Webb’s has a special relationship with Billy Apple. Not only has his work passed through the auction house over many years (a process the artist followed with keen attention), but it was in the rooms of the original Peter Webb Galleries in April 1981 that Billy Apple presented the first canvases and prints to mark his return to object making after more than a decade of time-based and ephemeral practice. As I outline in Billy Apple® Life/Work (Auckland University Press, 2020), this exhibition was a watershed not just for the artist but for New Zealand art in general. And the large canvas that was the centrepiece of the exhibition, Sold, 1981, was also the very first one painted by Terry Maitland. The story of this exhibition bears retelling as it paints a picture of the Auckland art scene in the 1980s that is very different from today. Contemporary New Zealand art was by 1980 well and truly being made and shown in Auckland by a growing number of serious artists, who were supported by a small number of dealer galleries – particularly Barry Lett Galleries (by then RKS Art), Denis Cohn, and New Vision – and by the Auckland City Art Gallery, which was running a cutting edge programme, especially utilising the new large galleries of the Edmiston wing for contemporary projects. But there wasn’t a secondary market for contemporary work and Peter Webb Galleries was set up in part to address that lack. Much more needs to be written on the crucial role Peter Webb played in the Auckland art scene at this time, but suffice to say, in late 1979 he refurbished a space on the first floor of the T & G Building on the corner of Elliott and Wellesley Streets to function as a combined auction house and contemporary gallery, launching this as Peter Webb Galleries (it is here that the first contemporary New Zealand art auction took place). Webb was helped in preparing the space by Billy Apple, then known as a New York-based conceptual artist who had flustered the public by staging radical installations across New Zealand in his two visits to his country of birth in 1975 and 1979–80. These largely entailed removing items from spaces and requiring owners to correct architectural, decorative or functional features he felt detracted from their performance as spaces fit for art, and presenting the empty or adjusted galleries as ‘his’ work. Indeed, between 27 November and 7 December 1979, Apple documented the changes he was responsible for in Webb’s new space as one of his The Given as an Art-Political Statement series titled New Premises in the rooms Webb now occupied. Then, on the invitation of Peter Webb, who had provoked the artist by asking him to make something he could sell, Billy Apple staged the exhibition Art for Sale (27 April – 8 May 1981). This consisted of one large canvas and ten smaller screenprints each functioning as a blownup bill of sale. Using the distinctive typography Apple had developed for the installations he executed nationally for his second tour of the country, these works were the first to move centre stage from ancillary documents to physical art works. The really radical dimension of the exhibition, however, was the challenge Apple set Webb, which was to ensure that all the works were sold prior to the opening. This was the only way their contents would make sense. I can still sense the drama of this undertaking: the pressure to sell every work in the show by a particular date (which was documented the night before the opening when each work was signed by the artist, the gallery and the buyer), the Webb's
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shock for guests at the opening to discover that everything had already sold, and the consternation that a painting that merely documented the transaction and even – shockingly – announced its price, could be a work of art! This was the moment that Apple’s conceptual practice found its visual form and the Art Transactions series Sold inaugurated, it has been the most enduring of the artist’s career. It was also the moment when the New Zealand art market came of age, at the very brink of the 1980s, that heyday for materialism that changed the system forever. From that moment, the cliché of the impoverished artist shivering in their garret was struck a terminal blow, as viewers were forced to realise that art is a material thing that can be traded like any other, and that it gains its value not because of its intrinsic qualities but because of a social contract based on relations between makers, sellers, and buyers, who must mutually believe in the value of the product. Billy Apple articulated this arrangement and continued to do so for the rest of his career. He was fascinated by the system that gave his very existence meaning, and in every deal he struck he required a re-statement of that deepest belief in the concept of ‘art’. This was as important to him as any price paid for an art work. Though of course he understood that our society equates high prices with increased value, and was happiest when his works were sold for their true worth. In this sense Billy Apple was the contemporary art world’s conscience. It was not always an easy role to play, and there are myriad instances of him being cold-shouldered. I know it will take time for his contribution to art history to be fully understood, but in the outpouring of tributes and memories that followed news of his death, I think a tide is turning.
Christina Barton is director of Te Pātaka Toi Adam Art Gallery at Te Herenga Waka Victoria University of Wellington. She is a respected curator, writer and art historian. She has known and worked with Billy Apple over many years, including curating his retrospective exhibition Billy Apple®: The Artist Has to Live like Everybody Else at Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki in 2015. Her monograph on the artist, Billy Apple® Life/Work was published by Auckland University Press in 2020.
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