Pretty Polly
Like any good artist, Polly Apfelbaum makes complex work. But it is also dazzlingly beautiful, which in the past has caused some snooty art-world folks to dismiss it as mere décor.
“People don’t want you to deal with beauty,” Apfelbaum says. “I was interested in the decorative arts. I was interested in the everyday. Screw you. If it is my sensibility to make something very, very beautiful, I want to do it.”
Squeezed into the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art’s main gallery are 14 pieces spanning 13 years of the New York City-based artist’s career; Apfelbaum designed all but two of the works specifically for this traveling exhibit. The space seems a little tight for the show (the longest piece measures 40 feet), but the cramped quarters create an interesting dialogue between the works.
The shimmering pastel “Ice,” from 1998, covers the floor in the south corner of the gallery. Inspired, Apfelbaum says, by the arctic landscape, it was meant to be contemplative — especially compared with its sister piece, “Reckless,” also from 1998, which is so colorful, so complex, so bursting with movement that it resembles a coral reef. Whereas “Ice” has been installed according to a specific grid, “Reckless,” as suggested by its name, is more free-form.
Compared with when she began making art in the 1980s, Apfelbaum says, people today are more inclined to take seriously art that deals with visual pleasure. “Earlier on, people were like, ‘Why go there? Why are you going to simple beauty or simple pleasure?’ I don’t think it’s so simple,” she says.
Lately, Apfelbaum has been creating complicated installations of synthetic fabrics dyed in a hallucinogenic range of colors (as many as 104 of them), cut into thousands of tiny pieces and arranged on a floor. “Split,” a recent addition to the Kemper’s permanent collection, covers the blond hardwoods along the north end of the gallery like a black, bubbly oil spill. Branching out from its glistening black-and-white body are long fingers of color — each of Apfelbaum’s 104 colors, twice. It’s simultaneously foreboding and inviting — dark but not dreary, wonderful to behold yet unsettling in the way the giant piece seems to encroach upon the rest of the gallery from its place in the corner.
To fully take in Apfelbaum’s art, visitors must constantly crane their necks; it’s almost as if the entire gallery is full of people looking for a lost contact lens. “With my work, the physicality is incredibly important,” Apfelbaum says. Not only are people forced to look down in order to fully see each piece; their traffic patterns are affected as well. Most of the pieces are so big that it’s hard to get a good look at them in their entirety. Weirdly, then, viewers must concentrate on one small area at a time. But doing so allows them a more intimate experience of the work.
It’s the intricacies of Apfelbaum’s art that make it so intriguing. The aesthetic elements — wild colors, soft textures, dramatic tonal gradations, a multitude of shapes creating visually kinetic patterns — captivate the eye and suggest endless possibilities. Abstraction leaves viewers without concrete, recognizable clues to an artist’s meaning, but Apfelbaum often uses pop-culture references to ease the conceptual exchange.
Back in 2000, Apfelbaum noticed a similarity between her work and depictions of the TV cartoon crime-fighting trio the Powerpuff Girls: an irreverent combination of brains, beauty and brawn. (With her short, black, bobbed haircut, Apfelbaum even looks a little bit like Buttercup.) “I’ve always wanted to prove my point that, yes, I can be beautiful and tough and rigorous and have a sense of form and geometry,” Apfelbaum says. So she created a series of work with color schemes based on the hair colors of Buttercup, Blossom and Bubbles.
“Big Bubbles” is composed of blots of fabric dye on dozens of pieces of synthetic velvet cut into oblong cross shapes with rounded edges. The pieces are arranged in a spiral 18 feet in diameter; spreading out from the center, the fabric color changes from yellow to orange to green to, finally, blue. With its green and yellow pieces resembling leaves, the work has an organic feel to it.
Except for its title and color scheme, though, nothing about “Big Bubbles” refers directly to the Powerpuff Girls. Apfelbaum uses her titles as a powerful tool to draw her audience in and to offer clues about the meaning of her work. The earliest fabric piece in the show, “Peggy Lee and the Dalmatians” (from 1992), refers to Walt Disney’s 101 Dalmatians; Peggy Lee recorded music and provided the voices for the Siamese Cats and Peg the dog. Installing this piece, Apfelbaum says, was “just throwing fabric on the floor.” Eighteen pieces of white, synthetic velvet stained with large, black blots lie strewn in a circle on the floor. “I think it’s just like dirty clothes,” she says. “It’s a beautiful collapse of form.” Although the visual elements are purely abstract, Apfelbaum hopes that the title will create a narrative in viewers’ minds — and the way the fabric lies haphazardly on the floor suggests that Cruella De Vil has succeeded in dognapping the unfortunate puppies and that their hides are waiting to be processed into fur coats.
Apfelbaum’s pop-art tendencies also influence the organization of this show. Along with curators Claudia Gould and Ingrid Schaffner of the Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania, Apfelbaum chose to begin the retrospective with “Daisy Chain,” her 1989 appropriation of Andy Warhol’s print “SAS Passenger Ticket.” Apfelbaum borrows the dingbats — clovers, flowers and starbursts — that Warhol overlaid on his silkscreen of an airline ticket and re-creates them in three dimensions out of wood. The second-oldest piece, “Pocket Full of Posies,” is a ring of cut-out steel flowers that lies flat on the floor. The flowers are cartoonish and graphic, like the flower-power emblem of the ’60s, yet delightful and girlish, like a child’s charm bracelet. “Color of My Fate,” from 1990, is several stacks of multicolored crepe party rolls sitting in a cardboard box; it’s a throwback to the highly conceptual, found-object-based sculpture of Apfelbaum’s career in the early to mid-’80s. “Early on with my work, it was really about trying everything,” she says. “When you start, I think, it’s better to be confused. Confuse yourself as much as possible and then at a certain point say, ‘What do I want to do here and what do I want to say?'” The two pieces foreshadow the color-rich direction her work would take in the coming decade. “Daisy Chain” and “Pocket Full of Posies” mark the point when, through experimentation, Apfelbaum moved away from using found objects and started making objects, which eventually led to her trademark colorful dyed blots.
“The stain became everything,” Apfelbaum says. “It really did. From there, I could go a lot of different ways and in a lot of different directions. Art can be just a pool of color dyed on to a piece of fabric. And it can be very beautiful.”
