Worcester Art MuseuM / worcesterart.org f l n

POLLY APFELBAUMneverMind: Work froM the 90s

“Of all the vast possibilities of the feminine, which inform (consciously orunconsciously, intentionally or inevitably) my work, I will mention (in anecessarily obvious and arbitrary way) three terms that are important to me:suppleness, the domestic (the everyday), wonder (beauty) (which is not toforget many other and important aspects of the work: color, the stain,hybridity, the formal, or its relation to history).

Suppleness: a non-rigid formal language, the softness of crushed velvet, theliquidity of fabric. Things piled up, draped, lying on the floor, leaning againstthe wall. Serial and variable arrangements (as opposed to orthogonal, erect,vertical and fixed).

The domestic (the everyday): …the realm of repetition, reiteration, androutine. That which does not declare itself to be a work of art first of all.

Wonder (beauty): to begin to wonder at the subversive and criticalpossibilities of the beautiful, the excessive, the fantastic.”

Polly Apfelbaum, 19921

cover: Blow-Up, detailAbove: Splendor in the Grass, Glory in the Flower, detail

POLLY APFELBAUMneverMind: Work froM the 90soctober 8, 2014 – March 1, 2015

Polly Apfelbaum – Nevermind: Work fromthe 90s focuses on the artist’s rarely seenformative works in synthetic velvet andfabric dye alongside one of her iconic cut-out stain installations, Blow-Up (1997), in theWorcester Art Museum’s collection. theexhibition invites reflection on the 1990s,when a generation of young artists, includingApfelbaum, was challenging traditionalboundaries between media and the conven-tional parameters of painting. curators wereorganizing exhibitions on the subject, suchas Painting Outside Painting (the 44th

corcoran biennial, Washington, dc, 1995);Painting: The Extended Field (Magasin 3stockholm & rooseum center forcontemporary Art, Malmö, 1996); AbstractPainting Once Removed (contemporary ArtsMuseum, houston, 1998); and As Painting:Division and Displacement (Wexner centerfor the Arts, columbus, 1998), to name justa few in which Apfelbaum participated. looking back, it also was a time when artshifted away from static, self-containedobjects toward experiential environmentsand installations responsive to the spacesthey occupied. Amidst a cross-fertilization ofvarious media in the 1990s, Apfelbaum andher peers recast the language of abstractionas one of inclusivity by letting the world invia materials and ideas that engaged withthe social realities of the day and spoke inthe vernacular: tony feher’s accumulationsof water-filled recycled bottles, felixgonzalez-torres’ consumed and replenishedspills of wrapped candies, david reed’shybrids of painting/tv/film, rudolphstingel’s room-size immersive and interac-tive gestures, and Jessica stockholder’sarrangements of found objects as paintsurfaces. Audiences were invited to engagea range of their senses and become activeparticipants in the open-ended process ofthe construction of meaning. in 1992, when Apfelbaum began to workexclusively with cloth and color and to inte-grate her raw materials with the horizontalplane of the floor, she opened up a newconceptual and physical space for abstractpainting. Attracted to velvet’s supple, floor-hugging form and light-catching texture,

Apfelbaum found it to be the ideal ground forher growing engagement with color.2 floor-based art of the 1960s-1970s by carl Andre,lynda benglis, and barry leva had been apoint of reference for her earlier sculpture.“sculpture sits on the floor, but i wonderedwhat it would mean to have a painting onthe floor. it was a support that i thought hadbeen ignored. And it can be an interestingplace – a place that belongs to domesticity,the place where your dirty clothes go.”3 sheadopted the term “fallen paintings” as a wayof talking about these works as hybrids,“poised between painting and sculpture;works not so much attempting to invent newcategories, but working promiscuously andimproperly – poaching – in fields seeminglyalready well defined.”4

