Billy Apple's Alterations, 1980

Billy Apple. Altered Staircase. The Given as an Art-Political Statement was one of a series of nine exhibitions Billy Apple undertook on a barnstorming tour through New Zealand between October 1979 and February 1980. Wherever he went, whether it was Auckland City Art Gallery or a dealer gallery such as Peter McLeavey’s, Apple called in the cleaners, painters and carpenters to give the spaces a ‘spruce-up’ or ‘makeover’ into exhibition spaces more to his liking.¹

 It was a national tour of inspection preparatory, although he did not know it at the time, to his permanent return to New Zealand. Dick Bett, whose arrival as Director of the Govett-Brewster more or less coincided with this project, welcomed Apple’s ideas; by joining in the artist’s exhaustive examination of the Gallery he was able to familiarise himself with the building for which he was now responsible. Most of the proposals Apple made involved relatively minor changes—items re-painted, re-positioned, or removed—compared with his major suggestion: the extension to the staircase between Decks B and C (now Mezzanine and Gallery 2) by a third of its original width and a rebuild of the balustrades.

This idea developed from a talk with Terry Boon, the architect responsible for the building’s original conversion, whom Bett had brought into the conversation. According to my notes;

Billy asked him, “is there one thing that now bothers you about the gallery?” “Yes,” Boon said, “those metal balustrades! John Maynard didn’t like them from the start. He wanted mahogany capping and plywood sides.” Boon wanted no balustrades at all! Couldn’t do that, though; Council required them. Billy wants to do what John wanted originally. Terry said, “Fine”. Then he said, “I’d like to widen the stairs. The Gallery has no auditorium, so think of it as a mini-theatre; stairs for seating, as a natural … an instant forum.”²

Apple belongs to a generation of artists who for a while turned their backs on painting and sculpture—those moveable, autonomous, art objects—art galleries even. In the early 1970s Apple, then based in New York, exhibited temporary installations, made tapes, presented his work away from the established art world—out in the street, in derelict buildings, or in the countryside. In 1975, during his first visit back to New Zealand since leaving as a student in the late fifties, Apple exhibited Neon Accumulation at the Govett-Brewster, 20 September–14 December. A glass ‘scatter’ piece from 1968 comprising broken glass tubing and neon elements, it is characteristic of the movement of his work away from the art object. Even though its ‘arrangement’—tipped down a carpeted back staircase entered from Gallery 5—occupied space not normally used to exhibit work, it incensed the New Plymouth Fire Brigade who had it removed. It was, nevertheless, accessioned by the Gallery, making it the only Apple work from this phase of his career in any public collection.³

The episode excited media attention, even a mocking editorial from The Taranaki Daily News [‘Apple Cart Upset. You Have to Laugh’, 2 October 1975]. The intensity of the ‘controversy’ not only in New Plymouth but in fact throughout his Queen Elizabeth II Arts Council tour, took Apple by surprise. Indeed, it had hardly begun before a national television news item, caused two public galleries to pull out and a third to start getting cold feet. I was not so much surprised as incensed; it was a sore point for me, as I struggled to adjust to the situation of high culture in a small province. I thoroughly documented Apple’s reception and published it. Some years later, back in New York, when Apple was considering a return visit, I offered to act as his agent, tour manager, PR man and in-house critic. I jacked up a lecture tour to fund his travel around the country and enable him to work out arrangements for the in situ projects that had by then begun to develop. Several venues were in fact finalised by the time he arrived in Auckland. Then we discussed his ‘psychic insulation’ and worked out the media strategy: he would be unavailable for interviews or photographs. Reporters were to be invited to the artist’s lectures and referred to me in Auckland or to the gallery staff at the venues concerned. Our aim being to frustrate media attempts to fetishise and disempower the ‘avant-garde’ artist.

At one level Apple, understandably, was personally upset by the media hostility, at another he recognised it as constitutive of the ‘given’, the downside, if you like, of the opportunity New Zealand had offered him: which was to extend to public galleries and dealers the kind of art ‘activities’ which in New York had previously been largely confined to artist-run and ‘alternative’ spaces, such as his own Apple gallery. The desire to consolidate these gains was enhanced by his first shows at the Leo Castelli Gallery, arguably the leading New York dealer, Extension of the Given (Front Office) (1977), and Extension of the Given (Stairway Entrance) (1978). In a lecture at Elam, in October 1978, a year short of a decade after he had opened his own alternative space, Apple declared that he was finished with working outside the system. Thus Neon Accumulation and Altered Staircase bookend an important period of change for Apple, one in which New Zealand and its art system, for the first time, provided the main stage. And Altered Staircase stands out as a crucial fulfilment of his purposes during this period, for just as his self-named gallery had materially positioned him as outside the system, so the accessioning of Altered Staircase materially embodies his subsequent critical positioning within it.

