Art in America, September 1995

The Cruelties of Affection

Since the late ‘70s, New York painter Ida Applebroog has produced a body of works in which bland, bourgeois figures engage in obscure and sometimes frightening activities. Her paintings deal obliquely with such themes as dysfunctional families, old age and the erotics of the death instinct.

I may have drawn an axe being raised…but I’m not the one who let it drop or decided how hard the blow, or who screamed, or why. That, dear reader, was your special crime…

Scott McCloud, Understanding Comics

As others take in vagrant cats, Ida Applebroog’s pictures keep home for family alarms and little butcheries, interspersed with chimeras. Of course, domestic misdeeds currently make headlines in newspapers or top stories on TV, and they’re undoubtedly real events. Recently, for instance, I came across an item in the Los Angeles Times, whose lead was “Tampa, Fla. – Jurors convicted a woman on a reduced charge of manslaughter Wednesday in the contract slaying of her husband – the claw-handed sideshow performer known as Lobster Boy.” The report went o n to say that the wife “portrayed her husband as a powerful, drunken brute who swatted her with his pincer hands,” etc., while “the state called it a killing of convenience, saying (she) stood to take over such carnival shows as the Human Pincushion, the Blockhead and the Gorilla Lady Illusion.” (1) From the late ‘70s, long before it became a voguish subject in art, Applebroog has emerged as our most eloquent poet of family discord, not always as special as this Tampa story, but vivid enough.

One seldom sees actual mayhem in Applebroog’s work. True, she has depicted a man in sunglasses, with casually folded arms, chewing a tiny person, and, recently someone’s head being pulled off his body. But these glimpses of carnage are rare. More often, the artist establishes a psychic distance from the terror implicit in her scenes and she underplays their drams. Despite the fact that her figures may gesture wildly, their faces are permitted no more expressiveness than vacant glances or decayed smiles. What little she indicates about their states of mind comes out mainly in their readiness with certain weapons…axes or rifles. A curious emphasis of drawing makes their teeth seem threatening. And they are oddly uninhibited: one character, who looks like the little tramp with daintily lifted leg, is shown pissing.

No one would say that Applebroog’s episodes are housebroken by orthodox narrative concern. Figures wither overshadow huge areas of the field, or in their progress is stalled inn successive little panels. Her characters’ engagement with each other has all the nonchalant promiscuity of a dream. Rarely does anyone get anywhere or complete an action. Who knows to which of the actors we should attribute handwritten remarks that fringe the panels? Since the artist is often inspired by choleric voices on radio talk shows or media reports of nasty domestic conduct – a venom sprayed in our very air these days – the events of which she treats have no particular locale.

To be sure, with her sequences of small Rhoplex drawings on vellum, from the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, the viewer is made to feel like a voyeur, looking into the windows of other people’s rooms. But this modular scenography soon turned into ensembles built up of painted segments disparately scaled, and, later, freestanding forms, where creatures of all sizes are disposed in a kind of undetermined mental space. To peer into this space is to be cast in the role of a voyeur of one’s own fantasies.

Applebroog is a New York painter of international repute, who produced artist’s books as well as videos in the late ‘70s, and more recently has made large picture installations. Writers on her work have enjoyed it as a game of free association, or enthusiastically treated it as something to unriddle, often from a Freudian and/or feminist perspective. The first approach tries to get the sense of the art by ingenious guesswork; the other implies that this intuitive painter has strewn erudite clues for the benefit of critics learned in current theory. Applebroog, says one writer, “depicts the triumph and decay of Oedipus…in her representation of the return of the repressed female, the prescient child, and the ancient monster. A bald Medusa now sits for her portrait in an evening gown (Noble Fields ,1987)…Medusa’s gaze turned men into stone…Pygmalion’s transformations are a miracle, Medusa’s a crime…Applebroog becomes both Medusa and Pygmalion.” (2) This reading in the archeology of primal myth is clever, but I am not sure it needed to be said.

For my part, I think her painting invokes a certain kind of chaotic world by means of an efficient poetics. It is a world in which people fail to perceive their emotional standing with others. There is a chronic deficiency in their social radar, and they unwittingly keep bad company. Many of Applebroog’s tableaux hint of dire portents and misplaced trust. Devious in narrative, she keeps viewers from knowing who are the victims and who the perpetrators. A link nevertheless exists between the open-endedness of her “stories” and her mordant view of human exchange. And this link inveigles us into her “fields” – a word she often uses in the titles of her works – by a sustained metaphor of cognitive doubt.