Apfelbaum’s practice of investing abstractionwith cultural content and creating a sensorylink to the world was both a generationaltendency and a feminist position. herchoice of velvet opened up the work to anarray of associations from clothing and craftto gender and class; her task-orientedgestures of cutting, folding, and arranginghad parallels in the domestic realm of repeti-tion and routine; her titles, with their familiarcultural connections – Cinderella (disneyanimation), Wonderbread (product pack-aging), Blow-Up (Antonioni film) – reinforcedthe emotive potential of certain color vocab-ularies and relationships. Perhaps indicativeof the decade’s prevalence of art about thebody as well as the gradual resurgence ofabstract painting, Apfelbaum’s “stain” wasinterpreted as a gendered and subversivemark – at once asserting the abject natureof the female body while challenging theauthoritative brush stroke of the painter. the literature of the time often cited how thefluidity of materials and collapsed nature ofApfelbaum’s work – “an abstraction thatwas like a meltdown of color and form”5 –built upon the unorthodox processes andformats of predecessors including thepigment pours of Jackson Pollock andbenglis, the saturated stains of helenfrankenthaler, Morris louis, and larryPoons, and the unstructured structures ofeva hesse, robert Morris, and sam

gilliam.6 less prevalent were critical refer-ences to the ways Apfelbaum’s humblematerials and modest gestures reflected theearly influence of Arte Povera, a radicalitalian art movement from the late 1960s to1970s whose artists (including Janniskounellis, Piero Manzoni, Mario Merz,Marisa Merz, and Michelangelo Pistoletto)explored a range of unconventional mate-rials and experimented with various forms ofphysical interaction between the work of artand its viewers. in 1984 Apfelbaum moved to spain for ayear and she recalled the impact of a “bigshow of that work in Madrid…My colors arelush and artificial, which is less Arte Povera,but the mix of high and low is similar. i wasalso aware of the support/surface [sic]group in france. What was going on ineurope – abstract work that was slightly outof the mainstream – definitely had an effecton my work.”7 exposure to french artistsassociated with the supports/surfaces group(daniel dezeuze, noël dolla, and claudeviallat, among others) would be particularlyrelevant for Apfelbaum during these forma-tive years, as their work was marked by aninterest in materiality, expansive ideas aboutwhat a painting could be, and the frequentuse of bright color. formed after the May1968 demonstrations in Paris, the group“combined Marxist thought, deconstructionistattitudes and the influences of Matisse andcolor field stain painting. firmly hands-on,its artists pursued a politically awareformalism,”8 one that both challenged andreaffirmed painting. however, in a critical departure frompostwar abstraction practiced by theprevious generations, Apfelbaum’s art,despite its insistent materiality, was “radi-cally provisional.”9 because Apfelbaum’sworks have no fixed configurations (indi-vidual elements are not permanentlyadhered to one another or the floor and arereorganized each time they are installed),they resist the historic qualifiers of finishand permanence and instead radiate asense of immediacy and possibility.similarly, Apfelbaum’s works accrue ratherthan fix meaning.10

Apfelbaum’s 1992 solo exhibition at theAmy lipton gallery, titled The Blot on MyBonnet, heralded what would be a career-long exploration of the intersections of colorand meaning through the deceptivelysimple materials of fabric and dye. it wasthe first time she dyed remnants of velvet,“a result of her decision to limit the mate-rials in her studio.”11 A reviewer for Artforumwrote, “Pieces of slinky crushed velvet arestained with spots of color and configuredin crumpled piles, or folded neatly on card-board boxes, or are laid flat, radiating froma corner.”12 titles such as The Dwarveswithout Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, andPeggy Lee and the Dalmations, with theirreferences to disney’s sanitized versions ofcomplex and dark tales, not only encour-aged viewers to experience the installationas one of conceptually related works butalso infused these abstract forms with addi-tional layers of latent significance. the ideaof bodies – female and male, human andcanine, flesh and fur – comingled with theovert sensuality and vulnerability of thevelvet. A reviewer described the works as,“Promiscuous with respect to the artistictraditions they embrace, sullied withblotches of ink, or hiding snatches of colorin their folds.”13

lipton remembers that the exhibition “wasindeed a huge breakthrough and quiteshocking at the time. but Polly’s work wasalways changing, evolving, and openingnew territories. these fabric floor pieceswere no more of an abrupt change than thepreceding found object work was from thewooden construction pieces that camebefore. Polly was continually pushingherself and open to investigation.” theconsistency in all four of Apfelbaum’sshows at her gallery, lipton recalls, wasthat “the installation process was para-mount to the work.”14

