[I]f the fate of twentieth-century man is to live with death from adolescence to premature senescence, why then the only life-giving answer is to accept the terms of death, to live with death as immediate danger, to divorce oneself from society, to exist without roots, to set out on that uncharted journey into the rebellious imperatives of the self.
FOR BATES, Rivers embodied so many of the things he either valued or aspired to after his first trip to New York: a deep and genuine connection with jazz music; a contrarian attitude to art-world orthodoxies; the sense that you didn’t have to love your subject matter to make great art from it; a committed individualism; and a capacity for personal branding and self-mythologising. Rivers had landed at the RCA right when Bates needed inspiration most. The American would also, in a proxy way, solidify Bates’s relationship with Ann Quin.
Apple doesn’t remember exactly how or when Bates and Quin got together, but thinks it was likely at the start of his final year of study, in October or November 1961. He also thinks the romantic relationship was a side-consequence of Bates’s ‘art director’ mentality: he needed a talented writer, badly, and Quin, along with Frank Bowling’s wife Paddy Kitchen, was the best writer he knew.
Towards the end of their second year, the RCA students had been given General Studies dissertation topics. General Studies had been an unpopular aspect of the RCA programme since its introduction in 1958. But it was seen by the likes of Robin Darwin as an essential component of an RCA student’s education: a way to introduce an element of intellectual rigour into their training. It was part of the larger revolution in art education that Darwin, Weight, Guyatt and others had been overseeing at the RCA since the 1940s, and a forerunner to the theory and philosophy classes that are such a feature of art schools today.
Hockney’s antipathy to the RCA’s General Studies requirements is well documented. He was already immersed in a heady intellectual and political environment alongside Kitaj, Berg and others, and the extra work was an unnecessary distraction from the studio: ‘there were too many lectures’, he wrote in 1976, ‘and it was taking you away from painting.’ He was, though, fond of the programme’s head, Michael Kullman, who wasn’t much older than the students.
Peter Webb describes Kullman as ‘a very clever and rather self-opinionated man who struck some people as an eccentric genius, whilst others considered him mad’. There’s plenty of evidence to suggest Kullman was closer to the students than most of the faculty. In Ron Fuller’s photo of Hockney and Bates together at Michael Adams’ Cornwall wedding, the shortish man wearing glasses running towards the camera in the background, adjusting his tie, is Kullman. His Mini van is also exactly the vehicle that would be immortalised by Hockney in Flight into Italy – Swiss Landscape, 1962, its licence plate ‘101TPC’ as clear as day in both photograph and painting.
But Quin, Kullman’s RCA colleague, evidently found his presence in London’s artistic and literary scenes less charming. ‘I wish you had been at that “Lit” party the other night’, she wrote to Bates in early 1962:
we might have been able to send it up together – as it was I was too tired I think to even ‘twist’ not that anyone was doing it properly apart from some tight-jeaned queer waving his arse in all the pretty boys’ faces. Colin Wilson – rather out of the limelight now dancing a sort of ring a ring roses, while I listened to his ghost-writer saying things like: Life is so dull, yeah I’ve been abroad, Spain, Monte Carlo, Italy; O.K. so I’m another undiscovered genius but the only way I can make money is to ghost.’ While Quin haunts the walls and stares at the blonde broads Kullmann [sic] brings in, deposits, leaves, meeting on the stairs – ‘Hallo Anquin’ Fuck – if I could have vomited that was the time and spot – I never have the conviction of my courage!
On paper at least, the General Studies course requirements were fairly draconian. In their first and second years, students were required to attend weekly lectures and tutorials, write essays and answer question sheets, and contribute to class conversations. In the final year, General Studies was required only in the first two terms, leaving the final term free for students to focus on their graduating exhibitions. But in those first two terms, they were required to submit both a spoken and written dissertation, the topics for which were handed out before students broke up for the summer at the end of their second year. The course was also compulsory: students couldn’t get their RCA diploma without having satisfactorily completed it.
Bates was given Vincent van Gogh as his dissertation topic. Before he and Hockney headed off to New York, however, Bates negotiated with Kullman to do his dissertation on Dada instead. There’s no documentation of Bates’s rationale for this, but the direction his work was heading in provides strong clues: already, before his New York trip, he was moving towards a conceptually driven approach, using found objects, directing others, and integrating image and text. Dada, then, was an infinitely closer art-historical precedent to his own work than van Gogh’s sunflowers and wonky bedrooms.
Bates’s presentation in October 1961 was a disaster. On the day he was due to give it, he arrived to class late, and found it being run by a tutor he’d never met before: Peter de Francia, who would later replace Weight as the head of the RCA’s Painting School. De Francia evidently didn’t know about the change of topic, Bates performed badly, and they had an argument. Unsurprisingly, Bates was failed.
This created a problem not just for Bates but for Guyatt – his great defender – and Kullman too. Bates may have been gifted, but he’d already established a reputation among some staff and students as being aloof, difficult and arrogant. In a letter dated 30 October 1961, the RCA’s assistant registrar Sybil de Boer wrote:
He [Bates] has now seen Michael Kullmann [sic] and I think apologise (as much as Barrie ever could apologise) for his behaviour….
In fact, he has an outsize inferiority complex and this results, as it does in many people, in making him self-opinionated, rude, and his own worst enemy.
This wasn’t a new assessment. As early as May 1960, Guyatt had written: ‘[a]lthough I regard Bates as my private pin-up boy, I appear to be the only member of the entire staff, including craftsmen, who does so. On all accounts he is the most abominable pain in the neck to everybody.’ And in a remarkably unprofessional exchange of letters between the RCA’s registrar J. R. P. Moon and Stewart Maclennan, the head of New Zealand’s National Gallery (and the man overseeing Bates’s government bursary), Maclennan suggested that a girlfriend might ‘infuse a little frivolity into his make-up’ – the 1960 equivalent of saying that maybe getting laid would help Bates lighten up. Guyatt couldn’t even raise his enthusiasm in Bates’s final report for 1961/62, scribbling five short sentences:
Got everyone against him. Gave up TV. Took to fine art. Great compulsion to be a bomb. May well be one.
In early 1962, there was also a vicious little piece in the student rag, Newsheet, aspects of which seem a likely stab at Bates. ‘ARE YOU A GENIUS?’, its headline asked. ‘It is never too early to decide.’
(a) Do you repeat your name many times in the hope that it will sound as easy on the tongue as say Michaelangelo [sic], Goethe, Mozart?
(b) Have you ever thought of changing your name?
(c) If you take the art out of Mozart, what are you left with?
1. An organist with two left feet?
2. A childhood genius who ‘whistled down the womb’?
3. Moz?
(d) Have you one of the following physical/psychological defects, such as are regarded as essential to being a genius?
1. Dwarf
2. Transvestism
3. New Zealand nationality
4. Protruding ears
5. Bed-wetting
6. Cupid-bow lips
7. Colour blindness
(e) What is your concept of the posterity for which you are working?
1. A babe in arms and a sucker for your charms?
2. A world full of your present tutors, hitting people over the head with your name?
It’s difficult not to see Bates in some of this: the New Zealand reference; the colour-blindness (Apple, though not colour-blind, has seventy percent eyesight loss in his left eye); the reference to changing names – which suggests that Bates may have been contemplating it much earlier than November 1962.
Kullman hadn’t completely abandoned Bates though. After the presentation disaster, the faculty decided that Bates should spend his entire second term focused on General Studies, under Kullman’s direct supervision. To keep him interested, Kullman set it up so Bates could study with Professor Colin Cherry, an expert in human communication at Imperial College London, just a short walk from the RCA’s home base in the Victoria & Albert Museum. This was an acknowledgement that Bates was becoming someone the RCA didn’t have the internal resources to manage. And, in retrospect, Cherry was a potentially brilliant match for the young artist who was feeling his way towards what would eventually be called conceptual art.
Cherry’s book On Human Communication was first published in 1957, a primer for the new and growing interdisciplinary field of communication studies, which Bates’s interests in language and advertising sat squarely within. Cherry had delivered lectures at the RCA, and was an influential figure, particularly for some of the more intellectually inclined young artists and thinkers connected to the ICA and ARK. Marshall McLuhan also quoted Cherry’s work at length in The Gutenberg Galaxy, 1962. Language was the key to Cherry’s intellectual framework. ‘The development of language reflects back on thought,’ he wrote, ‘for with language thoughts may become organized, new thoughts evolved. Self-awareness and the sense of social responsibility have arisen as a result of organized thoughts. Systems of ethics and law have been built up. Man has become self-conscious, responsible, a sociable creature.’
Sadly, the match-up seems never to have occurred: Apple has no recollection of meeting Cherry, and the work Bates eventually handed in shows no sign whatsoever of Cherry’s influence. Despite the fact that Kullman was trying to do right by the young man, Bates, perhaps still injured by the encounter with de Francia and certainly charged up with a post-New York confidence, decided to go his own way – with the essential help of Ann Quin.
Apple remembers Quin fondly, particularly for how she helped him out of a bind, but he is also clear that theirs wasn’t some great lifetime-defining love affair. He does, however, describe it as a strong intellectual connection, which evolved into a sexual relationship. He remembers that they would never go to her flat, but equally that she would never stay the night at his – possibly because this was when she would work on her own writing. In 1966, she wrote that she’d been kicked out of one flat because her ‘typing late at night disturbed the land lady’. A letter she sent Bates around the time is headed with ‘1 a.m., Tues. morning’ rather than the date.
Quin would come around to Bates’s Cornwall Gardens flat once or twice a week. They’d have sex, but also talk – particularly about the project he’d asked her to write for him: his RCA dissertation. Apple points out that there’s no way the pair would have been able to discuss this at the RCA, because Quin would likely have been sacked if they were found out. They also had to keep their relationship secret from the RCA faculty, following the fallout from the marriage of their friends Bowling and Kitchen. In that same letter in which she lampoons Kullman and Colin Wilson, Quin writes that:
AWAY from Weight and Co., (who by the way caught us yesterday morn in corridor did you know and said to me in front of Sir Roger ‘Now now we can’t have students man-handling our secretary, at least not in College hours’ …. ….) Shit I’m just waiting for you to have more than convictions, much more, in fact, a horse’s (or a dog’s if and as you prefer?) courage to come in and lay me down on that red plush couch of Carel’s underneath Frank Aurbach’s [sic] mighty of mightiest paintings….
But Apple also says the couple went out in public together regularly, usually to one of three pubs nearby, all of which were popular with RCA students and London’s wider literary and artistic scenes: The Queens Elm, The Hoop & Toy, and Finch’s.