Her people look bourgeois, in a dateless sort of way. The men are likely to wear suits and ties and her women have on simple dresses, as bland as possible. Most of these characters are implied as having lived and aged together. At the beginning of a four-panel set, which shows a couple kissing, is written, “You’re rat poison”, at the end, “I’m a pharmacist.” It’s as if people are bitterly at odds with each other, even when they smooch; but the final effect is ludicrous, not dramatic. One senses that actors with scripts from different though possibly related plays embrace on the same stage, and miss their cues. It makes me nervous, in Applebroog’s paintings, to read a punch line that arrives too early, or to wait for one that never comes. In his cartoon panels, Jules Feiffer can be more explicit, but not as eerie, not as skewed. With so much malignance implied by what they say or think, the affectionate gestures of Applebroog’s characters give her scenes a troubling intensity.

One could continue to describe the subject matter of these paintings and yet fail to account for the experience of them…unless one takes not of their allusion to comics, which dates from her earliest works. The artist is evidently aligned with the iconic or cartoon side of the comics idiom more than with the realistic one. She even introduced Blondie and Dagwood in a work of 1992, but they were withdrawn thereafter, possibly because their sweet personals distracted from her somber intent. The firm outlines, the frequent profiles and the schematic volumes of her figures might even recall those seen in paper doll or coloring books. But the lack of the requisite cuteness in Applebroog’s images is fatal to any childlike tone. In fact, the artist has glossed over these juvenile forms with an alien substance, a translucent gel troweled on by a knife in a process made equally hard to associate with either pop culture or high art.

In Applebroog’s work, the comics mode underlines the artist’s irony and acts as a false lead to story content. She serves up a mix of anecdotal, mythic, historical and sociopolitical themes in highly reductive form. Her characters are represented as immersed in stories – we know that from their illustrational style and frequent appearance in sequential frames – but the style is not backed up by a linear narrative. Normally, the comics format encourages us to fill in continuities between frames with transitions of our own. “Experimental” comics tend to be cavalier and break such transitions, but never with such offhanded brutality as Applebroog. The psychological violence of her scenes is matched by the formal violence of her methods, yet in the end, both are hushed by her reticent tone.

In comics as in other narrative forms, much depends on how we identify with the protagonists. Art Spiegelman’s comic book, Maus, tells the story of how the artist’s father’s survival of the Holocaust deformed his relation with his son in the present. Reading the script, we side intensely, now with the older, now with the younger man, as they impose claims upon each other. But the pictures themselves purposely do little to advance any such drama. They’re stereotyped, while characters are cast as inexpressive animals (mice for Jews, cats for Nazis). This fairy tale graphism makes for a pictorial shortfall wickedly designed by Spiegelman to heighten the power of his language.

Like him, Applebroog can be retrospective about pain. And she, too, is concerned with the weave of familial event with historical monstrosities. In a three-panel work from 1986, blindfolded, naked men, with legs raised as if for an obstetric exam, are contemplated by a gent in an apron, about to light a cigarette. Underneath is the phrase ”How must it smell?” – a line the artist reports as having been taken from Shoah, Claude Lanzmann’s documentary film containing interviews with civilian witnesses of the Holocaust. In one of her sequences that repeats a drawing of a man cradling a baby, the artist supplied the line “Are you still here?” Elsewhere, a couple dances and one of them thinks, “Hurry up and die.” The language in her sequences discloses homicidal rage, but only in arbitrary scraps too few to describe a character or carry a scene. Whatever their role in the action, these talking figures are placed out of emotional reach – of each other, and of the viewer. Such vignettes are usually casual and always mysterious. Applebroog’s images importune us, and they really baffle. Sometimes they even seem to burgeon with a repulsive charisma, and they simply multiply, as if the artist were helpless to stop them.