CinderellaCinderella, the earliest work in theWorcester exhibition, is one of three relatedpieces from 1992, including The Dwarveswithout Snow White and Pink Dalmations, each comprised of soft rectangles of foldedcrushed velvet placed atop a row of

shallow cardboard boxes.15 With itsmottled grey palette (found color, notdyed), repeated geometry, and proximityto the floor, Cinderella at first glance payshomage to carl Andre’s floor-bound, metalplate sculptures. but Cinderella modestly(and playfully) subverts its minimalistancestry, opening up to a world of imper-fection and allusion – cinder-soiled fabric,the domestic routine of folding, the utili-tarian identity of the garment box. A barelyvisible detail – the sheets of velvet arefinished with finely hand-stitched edges –is a testament to Apfelbaum’s privilegingof “making things with my hands” andsignals the ongoing attention Apfelbaumwould invest in the edges of the fabricelements in her work.16 While the boxes inthese works provided a kind of structurethat Apfelbaum would abandon later thatyear, they reminded her of “miniaturehope chests, with their trousseau laidneatly on top of the lids.”17

Fine Flowers in the Valley (White Spill) compared to the sculptural identity ofCinderella, the fluidity of fabric and dyethat Apfelbaum realized in Fine Flowers inthe Valley (White Spill), from 1992-93,began to ally her practice and sensibilitymore closely with abstract painting. Withthis work, Apfelbaum also began experi-menting with placement as a form ofgesture in response to site. the nine largesheets of white crushed velvet, eachstained with pours of a different family ofbrilliantly colored dyes, had been config-ured in three different formations in asmany different locations: neatly foldedand draped like banners over a banister atthe top of a staircase, laid blanket-likeatop a bed at a contemporary art fair heldin a hotel, and dropped onto the floor into“an intentional, but loose, crumple ofmaterial shaped into an awkward star” or flower.18 the latter, in which the flow of fabric and liquidity of poured dye werechromatically composed into a moment of stasis, has become the configuration of choice since its inclusion in the 1993group exhibition Future Perfect in vienna.

Cinderella, 1992, crushed synthetic velvet, cardboard boxes, 3 x 27 x 131 inches (as installed). courtesy of theartist & clifton benevento

With each reinstallation of Fine Flowers inthe Valley (White Spill), Apfelbaum mustre-perform the dropping and shaping of theflat rectangles of velvet until they mutateinto 3-dimensional piles (six petal-likeshapes, three circular mounds), keeping inmind the color relations, the ways some ofthe elements touch others, the occasionsof revealing and concealing the stains, theeffects of the negative spaces of the floor,and the proximity of the work to the walls.in a display of faith in handcraft and practi-cality, Apfelbaum recycled strips of cottonsheeting used during the dying processand attached them with safety pins to theends of the velvet so they have the playfuleffect of tassels.during these important formative years,as Apfelbaum experimented with variousapplications of sennelier liquid dyes(poured, blotted, stamped), differentconfigurations of the stained fabric(geometric folds and patches, organicspills and splats), and a range of orga-nizing systems of unmixed color (fromisolated blots arranged like a color chartto chains and patterns of related colors),she discovered methods of creating

dynamic optical, physical, and emotionalexperiences. the 1990s was a period ofintense learning - controlling the dye,responding to architectural space, real-izing the significance of cutting the fabric,and utilizing the element of light. “i wasmaking the rules as i went,” she recalls.19

Wonderbread one of the results of Apfelbaum experi-menting with control of the dye andorchestrating the simultaneous effects oflight, color, placement, and idea wasWonderbread (1993), with its area-rugarrangement of overlapping off-whitevelvet rectangles and its methodically

Fine Flowers in the Valley (White Spill), 1992-93, crushed synthetic velvet, cotton sheeting, fabric dye, safety pins,105 x 103 inches (as installed). courtesy of the artist & clifton benevento