Quin’s decision to risk her job to write Bates’s dissertation suggests a few possible motivations. One is that she loved him enough that she wanted to see him do well. Another is that she just found the whole thing amusing. But another is that the ‘intellectual connection’ between the pair served a useful purpose for her, too – and that the writing she did for Bates either fed into, or drew from, the manuscript she was working on at the time, and which would eventually become her first published novel, Berg.
The letter Bates sent to his friend Leon Lesnie soon after his return from New York, which Apple is convinced Quin must have written, certainly has something of her tone about it: literary and sinewy and erotic, cut with little flashes of her vocabulary and preoccupations. ‘There are so many camp people in N.Y.’, Quin/Bates writes,
I came back almost camp myself. Those boys, really sweet…. I got involved with a lot of gay guys on the beach at Long Island after some very gay parties. The boys here (there, that is) are very beautiful. I got involved with a lovely nymphomaniac negress, but she was studying opera. Also, a scizo [sic] from Columbia Uni. who let me f—k her in front of the whole of New York. She lay in front of an open window (on the Columbia campus) with the blinds up and the light on in the middle of the night and with a guy over the road cleaning his teeth and having an orgasm. She psychanalysed [sic] my every plunge and withdrawal. I am writing a song called ‘I’ve left my balls in New York’. So what’s new, what else is there to vomit out. Saw Rocco and his Bros. F—king good movie.
This teasing focus on Bates’s sexual ambivalence is a clue that the letter was by Quin, because it also appears in pieces of writing she is known to have produced – most notably ‘B. B’s [Barrie Bates] Second Manifesto’. The manifesto is a brutal, darkly humorous collaboration, marked by the spikiness that characterises much of Quin’s fiction. It is also dripping in the language of ‘Hip’, which had been such a feature of The Connection, and of the jazz scene in which Bates had been immersed in New York. The ‘Manifesto’ opens like this:
Yeah maybe I ought to get organised, trouble is I don’t know what I really want to do. O.K. so I could earn five thousand a year, but I’m not ending up like those other slick ad chaps. Christ they’re so mass-consumed they can’t even shit straight. And the exhibitions these other jerks have they’re for the birds, so provincial. I want to do something no one has ever done as good, if only to drive a van better than anyone before…
Later, on Bates’s behalf, Quin has a direct dig at his classmates:
Like the other night I got sloshed, brought back some chap, we did a painting together, that’s the real stuff, let it out first go, leave it at that, all these other crappy painters, they would be better if they used their pricks. Not that I dig this pop art, they haven’t anything to say.
The painting Bates/Quin refers to here is possibly Two Cobbers in Central Park, which Bates made in collaboration with Reg Fisher, another Painting student in their year, with whom Bates was close. Two Cobbers appeared in 1962’s ‘Young Contemporaries’ exhibition. Quin’s writing clearly shows how outside the core group of young Pop painters – Boshier, Phillips, Boty, and previous RCA students like Peter Blake – Bates already felt in early 1962. She was also writing these words just two months before Ken Russell’s film Pop Goes the Easel, the documentary that thrust Boshier, Boty, Phillips and Blake into the living rooms of Britain, was screened on the BBC. Bates, as their peer, and Quin, as the secretary in the Painting School, would certainly have known about its filming.
If Bates and, by proxy, Quin, really did find Pop art so dreary, what exactly was ‘B. B’s Second Manifesto’ aligning them with? After the swipe at their contemporaries, the answer comes in the next line: ‘Now Mailer could do anything and get away with it’, Quin writes on Bates’s behalf, ‘I suppose you’ve got to be a genius, or something, to do that, otherwise it’s sheer hard work.’ This is the key that unlocks Bates’s dalliance with the language and ideas of young America, and explains how he separated himself from the London drab of British Pop – because the novelist and essayist Norman Mailer was the self-appointed prophet of ‘Hip’.
In 1959, Mailer’s collection of essays and fragments, Advertisements for Myself, was published in the US: a self-consciously strange miscellany of previously published pieces with accompanying introductions and explanations, which Mailer described consistently throughout as ‘advertisements’.
At the time, Mailer was struggling: by his own admission, he’d been smoking an awful lot of marijuana, and had seen his cultural stature slip after the muted critical reception of his second and third novels, Barbary Shore, 1951, and The Deer Park, 1955. He’d briefly written an incendiary column for the countercultural newspaper he’d co-founded, the Village Voice (which counted Nat Hentoff among its columnists), and had written a daft essay for a gay magazine called ‘The Homosexual Villain’, which Mailer himself described as ‘beyond a doubt the worst article I have ever written, conventional, empty, pious, the quintessence of the Square’ (one of the many quirks of Advertisements for Myself is that it includes his disasters alongside his better work). The fifties had not been kind to the young star who’d published arguably America’s greatest World War II novel, The Naked and the Dead, in 1948.
Advertisements for Myself put him back on the literary map. But then, in November 1960, Mailer undid himself again. Having decided that he was going to stand for New York City mayor, Mailer threw a party at his apartment, and, in the early hours of the morning, stabbed his wife Adele Morales, almost killing her. He was, once again, America’s most notorious writer: the genius, in Bates’s manifesto, who could do anything and get away with it. (Morales didn’t press charges, though Mailer was committed for psychiatric evaluation.)
Andre Deutsch, the British publishing company that had made its name and reputation in 1949 when it released Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead, published Advertisements for Myself in the UK in 1961. The book’s most controversial essay, but also its most important, was one originally published in Dissent in 1957: ‘The White Negro: Superficial Reflections on the Hipster’.
One of the arguments of ‘White Negro’, at least when it came to the ‘negro’ part, was essentially that the adoption of black culture by young white America – specifically jazz music and the language of Hip – was part of a potential revolution in American cultural life. Mailer wrote the essay during the aftershocks of Brown v Board of Education and the debates about desegregation gripping the country. He argued that, because African-Americans had already lived for generations with fear and violence, to gain equality via the civil rights movement would mean that they would become the superior cultural group. And the terror this represented for America’s whites, he stated, was ‘[l]ike all conservative political fear … the fear of unforeseeable consequences, for the Negro’s equality would tear a profound shift into the psychology, the sexuality, and the moral imagination of every white alive.’
Mailer then doubled down on his strange prediction of a new American racial-sexual chaos. ‘With this possible emergence of the Negro,’ he continued,
Hip may erupt as a psychically armed rebellion whose sexual impetus may rebound against the antisexual foundation of every organized power in America, and bring into the air such animosities, antipathies, and new conflicts of interest that the mean empty hypocrisies of mass conformity will no longer work. A time of violence, new hysteria, confusion and rebellion will then be likely to replace the time of conformity.
Though Mailer declares himself a sexual libertarian who has no personal objections to whites and blacks sleeping with each other, he sees this underlying sexual threat as a far more defining fear than desegregation: ‘[W]hen it comes,’ he wrote, ‘miscegenation will be a terror, comparable perhaps to the derangement of the American Communists when the icons to Stalin came tumbling down.’
James Baldwin’s famous condemnation of Mailer’s essay, ‘The Black Boy Looks at the White Boy’, published in Esquire in 1961, came not in the immediate aftermath of the publication of ‘White Negro’ but after the infamous events of that evening in 1960 in Mailer’s apartment. With that night, Mailer had laid himself out on the cultural canvas, becoming a figure both of ridicule and sadness. But he was also a writer with whom Baldwin shared a complicated mutual respect, and one-time friendship, before Mailer criticised Baldwin’s work in Advertisements for Myself.
‘But why’, Baldwin asked of ‘White Negro’,
should it be necessary to borrow the Depression language of deprived Negroes, which eventually evolved into jive and bop talk, in order to justify such a grim system of delusions? Why malign the sorely menaced sexuality of Negroes in order to justify the white man’s own sexual panic? Especially as, in Norman’s case, and as indicated by his work, he has a very real sense of sexual responsibility, and even, odd as it may sound to some, of sexual morality, and a genuine commitment to life.
Mailer, in other words, knew better. The central problem with his essay was the wild generalisations he made about the collective character of the ‘Negro’: ‘it is no accident,’ he opined, ‘that the source of Hip is the Negro for he has been living on the margin between totalitarianism and democracy for two centuries’. There’s his assertion that: ‘Any Negro who wishes to live must live with danger from his first day.’ And later still: ‘Hated from outside and therefore hating himself, the Negro was forced into the position of exploring all those moral wildernesses of civilized life which the Square automatically condemns as delinquent or evil or immature or morbid or self-destructive or corrupt.’
When viewed like this, it is, of course, an insanely silly and racist piece of writing: psychosexual racial bombast dressed up as political nihilism. But it is also Mailer’s important attempt to define the singular figure of the ‘American existentialist’, who, in his framework, was the hipster.
In Mailer’s view, the hipster was distinct from European existentialists precisely because of the influence of black culture; the language of Hip and the abstract vocabularies of contemporary jazz gave expression to a singularly American experience of personal crisis and death. For blacks, these were survival mechanisms in a culture that discriminated against them and, at worst, wanted them dead. But World War II had inserted a fragility into white America’s comfortable, dominant existence too: the horrors of the Holocaust, the brutalities of Stalin which had shattered the utopianism of American communists, and America’s use of the atomic bomb to wipe out two Japanese cities all illustrated the real risk of societal annihilation. The hipster, then, is,
the man who knows that if our collective condition is to live with instant death by atomic war, relatively quick death by the State as l’univers concentrationnaire, or with a slow death by conformity with every collective and rebellious instinct stifled (at what damage to the mind and the heart and the liver and the nerves no research foundation for cancer will discover in a hurry), if the fate of twentieth-century man is to live with death from adolescence to premature senescence, why then the only life-giving answer is to accept the terms of death, to live with death as immediate danger, to divorce oneself from society, to exist without roots, to set out on that uncharted journey into the rebellious imperatives of the self.
This last handful of words is key: the exploration of the individual self rather than the collective self was essential to the hipster’s status as a kind of creative and existential libertarian. The war had shown how collective identity could lead to conformity, and that conformity could lead to fascism, totalitarianism, and oppressive moral and racial structures in society. To participate in a collective identity, then, was to run the risk of participating in state-sanctioned murder – as the Nazis, the Soviets and Americans had all proved.
The two pathways to this individualist freedom, Mailer suggested, are art and sex. Art, first of all, is the essential element in being able to ‘swing’: the vital condition of the hipster. And to swing, Mailer argued, ‘is to be able to learn, and by learning, take a step towards making it, towards creating. What is to be created is not nearly so important as the hipster’s belief that when he really makes it, he will be able to turn his hand to anything, even to self-discipline.’
