GROUP EXHIBITION

The two earlier works here seek a second life apart from the sites of their original exhibition, sites which were also the original subjects of their abstraction. As hung here their site specificity is not self-evident. The {Suite} works were hung side by side on the back wall of the gallery on an angle from their top right corners so that the line that bisected the lower right corner of each was parallel with the Gallery’s frontage on Oriental Parade. The Roger Williams works, here hung side by side, were originally hung opposite one another, as with the new Two Rooms pairing. [2]Each was hung upside down in relation to the other, so the lower edge of the plan in each painting is immediately above the floor line of the wall on which it hangs. These indicators of orientation provide a choreographical supplement to the cerebral abstraction of the plan—like what Laurie Anderson said of writing about music being like dancing to architecture.

By drawing viewers’ to attention to the spruced up covers of the inspection points of the underground sewage system in the floor of Two Rooms, and immortalizing them in ‘abstractions’ Apple might seem to debase, in glib postmodern fashion, all the transcendentalist aspirations of twentieth painting. Although Apple is less satirist than analyst—remember the way he dealt with his personal plumbing back in the seventies, the trouble he caused with his ‘Excretory Wipings”? –the juxtaposition of distributions systems, here of human waste and high cultural endeavour certainly offers a reality check of sorts. The proliferation Apple’s Auckland gallery abstractions implies there’s a map being drawn of the city’s art system, overlaying its street and drainage systems, and which like other of the artist’s recent public art projects is concerned with the culture of the urban economy. [3]

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