Cover, November 1989

IDA APPLEBROOG

Ida Applebroog’s paintings have always been deceptive. You look at them, then think that, since they seem so simple, you will be able to add up the fragments and have an answer. Viewers typically long to cull a narrative from Applebroog’s disparate images, particularly since her comic-style framing of some of them implies a sequential reading.

But what you get when you look at these paintings and the short film that accompanies them, is not answers but sinking feelings. Applebroog ultimately coerces us into confrontation with the realities of our existence, but her manner is so off-hand, her discourse so oblique, that despite humor and the commonplace we are often left with anxiety and not a prayer of resolution.

This group of paintings is entitled Nostrums. A nostrum is defined as “a medicine of secret composition recommended by its preparer but usually without scientific proof of its effectiveness”- snake oil. Applebroog assumes a charlatan and a hapless consumer/victim and makes specific who she thinks populates these categories. “You are the patient; I am the real person” is enscribed on a panel of Emetic Fields opposite an O.R.-prepped surgeon.

Applebroog has couched her investigations of violence, trauma and victimization in terms of surgeon-patient relations before (e.g., K-Mart Village I). This new series contemplates the subject in its entirety. With titles such as Lithium Square and Sphincter Pond, the paintings allude to deviance and infirmity, pharmacological solutions or snake oils for both, and finally issues of the individual, in all its divine aberrations, versus the norm.

Applebroog’s new works are more painterly than ever. There are several bravura passages in this series, notably the flock of turkeys which grace Camp Compazine and the panels of irises standing in for Van Gogh in Perisaltic Garden. A profile shot of a pill-boxed Queen Elizabeth occurs four times. With the pocketbook she clutches and her passive attitude, she is as much someone’s feeble mother-in-law as the actual figurehead monarch.

“Belladonna,” the compound from the deadly nightshade plant that is both poison and medication, is the name of the film Applebroog co-produced with her daughter filmmaker Beth B. It represents an extension and an elaboration of Applebroog’s visual strategies.

The compartmentalized and repeated images that have long been integral elements of her work have been given new life. In the paintings, some figures have now stepped out of their boxes, violated borders and been superimposed on other images in a Salle sort of way. In the film, they have become the main unit as Applebroog and Beth B translate this motif to celluloid.

Various talking heads, one of which belongs to Feldman director Martina Batan, utter disjointed fragments of dialogue, sometimes with an additional voice-over layer. The garments are excerpted from various sources including the notes of the infamous Dr. Josef Mengele. In combination, they edge around the “psychopathology” that so interests Applebroog. They hint at, but never spell out, the aspects of perversion, cruelty and abuse that comprise the dark side of life.

-K.K. KOSIK,