BILLY APPLE

Apple’s first use of the Golden Ratio was in 1986 when he represented art business as percentages in AC/DC (Artist’s Cut / Dealer’s Cut), a small hand painted (by Apple) canvas divided into 61.8% and 38.2% by its dotted line. The painting is part of Apple’s Art Transactions series of text-based works that investigated art world relationships between artist-dealer-collector. In 2007 he produced a newer version of AC/DC, this time using the Golden Ratio to scale the text so that AC is 61.8% larger than DC. This adjustment is typical of the refinement that exemplifies Apple’s life-long pursuit of perfection.

In 2015 Apple created a site-specific version of AC/DC for an exhibition at Starkwhite, dividing two columns up into artist’s cut and dealer’s cut percentages. Starkwhite’s share is white and remains part of the gallery architecture, while Apple demonstrated his by painting it cadmium yellow medium, much like a 3-D bar graph. Titled AC/DC (Artist’s Cut / Dealer’s Cut) the work is restaged in Divine Proportion, highlighting the intrinsic relationship between artist and gallerist that is the conceptual support structure of any dealer art gallery. Apple had a long history of working with gallery spaces and his first use of columns was in his 1975 work Circular Subtraction at Martha Jackson West, New York, where he removed a strip of paint from around a central column with a belt sander. His first painted pillar was a 1979 red censure – a critique of its intrusion into the exhibition space at the Bosshard Galleries in Dunedin.

The third work in the exhibition, The Artist Has To Live Like Everybody Else, employs the famous catchphrase Billy Apple and Wystan Curnow devised in 1985 after Apple began looking into cost-of-living indices in 1984 to determine how much money an artist needed to achieve the average standard of living. Here the Golden Ratio is used to determine both the dimensions and price. The canvas measures 618mm (h) x 1000mm (w) and the price is calculated at 61.8% of the price for the larger 1000mm x 1618mm canvas exhibited at London’s The Mayor Gallery in 2018. The catchphrase also appears in Apple’s PAID series (1987-2021) with invoices from Apple’s daily life were selected by collectors, paid for and mounted on Apple’s PAID document. Collectively they profile the life of the artist in the form of a paper portrait of invoices.