to the opening of the touring exhibition As Good as Gold: Billy Apple Art Transactions, 1981–1991), and tracking forward to 2001 with the inclusion of an invitation to Billy Apple in Idaho, a show at Sue Crockford Gallery in Auckland in May and June that year. It also contains drawings and notes referring to unrelated projects (there are handwritten lists recording various shows the artist undertook both in New Zealand and in Australia, as well as photographs, slides, invitation cards and press clippings to some of these), and preparatory material for projects that were in development but which may or may not have been later realised. Particularly interesting here are drawings for a site-specific landscape design for art patrons Alan and Jenny Gibbs, titled Prospects (1996) and featuring trees, stream and path, for their rural property on the Kaipara Harbour north of Auckland; and coloured drawings of sets of stepped rectangles that present the golden section in three dimensions as a series of ascending stairs, which would much later take shape as the public art work at Monkey Hill Reserve near Eden Park Stadium (realised in 2008) and which the artist proposed for a revamp of Khartoum Place, a public square in the cultural precinct of central Auckland. What’s more, traces of these realised projects, and their unrealised neighbours, are also stored in other parts of the warehouse; finished Pie Charts are kept in flat photographic boxes on different sections of the shelving, and the filing cabinets also contain press clippings and invitation cards and other related items.

The contents of this box, therefore, attest to a complex, evolving and multidimensional working process that shows the artist interacting constantly with people (suppliers and manufacturers, gallery owners, curators and patrons) and contexts (public and dealer galleries, artist-run spaces, private homes, public sites, commercial premises) and shifting his attention backwards and forwards in time. Finished projects exist in and emerge from a continuum that tracks from initial idea (manifesting as fleeting sketch, mathematical calculation, research into appropriate materials and telephone conversations), through presentation (the design of invitation cards and associated publications, the layout of works in specific sites), to documentation (slides and photographs, reviews and press). While every artist would accumulate items such as these, it is unusual to find such a fascination for process, whereby the material residue of every stage is granted equal status and obsessively saved without the imposition of clear divisions between preparatory drawing, ancillary design work and finished product – and this in the context of Apple’s avowedly conceptual practice (that is, one where the idea is privileged over its material realisation).

To the professional archivist the contents of this box and the warehouse in which it is stored present a problem to be sorted, the temptation being to categorically map Apple’s exhibition history and collate all material relating to each project carefully together, establishing some system that enables intellectual control over the process of production. Likewise, the historian would be inclined to get the chronology straight by removing items that don’t fit the time frame; while the art historian would want to clarify which works were realised and their current whereabouts, privileging these above others that are unresolved or which never made it past the conceptual phase, as well as uplifting items that could be elevated to the status of original ‘drawings’, which could be commodified as sketches for the final art works. But this would destroy something integral to Apple’s method, obliterating the connecting threads that, woven together, map his mental operations as they track between past, present and future, and skewing the story to smooth out the development of an oeuvre by ignoring how all this activity fits into the wider social milieus in which he is embedded. In other words, this exuberant confusion can be read, before a more rational system is imposed upon it, as the scene where the artist and his art work are, in Foucault’s term, ‘delimited’; we can understand Apple through it.

If you wipe a dirty spot off a wall you’ve removed it, but you haven’t eliminated it. You’re stuck with a dirty rag you didn’t have before.

⁷

—Billy Apple

Four Activities: Washing, 1971, silver gelatin print, 155 × 240 mm (photo: Jerry Vis), Billy Apple® Archive

Billy Apple™ Frieze, 2008, computer-cut vinyl, installed at Hamish McKay, Wellington (photo: Mary Morrison)

