Staging a Performance – In Conversation with Chris Appleby

Words by Isaac Parkinson

Chris Appleby is an artist who seeks surprise – the kind of surprise that emerges from what William Blake called “a process of self-annihilation.” This process confronts one’s preconceptions, prejudices and fears, and reveals that one holds an unconscious worldview. The painting process becomes Appleby’s vehicle to punch holes in the walls of those preconceptions, allowing new ideas and conjured imagery to broaden and evolve one’s worldview.

The improvisational nature of painting leads Appleby to see it as a distinctly theatrical practice as opposed to an architectural construction. Discussing this dichotomy, he notes Shakespeare’s description of the Globe Theatre as the ‘Wooden O.’

But pardon, gentles all,
The flat unraised spirits that have dared
On this unworthy scaffold to bring forth
So great an object: can this cockpit hold
The vasty fields of France? or may we cram
Within this wooden O the very casques
That did affright the air at Agincourt?

In this prologue to Henry V, the ‘O’ appears to denote ‘nought’ as a rhyme to agincourt, suggesting a disparaging tone towards the ‘unworthy scaffold’ of the theatre’s structure. Yet within that structure there was a belief that worlds could be brought forth.

This identifies the oxymoronic nature of staging a performance. Staging implies something is to be prepared, constructed, or contrived. Performance conversely suggests something live and present. Rigid structures must be afforded to scaffold the ineffable, ephemeral nature of what happens on the stage. For Chris Appleby, the practice of painting shares these aspects of theatre. The canvas is a stage, much like the alchemist’s crucible, within which the artist strives to turn lead into gold.

*The Live Performance*. Mixed media on paper. 56 x 70cm.

The foundation of many of Appleby’s works is formed with bole, a wet clay mixed with adhesive most commonly used for gilding gold leaf. Its application adds another two or three millimetres of depth, creating a visceral, interactive surface – no longer a static facade, but now a three-dimensional textural plane. This topographical complexity and uncertainty provides an opportunity for interaction and intervention, akin to the theatre’s stage. Each is a surface on which ideas can be developed and tested to reveal fears and intuitions.

While the bole dries, there is a limited window for text to be etched into its surface. A sense of urgency pushes Appleby to act upon it, bypassing the cogitating and considering of his rational self to plumb directly into his unconscious. The text etched into the drying bole floats among the figures like a divine voice from an unknown speaker. One example of such ethereal etching says, “Release that concept from its clinging words. Nothing prepares one for the live performance.” The omnipotent narration guides both the audience and its creator through the work.

The experience of a live performance, as noted above, prioritises in-the-moment choices over careful, over-rehearsed blocking which can stifle authenticity. ‘Presence’ is important for Appleby, noting how the American Abstract Expressionist movement strived for an intangible quality which brings the work off the wall and animates its viewer. Additionally, the notions of clinging words and restrictive binds are, for Appleby, the structures that must be broken through to achieve something more than rationality.

Appleby speaks of his time in the theatre with great affection. While working as a carpenter and stagehand, Appleby observed the balance of theatre between cerebral activity and praxis. Being in this position was an enlightening experience, revealing the scaffolding Shakespeare refers to. Appleby speaks of the smell of the grease paint, the unnatural lighting, the view of the stage’s blocking from the opposite prompt side as sensory revelations of its facade. The surface of the fourth wall became permeable in his mind, but existing within the world of the stage also revealed the narrative power of its objects and archetypes.

Stages

Stages are a common feature of many of Appleby’s works, forming the centerpiece of the image. Characters are placed upon the stage in their depiction, just as they are placed on the canvas by the artist. Their performance is textually interwoven as illustrative figures.

*Escape from the City* by Chris Appleby, 2003. Mixed media, clay ground on paper. 70 x 70cm.

Several works depict figures lying upon the stage, surrounded by the cruel background of the city. In the two works below, the characters appear as sacrificial victims. In the first, Appleby’s detective Lieutenant O’Kiff stands atop a stage, tied to a pole while arrows fire down on him. To his right, loosely formed figures look upon him from an audience, and behind him the city looms. The picture resembles the conclusion of a narrative in which the truth-seeking detective has come to a discovery which will get him killed.

In the second, a cartoonishly depicted Native American holds several arrows in his hand. Behind them, the towering Manhattan skyline imposes a silent violence. The Pan Am building can be clearly seen, its corporate presence placed directly in contrast to the stereotypical, old-world appearance of the character. This particular building is a potent embodiment of corporate weight bearing down, as it was the last tall tower erected in New York before building codes prevented logos or names to be used on the tops of buildings.

Below him, several men are shown rowing away from a Statue of Liberty-type figure. Placed in montage with the above imagery, the men could be fleeing the brutal metropolis. The central stage ties the image together, determining a theatrical narrative that would otherwise not be so immediately present.

Characters and Figures

These archetypes are not limited to single instances, but instead recur throughout many of Appleby’s works. By reproducing and reconfiguring them, Appleby is further committing himself to the theatrical notions of narrative, performance and character upon the stage of the canvas.

