ARTnews, February 1985

UNDER CURRENT EVENTS: IDA APPLEBROOG’S INMATES AND OTHERS

Ida Applebroog’s intense intent is meant to needle viewers. Like the edge of the palette knife she uses to paint these new oils, her art is a symbolic weapon, aimed at exposing to public view society’s underbelly.

It’s time to consider current events à la Applebroog. The names may have been changed, but no innocent is protected. Exposing a topical cruelty, cutting just below the tender surfaces of recognition, crouched in seeming banalities and saddened circumstances, Ida Applebroog’s imagery realizes pain with a visible pop. Her recent work’s stronger-than-ever undercurrents reveal an enlarged sensibility on the part of one of our most trenchant social critics. She’s sadder and meaner. Are we?

In December of 1982, when Applebroog hung her show in New York City’s Chamber of Commerce, one realized how abrasive the work was. But when the powers-that-be had a look at the embellished portraits of the city’s commercial barons (Andrew Mellon, John D. Rockefeller, and the like), it took them less than an hour to take the show down.

Beneath the portraits, Applebroog had installed a little statue of a young girl whose mouth emitted the provocative statement, “Gentlemen, America is in Trouble.” Their answers, encased in similar cartoon balloons, varied from the innocent, “Isn’t Capitalism Working?” to the obstreperous, “I am Hot Stuff. I am also White,” the bigoted, “It’s a Jewish Plot,” and the absurd non sequitur, “Underneath I’m Naked.” It was all obviously too much for the proponents of “what makes America great.” That quickly aborted attempt at bitter truth was entitled Past Events. But were they really?

Applebroog likes to move in fast for the kill. One foray occurred during the abbreviated subway-card project sponsored by Group Material in September of last year. A number of socially committed artists were commissioned to fill the advertising spaces on the Transit Authority’s city lines. (Was this an attempt to stave off the freehand commentary by “toys” and more accomplished graffitist?) Applebroog’s work joined that of Josef Beuys and Komar and Melamid to penetrate the “subway stance” taken by harried inner city commuters. Her piece, printed appropriately in hot pink, doubled its impact with a juxtapositioning of two pages from her books: the bland woman who notes, “He says abortion is murder,” was placed next to the three equally apathetic businessmen who proclaim a skewed moral imperative, “Why else did God give us the bomb?” With sentiments this abrasive, it is no wonder the project met with a short life span. The cards were stolen- or defaced- within hours.

Applebroog’s next brief appearance came last New Year’s Eve, when another of her situations flashed from Times Square’s Spectra-color Billboard. The elderly couple who form the core of her untitled book of 1981 walked off together into a hypothetical sunset, dad saying to mom, “Life is good, isn’t it, Mother?” Mother’s answer, absent in the book never appeared on the computerized board either, but was interrupted by an atomic flash that sent their hats rolling in opposite directions. Feeding her mordant message into a computer flashing over the crowd which filled the Square on the eve of 1984 was typical of Applebroog’s sense of humor.

The artist’s next attack came “out of town,” as she traveled south for the summer to try out the large oil paintings which have replaced her usual rhoplex and enamel works on vellum. At the instigation of Thomas Sokolowski, then Chief Curator of Norfolk’s Chrysler Museum, Applebroog mounted Silences at the Virginia institution. Her suitably Orwellian fancies have obviously matured, and this most recent imagery, a mix of her familiar cartoon strip/film frame presentation, is writ large.

This October, for a show entitled “Inmates and Other,” the Ronald Feldman galleries are packed to overflowing with four huge square diptychs and five vertical eight-footers, several sets of new drawings, and the small “strips” for which she is best known. Previously, Applebroog had consistently sugared her dour messages with humor. But she’s no longer “just a comedienne.” The tone of the new works has changed slightly. Now they catalogue probable collisions of past, future, reality and fantasy. But they are nonetheless as recognizable, as consistent, and as conceptually provoking, images ticking with ominous probability.

