The Metropolis – In Conversation with Chris Appleby
Words by Isaac Parkinson
Chris Appleby is an artist whose images emanate from the unconscious. By plumbing instinctual thought, his work attempts to break away from preconceptions, and speak to a realm of conjured figures and spiritual beings.
The antithesis of his intuitive figures is Appleby’s architecturally constructed metropolis. A cityscape of disordered buildings forms the background of many of his paintings – rigid lines, girders and beams of utilitarian structures without subjective meaning. To build this archetypal metropolis against which his conjured images stand, Appleby uses black-and-white photographs of Manhattan. By splicing its architectural elements together, his jumbled patchwork of a collage evokes the shallowness of urban chaos.
When Peter Quince First Dreamed Wall (Part of a Triptych), 2011.
Mixed media, plaster on panel. 106.7 x 61cm.
Metropolis [City of my Birth] by Paul Citroen, 1923. Gelatin silver print. 20.3 x 15.3cm.
Influences
The style calls to mind Paul Citroen’s ‘Metropolis,’ serving as the inspiration for Fritz Lang’s film of the same name from 1927. Both exhibit a Frankenstein-esque reconstruction of the city and those within. In Lang’s film, a central conflict is in the creation of the “Maschinenmensch,” an automaton built to “resurrect” the body and consciousness of its inventor’s dead wife. Beneath such technical corruption is a mass culture of anonymity which limits the city’s people to a homogenous block of workers. This presents the threat of the cityscape’s brutalism to the notion of a sovereign self. A social class of automatons is something that Appleby returns to often, determined to maintain a feeling of subjectivity in his work.
Citroen studied at the Bauhaus and was taught by Paul Klee, the highly influential expressionist who, like Appleby, focused heavily on the form of painting. Klee’s close friend and poet Rainer Maria Rillke wrote to Klee on New Year’s Eve of 1902 to say “Paris is a difficult place, and the beautiful things here and there do not quite compensate for the cruelty of its streets and the monstrosity of its people.”
New York by Paul Citroen, 1919. Gelatin silver print. 15 x 20cm.
While Metropolis (1923) presents an imagined city, amalgamating the urban concerns of the Bauhaus era, New York (1919) presents a more specific perspective, calling into question recognisable landmarks. By utilising an empirical location to ground his articulated fears, Citroen provides specificity to his critique.
Appleby provides similar specificity, using and reusing image blocks from the 1960s Manhattan skyline. The top half of the work below, for instance, relies upon definitive landmarks, including the Empire State Building and the Pan Am Building. The former is a dependable constant of New York’s topography through the twentieth century, and a globally recognisable totem pole of American ambition and extravagant means. The latter, now known as the MetLife Building, was constructed from 1959 to 1963. It was the last tall tower building erected in New York before building codes prevented logos or names to be used on the tops of buildings. Its brazenly displayed corporate logo marks it as a beacon of commercialism.
To a lesser extent, Ken Kiff’s ‘Street’ series places instinctively conjured figures next to rigid shapes. The architectural constructions he produces are not of the same detail and density as Appleby’s, as they remain in the same formal practice of painting rather than providing a photographic juxtaposition. Yet they nonetheless signify the same reminders of a grounded, practical world from which these dreamlike images diverge.
Man in Street by Ken Kiff, 1991. Lithograph in colours on wove. 85.5 x 62cm.
Jung
The routine structures in these cityscapes are emblematic of a rigid apparatus of thought, and their denial of personhood seems to be the central conflict for Appleby. The self can only be found beyond those structures, and outside the cerebral network of rational thought. Appleby notes here the relevance of Jungian theory. Jung’s concept of the shadow self provides a necessary counterweight to the persona, challenging the mind to reflect on itself and its comfortable collection of assumed preconceptions. These challenges are akin to William Blake’s notion of ‘self-annihilation.’ Blake posits a ‘selfhood’ constructed of many protective layers which insulate us from self-interrogation. We remain comfortable in our preconceived thoughts while our imagination becomes stifled and skewed. That selfhood can be seen in Appleby’s ‘necessary evil’ of the metropolis – the routine apparatus which can preclude curiosity.
Experience and surprise are key to accessing the second self beyond the ego, bursting the bubble of prejudices and presumptions. Appleby’s art is therefore an attempt to imagine beyond intellectual constructions, to enter the unconscious, and to achieve an ultimate empiricism.
However, the metropolis is not articulated exclusively as a dominant evil, and Appleby is keen to emphasise its juxtaposition, rather than its corruption. Even within those rigid material structures that can anonymise and objectify its inhabitants, there is thought and art. Each building contains a rich history betrayed by the two-dimensional figuration of its facade. Architectural concerns are not strictly confined to brutality. Here we can find the thoughts of Citroen’s contemporary Wassily Kandinsky:
“I would love to paint a large landscape of Moscow—taking elements from everywhere and combining them into a single picture—weak and strong parts, mixing everything together in the same way as the world is mixed of different elements. It must be like an orchestra.”
