NY Soho, December 1996

Ida Applebroog

Ronald Feldman Gallery is currently featuring a selection of works by Ida Applebroog. A new series of white paintings hangs in contrast to striking pieces from her “Marginalia” series, executed in a bloody red. All of the pieces are oversized, creating a palpable tension in the gallery’s divided space. The collections are split into two rooms; one first encounters the white paintings in a sort of self-created temporal circuit. Named after various years, the works incorporate calendar entries outlining dementedly fantastical planned activities, framing juxtapositions of dysfunctional and disjointed actions. The year “1956” contains a January 27 reminder to attend a “benefit for homeless scrotum”; “March 14 of 1948” admonishes the calendar’s creator to “plant tip-top scarlet slut.” These meaningless odd events are attended in the paintings’ border-space by symbols of seasonal change: flowering plant bulbs and gilt for winter, watermelon and angels for midsummer, pudding and wheat for an atmosphere of autumnal harvest. Postmodern absurd sums up the outstanding images documented in the compelling central space of these pieces. Kissing grandparents keep company with a figure resembling a bull-headed god of Knossos. The images of “1948” are of children in bondage and are contrasted with a scene of the mad science of phrenology, plus common objects like shoes and delicate teacups. The painting “1944” documents a reenactment of the missionary position and its product, a youth wearing his parental introjection on his breast in the form of a placard proclaiming him a “Good Boy.” Nightmarish images of childhood are summed up by a nude little boy pitifully hiding his testicles in his small cupped hands. Homoerotic fellatio occurs in the presence of this hapless child, and a fashion-plate dominatrix strikes a pose in red high heels. A bonneted baby in the arms of its Daddy sounds a further discordant note of innocence to contrast the maturity of experience otherwise presented. The red paintings of Marginalia are no less disturbing. For the most part freestanding, they vibrate with a sense of connected but inharmonious reality. Unlike the rather spectral inhabitants of the white paintings, these color-saturated individuals seem more present and immediate in the collectively unconscious exchange between artist and audience. Instead of appearing in ensemble with a Greek chorus of other emanations, these subjects are depicted in couplets or trios. A weird unsettling sexual subtext animates and underscores all of these works, capturing the viewer in the undertow. Like Alice’s red and white queens, the works as a group command in a thoughtlessly domineering manner, but give away their own vulnerability by presenting multiple faces to public view. The red paintings seem to display a real-time urgent repression of passion with its instantaneous effects of deformation upon the body and the psyche housed therein. The white paintings in their arid frigidity document the long-term sociopathologies that inevitably result from such a process.

SUSAN BROOKS