In her ten years of work in New York, the artist has moved from the minimalistic sculpture she produced on the West Coast to the cooled-down symbols of socio-psychological states, presented in the dead-pan, Pop-inspired format of the comic strip. Applebroog’s brilliance lies in her formal restraint. She strips her surfaces to the minimum, using a linear style derived from her years of advertising combined with the conceptual punch of all good social critics.

Following her feminist-inspired breakthrough to subject matter, she has hit squarely upon the battles of social life- and not just in the sexual arena. Her targets have also included the corporate world and urban alienation, but in much of her recent work she attacks the root of the problem in childhood’s harsh emergence from innocence.

Like Andy Warhol, Applebroog understands art’s voyeuristic capacity to cool off traumatic events. The artwork has a passive existence, merely representing a facet of real life. It operates in the interstices between its harsh subject matter and its viewer’s tolerances. While Applebroog would agree that our only real weapon against the ubiquitous inequities of daily life is irony, her sarcasm is tempered by a compassion that renders the works’ anger palatable.

The slightly sour jokes do recur in the intimate strips that mark a transition from her work of two years ago. They remain viable for the quick attack, and for drawing the viewer into the imagery. The raw humor of the fellow peering through fieldglasses, who finally exclaims, “It’s a tipped uterus!,” never fails to amuse. It’s a canny ploy since this touch of whimsy relaxes the viewer/patient for the harder blows.

An analogy between viewer and patient is pertinent, since Applebroog’s sensibility is a dissecting one, couched in the cool bedside manner of her stolid doctors seated by their female patients. The dichotomies that Applebroog revels in emerge most clearly here, where physical and emotional pain fuse and the games of power are played for the biggest stakes. One such doctor/patient panel moves staidly to the literal punchlines- a one-two sequence of abused authority. Says the doctor, “You’re my patient. You little nothing.” This offhanded slap takes place in the midst of silent panels that flicker toward the words like animation gels.

Applebroog’s art takes hold in the void between apprehension and comprehension, fantasy and reality, objectivity and subjectivity, the polite silences between human beings. Her format resembles not only film, storyboards, and cartoon strips, (again owing a debt to Pop’s appropriate confiscations), but also treads the fine line between minimalistic conceptualism and the harsh Critical Realism of Germany’s Twenties. She’s too American an artist to be as blatant as Dix or Grosz, however, choosing to distance her images by clearly humoring the subject matter. In this way, she sneaks up and disarms the viewer, leaving the anxious residue of the content like an infection on the conscience.

Applebroog has always insinuated the unspeakable, implicating the viewer as voyeur. She is justifiably known for her “window-shade” paintings, wherein figures move in pseudo-clandestine privacy. Trapped like flies in the rhoplex medium, her protagonists assume a calcified distance. These are sly formal puns on the Renaissance notion of the “window-on-the-world,” uninviting, non-reifying.

In her latest enlarged canvases, the window has disappeared, the figures projected to confront the viewer. The momentary cruelties are now replaced by “personal histories” of a generalized duration. Having abandoned the dangers of the rhoplex, Applebroog has managed to approximate its gelid feel in the more traditional medium of oil. The five vertical paintings are not de-sexed, nor are they any cooler in tone. With their pale coloration, their minimalized linearity, their messages hover over private practices and tabloid celebrity, childhood’s imaginings and adult reality.

Four of the paintings feature a child engaged in innocent dealings with the world, prior to entering the state of brutal knowledge. This is cinematically foreshadowed by the smaller panels affixed to the top of each image, where a commentary- future, alternative paths, or feared events- takes place. They are more caustic than the enormous quartet of “adult” image, since the innocence they depict is so readily corrupted by time and circumstance.

Connecting the child to the animal, its care to that of a clinic’s Tweedle Animal Hospital, featuring an isolated girl, evokes memories of such “abandonment” in early childhood. The unknown looms large, like the stern woman projected on her groin. Though she wears a flower, she remains an authority figure without affection, a daily guardian in the overcrowded day-care milieu.

