Art in America, February 1988
Applebroog
Ida Applebroog’s trademark used to be mordancy: an utterly deadpan style of humor, a peerless sense of timing, a heavy reliance on stasis and on silence. Recently, she has been pressing her point with more urgency. Her subjects remain the same, but while trouble seems to be the right word for the state in which her loveless, lonely, beleaguered subjects have always found themselves, Applebroog is now also dealing, inescapably, with violence.
In her increasingly complex assemblages of variously sized oils on canvas, the small, repetitive frames of modest contour figures that Applebroog introduced in the late ‘70s make vestigial appearances, echoing a simpler time. The larger panels they abut are denser (though the paint is thinned to a gleaming translucency) both in imagery and in narrative. But just as the emotional volume goes up, hands are clapped over mouths, masks are drawn over faces—imposing silence not by choice, but by force. There are terrorists, mothers hushing children, surgeons in hospital-issue purdah, and masks of every variety, from benignly horrific dimestore-Halloween types to coldly functional gas masks to, most chilling of all, makeshift blindfolds.
With the increase in structural and narrative complexity comes deepened enigma. It is not clear what is meanT in Noble Fields, for instance, by the conjunction of a child eating a watermelon half his size and a buxom woman in a décolleté evening dress, with one arm in a cast and a gruesome mask covering her face—and these are just the two main elements of the painting. Unmistakably, there is plunder, ignorance and fear, but other meanings lurk there too. Church of St. Francis Xavier shows a man attached like a streaming flag to the upright of a large crucifix-cum-unicycle that is hurtling along a bumpy course on its single small wheel. Across an intervening panel containing both a series of “Miss White Lake” portraits and a child being stifled by his mother (or is she extracting something from the boy’s mouth?), there is the image of a masked man—a terrorist? a thief? a rescue worker?—whose arms are outstretched in threat or in supplication. As ambiguous as they are compelling, these paintings depict violence that is often as generically political as it is interpersonal.
But the simpler (though no more tractable) problems of aging and illness, and of friction between the sexes, are also given their due. In fact, Applebroog seems more than ever devoted to chronicling the banality of evil, or at least of irreparable harm, documenting the ease with which it enters otherwise unremarkable lives and the scant distinction it bestows on those it touches. Blinding and deafening rather than illuminating, physical violation in Applebroog’s work is represented by a surgeon’s knife as well as by a battleship, and though each poses a mortal threat, neither promises glory.
NANCY PRINCENTHAL
