Four Spotlights, Apple, 1969
Extension of the given, Leo Castelli Gallery, 1977
Installed as Four Spotlights, Ramp 2003 and Subtraction from the given (internal entrance), Ramp 2003.
Billy Apple is New Zealand’s most important conceptual artist. In a statement as simple and as declarative as this, there are two major issues. The first relates to the question of ‘New Zealand-ness’. Often, important New Zealand art is thought of in terms of its response to ‘our place’, to the specific contingencies of our own geography and social experience. Apple’s work has never been concerned …
This is a picture show, an exhibition for which the visually novel has failed to turn up. The new will not make a rare appearance here. Instead, in literal senses and through articulations of familiarity and cliché, found material dominates the exhibited work of Berlin-based artists Ina Bierstedt, Bettina Carl and Alena Meier.
Flache Welt (trans. flat earth) suggests some general strains in contemporary picture making and art production-the notion of burying occidental perspective in abstract painting, for example, or that of the screen- a surface of mediation whose flatness threatens …