As I see it, the crux of the warehouse is this: when we see Apple’s art on public display, we are invariably struck by its clinical refinement and cool impersonality: his exhibitions always consist of no more than a few perfectly finished items carefully presented in pristine conditions. Even when he is not making tangible art works, his activities, alterations and endorsements generally entail physical or visual cleansing. Yet behind this, before and after it, there is a space full of stuff that mires Apple’s efforts in humdrum processes that generate all manner of material by-products. By not wishing (or being unable) to let this go, Apple may inadvertently be manifesting the contradictions of conceptualism’s claims to pure immateriality. But more importantly, I see this undisclosed dichotomy as a clue to the fundamental pathos of Apple’s modus operandi. Though blurring the boundaries between art and life has been his stated strategy, in point of fact, Apple’s efforts are better defined as a perpetual attempt to subtract and simplify, to rise above and find order out of chaos, and, through this, to enable the entity ‘Billy Apple’ to function as a pure sign in ideal conditions. That this process produces a remainder, which is secreted away but obsessively held on to, is in my view key to Apple’s project, pointing to the nub of the essential dilemmas he poses about the nature of being and the limits of representation as they play out in real social conditions. This, I would suggest, is the deeper subject of the artist’s practice. The warehouse is secret witness to the severing and suturing of person and artist, physical entity and abstract sign, artefact and commodity. From this point of accumulation the artist sallies forth, putting his finished products and branded services into circulation to test their value and utility in a system that puts a price on everything. The warehouse is not simply a physical repository (as raw material to be mined), nor some key to the artist’s psyche (unlocking his innermost secrets). It operates semantically and syntactically to position Apple’s practice dialectically within temporally and spatially specific parameters.

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, a warehouse is a building used for the storage of merchandise, where property is housed for safe keeping. This is true in Apple’s case, as he does not make work in the space; for him it is neither workshop, studio, factory, shop, nor gallery – yet because this repository is integral to his practice, its meaning structurally relates to those other historically significant sites of production and consumption.

Apple belongs to a generation of artists who turned their back on the studio as privileged site of artistic creation, rejecting its links to both the craft-based traditions of fine-art production (fostered in pre-modern times in the medieval workshops of the guild system) and the romantic cliché of the singular genius sequestered from the world and alone with their imagination. Most of his work is conceived and organised as he sits at his kitchen table, with a telephone at his side.⁸ The notes, sketches and calculations he constantly produces, which are the nearest approximation to preliminary drawings, are done with little forethought and no special equipment on any scrap of paper or used envelope, more often than not as a consequence or in the process of his constant stream of conversations. The work itself is made elsewhere. It evolves in a flow chart from scratchy sketch to computer-aided design and passes through the hands and studios, workshops and business premises of Apple’s specially chosen typographer and CAD operator, stretcher-maker, signwriter, printer, die-cutter, manufacturer, framer, and so on – a range of experts, all of whom are contracted by the artist to provide their skills and services and thus guarantee the quality of the final product. This is a team approach, quite other to the normal expectations of singular creation, or even master–assistant co-manufacture. In this Apple is typical of the post-studio, post-medium artist of the contemporary era. Outsourcing is a key innovation of art after 1960. It is also normal practice in advertising, a profession Apple drew upon in the development of his working methods. By delegating the craft involved in production to others, Apple privileges the artist as the generator of ideas; freed from the mechanics of making, he has no need for a traditional studio space.

‘Research material’ in the artist’s warehouse, 2020 (photo: Jennifer French)

But unlike his near-contemporary Andy Warhol, Apple has declined to replace the studio with a ‘factory’, which was the ploy designed to puncture the pretensions of modernist originality; had he done so, he would have been actively engaged in the physical processes of making – that is, he would be working within the framework of the first industrial age, making goods by means of mechanical production. Rather, Apple is an artist of and for a post-industrial era, providing his organisational and conceptual services rather than getting his hands dirty. The warehouse is a clean distribution point, a place of incessant accumulation and transfer: it contains only finished or unrealised works and the materials utilised in their making or generated by their reception. Apple is constantly seeking and testing new materials, technologies and techniques (like the scientist or industrial designer). The samples he refers to are saved for their potential to fulfil repeat orders, thus refusing the traditionally privileged status of the ‘original’.

