BILLY APPLE
Self Portraits 1962-67
6 August - 29 August 1997
Curated by Wystan Curnow
Late in 1962 a young New Zealander, just out of the Royal College of Art, London, launched his campaign as an artist with a change of name and identity. Plain Barrie Bates became Billy Apple, artist, and, with the help of Lady Clairol Instant Creme Whip, a blond. He changed his name and look as a company might change its corporate colours or update its logo. The portraits in this show were made to promote the new identity.
Apple's practice has always been closer to that of the advertising "art director" than the studio artist. Production is contracted out. The photos used for "Self-Portraits" were taken by the photographer, Robert Freeman, later famous for his five Beatles album covers. And the portraits printed by Roy Crossett, photo-lithographer at the Royal College. Though the portraits are on canvas, they are not paintings. They are offset lithographs — the method used for commercial printing. All the works present the same two images, passport-style mug-shots taken from front and back. The red, yellow and blue plates have been printed in and out of register, routinely generating various effects: producing a bronzed Apple, a skull head Apple, a lycanthropic Apple, a hydrocephalic mutant Apple. A hybrid of painting, photography and printmaking, the works belong to the history of Pop Art, to the time of Apple's close association with the other young artists in London and New York who were making that history: David Hockney, Richard Smith, Robert Indiana and Andy Warhol, especially.
At ARTSPACE, the portraits are accompanied by another "signature piece", a 1962 neon sculpture, A is for Apple. Recalling the neon signs used by US beer companies, Apple says this work was one of a number of further "visual aids made to reinforce the name change". The presence of this work affirms that Apple is neither a painter nor a sculptor, but an idea artist, a conceptual artist who is happy to use any medium to further his explorations.