This art does not intend us to identify with fictional individuals. It’s not simply that Applebroog occasionally masks her players. A more significant index of their remoteness comes out in spatial point of view, for however “close the figures, we’re never given front row seats at the action. Rather, she disposes them hieratically, neutralizing all possibilities of our intimacy and connection with them. In fact, their world communicates with ours a bout as fluidly as the main fields and predella panels of pre-Renaissance altarpieces. Even stranger, her color-light seems to reverse tonal values, in the manner of photographic negatives. Since 1989, her hues have been like unfamiliar mutations of those found in nature. Her vinegar crimsons, fermented peaches, stony flesh colors, olives and umbers, all seem to come from an occult region of the mind. At the same time, her figure groups occasionally nag us with a déjà vu effect that suggest, but does not fix, a specific moment of the past. Figures built up with paint are isolated on a blank surface, or in a kind of memory ether. Rather than as actors in scenes, on a stage, we’re asked to regard the characters as apparitions from mind-states, and disquieting ones at that.

There exists a visual parlor game called “What’s wrong with this picture?” – usually a drawing of a scene replete with aberrations: for example, a clock with hands of equal length. Whoever detects the most details of this sort, many of them subtle, wins the game. Because its departures from our ideas of use, placement and order are proposed as anomalies, the game assumes our faith in a rational world. It’s an effect opposite to that of Applebroog’s art, where the pleasure might consist in finding something “right” with the picture. We hunt in vain for meaning that can be processed by reasonable conjecture. For her world is defined by its instabilities: mismatches between speaker and language, or gestures and thoughts. Motley non sequiturs are the norm.

Of course, we’ve been acclimated to such dissonances as a birthright of our culture. As long ago as when they separated the blue from the sky – that is, the attribute from that which possesses it – modern artists have accustomed us to gaps in our train of thought. The Surrealists, of course, went self-consciously further, showing us memories habitually decoupled from their origins or contexts. And why not? During a century that has put us in the most brazen touch with our nightmares and our madness, it was inevitable that our art should reflect them.

But Applebroog’s sardonic metaphors of craziness lack modern glamour, and are unfamiliar, even in the context of their tradition. She doesn’t simply refer to mental disorder, as if in a by now ritual acknowledgment of some overall malaise. Her work seems rather to have come to grips with derangement and gotten to its other side. Once you’re engaged by the uneasy feeling of being there, with her, in a kind of muffled pandemonium, an unexpected jocularity asserts itself. She highlights it in some of her titles, which are simultaneously protests about our manias and flippant doggerel rhymes: bridal/bridle/spermicidal, circumcise/ostracize, merkin/gherkin, ooze/whose. And in a study of two men, greeting: “Santa Claus? No, sanity clause.”

All these diverting word groups are of course highly loaded, whether the reference is to race prejudice, birth control or impairments of organic function. Not only does the body misbehave but our perceptions get tangled up. Something intervenes between the sight of the object and our waking ability to name it, or to know what it’s for. And often, the very silences of this art imply the unspeakable. How much does Applebroog’s work chime with a famous ethnic joke on the absurdity of language: Two old Jews are talking. One comments to the other, “You never ask how I am”; so the other at last says, “How are you?” and the first one replies, “Don’t ask!”

Without the accent that makes it comic, a similar, though now terrifying thought is expressed in a line by the avant-garde poet Michael Palmer: “I’m fine, I’m fine; I’m really going blind.” Here, the shift in meaning doesn’t suggest a sarcastic guilt trip, but a kind of Alzheimer perception gap. Looking at Applebroog’s paintings, one begins to experience those gaps oneself, albeit in enchanted form. It’s a bit like entering Alice’s wonderland by way of Dr. Oliver Sacks, the neurologist who wrote The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. In merkin/gherkin (a merkin is an unusual item, a wig for a woman’s pubic area), there appears a chimpanzee in Santa Claus beard. Given the context suggested by the title, this image has some of the tone of the involuntary obscenities mouthed by sufferers of Tourette’s syndrome. In fact, Applebroog has a knack of making rhymes – and images – appear as vulgar corruptions of each other, puns on the run, in a loony menagerie of exploded meaning.

A number of her motifs resurface in different works, as if to provide measuring points for dark changes. For example, after various earlier appearances, the chimpanzee image came back and was repeated a few score times in her 1994 Brooklyn Museum installation, “Everything is Fine.” In that show, a wall label explained that the creature was inspired by a New Yorker article that dealt with the arrival of the previously little known, life-threatening Ebola virus, transmitted by monkeys. Applebroog’s art is centered by its reflection on disease. Underneath her sparse social banter, she suggests that flawed genes or invading cells do their mortal job.