Fine Flowers in the Valley (White Spill), detail

stained pattern – dots of red, yellow, andblue dye stamped in quasi-orderly rows.self-imposed “rules” included the relativeuniformity of the stains and the strictlylimited palette – a chromatic code linkedto the packaging of Wonder bread (thepopular, white, and malleable processed bread product of many American child-hoods) – and the form-shifting geometricstructure which accommodated bothvertical and horizontal orientations of thepattern as well as front and back sides ofthe pieces of velvet. When Apfelbaumreinstalled the work for the Worcester ArtMuseum, she maintained the overalldimensions while intuitively recreating the

internal logic between the vertical andhorizontal, relations between dense andopen patterns, and contrasts between thereflective front surfaces (always shown intheir entirety) and the matte backs. Apfelbaum’s ability to create an experi-ence of color that “we know” and thatremains abstract, like Wonderbread, wasat the heart of an essay in 1998 by arthistorian libby lumpkin. she identifiedApfelbaum, whose works were increas-ingly startling in their complexity andbeauty, as an artist who had “one foot inthe ‘conceptual’ world and the other in theworld itself,” and appreciated her refusalto distinguish between “thought and plea-sure on the grounds that pleasure can,and often is, the occasion for thought.”20

Splendor in the Grass, Glory in the Flower “I think Duchamp said that titles were likeanother color in the work.”Polly Apfelbaum, 200321

With Splendor in the Grass, Glory in theFlower (1994), Apfelbaum would “reinventthe grid which is the patch”22 – her desig-nation for the small rectangle of velvetstained once, like an oversize fingerprint.

Wonderbread, 1993, crushed synthetic velvet, fabric dye, 157 x 146 inches (as installed). courtesy of the artist &clifton benevento

Wonderbread, detail

this work’s color-spectrum simplicity andgeometric clarity were complicated(formally and emotionally) by a sense ofvulnerability communicated by thehundreds of touching but unattached andimperfectly aligned pieces of velvet. thisshimmering field’s ephemeral nature wasreinforced by Apfelbaum’s allusion in thetitle to a famous line from WilliamWordsworth’s ode to mindfulness andbeauty, made familiar to the artist andmany of us by natalie Wood’s emotionallyfragile and love-torn teenage character,deanie, who recites this passage in themovie Splendor in the Grass:

Though nothing can bring back the hourOf splendor in the grass, of glory in the flower;We will grieve not, rather findStrength in what remains behind

the expansive range of literary, musical,and cinematic references in Apfelbaum’stitles has been a notable aspect of her workover the years. in a recent interview, sheexplained, “As i work, the titles are alsoanother form of structure. the referencesmay give me a certain color vocabulary,working rules, or a series of relationships. inother words, it’s a very abstract filter.”23

E in the case of E (1995), both the title andpuzzle-piece format reference georgesPerec’s self-imposed exercise for his 1969novel, La Disparition (translated in 1995as A Void), written entirely without usingthe letter e. in a nod to the novel’s intri-cate relations between the smallestelements to their narrative whole,Apfelbaum created a work in which thesharply defined contour of the overallrectangle and the four uniform color bands(yellows, browns, reds, and blues) are instriking contrast to the overlapping, irregu-larly-shaped pieces of multi-colored velvetthat comprise the work. Writing at the time about E (which wasshown in Painting Outside Painting in 1995at the corcoran) in terms of the “arbitrari-ness of structures – and the paradoxicalfreedoms they allow,” david Pagelobserved, “Apfelbaum’s embrace of arbi-trary order highlights the subtle shifts intone and texture among her work’s innu-merable bits of fabric: each stripe of thefour-part rainbow includes a morecompressed – but no less gradated –rainbow of its own, segueing for example,

Splendor in the Grass, Glory in the Flower, 1994, crushed synthetic velvet, fabric dye, 191 x 112 inches (as installed).courtesy of the artist & clifton benevento

from an indescribable variety of delicatepinks and roses, through vibrant reds andrich crimsons, into deep burgundies andregal purples.”24 When reconstructing thiswork for the Worcester installation,Apfelbaum recalled that it was over thecourse of cutting the pieces for E (which didnot correspond to the shapes made with thedyes) that she recognized the potential forthe stain to determine the cut shape.