The sex paradigm is the more important in Mailer’s hipster universe. Orgasm, and the pursuit of it in ever-improving or ‘apocalyptic’ forms, was in his thesis an energetic life-force rather than the release of one: a little death that aspires to nuclear proportions, with long-term consequences. Sex was a physical expression of love with the potential to accelerate culture. ‘It is not granted to the hipster to grow old gracefully,’ he wrote, ‘he has been captured too early by the oldest dream of power, the gold fountain of Ponce de Leôn, the fountain of youth where the gold is in the orgasm.’ This is also where Mailer starts to get himself in trouble, conflating the outsider status and oppression of the ‘Negro’ with perceived sexual prowess. And what is jazz, Mailer asks, if not the (black-dominated) expression of this wild, primal, apocalyptic orgasm-chase?
It’s a dumb conceptual leap to make. More important is why Mailer placed orgasm at the heart of the American existentialist condition. And this has much less to do with miscegenation than with the huge influence on him of Wilhelm Reich.
Well before Mailer published ‘White Negro’, the Kinsey Reports had placed the discussion of sex front and centre in post-war America. Kinsey’s work is often cited as the start of a ‘sexual revolution’ that culminated in the collision between the freedoms granted by the contraceptive pill and the late-sixties counterculture. But this focus on Kinsey tends to overlook the work of Wilhelm Reich, who had coined the term ‘sexual revolution’ in the 1930s – and who would himself fall victim, eventually, to the moralising cruelties of 1950s America.
Reich was an Austrian Jew who had been one of Sigmund Freud’s star students but eventually split with his mentor. Freud’s psychoanalytic framework argued that the unconscious is the location for our infantile and antisocial feelings. This, Reich didn’t dispute. But he argued that the unconscious ‘also contains many impulses which represent natural biological demands, such as the sexual desire of adolescents or of people tied down in an unhappy marriage’ – in other words, our perfectly normal sexual urges. Provided they didn’t harm anyone and were expressed in consenting physical relationships with people of our own or similar age, these were nobody else’s business and the key to good mental health.
Reich expressed this thesis in his groundbreaking book The Sexual Revolution, first published in German in 1936 and then in English in 1945. It was a kind of pre-Kinsey rallying cry for the rights of everyone to have a positive sexual life on their own terms. As its title implies, Reich was deeply influenced by Karl Marx, and called for a restructuring of society based on ‘sex-economic’ factors. We live, he argued, in sex-negating cultures, where genital gratification, as ‘the decisive sex-economic factor in the prevention of neuroses and establishment of social achievement – is at variance, in every respect, with present-day laws and with every patriarchal religion’.
His was not a call for promiscuity but for satisfaction. If one had found their perfect sexual match in a single partner, as many people do, then it was perfectly acceptable in Reich’s framework to live out a monogamous life. But, he argued, ‘[c]ompulsive morality as exemplified in marital duty and familial authority is the morality of cowardly and impotent individuals who are incapable of experiencing through natural love capacity what they try to obtain in vain with the aid of the police and marriage laws.’
In 1939, Reich emigrated from Norway, where he’d been teaching for several years, to take up a position at the New School in New York. It was there that things started to get a little kooky. Reich had already raised eyebrows in Norway for some of his biochemical experiments, but it was in the States that he fully developed his theory of ‘orgonomy’: the study of ‘orgone energy’, which Reich argued was a literal thing – a tangible force in the atmosphere that, when concentrated, could do everything from cure cancer to dramatically improve orgasm.
The next step in proving his theory was to build ‘orgone energy accumulators’: essentially, metal-lined cupboards that individuals sat in to concentrate orgone energy. Reich’s biographer Christopher Turner points out that the orgone box became popular in the 1940s and 1950s, and was used in particular by writers, including Allen Ginsberg, J. D. Salinger and Saul Bellow. William Burroughs apparently claimed to have once had a spontaneous orgasm inside one. Mailer had several accumulators. ‘To bohemians,’ Turner writes, ‘the orgone box was celebrated as a liberation machine, the wardrobe that would lead to utopia, while to conservatives it was Pandora’s box, out of which escaped the Freudian plague – the corrupting influence of anarchism and promiscuous sex.’
Reich later also invented a ‘cloudbuster’: a machine that aimed to manipulate orgone energy in the atmosphere, to make it rain in the desert. All of this was, from a scientific perspective, complete bunkum. As early as 1941, he’d met with Albert Einstein to discuss orgone energy, and Einstein even carried out his own tests on an accumulator, eventually declaring that it had no scientific merit at all.
A man trying to recreate society by putting healthy sex at its core, and building machines that could free us from our sexual repression, improve our orgasms and solve the problems of climate change, seems both harmless and very cool by contemporary standards. But the America of the McCarthy fifties was different. Reich was a brilliant psychoanalyst, but his machines – and, clearly, his own slip into a kind of madness – were his undoing. The Food and Drug Administration eventually shut down the accumulator business on account of its ‘fraudulent’ scientific claims. When some accumulator parts were later shipped across state borders, Reich was arrested – and convicted – in 1956. Meanwhile, Kinsey had published Sexual Behavior in the Human Female in 1953. As Turner argues, ‘[i]f Kinsey’s libertarianism was attracting attention, bringing Reich to trial promised to stem that tide.’ Sexual liberation was, in McCarthy’s America, a communist conspiracy, and Reich became one of its fall guys. He was also the victim of an event that he’d doubtless never expected to see in America after escaping the Nazi push across Europe: in June and August 1956, his books were burned by the authorities – including copies of The Sexual Revolution and, ironically, his other great work, The Mass Psychology of Fascism.
Reich died just over a year later, on 3 November 1957, in Lewisberg Federal Penitentiary. He was sixty years old. His prosecution, imprisonment and death made brutally real his own words two decades earlier in The Sexual Revolution: ‘If one investigates ecclesiastical, fascist and other reactionary ideologies for their unconscious content, one finds that they are essentially defense reactions. They are formed for fear of the unconscious inferno which everyone carries within himself.’
Mailer, at the time of ‘White Negro’, was in thrall to Reich’s ideas, and placed them at the heart of his new agenda for creativity and liberty in America. Mailer’s hipster was the product, at least in his mind, of the twentieth century’s greatest forces and traumas: Freud, Marx, sexual liberation, technology, totalitarianism, nuclear war, jazz, urbanity, and art as the expression of the inner self. Little wonder that Mailer wanted so badly to be a hipster himself, and even wanted to write the great hipster novel – which, like his own Hip status, never quite arrived. Baldwin, in ‘The Black Boy Looks at the White Boy’, can’t resist pointing out that the black jazz musicians he and Mailer had hung out with in Paris in the fifties thought of Mailer not as one of them but as a kind of lovable square: exactly what he desperately wanted not to be. Nat Hentoff was critical of Mailer’s hipster vision too, writing in The Jazz Life that it was out of touch with present realities. ‘The amoral hipster,’ Hentoff wrote,
in short, is now a rare figure in jazz. As the music has become an object in itself, a discipline and responsibility is required of the jazzman which the ‘authentic’ hipster cannot regard as worth that much time and trouble if the only values are right now. The act of Sonny Rollins – withdrawing from the jazz life entirely for more than a year to re-examine the content and technique of his playing – is not the act of a hipster. The months of listening and sketching through which Miles Davis prepared a flamenco album signifies an involvement with the future that is not ‘hip’ in Mailer’s sense.
In ‘B. B’s Second Manifesto’, Quin and Bates collaborated to turn Bates into a singular embodiment of Mailer’s hipster: a young loner fixated on American style and jazz, who wants to remake himself and shake off his past, who’d been to New York and become obsessed with the inner workings of American advertising – not just for its creative potential, but also for the way it was reshaping mass culture, in the here and now, through sublimation, manipulation, and the exploitation of the repressed desires Reich believed we had to release if we were to build a healthier world.
Quin and Bates’s faithfulness to, and playfulness with, Mailer’s vision come through especially clearly in the manifesto’s condensation of bisexuality, art and the psychic force of miscegenation. ‘This club in New York we all went to,’ they have Bates say,
they stood around just staring, some in drag, quiet music and all that crap in the background, sure I’ve thought about it; maybe I ought to sleep with some guy. Told myself lately I don’t need sex any more, gone so hip I don’t think I do now. Wish I hadn’t had so many women, like a machine in the end. This chick I lived with, just a convenience, screwed her every night, again in the morning, get up at eleven and know she had cooked some breakfast, Jesus it gets so boring. She was a nymphomaniac, that was her trouble. I want it to mean something, not just sex. All these chicks dote on one, that’s why I’ve given them up. Now take these crazy negros in their white sneakers, paisley ties, two vents in their jackets and all that crap, not really wild, just conservatively wild you know, watch how they treat their chicks. One in the subway went up to this broad and said Get in there I’m going to fuck you, she did too, right there and then in the tube, isn’t that great, I mean it’s real, that’s how a movie should be made.
The subway incident seems too preposterous and convenient to be believable, except as an attempt to vividly illustrate Mailer’s more dubious points about the societal overthrow that miscegenation promised. The manifesto, then, wasn’t just an expression of Bates’s frustration with his life in London and the ascendance of the Pop artists he was surrounded by and thought mediocre. It was also a masterclass from him and Quin in how to turn a complicated theoretical idea into a living art work.
By drawing on Mailer’s figure of the hipster, the pair created a framework for Bates to understand his outsider status in relation to his peers, and also to British culture and the wider art world. The young New Zealander was clearly more drawn to the changes going on in America than to anything he was seeing around him at the RCA. This recognition would be the thing that finally separated him from his British Pop colleagues. He and Quin had also recently encountered someone who already embodied so many of Mailer’s ideas: that saxophone-playing, hyper-individualist, sexually free painter, Larry Rivers. Seen through this lens, it becomes clearer just why Bates had been so affected by Rivers’ talk.
The lecture became the basis for Bates’s and Quin’s most substantial collaboration: his RCA dissertation, otherwise known as ‘Pop Corn (Being a Conversation between Vincent Van Gogh & Larry Rivers at “The Five Spot” Jazz Club, New York)’.
‘I wanted the following piece to really swing, so I took a painter like Larry Rivers, whose ideas I dig in more ways than one,’ Quin and Bates wrote as the very first line of the foreword. The dissertation takes the form of an imagined dialogue between Rivers and van Gogh, the link having been provided by Rivers himself. ‘Van Gogh laboured to make a yellow cornfield,’ he’d told the RCA students:
He gave us the stalks, the air, the sky. Seventy-five years later the accumulative labour of a few marvellous painters, and many less than marvellous, allows me in the presence of just enough yellow and just so much off-white in relation to it to experience a similar sensation.
