Whipped Cream Difficulties

This could be an obit watch, too, but I thought I’d go in this direction.

Over his long, provocative career, the artist Billy Apple changed his name, registered it as a trademark, branded products with it, had his genome sequenced and, finally, arranged to have his cells extracted and stored so that they might survive forever even if he could not. He died on Sept. 6 at his home in Auckland, New Zealand, at 85.

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By 1964 he was in New York City (subletting a loft on the Bowery from the sculptor Eva Hesse) and showing his work. His cast bronze, half-eaten watermelon slice was one of many objects included in “The American Supermarket,” an early Pop spectacle at the Bianchini Gallery on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, where one could buy artist’s versions of real products: a painted turkey by Roy Lichtenstein, candy made by Claes Oldenburg and Campbell’s soup cans signed by Andy Warhol. The gallerist took orders on a grocer’s pad.

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Mr. Apple went on to work in neon, enchanting some reviewers like Robert Pincus-Witten of Artforum magazine, who described Mr. Apple’s rainbows as “sensuous neon impersonations.” But city inspectors were not charmed. In 1966, when Mr. Apple was 27, they unplugged a show of his at the Pepsi Gallery, in the lobby of the Pepsi-Cola Building at Park Avenue and 59th Street, saying the pieces weren’t wired to code.
The show’s opening had been so well attended that it caused a traffic jam. One attendee was Tom Wolfe, who later panned Mr. Apple’s pieces in New York Magazine — “they’re limp … they splutter,” he wrote. (Mr. Wolfe was writing about the artistry of commercial neon sign makers and poking fun at the art world in the process.)

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Their art-making methods — Mr. Apple went through a tidying phase, washing windows, scrubbing floor tiles and vacuuming up the dirt on his studio’s roof — were not always well received. His “Roof Dirt” piece, which came in the form of an invitation in 1971, prompted John Canaday of The New York Times to write that it “belongs to an area of art‐related activity in which nothing but the word of the artists makes the difference between a put‐on and a seriously offered project.”
Mr. Apple then turned to less festive practices, like saving tissues from his nosebleeds and toilet paper from his bathroom activities. When this work was included in a solo show at the Serpentine Gallery in London, some objected, and the police shut it down. But Mr. Apple was no prankster. He was deadly serious about his work, which, besides meticulously documenting his bodily processes, often included renovation and redecorating suggestions to institutions like the Guggenheim. (He proposed getting rid of its planters; the museum ignored him.)
Back home in New Zealand, to which he returned for good in 1990, Mr. Apple began exploring, in a variety of work, ideas about the transactional nature of the art market, branding practices, mapping and scientific advances. Among the works was an apple cast from pure gold, Billy Apple coffee and tea (for sale in galleries only) and the “immortalization” of cells from his own body, which are now stored at the American Type Culture Collection and the School of Biological Sciences at the University of Auckland.

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In 2016, Mr. Apple donated some of his early career bathroom tissues along with a contemporary fecal sample to a molecular biologist, who was able to determine that nearly half of the bacteria in Mr. Apple’s gut was still present in his body decades later, as The New Zealand Herald reported. It was a boon for science, and Mr. Apple, too, made new work from the study.