Blow-Up “Cutting is one of the main things I do… In cutting I get to know each detail, andthen I can know the next step, because therules change, during and after.”Polly Apfelbaum, 200325

in 1996, Apfelbaum arrived at her now-iconic format of overlapping hundreds ofcut-out stains, which led to the exhilarat-ingly free form and expansive palette ofBlow-Up. having experimented withdifferent configurations of stained velvetand a range of color systems for severalyears, Apfelbaum now mastered applyingthe dye into controlled shapes and clusters.she excelled at the craft of cutting the fabric

in relation to the rounded edges of thestains, often leaving slim margins of theunstained fabric’s color which served to high-light myriad small color units while creating avibrating chromatic whole. over the yearswriters have found in these cut-out stainsand their accumulative, uncontainable char-acter parallels in the natural world (waterflowing over a riverbed, cellular division,psychedelic bacilli) as well as the world of art(Monet’s Nymphéas, islamic carpets,Matisse’s cut-outs). Blow-Up was the first of the “splats,” a termApfelbaum applied at the time to cut-outstain installations whose configurationswere not dependent on architecturalelements. it was also notable because, asApfelbaum recently recalled, “With Blow-Upthere were no rules. All the colors could gointo it. it is a hybrid of different kinds andcolors of velvet, too.”26 it was one of severalworks Apfelbaum created and titled in refer-ence to Michelangelo Antonioni’s films.27

Antonioni’s Blow-Up (1966), constructed inrelation to the artistic world of london in the1960s, included psychedelic color, a leadcharacter (a fashion photographer) who waspassionate about his craft, and a plot

E, 1995, crushed synthetic velvet, fabric dye, 60 x 60 inches (as installed). courtesy of the artist & clifton benevento

centered on photographic evidence thatbecame more abstract with continuousenlargement. Apfelbaum’s Blow-Up is aparallel universe with a riotous explosion ofcolor, an accumulation of related gestures,and a perceptual back-and-forth from detailto overall configuration. literature from the 1990s describing thevisual complexity of Apfelbaum’s splats andspills regularly included words like plea-sure, beauty, humility, intelligence, feminist,devotional, fragile, and wondrous. terryMyers once characterized a visitor experi-ence to an Apfelbaum exhibition with thesewords: “no one who has seen, walkedaround, and bent over one of Apfelbaum’ssprawling, scintillating arrangements ofhundreds of hand-cut pieces of syntheticvelvet brightly stained with fabric dye haslikely thought that he or she needed amanual to understand or enjoy it.” shebeckons the visitor to walk in, he continued,“with no prior knowledge whatsoever of theartist’s work – not to mention recent trends inart – and walk away having experiencedsomething both thrilling and substantial.”28

today, when the installation format hasbecome ubiquitous in contemporary art and

the boundaries between media more porousthan ever, the sheer range of experiences –optical, physical, emotional – that Apfelbaumachieves with extraordinarily minimal means– cloth and color – remains a uniquelyrewarding attribute of her practice.

susan l. stoopscurator of contemporary Art

Blow-Up, 1997, crushed synthetic velvet, fabric dye, 187 x 88 inches (as installed). Worcester Art Museum,charlotte e.W. buffington fund, 2000.75

