Ida Applebroog in "Power" - Season 3 - "Art in the Twenty-First Century" | Art21

IDA APPLEBROOG: My name is Ida Applebroog.

It used to be Applebaum, my maiden name,

and then when I got married it was Horowitz,

and I really did not want a name that came from

either my father or from any other male member,

and so I invented my own.

Andrew, why don’t you line this...this girl.

Line her up on the other end.

ANDREW: Okay.

APPLEBROOG: Try and connect the dots, Andrew.

It’s the hand, the other hand.

ANDREW: This is the other hand?

APPLEBROOG: Yes. Can’t you tell?

APPLEBROOG: It’s hard to 
say what is your work about.

But for me it’s really how power works,

male over female, parents over children,

governments over people, doctors over patients.

Coming out of the ’50s, 
women were pretty invisible.

And it never occurred to me anything was 
wrong, that’s just the way things were.

I used to be very flattered 
when a teacher would say to me

oh you’re working is so interesting and good.

It looks just like man’s.

I have a real problem with feminism and art.

I never liked the all women shows.

It labels us, it ghettoizes us.

I hate being labeled. I really hate being labeled.

I came to New York in about ’74.

And I didn’t know anyone in 
New York. I was a New Yorker.

I’d been away for a long, long time.

So I came back and I really didn’t 
know how to enter the art world again.

I started to go back to my roots.

Just doing drawings, and 
drawing and drawing and drawing.

And from these drawings I started making books.

I took these books and I would mail 
them out to people I did not know.

I guess I was a nuisance.

I use a lot of repetition.

Then it becomes a filmic way of talking

because as you put the same image after the other,

even though it’s the exact, identical image,

everyone sees something changing 
from one image to the next.

They’re just really bizarre 
because I know what I’ve done,

but they see actual gestures and they 
see actual changes in the expression,

which I’ve never put there.

And that’s not the reason why I do repetitive,

it’s just because it’s a performance

and it’s sort of my way of animating 
one image from one image to the next

without the image actually changing.

When I work with canvases I work 
with three dimensional structures.

And the structure was as important 
as whatever it was I was painting.

And I love the fragmentation,

because my work has always 
been about fragmentation.

Even though the work is not comfortable work,

I feel like the paint is absolutely beautiful,

I love the coloration,

and it’s almost like I’m creating 
fly paper to sort of get you to…

over to look at the kinds of brush strokes.

It’s interesting looking enough 
to draw the viewer into it.

Then once they’re there,

they’re sort of confronted with 
material that they have to think about

or just walk away from.

I do a lot of work on murders and serial murders

and rapes and ageism and sexism 
and AIDS and child abuse.

I live in this world, now this 
is what’s going on around me.

I can’t change that.

The first time I ever did know I was an artist

is when I was about five years-old.

I wanted my father to draw something for me

and what he drew for me was a stick figure.

And I showed him what I can do

and at that moment I knew I 
was the artist and he wasn’t.

And that was my first 
recognition of being an artist,

and in a way, that’s what these are.

These are like the first recognition 
of making marks with some material.

And then you take whatever it is that you know

and bring it down to its most simplistic level,

and so it becomes a sort of 
something that’s a part of you,

that just pours out and pours out.

Comes to the point where you 
don’t even have to think about it.

These things just make themselves.

It’s a very calming activity to just sit 
there and have the clay in your hands

and just put out these things.

They’re crude, they’re weird,

but they’re wonderful to me.

I’ve been in the art world for a long time.

And yet when I do this,

it brings me back to just the 
basic way of how I might think,

is who I am.

—Andrew, you’re high on your side
if you can lower it to read his lip,

that will be good enough.

Someone once said this,

with art it has to be either 
too much or not enough.

There’s so much coming out at one time for me,

that even the sorting of them

and trying to put it into order

is something I’ve been unable to do.

I like that. I like the feeling.

I don’t consider myself a sculptor or a painter

or a book artist or a conceptual artist.

I just make art.

These little pieces that seem 
so ordinary and like nothing,

little mounds of clay

and if I place it suddenly on 
my stage become monumental.

And you photograph them any way you like,

and you can zoom in on any 
part of the body you like,

and they become something totally different.

Best part about these is I 
really never know sort of

what these things are going to morph into.

I mean you become a hair dresser,

a stylist, a photographer.

So I’ll start with these little sculptures.

I will have the single figure that I will 
pose and place in front of the black curtain.

Everything else has to happen 
with the camera at that point.

In terms of how many ways you can pose it.

Every time you change something the 
kind of portrait that I’m doing changes.

This one is of the Venus de 
Willendorf and we give her her hair,

nice red curly hair.

And we decided to change 
the color of her hair where,

much more of a grayish color.

And we go closer.

Looks like her tongue, sort of licking her lips.

You know there are some that someone will look at

and say I can’t stand looking at that.

Makes me very uncomfortable.

That’s good too.

My work is not about beauty,

and I know it does not hang 
over a couch very well,

matching the burgundy colors on the pillows.

It’s not work one hangs over a couch in that way.

But I make the work,

and I make it because for me it’s necessary.

Other people make work for them that’s 
necessary in a whole different way.

This is just my way.

I was actually computer illiterate.

There was no way I was going to 
bother turning on a computer.

I didn’t want emails,

I didn’t want to have to deal with that.

I was too old. And this was last year.

So I start to go to the Apple workshop

and took everything that they had 
on the schedule in the calendar,

and from that point on I found 
someone who I’d known for a long time

who was very good at working the computer.

She started to work with me and 
that’s how this all came about.

SPEAKER: I added some yellow, both to 
the black and then to the mid tones.

APPLEBROOG: That’s very, very good.

APPLEBROOG: So what we’re doing right now

is we’re trying out the new paper to see 
what it gives us in terms of the color.

By trial and error we’ve 
sort of come to this point.

APPLEBROOG: Wow, so that’s the cream paper?

SPEAKER: Right.

APPLEBROOG: It makes quite a difference. 
It’s like night and day here.

SPEAKER: Yeah, I think it looks a lot richer.

APPLEBROOG: It’s beautiful. It’s 
like...it’s lit from inside.

Uh, I’m going to...I need to 
work on her braces right now.

I will be doing some small editions

but for the most part they will 
be singling at eight pieces.

I don’t feel that’s any 
different from doing painting or

sculpting or drawing or anything else.

That’s just another way of making art,

using the technology.

For a while, because of aging and arthritis 
and everything else that goes with it,

I was very incapacitated.

And that’s why doing these 
sculptures was an incredible thing 

to happen to me at that point.

So I ended up on this route.

No matter what I see, no matter 
what I do, it all feeds me.

Anybody that creates, they’re 
going to find a way to create.

It doesn’t matter how.

I can not believe there’s a reawakening 
of every juice in my body at…

at this point in my life, 
which is incredible for me.