Collection Study
Ida Applebroog, Independence Plaza, 1979–1980

Text by Hannah Black
September 2015

Independence Plaza, from 1979–1980, 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 (2015). 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 Kenny.¹ 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 self- reproach. 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.