Polly Apfelbaum. Ed. Bennett Simpson.
Phildelphia: Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania. 2003.
ISBN 0884541037
UoA Fine Arts Library 759 A641
"Interview with Polly Apfelbaum by Claudia Gould" (11-9)\\\\titling of work\\\
"Daisy Chain", "A Pocket Full of Posies", "Peggy Lee and the Dalmatians" contrast with "Ice", "Bones", "Reckless"... etc. contrast in the aesthetic qualities: initial pop/bang/explosion of colour followed by the sense of minute accumulation, accretion, form layered upon form...
(((Pop is never innocent)))
My work is never explicitly narrative, so the titles are always indirect - sometimes they refer to the process, but they are often simply meant to be evocative - I think Duchamp said that titles were like another colour in the work. (11) Using film titles as colour references, etc.
\\\creating entertainments\\\
(((music is very evocative and emotional, but never literal)))
The difference between music and "entertainments" is, for Apfelbaum, that the emotional content is very literal in entertainments whereas in music it's "less intellectual and more intuitive, but at the same time it's very precise. (14)
\\\influenced by taste in film and music\\\
(((my taste is very eclectic)))
I think there's an analogy with what I do - taking little pieces and rearranging them.... I am drawn to the quirky and not always popular.. Many of the pieces work from very explicit rules, or systems, but often - in fact just about always - the system is invisible. I guess I like that kind of tension, between the intuitive and the formal, or the emotional and the controlled. (15-7)
\\\the power of colour and form\\\
(((there's no pure abstraction)))
there is always some reference outside - a connection to place, to memory or to popular culture... By keeping the content indirect, I try to leave space for viewers, so they can bring their own experience to the work. The idea is to make the work rich enough, dense enough, or complex enough so that there is always something unexpected that may come out of that experience. (17)
"Having It All: Polly Apfelbaum at ICA by Ingrid Schaffner" (21-43)\\\a contrarian\\\
Polly Apfelbaum believes you can have it all and she is determined to realise the possibility through her art ... "Every single painting has 100 more paintings in it, his [Matisse's] million decisions and
indecisions are the picture ... Apfelbaum's art appears free of anxiety and stress. But like Matisse's, it is based on a similar desire to embody the irresolute, especially the immateriality of colour ... Her work involves the activities and occupies the space of sculpture, but makes a contentious bid for painting, sculpture, and installation to occur all at once, and to be experienced simultaneously ... Apfelbaum's art has sparked talk about issues of appropriation and abstraction, the legacies of minimalism and feminism, and, most recently, the powerful pleasures to be had in surrendering to design and bringing in architecture. (21)
We can have it all: colour, drawing, structure, formlessness, systems, chaos, thinking, doing, painting, sculpture, geometry, mess. These things don't necessarily cancel each other out. Indeed, polarising them simplifies complexities, which are not only challenging to consider, but pleasurable to embrace. (40)
\\\colour\\\
Sculpture is about form, not colour, which belongs to the precinct of painting. In an essay called "Colour and Sculpture: A Capricious Affair," art historian Frances Colpitt elaborated: "The rejection of colour in sculpture stems from the Western predilection for purity. From Joachim
Winckelmann (1717-1768) to Clement
Greenberg (1909-1994), theorists have demanded that each art form be true to its essential nature, with the implications that colour belongs to painting and is superfluous in sculpture." (26- Frances Colpitt, "Colour and Sculpture: A Capricious Affair,"
Chromaform: Colour in Sculpture, University of Texas at Antonio Art Gallery, 1998, 7.)
Since the Italian Renaissance, artists, philosophers, and critics have argued over the supremacy of drawing (
disegno) versus colour (
colore). It was a mind/body debate, as well as a moral and class issue: akin to writing, line was the intellect, with all the privileges due enlightenment. Beyond words, colour was sensual, immoral, tricky, dumb. (Anybody can enjoy it.) (40)
"Yes, colour grounds the value of art in the bodily social relationship between the beholder and the object, not in the shadow realm of the disembodied idea.
Think about it!" -- Libby Lumpkin, "
Vive la
résistance: Polly Apfelbaum's
Vanitás of Painting,"
Reckless, Helsinki:
Kiasma, Studio K, Museum of Contemporary Art, 1998, 13. (40)
\\\Feminism & Abjection\\\
The art market, along with the economy, had crashed, taking mainstream heroes like George
Baselitz, Sandro
Chia, Julian Schnabel and David
Salle down with it. The culture wars called for artists (especially female, gay, and non-white artists) to champion difference and to degrade the canon with critical bodies and subversive politics -- or at least confuse it with hybrid practices and shape-shifting works of art. (26)
Slinky and cheap, textured and tactile, crushed velvet treated with
Sennelier dye, a French brand available in 104 colours that she [Apfelbaum] pours directed out of the bottle, has been her main material since 1992 ... Apfelbaum had been distilling throughout her transition from readymade or found sculpture. The mark of the hand is now signified by the stain of the dye and by the gesture of arranging pieces of fabric on the floor. (29)
\\\stain\\\
In Apfelbaum's work, the stain isn't simply repulsive or taboo. It's smart, sensual, and full of feeling. Apfelbaum calls this sculpture "a beautiful mess." It operates equally as a critical and as a constructive object. (30)
\\\the question of rules\\\
Gilles Deleuze: "Folding -- unfolding no longer simply means tension -- release, contraction --dilation, but enveloping -- developing, involution, evolution." Instead of a system of oppositions and ruptures, Deleuze imagines one composed from continuities, which he elaborates elsewhere as elastic, affirming, flowing, and horizontal. (43)
"Polly Apfelbaum: 'I wanted the work to be... as sexy and hallucinogenic as possible.' by Irving Sandler" (49-53)"I am interested not so much in attempting to invent new categories but in operating promiscuously and improperly -- poaching -- within fields seemingly already well defined." Her aim, as she said, was to "twist" these categories "into a different form." -- Polly Apfelbaum, "Statement for
Chain, Vol. 2, one page typescript. (49)
Daisy Chain (1989): composed of found objects, simply juxtaposed, significantly titled, and exemplary of the post-Duchampian practices that were prevalent throughout the 1980s. Inspired by Marcel Duchamp's readymades and Andy Warhol's remades at a time when appropriation art was everywhere in the art world.
