Billy Apple

In 1961, Billy and David Hockney travelled to New York where Billy worked as an intern at Sudler & Hennessey and learned to ‘let type talk’ from Herb Lubalin.  

“Advertising had a language that art didn’t have at the time, which gave it structure. It taught me that I could call myself an art director and assemble a team of specialists to produce the work.”

On 22 November 1962, in London, in a self-branding exercise, the artist bleached his hair and eyebrows and changed his name to Billy Apple, taking on a new identity as a work of art. He became an art brand and merged art with life, stating, “All the works that immediately followed were visual aids, mnemonic hooks to back up my new identity… Apples: 2 for 25¢ and 2 Minutes 33 Seconds were support material.” Billy Apple was launched in Apple Sees Red, 1963, his first solo exhibition at Gallery One, London.

In 1964, Billy moved to New York, and was curated into the seminal exhibition, American Supermarket alongside other leading pop artists like Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, and Jasper Johns. Considered an early installation, the Bianchini Gallery was refigured as a supermarket complete with display cases, signage and produce that were either artworks, facsimiles, or the genuine article, which put a lens on the nature of consumer culture. Billy and Andy were photographed for the November 1964 issue of LIFE which disseminated pop art to the masses.

Billy’s innate curiosity led him to explore many non-traditional art materials and he is credited with being one of the first to treat electric light as a new sculptural medium. He developed an ‘electric palette’ from his experiments with neon and his Apple Green neon remains in production today. In Neon Rainbows, 1965, the additive values of his perfectly pitched neon-coloured rainbows created pure white light.

Billy had always made idea-driven art but ultimately pop didn’t have enough conceptual rigour. He changed tack from making art objects to focus on a fully dematerialised art practice, contending that “inclusion of everyday life processes in the declared art context is an attempt to bring the art context closer to life”. He established and ran APPLE (1969–73), the second of the seven independent alternative spaces that secured New York’s reputation as the epicentre for conceptual art.

The Serpentine Gallery, London, staged a survey exhibition From Barrie Bates to Billy Apple: 1960–1974, which was to influence the upcoming Y.B.A.s (Young British Artists). It was temporarily closed by the Metropolitan Police until censored works involving Billy’s collected Body Activities, 1970–73, were removed. He endured a similar reception on his first trip back to New Zealand in 1975 when he introduced his process-oriented practice in the country’s dealer galleries and public institutions. Many failed to understand this new artistic agenda and dismissed it outright.

Art Transactions, the title Billy used for a group of works begun during the boom-and-bust decade of the 1980s, reveal the network of relations underpinning the economy of the art world. In the I.O.U. series he issued his own private currency as promissory notes and in Barters arranged for the exchange of goods or professional services with collectors.

PAID: The Artist Has to Live Like Everybody Else began with the question ‘What is the average amount of money required to live for a year?’ and presented the artist’s framed invoices from everyday living. The 1983 iconic solid Golden Apple, a commission emblematic of the decade, was made up of 103.599 ounces of gold bullion.

Billy’s collaborations helped expand his field of practice and produce extraordinary works like calculating the distance between the Earth and the moon and sending a laser light beam there in 1970. His last years were spent working with scientists, adding his artistic voice to scientific projects. In 2003, he and Dr Allan White of Plant & Food NZ worked on a brand-new Billy Apple® cultivar. Although the apple didn’t eventually go into commercial production, it did lead to the artist to becoming a registered trademark.

In 2007 Billy Apple® became a registered trademark in eight classes, formalising his art brand status, which enabled him to protect his art’s intellectual property and produce works that addressed the legal concept of I.P., like Billy Apple® Cider.

The Immortalisation of Billy Apple® was a project spearheaded by Dr Craig Hilton in 2009 where Billy’s somatic (body) cells were transformed or ‘immortalised’ by a virus so they could live outside the body and replicate. The Billy Apple® Cell Line is a living artwork available to scientists for research purposes. His genome was sequenced in 2014 at the University of Otago and represented as a circular ideogram in the Analysis of Billy Apple®. SNPs (variations in nucleotides) from this were used by Professor Justin O’Sullivan at the Liggins Institute in a project which thanks to Billy extended international gut microbiome research by 46 years.

“We characterised and compared the gut microbial composition of artist Billy Apple from stool samples… on well preserved toilet tissues collected in… Excretory Wipings May 18–October 21 1970, and in 2016. They represent a unique record of an individual’s daily microbiome.”

After hearing from GNS Principal Scientist, Dr Cornel de Ronde, about the discovery of the Extended Continental Shelf of New Zealand (part of the continent of Te Riu-a-Maui/ Zealandia), Billy asked where its centre was. Consequently, the geographic centre was calculated, amazingly, to be on a ridge in the Tararua Ranges and, in 2019, Billy’s engraved survey disc was helicoptered in and installed on site to mark the centre of New Zealand’s vast maritime estate.

Over Billy’s six-decade career until his death in 2021, he exhibited internationally in more than 250 solo and 250 institutional exhibitions. Recently, The Mayor Gallery, London has arranged for sales of his works to Tate Britain, Philadelphia Museum of Art and National Gallery of Australia, adding to his representation in international public institutions. Billy Apple® Life/Work, by art historian Dr Christina Barton, was published by Auckland University Press, Auckland, and Circle Books, New York.

Billy was appointed an Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit (ONZM) in 2005 for services to art and named an Arts Foundation Icon in 2018. He raised more than $2 million for charities and organisations across Aotearoa New Zealand.