Central to this search for truth is Appleby’s recurring protagonist, a hardboiled detective in the vein of Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe. Touching on film noir, Appleby notes ‘The Big Sleep’ and ‘The Maltese Falcon’ as favourites. Their influence permeates, focusing on a curious individual at the centre of a cerebral web of the metropolis. There are various names for this figure, but the most common and enduring is Lieutenant O’Kiff, named after Appleby’s late friend and fellow artist Ken Kiff. The Lieutenant is uncharacterised, instead depending more quietly on his symbolic Bogart-ness. By including an avatar in this way, Appleby is able to impart his own truth-seeking into the text itself.

“A good detective follows his hunch to the bitter end,” the narrator’s voice reads in the above painting, much as the artist follows his instincts to their ultimate realisations, no matter how uncomfortable for the ego’s preconceptions.

The boat also recurs frequently as an floating, untethered antithesis to the rigid city. Importantly, Appleby avoids an illustrative depiction of the water, creating instead an intangible shimmer often built with silver leaf. The boat also recurs in Kiff’s work, forming a vessel which carries its cargo in an empty abyss (Below). The boat’s mast also doubles as a kind of crucifix for Appleby, upon which his figures absorb pain. The detective in particular appears to be made a receptacle of the city’s sins.

*Visiting Hell in a Boat (S-68)* by Ken Kiff, (S-68), 1973.

Gnostic Beings

Other figures within his work include the divine beings of the feminine spirit, known as aeons in the Gnostic emanations of God.

Gnosticism is the belief in the importance of individual spirituality above the authority and didactic teachings of orthodox religious institutions. Appleby speaks often of Renaissance philosophers who espoused this ideology and their rebellious challenges to established preconceptions. Giordano Bruno is a primary influence – a Gnostic saint burned at the stake by the Catholic Church for heresy. His beliefs and writings on such rebellious concepts as metempsychosis, heliocentrism and pantheism made him a target for institutional Christianity. In her book ‘Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition’ (1964) – a guiding text for Appleby – Frances Yates says that “philosophy was to be used, not as a dialectical exercise, but as a way of reaching intuitive knowledge of the divine and of the meaning of the world, as a gnosis.” Bruno’s belief in intuition promoted the spirituality of Self, threatening the orthodoxy of the Church.

*Who Shot Epinoia*, 2010. Mixed media, plaster on panel. 33 x 24.2cm.

The most exalted of the Gnostic aeons is Epinoia, meaning ‘insight’ or ‘wisdom.’ Her name comes from ‘metanoia,’ meaning the changing of one’s mind, and is merged with Sophia, who is the feminine figure of the light of God. In the practice of gnosis, Epinoia is the closest figure to Appleby’s sense of divine conjuring. He renders her above as an intangible figure, faceless and unknowable to the more defined Lieutenant O’Kiff, indicative of the ethereal style associated with these divine beings. The text above “Who Shot Epinoia” suggests a death of personal spirituality.

A more definitive motif is the ass, or donkey. This was a crucial figure for Giordano Bruno as well. Nuccio Ordine, Italian literary critic, published ‘Giordano Bruno and the Philosophy of the Ass’ in 1987, which explores the figure of the donkey and how it can be used as a lens to understand Bruno’s humanist philosophy:

*Bruno’s Donkey*. Mixed media on paper. 75 x 42cm.

“The symbol of the ass therefore lends itself easily to Bruno’s method, which projects onto human beings the same symbolic qualities as those of asininity: to the divine and bestial nature of the ass corresponds the image of man as the mediator between bestiality and divinity [...] reveals how the human soul is no different to that of asses or of other living beings.”

Within the Christian story, the donkey bears Mary to Bethlehem as a strong and dutifully passive figure. For Appleby, it is divine and yet unknowing, reliant on intuition and instinct. The donkey represents the scale of our own ignorance. Yet there is spirituality in all beings, as Ordine says “at the basis of every living organism lies the same ‘corporeal matter’ and the same ‘spiritual matter.’”

Montage

Another theatrical facet of Appleby’s work is his focus on montage. He is particularly fond of constructing storyboards, as seen below. The images are segmented into comic strip-style rows and columns. By placing them amongst each other and at perpendicular angles, meaning is derived not only from each contained panel, but from their connection with one another. Appleby’s ethereal captions return again, interspersed throughout to provide a poetic counterweight to his busy imagery.

*Story Board* (Triptych), 2011. Mixed media on board. 96.5 x 133.4cm.

Montage can also be seen beyond the two-dimensional confines of the image plane. Appleby has constructed hinged frames, akin to altarpieces, which contain four works, two on either side. The artefacts can sit at an angle, providing a pliable view, or can be folded in on themselves to sit side by side.

The Lieutenant O’Kiff Files. Six hinged panels. 44 x 30cm.

*Burg Weiler Altarpiece*, c. 1470. Oil paint, gold leaf on wood.

His book of woodcuts, entitled ‘Joey Twostreams’ also channels his narrative interest. Each set of panels is a sequential page of a larger whole, marking his furthest foray into what could be considered a graphic novella.

The cinematic quality of this work is indicative of Appleby’s interest in painting as a distinctly theatrical practice – his canvas is intended for the same experimentation and improvisation as that of the stage.

Staging a Performance – In Conversation with Chris Appleby

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