This wasn’t just a comment on van Gogh’s use of yellow: it was a call for contemporaneity – something Bates had been striving for in his own work, and something that was becoming even more urgent for him as he saw the growing success of his painting peers at the RCA who were engaged in what he saw as a pretty conservative set of pursuits. This is arguably what began to separate him from Hockney, too: as much as Hockney’s work was a breath of fresh air, it was deeply concerned with looking to the likes of Bacon and Hogarth – those ‘grandparents blocking the highway’. Bates, the New Zealander, wasn’t burdened with the same historical legacies.
Apple says that Bates came up with the title and concept for ‘Pop Corn’ as a play on Rivers’ status as a proto-Pop artist and van Gogh’s cornfields. But it’s just as likely it was a dig at ‘corny’ classmates like Peter Phillips, who was being championed as one of the young trailblazers in British Pop. Apple is also clear that it was Quin who stitched together the seamless conversation between the artists, one living, one dead, by using quotes from van Gogh’s letters to his brother Theo and quotes from Rivers’ lecture, and a conversation she had with Rivers himself at Finch’s Pub (Quin references the conversation in the dissertation’s bibliography).
Reading ‘Pop Corn’, it’s hard not to infer the influence on Quin of Samuel Beckett (later, they’d share a publisher in John Calder), who had himself been heavily influenced in his early years by Dada (and its successor Surrealism), the ostensible subject of Bates’s aborted dissertation. This is seen in the overlapping, slightly disjointed conversation she constructs between van Gogh and Rivers, a kind of hipster Godot:
V.G. You talk about plants – that may be, but you are corn, and your place is in the cornfield, and in order to grow one must be rooted in the earth. Take root in the soil you will germinate there – don’t wither on the sidewalk brother
L.R. Sure if one remains at a railroad station too long he must die, for nothing comes along to give you substance. No one cares about your personal problems, and the dead can’t talk
V.G. Brother I wouldn’t say that. Lately I’ve been thinking of doing a drawing of my father the way he looked at a funeral
L.R. My old man played the violin, but let’s clear that up. My parents are from Poland, which was Russia before the first World War. They’re no more nor less interesting than the peasants who lived and worked in the same area. I can’t think of anything they did which, if I had had the chance, I would do – no matter, if I did, I’d then be them
V.G. Which reminds me Father had a windfall, Uncle Stricker sent him 100 guilders, which I thought was very kind of Uncle S. you know, but then as far as money goes I haven’t profited from being here
The dialogue continues like this for over thirty pages. In it, van Gogh comes across as an earnest trier grappling with his lack of success, his theories of painting and colour, and his relationship with Paul Gauguin. Rivers acts as his deadpan foil, giving the dead Dutchman the occasional acerbic Hip reality check.
The presence of van Gogh, though, served more than just a dramatic purpose: it was also a chance for Quin and Bates to make fun of the RCA and the disaster that had led to Bates’s General Studies probation in the first place – the fact he hadn’t wanted van Gogh as his dissertation topic. ‘Well here’s the thesis of all thesis,’ Quin wrote in the letter she sent Bates with the finished document,
will it cool Kullmann’s [sic] tongue and/or scroo scroo Darwin’s b … s? You will see it swings a little more than it did in places, I put a bit more in and took a lot of the duller bits out – take a look at that BIBLIOGRAPHY man it’s really wild don’t you fink fink? By the way did you manage to squeeze Pete Collins enough for the snaps of L. R. in wedlock bowler hatted? that’ll really send ’em up – and hey what about acknowledgements to QUINOLOGY also Secretary, plus typist and not forgetting Patience …. …. .
Pete Collins was a photographer and friend of Elisabeth Frink, who’d taken photos of Rivers’ and Clarice Price’s wedding. Rivers includes one of these in his autobiography What Did I Do? and he is, as Quin suggests, wearing a bowler hat for the occasion.
It’s easy to write off ‘Pop Corn’ as juvenilia for both Bates and Quin. But it’s a serious, experimental work, which clearly served a purpose for both of them. Bates couldn’t possibly have thought that handing in something so far from what he’d been assigned – whether van Gogh or a studentship with Colin Cherry – would earn him the pass he needed. And Quin would have lost her job if the collaboration had been discovered. Nor was she a writer who was messing around: she’d already completed two novel manuscripts (both rejected by publishers) and was on her way to finishing a third.
‘Pop Corn’ is, in retrospect, a nuanced document of the period Quin and Bates were living through together. There was van Gogh, obviously, who’d been brought back to life by Rivers in his talk. Henry Miller, in Tropic of Cancer, had written that van Gogh’s letters had a perfection beyond either Dostoevsky or Turgenev, and that they represented ‘the triumph of the individual over art’. The publication in the US of Miller’s Tropic of Cancer in 1961 by Barney Rosset of Grove Press had been a linchpin of the obscenity debates. The Grove edition – ‘The book they are trying to ban!’ – was advertised in those same New Yorkers Bates had flicked through in John Craddock’s apartment. But copies from its original French publisher, Obelisk Press, had been circulating in London for years, particularly among art students. ‘How’s Henry Miller’, Quin asked Bates in the letter she sent him with ‘Pop Corn’, ‘but I don’t suppose “genius” No. 2 (guess No. 1?) has had much time for peering at the printed word …’
‘Pop Corn’ also makes clear that the pair were actively working through Mailer’s influence. At one point in the foreword they suggest of van Gogh that ‘here was a man more “hip” than the many potential hipsters of today – what Mailer would call “very much with the scene” …’ The foreword also closes with a quote from Mailer: ‘The final purpose of art is to intensify, even, if necessary, to exacerbate the moral consciousness of people.’ This comes directly from the 1961 Andre Deutsch edition of Advertisements for Myself, from an interview with Mailer conducted in the wake of ‘White Negro’.
Beckett, sex, hipsterism and existentialism – all were present in this strange, semi-Dadaist collaboration. But there is one more big presence in its foreword: the psychiatrist R. D. Laing, whose The Divided Self had been published in 1960, and who would become a strong influence on Quin’s writing.
Like ‘White Negro’, The Divided Self was an existentialist text, which defined mental illness not as something solely located in our subconscious, but as a state of being shaped and defined through our existence in relation to others. Madness, Laing argued, might in fact be a form of ‘ontological insecurity’: an inability to experience one’s own subjectivity as complete, coherent and whole in the world. Laing wrote that if the ontologically insecure individual,
cannot take the realness, aliveness, autonomy, and identity of himself and others for granted, then he has to become absorbed in contriving ways of trying to be real, of keeping himself or others alive, of preserving his identity, in efforts, as he will often put it, to prevent himself losing his self. What are to most people everyday happenings, which are hardly noticed because they have no special significance, may become deeply significant in so far as they either contribute to the sustenance of the individual’s being or threaten him with non-being.
In an echo of this, Quin/Bates wrote of van Gogh that:
Even with the psychiatric treatment that is now taken as a matter of course, could anyone have brain-washed the destructive element, which in its own way is creatively wild, of such a painter, and would he still have preferred to drive himself ‘mad’ rather than face the strain of a supposably [sic] sane world – I think he might well have done.
There may have been a measure of self-identification for both of them here: Quin, creatively wild with a self-destructive streak, who had already received psychiatric treatment after her breakdown in Cornwall before she started working at the RCA (‘I went to see a psychiatrist, more from curiosity, and spent a few hours entertaining the horrified lady’); and Bates, increasingly recognising his own outsider status as he became more isolated both from his New Zealand home and his London classmates – with his own capacity to self-destruct too.
My job at the art college lasted three years, and before leaving I finished the third novel, of which I did three or four versions. This was accepted. Soon after I went down with glandular TB and spent several happy months revising the book while convalescing; dreaming in fact of months, years maybe, of being in a sanatorium somewhere in the mountains, and writing masterpieces. Instead I had to face the world again, and the problems of being published. The proofs finally arrived, I couldn’t open them, and spent the whole day vomiting from anxiety and depression. Eventually the galleys lay all over my room. The dream had been realized, but reading what I had written seemed someone else’s dream. A kind of involuntary commitment. And like Camus I became aware that: ‘There is in me an anarchy, a frightful disorder. Creating costs me a thousand deaths, for it involves an order and my whole being rebels against order. But without it I should die scattered.’
That ‘third novel’, which Quin says she finished at the RCA in her brief 1966 autobiography in London Magazine, was Berg – the first book she published, in 1964. Quin resigned from her secretarial position at the end of 1962. She would go on to publish three more novels after Berg, but it’s still widely regarded as her best book.
The novel’s titular hero is Alistair ‘Aly’ Berg, immortalised in the book’s opening line: ‘A man called Berg, who changed his name to Greb, came to a seaside town intending to kill his father….’ It seems likely he was named after the painter Adrian Berg (his first name has the same initial too), who was studying in the RCA’s Painting School for two of the three years Quin worked there. Berg had done a degree in English literature before his arrival at the RCA, so books may have been a connection between the pair. But Quin may have been just as attracted by the easy reversal of his surname, to Greb, because Berg is ultimately a book about reflections: about doubles, mirrors and their images; about temporary identities and their effects on our sanity.
Aly Berg, out to avenge the emotional hurt caused to his too-forgiving mother by his estranged father Nathaniel, identifies his father in a seaside town and takes a room in the same boarding house. Nathaniel is there with Judith, his current lover. Berg’s room adjoins theirs, and through the thin partition he can hear the full mess of their lives: the fights and the reconciliations, the fucking, the night-time grinding of his father’s teeth, the squawks of a pet budgie. It’s an obviously Oedipal set-up: a three-way situation in which the father doesn’t recognise the son and the son eventually takes the father’s place in bed, becoming just as obsessed with Judith as he is with murdering Dad.
Quin expert Jennifer Hodgson has made the point that there was a widespread revival of the Oedipus theme in sixties culture: ‘recovered and reinvented to describe the limits upon the individual that are imposed by social reality and internalised, etched upon the self by ideology. It was employed to describe the ways in which the anarchic productivity of unconscious desire is sublimated and regulated.’ Shades again, then, of the way Quin had described van Gogh’s madness in ‘Pop Corn’, and strong echoes of the idea of the individualist outsider in Mailer’s ‘White Negro’. But perhaps even stronger is the connection here to Laing’s ‘divided self’, and the way, Laing suggests, madness is constructed socially. Hodgson also points out that the Oedipus complex became the cornerstone of Freudian psychoanalysis – which both Wilhelm Reich and Laing worked so hard to expand and reinvent. Throughout Quin’s writing, Hodgson states, ‘Quin turns to the Oedipus story as a mythic master code with which to articulate the human existential plight and her profound ontological distrust of the normative.’
