The Village Voice, November 1989

Ida Applebroog

Once upon a time, the characters in Ida Applebroog’s narrative paintings were naïve puppets with vacant expressions and nowhere to go. When the artist breathed life into their wooden bodies, the figures grew older, more independent, and more sinister. Applebroog’s stage had become a safe house, a womb for her offspring; so she kicked them out to fend for themselves. Their survival is the current question.

Applebroog remains loyal to her generic figures; she’s still building paintings out of a number of individual canvases, surrounding large central images with smaller ones as if they were afterthoughts. Psychological violence has always been her theme of choice, but some of her stock characters are resorting to concrete weapons. The stage she currently sets is a grim reality, riddled with social deviants—fathers, doctors, preachers, and golfers. (Applebroog’s golfers play the game with hatchets instead of clubs.) Women also take on a variety of highly valued social roles, like wife, mother, porn queen, or mental patient. Applebroog has created enough characters to fill a social register, but Emily Post would hardly approve. Emily’s just the kind of authority the artist likes to kill off in her paintings.

Walking into “Nostrums” (the title of this exhibition) is like stumbling upon an accident: bodies are drowning, deranged faces glare into space, a patient waits on a hospital bed, a man is hooked up to an electrocardiograph, a surgeon gets ready to operate (with his eyes closed). The gummy surfaces of Applebroog’s canvases look as if they’re actually painted with blood and guts, and she’s fond of using a sickly, hospital green. “Nostrums” is filled with a seemingly random selection of mundane and bizarre images. But there’s nothing random here. Applebroog’s strategy is not hit or miss, it’s hit and run.

The subject is madness. Applebroog conveys exactly how perverse conventional states of mind can be; by the end of this show normality becomes an obsolete concept. “Nostrums” is about the construction of insanity and its discontents. Each paintings is named after a drug or medical term (Camp Compazine, Peristaltic Garden, Lithium Square, Elixir Tabernacle), casting the entire show into a chemically induced haze. We go from painting to painting like an addict, and each dose is stronger than the last.

Elixir Tabernacle I and II feature a shapely female backside, dressed only in panties, stockings high heels, and a seductive garter belt. What’s a feminist artist doing make “soft-core” images? This one’s for Jim Bakker.

Greedy executives frequently lampoon as a generic breed of suits and ties, are the dominant evil class throughout Applebroog’s work. She doesn’t paint pictures of their overt crimes—anybody could do that. The artist is more interest in their inner lives, if they had them. Who are the white men currently ruling the world?

They’re turkeys. In a spectacularly vicious painting, Applebroog equates couples of white men chatting with each other with couples of turkeys; one can almost hear them gobble. The piece is funny, sort of, in typical Applebroog style; she allows us to laugh at these birds before subsequently making us realize that they’re no laughing matter. Her corporate turkeys bump into a panel in which a ghoulish man holds a tiny baby in his mouth as if he were a dog eating a bone. These turkeys are baby killers.

There’s a method to Applebroog’s madness but her metaphors aren’t always obvious. Viewers must work on her paintings, like crossword puzzle, putting clues together. In Lithium Square, two surreal Ping-Pong tables, which seem unrelated to any other images in their proximity, float in the air. The initial strangeness of the tables is what makes them intriguing, but they remain passive, open to interpretation. Applebroog brings out the viewer’s subjectivity; most everyone has killed time hitting a ball back and forth, whether for pleasure or treatment. Applebroog’s rec room is haunted by ghosts. A stern but frumpy female, part Queen Elizabeth, part Margaret Thatcher is repeated three times in Anhedonia, a painting about memory and identity. A small panel at the top of the canvas, which reads like a thought balloon, depicts a bald man in a hospital gown; the gown’s laces run up his back like stitches on a wound. A demented grin is splashed across the patient’s face and one eye doesn’t open properly. In a subsequent panel, Applebroog scrawls the letters A K A across his forehead. A mind has been lost, but lost off-frame, where the crimes in Applebroog’s dramas usually take place.

Applebroog is currently generating a baby boom in her canvases, despite the fact that her images are getting more gruesome. Her characters haven’t been able to start a revolution, but the seeds are planted. A blank placard hangs around the neck of a young boy in a silent protest—nevertheless, a protest. A woman does a striptease in one frame and practices shooting a rifle in the next; you can guess who she’s aiming at. The fruit in Applebroog’s landscape is ripe, ready to be picked by the next generation. Applebroog paints its as our salvation. Applebroog paints it as our salvation. But the old guard—the turkeys—are still in control of the yard.

ELIZABETH HESS