Billy Apple® Life/Work

Publication Details Hardcover; ISBN 9781869409135; 400 pp; more than 200 images; 24 x 17 cm

Author and/or Editor name/s Christina Barton

Author and/or Editor bio/s Associate Professor Christina Barton MNZM is director of the Adam Art Gallery Te Pātaka Toi at Te Herenga Waka Victoria University of Wellington and has taught art history there since 1995. She is a respected art historian, writer and curator who has worked at Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki and Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa. She has curated numerous exhibitions, including the major Billy Apple retrospective at Auckland Art Gallery in 2015. Her writing has been published widely, and she has contributed as an editor of journals Antic and Reading Room, and volumes including the collected art writings of Wystan Curnow. She was made a Member of the NZ Order of Merit for her services to art history and curation in the 2020 New Year’s Honours List.

Year of publication 2020

Publisher Auckland University Press, Auckland, New Zealand

Abstract This is the first substantial book on the life and work of Billy Apple (born Barrie Bates, in Auckland, 1935). Based on more than a decade of research and unprecedented access to Apple’s own archive, Billy Apple® Life/Work chronicles the career of an artist who has made important contributions to the histories of pop and conceptual art, providing a wealth of insight into the art scenes that sustained him in London, New York and New Zealand. More than the narrative of a single artist, the book tackles methodological questions about how to read an artist who re-invented himself as a ‘brand’, as well as tracking the fortunes of a figure who cannot be easily pigeonholed by location or medium. Thomas Crow, Rosalie Solow Professor of Modern Art, New York University, says of the publication: “This is scholarship of consummate thoroughness and insight on an important, under-examined artistic career. The accomplished quality of writing combines a prodigious ability to articulate detailed historical information with a frequently affecting personal voice. Christina Barton’s deep and long acquaintance with her subject lends convincing authority to her account; indeed, it is difficult to imagine another writer as competent, informed and motivated enough to fill this major gap in the literature of postwar art.”