Aly Berg, of course, is different from the Oedipus of myth: he knowingly wants to kill his father, knowingly wants to fuck his father’s lover, and eventually does. As if to emphasise the maternal confusion, Aly is obsessed with Judith’s breasts. At one point, as they make love, Judith tells him how much better – how much bigger – he is than his father, before she calls him by his father’s name as she climaxes. ‘The gap in the wall seemed wider from the angle of his head,’ Quin writes, at the moment of Judith’s mistake. ‘He closed his eyes.’ (Oedipus, of course, blinds himself after his mother-lover commits suicide.)
Judith’s name is no accident either: it is the name of that great widow and beheader of Holofernes (her surname, ‘Goldstein’, is Jewish too, hammering home the point). There are other references in the book to the great emasculators of myth. Berg – significantly, given what Hockney and Bates were up to with their personal images at the time – is a travelling hair-tonic salesman. In his suitcase are bottles, wigs, and pamphlets that read, in caps: ‘BUY BERG’S BEST HAIR TONIC DEFEAT DELILAH’S DAMAGE: IN TWO MONTHS YOU WILL BE A NEW MAN’.
Oedipus was also a convenient building block for Quin’s fixation with three-way relationships. Berg is basically an incestuous love triangle; her second novel Three is about an older couple’s sensual fixation with a younger woman who has disappeared; her book Passages is about a woman and her lover trying to find the woman’s brother. And, of course, Berg is about reflections: Oedipus is his father’s younger double; so too Berg is to his father Nathaniel (emphasised when Judith calls out the wrong name during sex). Jennifer Komorowski has written that: ‘When Berg changes his name to Greb, with the intention of disguising his true identity in order to get closer to his father, he is also (unwittingly?) changing his own reality; rather than creating a new identity separate from his father, Aly Berg becomes his father’s mirrored double.’
Berg encounters his reflection (‘Greb’), either crystal-clear or partially fogged and warped, everywhere: ‘Berg grinned into the mirror, at the landscape accustoming itself to the interior planning’; ‘He cooked the beans and the bacon, until the steam curled over the window and mirror’; ‘he stared at his reflection in the plate, a faint glimmer of someone barely recognisable’; ‘they sat either side of a glass-topped table, above them a cherub-garlanded mirror, into which Berg gazed at the blind man thumping the piano’; ‘He drew a circle in the mirror and wrote NON OMNIS MORIAR’; and, when Berg encounters his father having a bath, ‘The mirror steamed over.’
As Berg’s grip on reality slips, we see his world not so much through his eyes but as a series of framed images – not just reflections, but also scenes spied through keyholes, through windows, through partially opened doors and cracks in the partition walls: ‘[i]dea and image juxtapositioned,’ Quin writes early in the novel, ‘spinning between myth and rationality’. At one point, Berg hatches a plan to hide from Judith and his father by stealing some of her clothes and putting on one of the auburn wigs he has in his ‘hair tonic’ case: shades of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960 classic Psycho, in which its lead character Norman Bates dresses up as his (dead) mother to carry out murders at the family motel.
Just as with Norman Bates, Berg’s drag is less about masquerade than a literal reinvention as, or stand-in for, his absent mother – the ingenuous woman jilted by his deadbeat dad Nathaniel. But there’s another stand-in too, which in many ways defines the novel. Early on, Berg encounters his father – his ultimate reflection – in the street. The older man reveals that he’s trying to escape from Judith, and gives Berg a room key so he can collect his personal effects for him, including Berty, the budgie, ‘[a]nd there’s also a ventriloquist’s dummy, actually he’s most important, in the wardrobe, at the back, I think on the left side. You see I’m going on tour with a friend, a sort of vaudeville act, hope to make a bit of lolly, doing the resorts as soon as the season begins.’
It’s the ventriloquist’s dummy – yet another reflection of his father, and of him – that really does for Berg’s grip on reality. When he finally believes he’s killed Nathaniel, he bundles the corpse in an eiderdown: ‘At last action has supplanted idea and imagery,’ Quin writes. It’s not until later, after he tries to dispose of the body, rolled up in a rug, that Berg discovers that all he’s managed to kill is his father’s wooden doppelgänger. Nathaniel is still alive, and instead it’s the dummy – a kind of brother he never had – that becomes his tormenter.
‘The purpose of the ventriloquist’s dummy,’ Komorowski writes, ‘is to allow the spoken voice of the other to speak. That is to say, the dummy possesses neither a literal voice nor an internal voice of its own: it is an object.’ This might seem obvious, but it also points to the influence on Quin (and, by association, Bates) of Laing’s The Divided Self and his idea of ontological insecurity. Giles Gordon, in his 2001 introduction to Berg, suggests that Quin had to have known about Laing’s book. Hodgson, too, is clear on the influence: ‘[w]hile she frequently peoples [her novels] with Laingian fellow travellers … she does so in order to indict their vain and hubristic attempts to summon the Dionysus within. Their ecstatic release never arrives. To be insane is always to suffer; toying dilettantishly with these dark and formidable forces can be deadly and by “going over the edge” her characters sacrifice themselves to more authentic truths that are at length revealed to be trivial and insubstantial myths.’
In The Divided Self, Laing writes that for the ontologically insecure person,
one is open to the possibility of experiencing oneself as an object of his experience and thereby of feeling one’s own subjectivity drained away. One is threatened with the possibility of becoming no more than a thing in the world of the other, without any life for oneself, without any being for oneself. In terms of such anxiety, the very act of experiencing the other as a person is felt as virtually suicidal.
This is precisely the situation Aly Berg finds himself in, as his autonomous identity comes unstuck in the face of not just the father who didn’t raise him but his father’s dummy – the empty shell, the object his father seems to have held in greater affection than the son he abandoned. Eventually, he can only see himself as a reflection: as ‘Greb’, as the dummy, as his father’s lover’s lover. So as not to see himself when Judith mistakes him for his dad as they fuck, he closes his eyes.
It’s easy to see the connections in Berg to Quin’s own life, born as she was in Brighton, the assumed ‘seaside town’ of the novel, and the fact that she was estranged from her father for most of her childhood. There is also the fact that her mother had left her first child, her son John, when he was a boy, not to encounter him again until he was fully grown. Nathaniel’s aspirations to be part of a vaudeville act hint at Quin’s own desires to be an actor. Then there are the Oedipal themes: ‘At eighteen,’ she wrote, ‘I went up to London to spend Saturdays with my father (he had left my mother when I was ten) and pretended he was my lover.’ When Berg thinks he has his father’s body rolled in a rug, he stashes it at the train station’s left-luggage office. In 1934 there were two separate murders in which the victims’ bodies were found inside trunks at the Brighton station left-luggage office. That was the year Quin’s mother Anne first arrived in the town. The novel, in truly ambivalent form given these details, is spikily dedicated: ‘For Mother’.
But to read Quin’s work strictly autobiographically undermines the deep theoretical and conceptual thinking underpinning it. Berg’s greatness lies not in its riffing on the classical story of Oedipus but in its cultural and psychological contemporaneity. This is a novel shaped by a deep awareness of existentialist thought, both in literature and new psychoanalysis; by an understanding of the new dynamics of sex in literature, exemplified by the obscenity trials that had taken place in London and the States, particularly around Lawrence and Miller; and by an intense, deep understanding of the complex relations between the framed image and language. The reflections in Berg turn the novel’s confused hero into a man at sea in a world of objects: wigs, budgies, dummies, lovers, breasts, mouths, fathers, glasses, mirrors, pubs, beans and bacon. There’s a strange distancing effect, where Berg seems never to fully touch anything but, rather, always to observe the act of touching. Everything turns into a kind of fetish: a way either to sublimate or release his desires.
The connections with what Bates was starting to do in his own work, and the way he was thinking about his own place in the world, are strong. When he and Quin collaborated on ‘Pop Corn’, it seems each was using the other to inch towards something personally revelatory.
Bates handed in the dissertation, probably at the end of January or the very start of February. In his student file is a confused if conciliatory note from Michael Kullman to the RCA administration from 6 February: ‘… though he may not have done quite the work specified,’ Kullman wrote in a pretty remarkable understatement, ‘I don’t feel like holding him to blame for it because he has been going through a crisis. He seems to have decided against the world of advertising, and now wants to be, as he puts it, an “Ideas Man”.’ The following day, Guyatt chipped in with support too: ‘For my part,’ he wrote, ‘I would strongly recommend that we keep him on and just accept the fact that he is a quirk … He is a very talented man and is painfully trying to find his true direction as an artist.’
Though theirs might not have been an earth-shattering love affair, there is enough to suggest that Quin played a role in accelerating Bates’s discovery of that true direction – which would lead, before 1962 was out, to the disappearance of Bates forever. What she’d created through his manifesto, his correspondence and his dissertation was a language and a framework of existentialism and Hip that he’d been feeling his way towards but been unable to articulate on his own. After his time in New York, his encounter with Rivers and his time with Quin, Bates was starting to assemble the equipment he needed for a radical change.
Bates didn’t know about the correspondence between the RCA faculty about ‘Pop Corn’. At the same time, his friend Hockney was also in trouble over General Studies: his own lack of enthusiasm for it had resulted in his half-arsed dissertation on Fauvism, which was deemed not up to scratch. But neither man was particularly perturbed by the crisis building for them at RCA – because, at the start of 1962, they had an exhibition to get ready for.
If ‘Young Contemporaries’ in 1961 had put Hockney on the radar of British art-world figures like John Kasmin, the 1962 iteration of the exhibition cemented his reputation as London’s most promising painter. It is also the exhibition that, in the hands of historians like Marco Livingstone and several contemporaneous art critics, established a new school of British Pop.
Hockney’s bravura moment in the 1962 show was delivered in the form of his ‘Demonstrations of Versatility’ – four canvases, completed between 1961 and early 1962. There was: A Grand Procession of Dignitaries in the Semi-Egyptian Style – that big painting he’d started after returning from New York; Tea Painting in an Illusionistic Style – that seated figure trapped inside Hockney’s tea caddy; and an early version of Flight into Italy – Swiss Landscape called Painting in a Scenic Style (the later one includes Michael Kullman’s Mini van dashing through a mountain range, the words ‘thats [sic] Switzerland that was’ shooting out of its exhaust). The painting documents a trip taken in the winter break at the end of 1961, and there are three figures in the car: Hockney, crammed in the back; Kullman driving; and Ferrill Amacker, Hockney’s sometime lover and flatmate in Brooklyn, who’d come to Europe to travel. The group of paintings was completed by Figure in a Flat Style, made up of a small canvas for the head, a much bigger one for the torso, and two angled wooden batons for legs (this was the Hockney work for sale in the 2016 Christie’s catalogue that Apple and I had pored over in his living room).
