Billy Apple: Exposé
A series of posters to complement Billy Apple's architectural interventions of art galleries in the late 1970s and early 80s serve as an early indication of the graphic template that was to become the artist's enduring signature. In this essay, writer, curator and editor Christina Barton explores the context and history of this poster ahead of its auction through Works of Art live sale on Monday 28 July, 6.30pm.
Lot 13.
Billy Apple,
EXPOSÉ: 17 November 1979, The Given as an Art-Political Statement, National Art Gallery
1979,
ink and graphite on exhibition poster; timber batten and screw
, 650 x 910mm; 585 x 850mm. EST. $12,000—$20,000
For ten months between October 1979 and March 1980, conceptual artist Billy Apple (1935–2021) returned to New Zealand from his base in New York to undertake a second ‘national tour’ – after his notorious first visit in 1975 – in which he executed a new series of site-specific installations, each subtitled The Given as an Art-Political Statement. With assistance from art writer and tour organiser Wystan Curnow, Apple delivered nine projects in public and dealer galleries in Auckland, New Plymouth, Whanganui, Wellington, Christchurch and Dunedin. In each case these entailed the artist assessing the site (what he understood as the ‘given’), proposing to the gallery owner or museum director an alteration to their space, and enlisting gallery staff and local artists to undertake the designated changes, usually in the interests of aligning it more fully with the clean lines of the modernist white cube.
An intriguing adjunct to the artist’s actual interventions are the posters Apple produced for each project, which, to varying degrees, conform to a graphic template that was to become Apple’s enduring signature. Each poster operated to announce the ‘exhibition’, but also functioned as a visual remainder, documenting the before and after of what the artist had done. As part of a conceptual practice that did not produce saleable objects, Apple’s alterations could not be commodified, nor were the posters imbued with intrinsic value, being designed as multiples for distribution.
However, there were exceptions to this, and the framed artworks produced alongside Exposé, the project he undertook at the National Art Gallery in Wellington, are a case in point. Here, the artist laid out evidence of his working process, rendering visible the exacting attention he paid to the graphics he designed to announce this ‘art-political statement’, and including artefacts associated with the event that took place in the gallery on 17 November 1979. These are unique relics that reveal the ‘hand’ of the artist and preserve items salvaged from the occasion.
‘Exposé’ has a double meaning. On the one hand it describes the action that took place, which consisted of the de-installation of two mural-scale paintings by British artist Sir Frank Brangwyn (1867– 1956) that had hung in the entrance foyer to the National Art Gallery for more than two decades, adding to the atmosphere of fussy provincialism that incoming director Luit Bieringa (1942–2022) was happy to dispel when Apple proposed the idea. Removing the paintings literally exposed the bare walls that had been hidden for years, leaving two ghostly rectangles of lighter paintwork that gallery staff had regularly painted around.
But an ‘exposé’ was also the inevitable consequence of finding that the paintings had been secured with screws through the face of each canvas and stretcher, a shocking act of professional incompetence hidden by the addition of battens painted to match the original frames. Apple had no inkling this would be the outcome of his injunction, so as well as calling out the museum’s conservatism he was able to lambast the institution for its ineptitude, taking a section of batten and the only screw that his helpers were able to retrieve intact as evidence of this transgression. No wonder he decided to frame his proof, and diarise the place and occasion in the distinctive form of a Billy Apple poster.
The winter 2025 edition of Webb's foremost art auction series, Works of Art offers an enviable selection of museum-quality pieces by some of the most seminal practitioners from New Zealand and beyond. Live auction is scheduled for Monday 28 July, 6.30pm in our Mount Eden Gallery.
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Monday 28 July, 2025, 6.30pm.
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