Further, and symptomatic of the information age in which Apple is immersed, his practice entails not just the production of art works, but also their presentation and documentation, processes that are integral rather than ancillary to his thinking. This suggests an expanded understanding of art not as discrete object but as a suite of operations that are granted meaning within a wider circulating system. Thus the warehouse contains architectural plans of an impressive array of spaces, many of which are worked over as he seeks to correct built anomalies or exploit hidden geometries. There is also design work for posters, invitations, catalogues and magazine spreads, all of which Apple has taken charge of, in the interests of extending the reach of his signature graphics. His photographic documentation is in myriad formats, from 35 mm slides to large-format transparencies, proof sheets and negatives, to carefully developed vintage black-and-white prints, most of which are ‘exhibition quality’. In keeping with the principles of conceptual art, Apple’s repository is replete with evidence that for him the work is not a self-contained and autonomous object, but can be materialised in various media and formats and dispersed in space and time.

The final term in relation to which the warehouse gains its meaning is the archive, which this depository is slowly becoming. Commentators have noted a fascination for archives among a recent generation of artists who have turned to the collected but raw matter of history – its documents, photographs and recorded traces – to dwell on both the impossibility of reconstructing the past and the creative potential its reworking posits for the future.⁹

The contents of Apple’s warehouse suggest he treats his own history as a source of fascination, for not only does he keep everything (matters of substance and even the most trivial residue) but he also rakes through it and revisits it, both from a desire to remember and make sense (there are copious handwritten lists dispersed through the cabinets that show the artist compiling his exhibition history or tabulating the titles of works or corralling the names of clients, patrons and collaborators) and with a will to keep certain ideas alive so that they can be retooled for new opportunities. Past, present and future are compressed in this space and a teleological model of progress overturned, aligning the artist with new understandings of the simultaneous coexistence of multiple times made possible, as contemporary art historian Terry Smith suggests, by the technological developments of our own contemporary era.¹⁰

Apple’s constant negotiation of his back story is evidence of his understanding of how he functions as a signifying name within a discourse, rather than as a unique and self-determining individual. His career has been constructed through careful attention to the professional structures within which he operates, but also in acknowledgement of the role publicity plays in crafting a persona. Here, too, the archiving process achieves the effect of embedding the artist in history – literally knitting him into the pages of magazines and newspapers so that his name butts up against others, establishing a chronology for his work that meshes with the full texture of historical events that happened around him. It is notable here that Apple does not simply compile clippings as is common practice; instead, he insists on keeping the entire newspaper, magazine, book or journal in which he is referenced. Tracking back through his records, the historian can not only reconstruct the details of the artist’s life, but is also offered a take on the last sixty years that is filtered and focused through this one individual, so that background (the wider world) and foreground (Apple) remain curiously meshed.¹¹

All this activity – with its very specific character – is made especially possible because of the crucial decision the artist made in 1962 to change his name from Barrie Bates to Billy Apple. This decision was self-consciously enacted as an artistic act, so ‘Apple’ is Bates’s invention. Bates, the person, was made to disappear, and a new entity took his place. This new entity has always been thought of by the artist as an idea that functions in three interrelated ways: as an art work that literalises the closing of the gap between art and life, and then, after 1974, an artistic agent with a practice rather than a biography; as a sign (in its correlation of signifier and signified that bears only an arbitrary relation to reality); and as a ‘brand’, a package designed by the artist to sell his new identity. It is ‘Billy Apple’ who is archived in the warehouse, and, in his capacity as a floating sign, his traces are appropriately dispersed in the dematerialised forms that the warehouse contains (as logo, image, linguistic fragment).