There’s an oft-quoted line from an interview with Hockney in 1965, about the motivation behind these works: ‘I deliberately set out to prove I could do four entirely different sorts of picture like Picasso,’ he’d said. ‘They all had a sub-title and each was in a different style, Egyptian, illusionistic, flat – but looking at them later I realized the attitude is basically the same and you come to see yourself there a bit.’ Just as interesting is the identity of Hockney’s interviewer: Larry Rivers, who was writing about the young British artist for the Summer 1965 edition of Art and Literature, a publication edited by Rivers’ friend John Ashbery.
One of Hockney’s key prints from this period was also included in the exhibition: My Bonnie Lies over the Ocean, 1961–62. As Martin Hammer writes, this is the earliest known work associated with Hockney’s first New York trip: it is dated ‘July 1961’, and was made at the Pratt Institute, where William Lieberman had arranged for Hockney to have access to the printing facilities (Apple still owns a print of it, inscribed to Bates).
Hammer juxtaposes this work with a print from the portfolio ‘Stones’, which was a collaboration between Rivers and Frank O’Hara, published in 1960. The affinities are compelling, including, as Hammer writes: ‘the integrated lines of hand-written text, sometimes floated at eccentric angles; the passages of dense scribbling located towards the bottom centre of each image; a general effect of improvisation and of pockets of artistic incident, from legibly figurative to abstract, dispersed as if randomly within the compositions.’
It’s notable that Hockney made this before Rivers showed up at the RCA and visited him in his studio, and illustrates that the older painter was already being treated as an influence. There are other aspects to the work that show Hockney’s new American enthusiasms: a vertical American flag held aloft by a tiny figure with the initials ‘Dh’ (Jasper Johns’s ‘Flag’ paintings were another key touchstone for these young British artists), and the head of George Washington on another figure (again, a potential reference to Rivers’ Washington Crossing the Delaware, if the ‘Stones’ connection is correct). The theme of a wistful transatlantic love – Hockney’s bonnie over the ocean – plays out in the figure on the opposite side of the etching with a Union Jack: a reference to Peter Crutch, Hockney’s crush, back in London. But as Hammer also points out, this is Hockney once again using a pop music reference: the guitarist Duane Eddy had a 1960 transatlantic hit with his instrumental version of the traditional tune, called ‘Bonnie Come Back’.
Bates had several works in 1962’s ‘Young Contemporaries’. He had also come up with a canvas that wasn’t included, which combined poster, invitation and work label as a proposition for the show’s visual identity (he’d been responsible for the 1961 identity too, with his strange eyeball-target form). ‘Young Contemporaries 1962’ is spelled out in bold black type at the top, just above all the details of the exhibition – address, dates, opening times and so on. Below this are several strips in which information about each work could be entered: the artist’s name; title of the work; the price; and the school the artist attended. Christina Barton writes that ‘the work has since become a defining marker in [Apple’s] conceptual trajectory’.
It may have missed the mark with his fellow students, but some of Bates’s works in the exhibition garnered him the attention of London’s critics, most notably Two Cobbers in Central Park, New York on Wednesday 19 July 1961 at 2pm, 1961 (its title, obviously, referencing the same timeframe in New York as Hockney’s My Bonnie). This was, in fact, a collaborative painting Bates made with his close friend Reg Fisher. The work is made up of two joined canvases, a policeman’s arm spilling from one to the other, while two disembodied heads float freely. (Given Hockney’s use of heads in ‘A Rake’s Progress’, this is further evidence of the cross-fertilisation between the men at this time.) Both heads wear hats: one a boater with a red-and-blue band; the other an American-style trilby. This figure also wears tā moko on his nose and chin – traditional Māori tattoo, which Bates and Fisher borrowed from Horatio Gordon Robley’s late-nineteenth-century book on the subject. (Apple tells me Bates had pinched a copy of the book from the New Zealand High Commission in London.)
Near to where the painting was displayed, Bates also presented Love for Sale, a sculpture that picked up, like the boater’s ribbon, the iconic colours of both the Union Jack and the American flag: a white plinth with three perfect blue stripes painted on it, supporting a single glossy red heart, stuck with a butcher’s price tag: ‘London’s Best 2’8 per LB.’ The heart was in fact the wooden buck used to shape the tea caddy from Bates’s ‘we all love tea’ campaign, painted red. Bates made the work at his Cornwall Gardens flat. Quin must have seen this and the collaborative painting in progress there at the same time she was working on ‘Pop Corn’. ‘[S]o how’s the stripes, red white and blue’, she wrote in the letter she sent to Bates with the finished dissertation, ‘(say how about an all-over red – no scarlet bedspread for Valentine’s Day?) butcher’s enterprize, and that crazy boater building?’
All of the RCA up-and-comers were included in ‘Young Contemporaries’ that year. Reviews in the British press were mostly positive, and the smarter critics clearly recognised that a significant shift, particularly in contemporary painting, was underway. The Times’s critic described it as a ‘brilliant’ exhibition that ‘fairly bubbles with bright ideas and visual excitement’. The exhibition was, apparently, full of intelligence ‘and it is interesting to see in what directions it is currently aimed –’:
Larry Rivers, Henry Mundy, Vasarely, Pasmore, ‘hard-edge’ Americans, and two markedly influential ‘art-school movements’, the girder-and-iron-plate painted sculpture at St. Martin’s, and the raspberry-blowing ‘new surrealist school’ (for want of a better name) at the Royal College of Art.
This last dominates the first room, particularly in the person of its present star turn, David Hockney, and in the tougher, harder-hitting talent of Peter Phillips. But its weird mixture of impudence, whimsicality and beautifully tender painting is also well exemplified by Derek Boshier, Michael Upton, Barrie Bates and, in a somewhat different vein, by Malcolm MacLeod.
Ray Watkinson, writing for The Arts Review, sensed that something was up too, describing the show as:
… fundamentally a flood of imagery, half-resolved because continuously experienced; not collected in neat tranquillity, but raw, tasteless, and living. Pin-ups and pin-tables, space fiction and city construction, the pabulum of admass and the monitory shapes of motorways, are all pouring furiously through the shifting sieve of consciousness into the patterns of a fully urban art. Behind this visual babel, these youngsters are pressing towards comprehension and communication. Is the language sometimes frightening? It’s a world full of frightful, as well as wonderful, possibilities.
John Berger, writing for the weekend Observer, even tried to offer up a working thesis for the new Pop art on display, which hugged close to some of Marshall McLuhan’s ideas: ‘Pop art is an art of social comment,’ he wrote,
both satirical and poetic. It rejects the whole tradition of fine art as useless sugar coating a bitter pill. It is anti-authoritarian, anti-military, anti-snob. It affirms the individual unnoticed imagination which can transform the commercial pulp fed to it. A film is dismissed as trash by the pundits, but the couples who watch it in the dark put it to uses never considered by the experts.
Terence Mullaly, writing for the Telegraph and Morning Post, was less convinced, and Bates was his symbolic villain: ‘A red heart marked “London’s Best 2s 8d per lb” hardly seems a just reward for all the money spent on our art schools,’ he wrote. ‘Nor should the appallingly shoddy craftsmanship that provides the common factor in this exhibition be accepted.’
Accepted or not, the buzz around the RCA generation was confirmed when on 25 March, just a month after ‘Young Contemporaries’ closed, Ken Russell’s film Pop Goes the Easel screened on the BBC. Though neither Bates nor Hockney was among the featured artists (Hockney has an incredibly brief cameo on a dancefloor), the film’s screening was a crucial moment in the trajectory of that year, helping the young artists at the RCA define exactly what they were – and what they weren’t.
The film’s four heroes are Boshier and Phillips, Pauline Boty and Peter Blake. At the film’s start, they frolic at an amusement park, driving bumper cars and playing arcade games. Then we see Blake in bed, caught in a creepy fever dream about French film star Brigitte Bardot, set to the bizarre soundtrack of the tribute to her by the band Achilles and His Heels, released in 1961: not just a pop reference but a clear allusion to Boty’s resemblance to Bardot. Out of bed, we see Blake’s flat is pasted in pin-ups. ‘This is like living in Girls’ Town’ comes the unfortunate opening line of Blake’s voiceover.
Phillips’ eventual arrival is just as weirdly pitched: he is chauffeured to his flat in a top-down American convertible by a black driver. Blake’s Elvis-era pop songs are gone; instead, Phillips is consistently accompanied by jazz. As he enters the flat, we see Bates’s poster for the 1961 ‘Young Contemporaries’ show pasted to the wall next to the mirror Phillips checks himself out in. The place is packed with Phillips’ paintings. In the first room, he flings a horror magazine at a Hip woman sitting on a bed in the corner; in the next, a good-looking blonde plays a pinball machine while Phillips flicks through girlie mags (pinball machines and dirty pics were regular subject matter in his paintings).
Apple, in 2013, said of Phillips that he was ‘not an intellectual but he was stylish, like a James Dean from Birmingham’. Phillips’ paintings from 1961 and 1962 are arguably the most archetypically Pop works produced by any of the RCA artists associated with the movement at that time, in the sense that they most obviously – and least critically – reference American popular culture and its effects. Paintings like Motorpsycho/ Tiger, 1961–62 (which Phillips is seen working on at the end of Pop Goes the Easel) seem to venerate the implicit ‘cool’ of American biker culture. And 1962’s Star Card Table is a monochromatic image of Bardot seen through the aperture of a star, sliced into a green surface – meant to evoke a baize table-top. Many of Phillips’ other paintings from the period reference playing cards.
Next is Boshier’s McLuhan-esque breakfast experience, followed by his declaration of his love for the dead American pop star Buddy Holly. And finally, there’s Boty, with whom Russell’s camera spends much of the next twenty minutes fixated. Boty, like Blake, enters in the midst of a dream: trapped in a curving hallway where she lays out pictures, only to have instructions barked at her by grumpy German nurses before she’s chased by a wheelchair-bound woman wearing dark glasses who eventually catches up to her in the lift and rises from the chair just as Boty shakes herself awake. When she does wake up, she finds Boshier, Phillips and Blake waiting to be let into her flat. Boty explains how much her vivid dreams feed her collages: clearly the most surreal and least obviously Pop works of the group. Blake and Boty talk about her new works; Boshier reads the back cover of a science-fiction pulp mag to a grinning Phillips. Soon after, Boty, dressed in suit and top hat, lip-syncs Shirley Temple’s ‘Good Ship Lollipop’ to camera.
