BILLY APPLE

Starkwhite is pleased to present the exhibition Billy Apple®: $23,610 Top Up at the Auckland offices of Minter Ellison Rudd Watts, from 7 April to 3 June 2011.

In October 2005, Minter Ellison advanced Billy Apple $100,000 credit for legal services for an artwork staged as a site-specific wall painting in the firm’s reception area. With this transaction work Apple merges the two brands, adding value to the Minter Ellison brand by taking it into the realm of art. The work also confirms the high value Minter Ellison places on its artist client and the firm’s belief that its support of his work brings, so to say, credit to it.

$100,000 Credit Held has since become a cornerstone work in Apple’s continuing series of ‘transaction’ works, which describe and serve to contract the many and varied involvements of art works in the process of exchange. Beginning with Art For Sale, 1981, with its focus on the artist’s core business, Apple’s ‘transaction’ series has progressively and inventively extended its field of reference to cover all manner of everyday transactions, either under the general classification of the on-going Paid, The Artist has to Live like Everybody Else series, or by individual arrangements (deals) whereby the artist receives, for instance, coffee, lunch or particular services, such as medical services (Well-Being) ) or, in this case, legal servicesin exchange for works of his art.

$100,000 Credit Held is a spectacular addition to Apple’s list of transactions, not just because of the monetary value it represents, or the explicitness of the brand exchange (‘credit where credit’s due’), but because of the importance of the work to the management of his transaction portfolio and his brand name. The artist has used the credit to secure his legal status as a brand and the forthcoming exhibition includes artworks documenting the purposes to which the artist’s credit has been put - the 4 artworks record the class of commodity for which Apple holds New Zealand trade mark registration as a direct outcome of Christopher Young and Rachel Colley of the Minter Ellison’s intellectual property team’s advice and services provided under the credit for legal services contract. The classes in which Billy Apple holds trade mark registrations are: Class 16 Printed Matter, Class 25 Clothing, Class 31, Fresh Fruit and Class 44 Orchard Services.

Registered trademark protection is required for one of Billy Apple’s projects. He wants to grow his own variety or ‘cultivar’ and the new strain of apple will bear his name and be sold in the (global super) market. A polyester cast of the Billy, a cross between a Royal Gala and a Braeburn, is included in the exhibition.

The exhibition also includes another new work on canvas $23,610 Top Up, publicly celebrating an extension to the agreement between the parties. Apple calculated his need for further credit by reference to the Golden Ratio. The sum $23,610 is a golden section portion (23.61%) of the original deal that was agreed by both parties.

For further information on this exhibition and images please contact the gallery