© 2011-15 Sait Akkirman, including all photographs.

13/03/2015, + Auckland Art Gallery o Billy Apple
"Billy Apple®: The Artist Has to Live Like Everybody Else".
Curated by Christina Barton.

The photographs on the following pages were taken on 13/03/2015 during curator
Christina Barton's media briefing, and the subsequent exhibition opening. I would
recommend reading the exhibition notes below, provided by Auckland Art Gallery:

Covering fifty-five years of Apple’s prolific career, the extensive retrospective reveals Apple’s decades-long examination of the boundaries between art, life, commerce and science. It explores his on-going contribution to art on the global stage, his past practice and current projects, including:

+ Billy Apple’s ‘rebrand’ in 1962, London, when the young New Zealand artist changed his name and bleached his hair, redefining himself as a ‘product’ with his own distinct brand. This was a unique and lasting contribution to the emerging pop art scene where the focus was on the rising world of consumerism;

+ Apple’s innate attraction to new technologies, such as his work of the 1960s with neon light;

+ His move away from art as object in the early 1970s towards activity-based work, such as cleaning his not-for-profit APPLE Gallery in New York;

+ His process-driven works with New York and New Zealand galleries, where he alters a gallery’s fittings, fixtures or structures – and in so doing challenges the operations and relationships of the art world;

+ Apple’s investigation of art as value transactions in the 1980s, when his work, including his paintings that resemble IOUs or receipts, was condensed to the basic fact of its material worth;

+ Apple’s further consideration of the concept of ‘value’. Through the adoption of the Golden Ratio, an universal formula evident in nature and geometry that he applies to his work;

+ Apple® the brand. In 2007, Apple registered his name as a trademark. Current projects explore the legal concept of intellectual property by bringing Apple’s art brand into the market place. Projects include Billy Apple cider, pies and coffee. As he says, ‘In 1964 we took the supermarket into the art gallery, now we’re taking the art gallery into the supermarket.’

+ Apple’s collection of race-ready high performance motorcycles and cars that reveal something of artist’s personal passions and their cross over into his art;

+ Refrigerated somatic cells from Apple himself, virally transformed to live independently from his body - a collaboration known as the Immortalisation Project with biochemist, Dr Craig Hilton, and;

+ Good Works for charity, where Apple’s artworks are transacted to raise funds for a variety of charitable purposes from Women’s Refuge to AIDS to Youthline.

13/03/2015, + Auckland Art Gallery o Billy Apple - "Billy Apple®: The Artist Has to Live Like Everybody Else".
Curated by Christina Barton.