Excerpt from: 
Wystan Curnow, The Difference a Gallery Makes: A History of the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery in Nine Exhibitions, 1977–2007

Reproduced from Now Showing, A History of the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery.

Soon after it was widened the Govett-Brewster’s staircase began to be used for seating audiences. Altered Staircase, with its staged broadening of the ascent from the ground floor, had enhanced the viewers’ sense of arrival at the top of the stairs and endorsed the altar-ing effect we noted with the positioning of Blade in Kinetic Works. It was accessioned, after some argument, but unlike all other works in the collection it is not a movable object, not autonomous; it’s a ‘fixture’, inseparable either from the fabric of the building or from its indispensable function as a staircase.4 It is the only alteration produced on that tour to be so collected—the Sarjeant Gallery, and Auckland City Art Gallery acquired ‘documentation’ only. Although other important works of Apple’s have since been acquired by other public galleries, Neon Accumulation and Altered Staircase remain the two most farsighted and courageous Apple acquisitions made by a New Zealand art institution.

Apple’s alterations all crossed the normally clear dividing lines defining the usual guest/host relationship implicit in the nature of temporary exhibitions. The staircase was really none of his business, so why didn’t he just get on with putting his pictures on the wall? Apple politicised the relationship—the alteration works were all sub-titled ‘The Given as an Art-Political Statement’, the phrase enabled the viewer to understand the work as what, five years later, some critics began calling an ‘institutional critique’.⁵ Altered Staircase is a work of art because it has something to say about art and its context, as well as something to say about life in any building, about the politics of the institutional ‘frame’ that organises that life. By so imbedding his work in the building, Apple changed the relation of all works subsequently exhibited in the Gallery to the Gallery. When I asked Fiona Clark about the ‘installation’ of her 1982 Mr Fine Arts body building competition she said: “It was staged in the centre of the Gallery at the top of the ‘Billy Apple staircase’”.

With its opening show, which turned the entire Gallery over to Leon Narbey’s Real Time, a single light installation, the Gallery had declared an alignment with the contemporary international trends represented by this work, an alignment which confronted the belatedness that was more or less a standard feature of the development of art practices and the reception in New Zealand up to that time. In so far as the Gallery’s collection, its archive, represents a unique ‘record of the recent’ Neon Accumulation forms a vital link with Narbey’s film of Real Time, Jim Allen’s New Zealand Environment No. 5, and Len Lye’s films and moving sculptures, in a series that serves as the pre-history, a kind of kinetic and light art preface, to Apple’s Altered Staircase of 1980, a defining example of New Zealand post-object or conceptual art.⁶  It is that series, rather than the late formalist abstract painting that led to minimalism in the United States, that distinguishes the origins of contemporary art in New Zealand. The exclusion of the work of expatriate artists, even when it has been made and exhibited in New Zealand, and even when it relates to work made before and after in New Zealand or by New Zealanders, exposes the negative face of cultural nationalist accounts of New Zealand art.

1. See my ‘Report: The Given as an Art-Political Statement. Text by Wystan Curnow on Nine Works by Billy Apple’ in Art New Zealand 15, 1980, pp. 27–28, and Altered Staircase. The Given as an Art-Political Statement. Billy Apple Govett-Brewster Art Gallery pamphlet, 2002, reprinted 2010.

2. From my notebook record of a telephone conversation with Billy Apple dated 1 November 1979.

3. Following its removal Neon Accumulation was re-installed in Gallery 6.

4. “Mr Newmarch said he supported the stand taken by Messrs Honnor and Moss. The modifications should not be designated as a work of art, but as structural alterations, and therefore paid out of maintenance funds … Mr Honnor reiterated his position … It was unfortunate the matter had gone this far as it was Mr Bett’s first art acquisition as new director.’ Taranaki Daily News, 14 November 1979.

5. See Andrea Fraser, ‘From the Critique of Institutions to the Institution of Critique’ in Artforum, September, 2005.

6. 278–283. Fraser claims she was the first to use the term in print (in 1985). Her description of the ‘given’ accords with Apple’s practice in these years: “The institution of art is not something external to any work of art but the irreducible condition of its existence as art. No matter how public in placement, immaterial, transitory, relational, everyday, or even invisible, what is announced and perceived as art is always already institutionalized, simply because it exists within the perception of participants in the field of art as art, a perception not necessarily aesthetic but fundamentally social in its determination.” p. 281.