Moscow I by Wassily Kandinsky, 1916. Oil on canvas. 49.5 x 51.5cm.
Jung’s ‘collective unconscious’ can also be applied to Appleby’s rigid metropolis. For Jung, this contains all the intuitions and impulses of which we are unaware, but are nevertheless as objective and fundamental to our being. Appleby gives limited credence to the ‘tabula rasa’ view of environmental conditioning, believing instead in a genetic base code of internal programming, within which we develop and explore.
The tabula rasa theory was put forth by Aristotle and advocated notably by John Locke. It suggests that the mind is a blank slate without innate knowledge or psychological traits. The philosophical counterpoint to this would be innatism or idealism. Plato argued that there is knowledge we do not gain from experience, and therefore must exist before birth. Descartes further suggested that experience did not provide knowledge, but merely acted as a catalyst to uncover or reveal innate knowledge.
Similarly, Appleby questions where biology ends. He does not believe we are merely a receptacle for the world around us, nor does he believe in predetermination. He stresses the importance of not knowing, and of holding onto whatever innate essence we have before it is suffocated by the claustrophobic anonymity of the city.
Jung also expressed his own disdain for the industrial city:
“The industrial worker is a pathetic, rootless being, and his remuneration in money is not tangible but abstract. In earlier times, when the crafts flourished, he derived satisfaction from the fruits of his labour.”
“We all need nourishment for our psyche. It is impossible to find such nourishment in urban tenements without a patch of green or a blossoming tree.”
– ‘Man and his Environment,’ Carl Jung Speaking, 1950
Instead, he emphasises the importance of rural life, and of holding a comprehensive view of one’s world, rather than drowning in the overwhelming tide of industrial labour.
When the Skin of the City Pressed by Chris Appleby, 2010. Mixed media, plaster on panel. 101.6 x 114.3cm.
Appleby’s work speaks directly to this. In the above work, the orange grove is placed in juxtaposition with the city. Its fruit emerges within and around its figures, connecting them to nature while clustered buildings and repeated traffic jams lie in the distance. He mentions the alchemical notion of the orange’s symbolic value of the sun. It sustains us and the ground we live on, and the rigid skyline can only block its nourishment.
Woodcuts
The brutality of the metropolis is nowhere more present than in Appleby’s book of woodcuts, titled “Joey Twostreams.” Effecting the style of a noir comic serial, he moves away from the ethereal figures and instead employs block primary colours.
The story follows Joey, a part-native American police detective caught between his disillusioned family and a cruel police department. The eponymous “two streams” are these conflicting cultures. By providing a narrative to a character like Joey, Appleby applies sympathy to those within his earlier jumbled tableaux of the metropolis. The formal playfulness avoids a face-value exploration, however, requiring a degree of generic distance to interpret their pain in cartoonish terms.
Again, the location is non-specific, maintaining the archetypal city of Anywhere, USA. However, the suggestion that a threat to national security has led to a curtailment of liberties calls to mind the post-9/11 paranoia of New York City.
“If the grip isn’t tightened,” chaos will reign, and so the city must swallow its inhabitants to strip them of their sovereignty. Appleby maintains the Dick Tracy style for his policeman, opting to articulate corruption through a comic style, ironically echoing the strips which placed police on a pedestal.
Joey Twostreams (Book of woodcuts, page 2), 2005. Woodcut. 30.5 x 25.5cm
The cartoonish aesthetic carries over to the Native American characters, who are depicted with red skin and bows. They are dressed in limited clothing, while the white police officers are clad in heavy trench coats.
Joey Twostreams (Book of woodcuts, page 5), 2005. Woodcut. 30.5 x 25.5cm
Their sense of purity points to a difference from the rigid rationality of their new world. Appleby makes particular mention of the Lenape in Pennsylvania, whose intuitive worldview fostered a spiritual evolution unseen in the white world.
William Penn, a leading Quaker and advocate for democracy, maintained that the indigenous peoples held a deeper spirituality than that of white men, and embraced the story of Christ.
The Quakers had left for America to pursue a more spontaneous form of worship, without priests or ceremony. For them, organised religion was a restrictive system which had to be broken through to find true spirituality.
The Treaty of Penn with the Indians by Benjamin West, 1771-72. Oil on canvas. 191.8 x 273.7cm.
Nevertheless, the evangelisation of America remained the dominant momentum. The imperial juggernaut of rationality did not cease, and the wave of white colonialism curtailed their cultural freedom, continuing into the new reality Appleby depicts. His characters are encased among concrete pillars and their totemic power of imperialist oppression. Like many of Appleby’s works, these figures of instinctive thought appear stuck among inflexible and systemic cerebral logic. The world around him seems much the same, and the only way out is to conjure something new and unexpected, even to himself.