Ashley
Bickerton, Sherrie Levine, &
Haim Steinbach: appropriating newly-minted objects to make art that critiqued commodity culture.
Ann
Hanilton, David
Hammons, Donald
Lipski, & Nancy Shaver: transposing things
patinated by human touch and time, to convey cultural memory and a sense of loss. [with which Apfelbaum's use of the found object allied] (21)
Colour is notably absent from Apfelbaum's take on this work. Daisy Chain copies the printed set of shapes and their configuration in the form of raw wooden elements, laid out in rows upon the floor.
Pink Dalmatians (1992): She began to control her marks. "The pieces are dyed and cut out, then set on the floor, ordered and arranged to make more forms. The assemblage of pieces mobs through the space like an organic growth... Much of the work consists in directing its flow, organising and looking for new organisations in the liquid movements of fabric and stain." -- Polly Apfelbaum, "The Night," in
Polly Apfelbaum, San Francisco: Walter/
McBean Gallery, San Francisco Art Institute, 1997. (50)
Shaping each velvet swatch by hand is critical. With Matisse's cut-outs as a precedent, Apfelbaum said, "Cutting is drawing, almost." Scissoring into dyed fabric enabled her to draw directly into colour. (50) Decoration and handicraft materials and techniques are historically identified with women's work, which feminists rightly considered art ... Apfelbaum views her artistic enterprise as a quest for beauty. After all, the purpose of decoration is visual pleasure .. It is commonly thought that art that is pleasurable is or has to be mindless. Not so in the case of Apfelbaum's floor reliefs. In providing a conceptual component, she bridges pleasure and cerebration. As Wesley Gibson observed: "Here, beauty is intelligence, and intelligence is beauty." -- Wesley Gibson, "Reviews: Polly Apfelbaum,"
New Art Examiner, March 2001, 54. (51)
Apfelbaum's abstraction signifies her concern with "high" art. At the same time, she looks for inspiration to popular culture, notably in her material ... The diversity of interpretations that Apfelbaum's work evokes is such that at the same time you are reminded of "high" abstract art and popular culture, you are put in mind of lily pads, landscapes seen from on high, and other natural phenomena... her work is open to myriad readings. -- David
Pagel, "A Supersaturated Return to the Spirit of the Punk Era,"
Los Angeles Times, May 10, 2002, Sec. F, 26. (51)
The underlying content of Apfelbaum's work is the tension between the structured and the unstructured. Her aim, as she sees it, is to compose an initial order, then to welcome disorder - or the unknown - and finally to order it. (52)
"Let's Twist Again by Tim Griffin" (59-60)Bones (2000): The tubes are totemic, with their basic forms and serial layout; at the same time, they are completely, even uncomfortably
ordinary, resembling so many rolled-up rugs on the ground. Embedded in their repetitions is the implication of manufactured items, but the pieces are obviously handmade, richly marked with the artist's trademark mottled patterns of coloured dye. This signature aspect draws the pieces away from the context of minimalist sculpture toward painting, taking potential artistic references off the floor and onto the wall. Evoking the formal purity of, say, Helen Frankenthaler's staining technique, whereby she allowed her paints to seep into canvas, these traces of the artist's hand invite closer inspection ... The majority of the piece is, in fact, wrapped up and completely out of view, enfolded within the layers of would fabric. Bones shows and withholds at once. (59)
Apfelbaum produces work in which two basic factions - whether medium, art history or popular culture - are at odds yet bound together inextricably, so that, as in Bones, the implications wind continuously outward and inward ... her works often have consisted of coloured strips and spots organised into patterns on the floor, invoking Jackson Pollock. But Apfelbaum has rendered Pollock's
performative mode into a motif. The drip remains in place, but now registers as flat fabrics saturated with dye; and what was once the gestural trace of the creative subject is now organised according to a formal system set up by the artist. Indeed, any sense of "action" is displaced from artist to the viewer who must navigate the space shaped by the individual works. In this vein, Apfelbaum further closes the gap between painting and sculptural space, as the act of looking becomes more resolutely corporeal, more physical. (59-60)
The Color of My Fate (1989-1990)
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1248/is_1_92/ai_112131277/pg_2 http://citybeat.com/gyrobase/Content?oid=oid%3A90962http://citybeat.com/2003-12-10/art.shtml http://www.irhine.com/index.jsp?page=home_cac012504 http://contemporaryartscenter.org/exhibitions/apfelbaumLibellés : artistes, book, note, peinture, polly.apfelbaum, reading
Waplington, Nick. Learn How to Die The Easy Way. London: Trolley Ltd., 2002.