The girl musing over a book in Missionary Sisters of the Immaculate Heart of Mary is the most humorous of the group. The Pope is on the page, but nuns loom overhead, engaged in things all parochial schoolchildren suspect. Such self-isolated role-models, flexing real or imaginary biceps and ordaining purity, leave unavoidable psycho-sexual scars on their charges. The humor of this piece has a lasting edge.

The juxtaposition of the cold purple panel, with its lascivious blood-red activities, against the dark void surround the boy in Lovelace Clinic, implies a particularly unhealthy future. The oral innocence of the bubble (which also resembles a blank speech-balloon- has he nothing yet to say?) collides unpleasantly with the obese cigar-chomper on his sleeve, and reflects the inevitability of contact with the submissive sexual violence above.

But the two most affecting images are the saddest. A dim future possibly awaits the eager Boy Scout at attention in the larger panel of Willow Point V.A., an imaginary hospital containing the paraplegics in the frame above. The child’s model, an officer, salutes on his sleeve with the same correct rigidity. If the “child is father to the man,” then the dull-eyed fellow in Hillcrest State, clutching his hatchet, seems the most pathetic victim of society’s pressures. His accompanying panel suggests the typical response of people acquainted with a mass killer before he ran amok. He was, they always respond, “such a nice, quiet young man, so very well behaved.” And shimmering with repressions. This fellow, the oldest of Applebroog’s vulnerable youngsters, has been frozen by stress, locked into his own deep void. An inmate of the state, his amoral hostility is controlled. Like paraplegics and shell-shocked veterans, he is isolated by social fiat.

In the preventative confinement of the Jail (alternatively titled Palais Ballroom), solitary containment is also socially approved. The thick inmate behind the bars lives in dreams and memories, dancing in blood-red energy. The tiny couple is fading in the frame as isolation distances the world outside. They retreat as he freezes in frustration.

Another sad inmate, the edema-ankled shopping bag lady of the Riverdale Home for the Aged, alludes to a fantasy common to the women who inhabit those “retreats.” Tangling past and present, exercising their capacity for fantasy, they often speak to visitors of the young men who occupy the bed next to theirs, nice young men in their BVD’s.

A series of drawings, which the artist has arranged in a triple triptych, serves as a transition between this image and the one alternatively titled Gun or Wentworth Gardens, a pseudonymous middleclass housing development. Mirthful faces form the flanking wings of these drawings, but the focal panels are hardly a laughing matter. The subject is guns, topped by a torso stripped of its concealing outerwear, revealing the thigh-harness that carries a handy weapon. The central image depicts a smiling soldier with rifle raised, an image that recalls the army cadence:

This is my rifle,

And this is my gun;

This is for fighting,

And this is for fun.

This jest turns very sour indeed in the bottom panel, where a smiling child mimes Russian roulette’s fatal game.

The guns in Wentworth Gardens (Gun) are handled by adults, middle-class citizens armed for protection. While the smaller business-suited man holds the rifle with some familiarity, the thick-set housewife seems vaguely puzzled by her handgun. This blood-red figure surrounded by a void holds a void, for the little “lady-sized” weapon is merely an outline, albeit a lethal one.

All these potential disasters are private ones, locked away, held for the future, or isolated. The final image is more public, taking place on New York’s streets, and redolent of the social dichotomy inherent in the words “uptown” and “downtown.” In Dog (or Helmsley Palace, in reference to the infamous kitsch fatuity, Trump Towers), an elegant befurred woman pulls her spiky little dog through the void, her lips set in a fashionably indifferent moue. In the contrasting panels, a thin boy carries a smaller one, their smutty brown coloration fairly reeking of poverty. And never the twain shall meet. Is capitalism working?

Applebroog’s intense intent is meant to needle viewers. Like the edge of the palette knife she uses to paint these new oils, her art is a symbolic weapon, aimed at exposing to public view society’s underbelly. The powerful among us might like to ignore that sight, but Ida Applebroog refuses to stick her head in the sand and play ostrich. Let the viewer beware.

LINDA F. MCGREEVY