The foursome flick through comic books together; go to professional wrestling together; twist together at a student party (where Hockney briefly head-bangs his way through the crowd). The final few seconds are of all four painting, alone in their respective studios, accompanied by classical harpsichord. It’s an inadvertent affirmation of the conventionality of their work. Despite new subject matter, in the end, they are figurative painters in a British figurative tradition, wedded to the same workaday studio practices of previous generations. In 2013, Marco Livingstone all but confirmed Russell’s implicit thesis when he wrote that many of the stars of early-sixties British Pop were ‘devoted to finding a personal voice through an insistence on the hand’.
Russell’s film was seen as both a breakthrough and controversial; innovative for its subject matter, shocking to many regular Britons sitting at home watching the BBC. But its scripted nature meant that all four artists became tools towards the expression of a flawed notion: that British Pop, as the film presented it, was something new and radical. With the exception of Boshier’s brief McLuhan-inspired musings, the film failed to grapple with the fundamentally existential questions of what it meant for these artists to make Pop work in an age of mass communication. Instead, their work was presented as something to be read simplistically and iconographically – as a series of signs that pointed to things elsewhere: celebrities, brands, musicians, space rockets. It inadvertently confirmed the worst fears that British Pop was something entirely superficial. Berger’s definition of Pop in the Observer had been far more acute, and closer to the mark.
Little wonder, then, that Hockney and Bates didn’t feature: their sophisticated explorations of the self in the age of mass communication would have blown the film up like an atomic bomb. In fact, Russell had tried to get Hockney for the film’s original line-up, but the artist declined, confirming to Lisa Tickner in 2011 that ‘[h]e didn’t see himself as part of a group or as having a significant connection to Pop, and so “backed down and left it to the purists”.’
Despite the fact Michael Kullman and Richard Guyatt both felt Bates shouldn’t be failed for ‘Pop Corn’, he was one of five students that year who, in early April, were informed that they couldn’t graduate. Hockney was another. Apple remembers the meeting with the RCA’s registrar J. R. P. Moon clearly. Bates and Moon hadn’t had much time for each other even before the General Studies fallout, as evidenced by numerous letters in Bates’s file between Moon, other faculty members, and Stewart Maclennan back in New Zealand. This culminated in the very last letter in Bates’s file, from Moon to New Zealand’s High Commission in London. ‘Barrie Bates has made a very considerable and highly individual contribution to the life of the College,’ Moon wrote dryly, ‘although perhaps his contribution has not always been as outstanding as Barrie Bates has thought.’
The five students were summoned into Moon’s office and informed of their fate. The three others, according to Apple, said nothing. Bates and Hockney, meanwhile, laughed it off, saying that they’d like to make their own versions of a diploma and stamp it with ‘FAILED’. (Hockney did make a version of the certificate, the five downcast students at the base of the work, echoed in the five anonymous Bedlam inmates in the final plate of ‘A Rake’s Progress’.)
Their cockiness, to be fair to them, was by this stage pretty well grounded. Hockney was still basking in the aftermath of ‘Young Contemporaries’ and the fact almost every critic in London who mattered had mentioned him by name. Rivers and other artists had passed through the RCA studios and identified him as a standout too.
Bates was also doing well, clearly framed by the critics as part of the RCA’s rising generation, as well as receiving attention, alongside Frank Bowling, for his contributions to ‘Young Commonwealth Artists’, in April. Perhaps his most important work from that exhibition was the one plastered around London: his poster for the show – a plain white Union Jack, with red pencil scribbled into the top half of its English cross and a couple of the bars of the saltire. Its strapline was as pithy as anything a Madison Avenue copywriter could have come up with: ‘A Union, Jack!’, its perfectly placed comma turning it into a sharp piece of street slang, as well as a summation of the context – artists from around the Commonwealth, exhibiting in the heart of London. It won Bates – or Apple, as he was by then – a prestigious D&AD award for best poster the following year.
Unbothered by what was unfolding at the college, Bates decided to spend the April break in Europe: specifically, Yugoslavia. His mother Marija was a Croatian New Zealander, and Bates decided to make contact with his relatives there. But he also stopped off in Paris to do two things: to see Larry Rivers’ solo exhibition at Galerie Rive Droite (10 April – 7 May 1962) and to drop in on the artist himself.
This exhibition, along with his solo show at London’s Gimpel Fils in May, were watershed moments for Rivers, signalling a substantial shift in subject matter and its treatment. In paintings like Washington Crossing the Delaware and other works like his nude double-portrait of his mother-in-law, he’d established himself as one of the great figurative painters of the time. But in his RCA talk he’d indicated that he was in the middle of a change. That change would become crystal clear in the Paris and London shows.
As Sophie Cras argues, the heart of that transformation was his move away from working from models towards found images. In particular, he began to work with Camel and Tareyton cigarette packets and French banknotes. There’s hardly any time between Rivers doing this in Paris and Warhol making his own dollar-bill and ‘Campbell’s Soup Can’ paintings in New York (Warhol’s first show of the soup can paintings took place in Los Angeles, in July 1962). Rivers’ treatment of his found subject matter was far more painterly than Warhol’s, though, and far more about the subject of painting itself. His works often included, for instance, the kinds of grid-lines that painters use for perspectival guidance or translation from preparatory sketches.
As Cras writes, ‘The banality of these images, together with the profanation evident in the appropriation of official banknotes (bearing the portrait of the national hero Napoleon) or the reduction of painting to a pathetic diagram … produced a spirit of impertinence and dark humour that became the trademark of Rivers’s new style.’ There is evidence, though, that this ‘impertinence and dark humour’ didn’t land well with the young London artists who saw the Gimpel Fils exhibition.
In May, Rivers gave a lecture at the ICA that was sufficiently contentious to warrant a long mention in the Guardian. On 21 June 1962, in an article called ‘The Anatomy of Pop’, George Butcher wrote that:
One of the interesting things about the ‘pop’ label is that it comes nearest to suiting that variety of the movement which is most at home in London. That there is a peculiarly local expression was very evident from the discussion between Rivers and the ‘pop’ painters in the audience at the ICA in May. Neither side really understood much of what the other was trying to say. It was almost as though some Academician from Moscow were on the platform instead of an ex-jazz musician from Brooklyn [sic: Rivers grew up in the Bronx]. Rivers really did sound like the opening lines from his catalogue [written by John Ashbery], where it is said that he ‘paints whatever comes within his reach. This is what Lautréamont was thinking of when he wrote of the sublime logic of making love to the first person who comes along.’ Busting up the whole mood, the young ‘pop’ artists kept pursuing the thread of ‘responsibility,’ and trying to pin Rivers down to some form of social commitment. They failed.
Butcher doesn’t name the young artists haranguing Rivers. He does, however, go on to unpack his view of the specificities of British Pop and the young artists who best embodied it. The two he singles out are R. B. Kitaj and Hockney. Butcher drew attention to Hockney’s A Grand Procession of Dignitaries in the Semi-Egyptian Style, and also focused on Kitaj’s Red Banquet from 1960: a ‘history painting’ that includes the Russian anarchist figures Mikhail Bakunin and Alexander Herzen, and one of several paintings Kitaj made with explicitly socialist content.
Is this, then, why the young Pop artists were interrogating Rivers? Against the likes of Kitaj, painting about socialism, or Hockney, painting openly about homosexuality, Rivers’ banknotes and cigarette packs might well have looked tame, perhaps even reactionary. But some of the younger artists may also have arrived at the ICA talk forearmed; several would have attended Rivers’ lecture at the RCA or heard the broadcast version on the BBC. Allen Jones, who was there, remembers Rivers saying at one point that if you didn’t know what to put in the bottom left-hand corner of a painting, maybe it was finished already. According to Jones, Hockney was there too, and when Rivers discussed a painting in which the main figure was incomplete, Hockney heckled from the crowd. ‘Yes, but hands are hard to draw!’
Jones, of course, had long been expelled from the RCA, so hadn’t heard Rivers speak the previous November. He had nonetheless encountered Rivers’ work well before the ICA talk. He had first seen Rivers’ painting The Next to Last Confederate Soldier, 1959, on the cover of the March– April 1960 edition of Evergreen Review. (This was a journal published by Barney Rosset of Grove Press, the same man who had published Lady Chatterley’s Lover in 1959 and faced down the US courts.) He says he was deeply impressed by Rivers’ ability to corral the painterly language of Abstract Expressionism and direct it towards figurative painting. He realised that what had become stale, in the hands of educators like Carel Weight, Ruskin Spear and others, was the language around figuration’s potential. But Rivers’ work was a reminder that the actual potential of figurative painting hadn’t yet run out. And this, he says, was an important realisation for many of the young Pop artists who were struggling under the weight of American abstraction.
Apple recalls that when Bates saw the Paris show, it wasn’t the lack of political content or ‘responsibility’ that irked him as much as the painting itself. The young artist didn’t see what was gained in remaking the found images, and in such a painterly way. For him, that process of translation just got in the way of the conceptual significance of the subject matter. Bates had needed, desperately, the ideas Rivers had offered up at the RCA in November. But the man’s paintings – not so much. He did, nonetheless, drop in unannounced on Rivers and his wife Clarice while in Paris. He didn’t stick around for long, and Apple doesn’t remember anything particularly significant about the exchange, though does recall seeing more banknote paintings in Rivers’ studio – likely for the forthcoming Gimpel Fils show in London. Nor did Rivers seem particularly excited to have the London art student on his doorstep. Evidently, Bates’s brief obsession with Rivers had – while leaving a lasting impact on him – run its course.
The subsequent Yugoslavia visit is an unusual incident in Bates’s story. Between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, hundreds of Croatian men, mainly from Dalmatia, left their homeland for New Zealand. The motivation for many was to avoid conscription into the army, as the Austro-Hungarians basically used Dalmatia as a rump against the Ottoman Empire. For many Dalmatians, the Austro-Hungarians were an occupying force, and so they left for ‘Amerika’ – which just as often meant Australia and New Zealand. Since that time, Dalmatia had become part of Tito’s Yugoslavia, a Soviet satellite state.
Many of the men who came to New Zealand settled in the northern regions of the North Island to work in the gumfields, where they would dig up large chunks of gum from ancient kauri forests. The gum was a prized furniture resin in Europe and the US before synthetic resins became widely used. Later, many of those Dalmatian families would go on to found New Zealand’s wine industry. Some became great market gardeners too.
Evidently, Bates still held his family history in some affection. Quin, writing as Bates, hinted at this. ‘I want to do something no one else has ever done as good,’ she has him say in his manifesto,
if only to drive a van better than anyone before, thought of motor racing once, well maybe I’ll end up growing cabbages. Take my grandfather, he potters about the farm, all these years doing shit all, apart from watering a few plants, that’s why he’s lived so long. Man of ideas though, bought two trawlers for herring fishing, made anchovy paste, sold for miles around, yeah he’s really wild.