In the work of certain other artists who also use the idiom of disjunction, we can never unscramble the medley of references. A viewer’s ignorance there is actually a comfortable state. Nothing about the “difficult” montage art of John Baldessari or David Salle, for instance, taxes us in the least. For the meanings that might arise through their techniques of disarray – techniques employed for their own sake – are optional, spasmodic and inconsequent. These artists are virtuosos of a sometimes wild and layered, yet thinned out surprise, without stake in values other than their own serendipity. Such art sets forth a routine overcharged barrier effect, and is anything buy mysterious. Applebroog, by contrast, tugs us into dispersed images that are nevertheless emotionally fraught. Though initially a viewer may not know where to start with her competing vignettes, or how to deal with opaque passages, her jumped-up figures have a real snap. Relating to each other across voids, they are implacable presences, the product of an art she characterized in 1977 as a form of “obscure realism.”

If the artist only meant to tease, her paintings would not be as disturbing as they are. Whenever I am offered a scene that has been inexplicably taken apart – a fait accompli – there’s little that I can or want to do. But her world starts unassembled, yet looks like it could be put together, and is a more solicitous presence. Instead of an accent on spectacle, she implies a process of self-questioning. Rather than a semiotic approach, she works out a metaphorical treatment of images. Applebroog’s metaphor is not about the exhaustion of cultural signs – a shopworn critique – but of a mind hell-bent in search of its past, and therefore its identity. That’s why this art is possessed by a retrospective tone, often realized by a kind of “incontinent nostalgia,” to use a phrase of Dr. Sacks. One is deflected from approaching her paintings with the idea of unlocking their “secrets,” and beckoned into a sympathy for the squalor they depict.

How appropriate, therefore, that Applebroog should evoke the indignities meted out to inmates in the hospital. A case in point, Emetic Fields, 1989, stresses the conflict between the words “patient” and “real person.” Instead of hitting on the pathos of the sick ward, Applebroog typically juxtaposes the corporate with the individual assertion of identity. That identity is never so much under pressure as it is in the experience of displaced old people. In today’s at scene, often marked by a fondness for kiddy subjects and silly styles, Applebroog is distinctive in having created a life problem from the viewpoint of the old. No one else has quite visualized the loss of identity brought on by the ravages of age as Applebroog has imagine it in a sixtyish Marilyn Monroe Beulahland (for Marilyn Monroe), 1987. Since her more recent work looks with candor upon the decline of flesh and faculties, the artist’s realism, in fact, may not be so “obscure.”

More oblique yet shocking is her account of another theme, the erotics of the death instinct. In Trinity Towers, a Rhoplex diptych from 1982, two naked youths, seated left, appear to be contemplating the hung corpse of a third, visible in the next window. From whatever springs of memory or dated news Applebroog compiles her imagery, the meanings of he work must earn their way amid the anxieties of the present. This piece might look to us today to be a terrible comment or allegory on the misery of AIDS. But when I questioned the artist, I learned of the image’s source in newspaper reports of the accidental deaths of suburban masturbators whose belief that near-strangulation improves orgasm had gotten out of hand.

A relaxed man on a sofa cuddles a young woman and points a gun at her head in Orgiastic/romantic plastic, 1990. This, too, stems from the newspapers – an old photograph illustrating the story of a guy who posed for the camera in advance of the sex murder he was about to commit. And now his image becomes a particularly smug ancestor of the hostage photographs that are staples of our visual culture. The artist literally drew the gun, but it is I, the viewer (as Scott McCloud remarks), who now fill in the blanks in the story. To be prompted by only a schematic line drawing into the imaginative reliving of a moment that happened long ago is an uncommon experience.

Much in the overall content of Applebroog’s fields remains dormant or inaccessible, to be sure, just as it does in older art, where loss of meaning increases with the passage of time and differences of culture. All the more is the loss apparent when the art is concerned with impediments to knowledge. Applebroog paints a woman with a bucket over her head, a reminder that we are in the dark, too. We know and we don’t know hot it is with us. Recognition of this predicament plunges us into a space that concentrates the mind, wonderfully. The artist configures a world I do not often understand, but which leaves me thrilled, unaccountably amused, and in dread. Only later do I also realize how poignant it is.

1. Los Angeles Times, July 28, 1994
2. Mira Schor, “Medusa Redux –Ida Applebroog and the Spaces of Post-Modernity,” Artforum, March 1990, p. 121.

MAX KOZLOFF