Artist statement, “the Question of gender in Art,”1Tema Celeste, no. 37-38, Autumn 1992, 69-70. Apfelbaum had studied painting at tyler school of Art2(bfA 1978) where the visiting artist, Judy Pfaff, had amemorable impact as a female artist and as asculptor who embraced the potential of color. seeingrid schaffner, “having it All: Polly Apfelbaum at theicA,” Polly Apfelbaum (Philadelphia: institute ofcontemporary Art, university of Pennsylvania, 2003),26.Quoted in Jeanne siegel, “eva hesse’s influence3today? conversations with three Artists,” ArtJournal, vol. 63, no. 2 (summer, 2004), 85.Polly Apfelbaum, “A Partial taxonomy,” Journal of Art4and Philosophy (no. 5), 1995.Quoted in siegel, 85. 5for an excellent discussion about Apfelbaum’s work6in relation to the modernist stain, see lane relyea,“A dozen Paragraphs scattered Around the topic ofstains,” Polly Apfelbaum: What Does Love Have ToDo With It (boston: Massachusetts college of Art,2003), 25-37.Quoted in roxanna Marcoci, Comic Abstraction:7Image breaking, Image making, the Museum ofModern Art interviews (london: thames & hudson,2007), 42-49.roberta smith, “supports/surfaces,” The New York8Times, June 27, 2014, c24.Polly Apfelbaum, artist statement, Planiverse, galerie9nächt st. stephan rosemarie schwarzwälder,vienna, 2012.Alison ferris, “intangible Pleasures,” Polly10Apfelbaum: Installations 1996-2000 (brunswick:bowdoin college Museum of Art, 2000), 6.deirdre stein greben, “stain Power,” ARTNews,11June 2001, 104.Jan Avgikos, “Polly Apfelbaum,” review of Amy lipton12gallery, Artforum, summer 1992, 109.Avgikos, 109.13Amy lipton in correspondence with the author,14october 18, 2014. the palettes of each vary and Cinderella has seven15rather than eight elements. Cinderella, Fine Flowersin the Valley, and Splendor in the Grass, Glory in theFlower – three works in the Worcester project – alsowere shown together in the important group exhibi-tion, Sense and Sensibility: Women Artists andMinimalism in the Nineties, at the Museum ofModern Art, new york, in 1994.Quoted in siegel, 84.16schaffner, 30.17elizabeth hess, “Minimal Women,” The Village Voice,18July 5, 1994, 27.conversation with the author, March 20, 2014.19libby lumpkin, “vive la résistance: Polly Apfelbaum’s20vanitás of Painting,” Polly Apfelbaum (helsinki:kiasma, Museum of contemporary Art, 1998), 9-10.Quoted in claudia gould, “interview with Polly21Apfelbaum,” Polly Apfelbaum (Philadelphia: instituteof contemporary Art, university of Pennsylvania,2003), 11.

Quoted in Revisioning the Familiar (Middletown:22Wesleyan university, 1994), 8.Quoted in roxanna Marcoci, Comic Abstraction:23Image breaking, Image making, the Museum ofModern Art interviews, (london: thames & hudson,2007), 42-49.david Pagel, “ring-A-ring-A-roses,” Art & Text,24January 1996, 53.Quoted in Ann Wilson lloyd, “seamstress of ‘splats’25and 7,000 Asterisks,” The New York Times, May 11,2003, Ar21.conversation with the author, July 24, 2014. Prior to26being acquired by the Worcester Art Museum in2000, Blow-Up had been installed at the dalarnasMuseum, falun, sweden (1997); d’Amelio terras,new york (1998); the blackwood gallery, universityof toronto at Mississauga, canada (2000). this exhi-bition is the third installation of Blow-Up at theWorcester Art Museum.other Apfelbaum works titled in reference to27Michelangelo Antonioni films include L’Aventura(1994), Zabriski Point (1994), Red Desert (1995), andEclipse (1996). terry Myers, “Polly Apfelbaum,” ArtUS,28november/december 2003, 38-39.

About the Artist

Apfelbaum was born in 1955 in Abington,Pennsylvania, and lives and works in newyork city. she received a bfA from tylerschool of Art and has exhibited regularlythroughout the u.s. and internationallysince 1986. A mid-career survey ofApfelbaum’s work in 2003 at the instituteof contemporary Art in Philadelphia trav-eled through 2004. Apfelbaum was the2013 recipient of the prestigious romePrize. her work is held in the collectionsof the brooklyn Museum of Art; the dallasMuseum of Art; the los Angeles countyMuseum of Art; the Museum of ModernArt, ny; the Philadelphia Museum of Art;and the Whitney Museum of American Art,among others. loans courtesy of the artistand clifton benevento. This exhibition is supported by the Don andMary Melville Contemporary Art Fund.

Photography: stephen briggsimages © Polly Apfelbaum

notes

Worcester Art MuseuM / 55 sAlisbury street / Worcester, MA 01609Wed- sun 11-5, third thu 11- 8, sAt 10 -5 / 508.799.4406 / W W W. W o r c e s t e r A r t. o r g