Art in America, March 4-10, 1981

Rear Windows

It’s hard to find a show in New York that is contemporary, original and not trendy. Ida Applebroog’s work is all of that, and will make you laugh, too. What makes her art thoroughly engaging is that the spectator has to take part: if we don’t use our imagination, we miss out on the fun. Applebroog’s canvas is a window through which we peek at our neighbors and, in turn, see ourselves. In the Hitchcock tradition, the artist feeds us information through a half-raised window shade, and we become voyeurs. She takes a second, often a moment, in time from the humdrum encounters between men and women and transforms it into theatre. Each of her pictures (which are done in ink and roplex on vellum) is framed by a proscenium arch with stage curtains gathered at the sides. Or are they living room drapes? Stage becomes window becomes stage. Her art is a complex meditation on real life drama. She extends a tentative moment across several panels. The surprise is that nothing happens in Applebroog’s narrative. The images in each series remain the same; occasionally she adds a caption. The action is all in the eyes of the beholder.

Applebroog has an uncanny knack for catching private moments – a man rolling over in a double bed reaches out to the empty space next to him – which she freezes for closer inspection. She pinpoints tension – two couples meet and shake hands in a stiff, formal manner – and leaves us there to project the fiction. An unattractive man in a suit and tie sits on a chair looking into off-canvas space. The caption reads: “Take off your panties.” In another, a pregnant woman sits on an uncomfortable stool with her hands and feet bound. It’s a satirical work about the pleasures of pregnancy.

In a seven-panel piece, a woman lies rigidly horizontal in bed, while a man stands over her taking off his jacket. Or is he putting it on – coming or going? At the bottom of the second panel it says “I threw it away.” The sixth panel caption reads: “Sure I’m sure.” The minimal number of verbal clues that Applebroog puts into this series, and others, add up to an ambiguity that’s critical. She offers too little for us to know exactly what’s going on, but more than enough to hook us.

Applebroog’s characters look like they come from the same family, which gives this show a soap opera quality – more like Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman than Dallas. Most of the pictures deal with couples (even if one is off-frame or in the womb) and dramatize or expose an oppressive relationship. Applebroog’s theatre exaggerates and ridicules the roles her characters act out, but when we look through her window we discover how destructive these roles are. Her analysis is mediated by a chilling sense of humor; family life becomes a series of poignant, absurd dramas. The phrases that come from the mouths of these cartoon characters are the clichés of modern life. But wrenched out of their mundane contexts, they are filled with mystery. These characters are puppets in a still-life performance – but they are far from wooden. Casting us as complicit voyeurs is Applebroog’s insurance that her figures are touching and vulnerable. They are able to give the performance of their life because no one is supposed to be watching.

ELIZABETH HESS