The Brooklyn Rail

The opening salvo at You what?, Ida Applebroog’s current show at the Ronald Feldman Gallery, is two versions of Shake from 1980. One is made from ink and rhoplex on vellum, while the other, Shake (shadow), ink on vellum, looks like the negative, a fadeout of the first. It shows two formally dressed couples, the men shaking hands in greeting, the women behind them politely looking on, merely supporting actors. Presented as theatre, the scene is staged and framed by a curtain, a commentary on the coded conventions of socialized interactions and how they might be parsed. The deft entwining of the political and the personal—for Applebroog, they are inseparable—is her calling card. Her narratives can be disturbing, even weird, delivered cryptically with disingenuous understatement. The intent is to challenge, posing questions for viewers to react to and ponder, her deeply subversive messages more biting for their indirection.

The dozen works on view in the main gallery by the late feminist icon (she both embraced feminism and rejected such labels as too constrictive, inadequate) seem like more, since most are multi-paneled, their format suggesting storyboards, comic strips, or filmstrips, among other storytelling devices. All were made in the 1980s, with one exception from 1991. They take us back to a period when women artists were finally thought to be gaining traction, when the Guerrilla Girls were teaching the art world (and beyond) to count all the ways women in the arts (and in general) were still being sidelined. Applebroog (1929–2023) was certain that there was much more to address. Though now her work may not raise an eyebrow, she was ahead of the curve in her representation of women, particularly in her depiction of female genitalia, specifically her own. “Monalisa,” her series of over 160 vaginal drawings completed in 1969 (not shown here), was first exhibited in its entirety only in 2010, and was once considered shockingly explicit, as it confronted long-held taboos with an unflinching matter-of-factness that was skewering, liberating.

During a more than five-decade career, the pioneering artist—a master of multiple mediums and enviably prolific—investigated the nature of power, violence, gender politics, and the politics and psychodramas of domesticity, as well as female sexuality and its ramifications as expressed in the relationships between men and women, parents and children, governments and the governed, doctors and patients. Her work, she said, “is a microcosm of the world we live in.”

Her series of smaller scale works here are the most memorable, the most potent, primarily because they aren’t trying to be. They also feel the most personal, their themes extracted from daily life. Syncing text with drawings in the distinctive, disarming Applebroog graphic style, the humor is absurdist, prickly, and ambiguous. She deployed words like weaponized haiku, their detonations small-scale but landing with precision. Viewers are tasked with assessing their impact and interacting with the story, since they are our stories too—open-ended, interrogative, and ongoing, reflective of a reality that eludes definitive statements and tidy resolutions.

Not This Time (1982) is more easily parsed than many of the other works here, if not resolved. In a sequence of seven parts, it repeats the image of a woman caught behind a frame. She is sitting on a bench, as if waiting for a bus or train, her suitcase beside her. The title is double-edged: does it mean this time she will or she won’t run away? What is most critical is the hesitancy, all that is left unsaid. We can only imagine what that might be, the outcome entirely dependent on what is withheld. So? (1981) is also self-explanatory and dishearteningly topical now with the overturning of Roe v. Wade, in which a text about abortion as murder is paired with a repeating image of two hapless young women, the sequence culminating in a triumvirate of suited, middle-aged men praising bombs.

Three multi-canvas assemblages from the late 1980s suggest modern altarpieces cameoed with mysterious figures and scenes, a mélange of the traditional and the contemporary. They are more overtly political in imagery, more epic in subject as well as scale—and also more enigmatic. The paint is thicker, raw, gestural, compelling. Camp Compazine (1988)—Compazine a discontinued anti-psychotic—depicts a veteran obliviously chomping on a homunculus while two other men confer, most likely about the fates of the world’s disenfranchised, such as him or the women in So?. An anti-war altarpiece, it condemns a god that encourages such carnage in its name, its center radiating a blast of hellish reds. As for the meaning of the turkeys curiously scattered throughout, I venture this: let’s talk turkey?