The artist at work, Mount Eden, Auckland, 2020 (photo: Jennifer French)

But Apple-as-idea and the person who created him are one and the same individual. Therefore the warehouse is the place where this suture is negotiated. Here an identity is produced and maintained, firstly, as a signifying subject actively interjected into a discursive framework, and secondly, as an artist whose products are physically distinguished by being literally isolated from the detritus associated with the individual’s other activities and interests. The radical shift that occurred in 1962 has consequently entailed the artist monitoring his construction, in an acting out of the processes Michel Foucault itemised in his essay ‘What Is an Author?’. Here, the author emerges as a product of his texts; he is the organising principle around which ‘works’ are distinguished.¹² What makes Apple’s project so intriguing is that while he is truly a symptom of our sceptical times (he is, as Foucault puts it, ‘creating a space into which the … subject constantly disappears’),¹³ he is also responsible for demonstrating just what this entails. The fact that the warehouse is the scene of an abundant, if not excessive, accumulation suggests a nervousness about what has been transacted in the replacement of Bates by Apple, just as the purity and concision of the artist’s public presentations produce anxieties about all that remains hidden about the person behind the name. We might therefore imagine Apple’s life story as a constant negotiation of that ‘dirty spot’. From the warehouse to the places where his works are seen and consumed, between processes of accumulation and dispersal, identification and disappearance, his artistic outputs teeter at the interface between idea and matter, object and sign, body and being.

1 Michel Foucault, ‘The Historical a priori and the Archive’ [1969], extract reprinted in The Archive, Documents of Contemporary Art, ed. Charles Merewether, Whitechapel Gallery & MIT Press, London & Cambridge, 2006, p. 30.

2 Andy Warhol, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B and Back Again) [1975], quoted by John W. Smith in ‘Andy Warhol’s Time Capsules’, in Andy Warhol’s Time Capsule 21, Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh & Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt, DuMont Literatur & Kunst Verlag, Cologne, 2003, p. 11.

3 Warhol, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol, quoted by Mario Kramer in ‘The Last of the Wunderkammern’, in Andy Warhol’s Time Capsule 21, p. 14.

4 C. S. Lewis, quoted by Charles G. Salas in ‘Introduction: The Essential Myth?’, The Life and the Work: Art and Biography, Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, 2007, p. 5.

5 With the exception of Chesterman, Morrison and myself, few of even Apple’s closest collaborators have spent time in the warehouse; its location and purpose are largely kept secret.

6 It was only some years later that Apple finally realised a design for Dilana. This features his new logo (the word ‘Billy’ in white text written over a stylised red apple on a green background), which was included in A History of the Brand, a solo exhibition at Sue Crockford Gallery in Auckland in 2005.

7 (Overleaf) Billy Apple, artist’s statement, Spot Cleaning, 1 March 1971. Typescript, artist’s archive.

8 Since 2014 Apple has added a mobile phone and iPad to his essential equipment. These simple office tools are all he needs in the initial stages of conception. This type of workspace could be thought of as belonging to the first conceptual stage of production, with the second stage of production outsourced, and the final stages of accumulation and distribution served by the warehouse.

9 For example, see Hal Foster, ‘An Archival Impulse’, October, vol. 110 (Fall 2004), pp. 3–22, and Okwui Enwezor, Archive Fever: Uses of the Document in Contemporary Art, International Center of Photography & Steidl, New York & Göttingen, 2008.

10 See Terry Smith, What is Contemporary Art?, University of Chicago Press, Chicago & London, 2009, especially chapter eleven, ‘Taking Time …’, pp. 193–215.

11 This offers an alternative model for the writing of history, whereby Billy Apple, an artist who has not as yet found a place in mainstream accounts, is used as a cipher to track through the history of late twentieth-century art as it has played out in the major metropolitan centres of London and New York. This conforms with the notion of ‘minor history’ developed by Branden W. Joseph. See Joseph, Beyond the Dream Syndicate: Tony Conrad and the Arts after Cage, Zone Books, New York, 2008, especially chapter one: ‘What Is a Minor History?’, pp. 11–58.

12 Michel Foucault, ‘What Is an Author?’ [1970], reprinted in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow, Penguin Books, London, 1984, pp. 101–20.

13 Ibid., p. 102.

Billy Apple at the Young Contemporaries annual exhibition, RBA Galleries, London, 1961, silver gelatin print, Billy Apple® Archive

Chapter One

1935–1963

From Barrie Bates to