The Village Voice, November 1987
Beyond Domestic Agony
Some artists tell us what to think, some let us know what they think, and some provoke us to think for ourselves. Whatever the strategy, art, at its bed, must be strong enough to rattle, if not destroy, the assumption we bring to it. This is the only way it can alter our visions. Over the years, Ida Applebroog’s paintings on the subject of social and psychological violence have never fallen short of this ambitious goal; her current show is another triumph. Major talents ordinarily rest once they reach a plateau, but Applebroog keeps climbing.
She still thrives on visual disjunctions in paintings, which rhetorically ask: What is wrong with this picture? In her earlier works all the world was a stage, but the sterile proscenium that framed her emblematic figures has collapsed. The largest paintings abandon her once minimal, more complex imagery. Their content remains deeply disturbing, at times even shocking, but Applebroog also makes an unexpected move outside, into the landscape. These works allow us to languish in painterly detail—but not for long.
As a polemicist, Applebroog still can’t resist commenting, literally, on her own canvases. As her images and quips reinforce or contradict each other, this analytical process itself becomes a component of the work. Applebroog assaults us with her prose as we wander through a minefield of fragmented narratives. As usual, the stories she tells are not for the squeamish.
Women—how they look to men or to themselves, how they grow up, or grow die, how they give birth, or how they die—are the main players. Children and men are also actors in Applebroog’s dramas, but everyone, regardless of their age or gender, plays an agonizingly ordinary role. Sex, abortion, suicide, and illness are the covert domestic actions Applebroog uncovers, but she also paints someone simply picking his nose. Humor allows us to catch our breath, before the artist takes it away again.
Applebroog uses canvases like block to build an image. Sometimes the construction is symmetrical, sometimes it is slightly off balance. On occasion one of her figures manages to cross the thin gap between frames without losing its head. The edges of each panel block or edit our vision, as if the work is being actively censored as we see it. Applebroog is the censor, of course, but she argues that her vision, and our, is as intentionally constructed as her paintings.
K-Mart Village I and K-Mart Village II are an act of revenge against the medical establishment’s abuse of women. Applebroog has a healthy hatred of experts—especially doctors. The first painting shows a surgeon with a kitchen knife, cutting a limp, unrecognizable organ as casually as if it were a piece of fruit. In a seemingly unrelated panel we see a view of his victim, a portrait of the artist screaming in agony. The companion canvas depicts a stern woman, decorated with a corsage on her lapel, also holding a knife; in her hands, however, it’s clearly a weapon. An elderly male face appears in a disruptive frame with the word RAT carved on his forehead.
Both central figures are perpetrators of ambiguous crimes. Each is awash in an unsettling institutional green, with the exception of their slippery black gloves, the fingers of which look as wet as used prophylactics. The female figure takes action against medical cruelty (unnecessary hysterectomies come to mind), but the balance between images also suggests that women are as capable of violence as men. We are reminded of the tabloid love affair between Jean Harris and her diet doctor, but by employing her self-portrait, the piece becomes intensely personal: RAT is also an anagram for ART.
In Noble Fields, Applebroog places us in the midst of a watermelon patch, with a child happily devouring an oversized slice. The seeds that dot the ripe, pink melons suggest fertility, as her paint moves over the open field in natural drips and drabs. But the innocence of the picture is destroyed by a large woman, wearing an elegant gown and a hideous mask. This depiction of woman as both beauty and beast is not linked to the child’s point of view; Applebroog appears to argue that we are born women but are turned into monsters. Throughout she paints children with great affection and allows the adults in her image to shatter their hopes.
Harvest imagery proliferates throughout her canvases in rich, yet faint, colors; red, browns, oranges, purples, and yellows affectionately cover the terrain, which is often fertile, or alternatively used as a burial ground. Applebroog usually paints nature optimistically, as an arena that has not been distorted by greed or sexism. Yet, in Beulahland (for Marilyn Monroe), a frightening portrait of the eponymous star as an old woman, her body is covered with brown round shapes; on one of the landscapes they would signify rocks or potatoes but here they look like giant liver spots attacking her body. Monroe, wearing only a skimpy bikini, awkwardly attempts to hide her aging skin and figure.
In Velcro Village, another distorted female figure is deployed as a scarecrow in a rocky garden. Images of women either caught inside the male gaze, or struggling against it, surround the central image: A Miss America caricature squeezes herself to exaggerate her cleavage; a father holds up an infant as if on a pedestal; a stunned woman holds a round ball in each of her hands as if she has just had a double mastectomy. In a small frame, a nurse informs a doctor in the middle of an operation that his “fly is open.” (Nurses are responsible for everything in the OR.)
Sex is the most popular sport in Applebroog’s maze of canvases, and she draws it with pornographic clarity; she makes the argument, with Freud on her side, that the conflicts begin early. In a painting called Tomorrowland (reproduced in the excellent catalogue but not included in the show), a small boy comes up to his mother, gives her a hug, his face in her crotch, and says, “It smells nice.” On the same canvas a little girl fiddles with her hands and shyly asks her friend: “Are you bleeding yet?” The children eventually grow up and have serious problems. In the multiple frames of Rainbow Caverns, a couple screws as mechanically as rabbits. Romantic love comes up as a possibility but is usually relegated to the status of a joke.
Applebroog’s humor, however, hardly provides comic relief. In Crimson Gardens, her can-can line, an image she often returns to, is made up of bald Auschwitz victims. A barely noticeable woman on the edge of one painting glances at her watch; Applebroog informs us that time is running out. Her disturbing realism turns incidental events into life and death issues with the same current logic that transforms lovers into AIDS statistics. Ignorance is never bliss in Applebroog’s work—it’s always inexcusable.
ELIZABETH HESS