Bates’s entire trip to Yugoslavia took place between 16 and 22 April 1962. In that time, he visited relatives in four cities: Rijeka, then Zagreb, Sarajevo, and finally Split. At each stop, Apple recalls, he felt as though the relatives were keen to move him on to his next one, quickly. To this day, Apple isn’t sure whether they just didn’t want him there, or whether they were worried about informants, given that Bates was a ‘Brit’ from London. Either way, the trip did little to make him feel connected to his roots, and helped confirm that he was ready to break with his New Zealand past.
In May 1962, Bates received a letter from Moon confirming he’d failed his diploma. Sykes writes that Hockney received similar correspondence. To pass, both men would have to re-present their work for assessment after an extra term at the college. Neither had the remotest interest in doing so. Believing this was the final word on the matter, Bates booked a second trip to New York for July. He planned to stay with Craddock again, and to build on the connections he’d made the summer before. But he was also interested in making links in New York’s art world, rather than mainly focusing on Madison Avenue as he had in 1961.
A big factor in his ability to make these connections was his friendship with the slightly older artist Richard Smith, who, as the first artist to receive a Harkness Fellowship to the States in 1959, had made serious connections of his own in New York. There were two major aspects to this: his friendships with artists including Ellsworth Kelly, Barnett Newman, Agnes Martin, Tom Wesselmann, Jim Dine, James Rosenquist and Robert Indiana; and his working relationship with the art dealer Richard Bellamy (who had played the bishop in Pull My Daisy, acting alongside Rivers). Smith had met Bellamy through Henry Geldzahler, the curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and had his first show at Bellamy’s Green Gallery while he was still in New York in 1961. ‘It was a very exciting time,’ Smith recalled in 1992. ‘It was exciting and it was hip in a way that was so easy. Hearing jazz at the Five Spot, and you know, eating at Ratner’s [a Jewish deli, and a Lower East Side institution], and just being around.’
New York, and specifically his time as part of the thriving art scene in the Manhattan neighbourhood of Coenties Slip, gave Smith a taste for large, loft-style spaces that doubled as apartments and studios. When he returned to London in 1961, he set about finding something similar there. He found one, in Shoreditch, not far from Moorfields Eye Hospital. Smith took over the top two floors of a building at 13 Bath Street which were connected by a ‘loading bay’ that allowed him to transfer paintings and materials between the two levels. Soon after he moved in, he held an exhibition in his studio, which was sponsored by Alan Power, son of the collector Ted Power. Smith’s loft also became the backdrop for one of Pop Goes the Easel’s most memorable scenes: the party where we see Derek Boshier and Pauline Boty twist, and Hockney crash his way through the crowd. Some of Smith’s big canvases are just visible, leaning against the walls.
Since the mid-fifties, Smith had been a regular contributor to ARK. This kept him closely connected to the RCA, and in the Summer 1962 issue he published an article on the work of Boshier, Phillips and Hockney. As much as it was an analysis of them as individuals, it was also Smith – slightly older, more established, the Harkness already under his belt – validating their interest in contemporary culture as subject matter. ‘In using this material,’ Smith wrote, ‘the painters are not either saying “We love it” or “We hate it”. They accept it for what it is; a part of the visual world with more associations, more complexities and more impact than St. Ives, Shoreham, or the antique room at the Slade. The material functions in different ways in their work, though they all inhabit a similar world.’ There are strong echoes here of Rivers telling the young artists that they should consider their contemporary world as valid subject matter, and that they needn’t love their subjects to create great works of art from them.
Despite the fact that Smith is best known for his large abstract paintings, he and Bates shared interests, most notably in American films and advertising (many of Smith’s seemingly abstract works from the time take their cues from found images or concepts, with titles like Revlon, Chase Manhattan and Product). Apple recalls that Smith was obsessed with movie trailers as a format, and in 1961 made a short film with the photographer Robert Freeman called Trailer, which was shown at the ICA that November. According to Martin Gayford, a row broke out in the audience straight after the screening: many were supportive of the film, while others thought its subject matter – advertising – was outrageous. Apple doesn’t recall if he was at that particular screening, but remembers Smith’s and Freeman’s Trailer films well. Both men – as well as Smith’s loft – would end up playing vital roles in Bates’s story at the end of 1962.
In early June, Hockney’s graduation fate took a turn. The RCA’s principal, Robin Darwin, had decided he wanted Hockney to receive the college’s prestigious gold medal for the most outstanding student, from any of the schools. To his dismay, he discovered that Hockney was ineligible, not just for the award, but to graduate at all, because of his General Studies failure. Rather than letting the matter lie in the hands of the faculty who had assessed Hockney’s half-hearted dissertation, Darwin cooked the results. He convened a faculty panel, which included Weight and Kullman, and changed the grades: Hockney and one other of the five failing students could graduate after all.
Bates wasn’t the other; a letter in his RCA student file from Moon, dated 6 June, confirms that he would have to re-submit the following year. But when the corrected results were posted on a college noticeboard, Hockney immediately protested to Moon, insisting that all five of the previously failed students should be passed. Whether Hockney had recognised just how much sway he now had over the RCA faculty, or whether he saw this as a basic matter of fairness, is difficult to know. But the result was that on 22 June Bates received a letter from Moon saying that he had, in fact, passed General Studies, and could therefore receive his diploma.
The RCA’s convocation that year took place on 13 July. Again, this is one of the most famous moments in early Hockney lore, as the college’s golden boy took to the stage with his golden hair, wearing a gold lamé jacket. He also won the college’s life-drawing prize. Several schools awarded silver medals to their top students. In Painting, the silver went to Frank Bowling – the man who’d been kicked out in their first year for marrying Ann Quin’s best friend, Paddy Kitchen. Reg Fisher, Bates’s painting collaborator in the 1962 ‘Young Contemporaries’ show, won a medal for mural painting. Bates was nowhere on the prize list (interestingly, Guyatt chose not to award a Graphic Design medal at all that year), nor was he even at the ceremony. By that stage, he was already back in New York.
Despite all the ructions and plot twists in their RCA journey, both Hockney and Bates pushed on relentlessly with their respective art practices through 1962, laying foundations for the work that would, over the next decade, come to define them. ‘Young Contemporaries’ in February had been confirmation that the paths they were on were the right ones. After that show, both of them picked up pace dramatically.
Bates’s work had started to move towards a tougher, more conceptual approach – though one still deeply rooted in what he’d picked up from Herb Lubalin, Ernie Smith and others on Madison Avenue. One of his breakthrough works in this regard was Relation of Aesthetic Choice to Life Activity (Function of the Subject), 1961–62, which had its origins in the RCA’s publication, ARK. Bates saw the plates for the image leaning up in the Graphic Design School’s printing room, and asked the RCA’s lithography technician Roy Crossett if he would print it four times on canvas, using offset lithography, for him.
The image was eventually used in an ARK article from its Autumn 1962 issue called ‘Twist Drunk’ by Keith Branscombe. The picture is of an officer who worked aboard the MV Daffodil (the subject of Branscombe’s article), a boat that sailed out from Gravesend and was popular with university students as a party venue beyond the reaches of restrictive British licensing hours.
This aspect of Bates’s image choice feels more student in-joke than truly relevant detail. Far more important is the work’s central conceit: that there is ostensibly no difference whatsoever between the four reproductions, but that the first in the grid of four is marked by a neon tick. The neon tick comes through the canvas, via two neat holes: an early use by Bates of a commercial technology hugely popular in American signage and advertising, and that would become a major art material in New York in the mid-1960s (and used by Billy Apple, who was briefly one of the pioneers of neon art in the United States). The function it was performing had its origins in New York, too, in Bates’s Madison Avenue experiences. Marking up proof sheets with ticks and crosses was exactly the process commercial photographers like Bert Stern and art directors like Helmut Krone used to identify the images that would eventually find their way into the advertisements that graced the pages of magazines like the New Yorker. The way the work was printed would become crucial to Bates, and later to Apple: Apple would continue to use Crossett as a technician to make some of his most important works well into the 1970s.
Bronze casting became an essential process for Bates in 1962, too: another technique that relied wholly on others making the work for him – both the Angeloni brothers at the RCA’s foundry, and the technicians at the Art Bronze Foundry. In anticipation of the transformation he’d undergo at the end of the year, much of this work involved creating moulds from fruit – some of which, Apple says, were eventually bought by Ted Power. One of Bates’s kookiest objects from this period is a grinning orange with a full set of white false teeth, a work that likely had its origins in George Lois’s Wolfschmidt vodka ads that had so affected Bates when he first saw them.
Mimicking the orange’s grin is a slice of watermelon, half eaten and cast in bronze. There were bananas too, always half-peeled, their skins splayed in three. In one set-up Bates had photographed, a banana and the smiling orange face each other, the banana’s tip bending towards the pearly whites (its title: Smile, Slim, We’re Having our Photo Taken). In another, a banana, with its skin drawn back, stands on a plinth with a sign that reads ‘Revlon’s Low Down Pink’, its tip nibbled and stained with the same shade of lipstick – leaving no doubt as to the work’s real subject. (Apple remembers that it was eventually purchased by the collector Chuck Diker, then an executive at Revlon.)
This idea of using common objects to stand in for an individual, absent body – Bates’s – began to develop into an essential element of his work. Again, in a strangely anticipatory gesture, Bates made a bronze cast of his own very prominent Adam’s apple. (As Apple, he’d later be fond of saying that the eponymous fruit Adam and Eve ate in the Garden of Eden was ‘the world’s first product’ – which would presumably make the serpent the world’s first advertising director.)
In 1962 he also made a series of works that are still regarded as essential to the evolution of Billy Apple: a group of bronze castings collectively known as 2 minutes 33 seconds. Each group is made up of three apples mounted on a white base, at various stages of consumption: whole; a single large bite taken; a well-chewed core. The work’s title refers to the time it took him to eat the fruit while amused technicians waited for him at the Art Bronze Foundry. Two early sets were painted – one red, another green – while a later third set was gold-plated – archetypal apple colours, both natural and mythical, that would come to be the trademarked colours of the later Billy Apple brand. 2 minutes 33 seconds would also play a key role in his debut in London as Billy Apple, at Victor Musgrave’s Gallery One, in 1963.
The strangeness of these works lies in the ways they so clearly carry marks of a real body: a real mouth that has taken big, crunchy bites from the fruit, which itself has such heavy religious and mythical connotations of bodies, sex and original sin. (Bates had also bitten the tip from the wax mould of the Revlon banana, and munched away at the watermelon slice.) There are shades here too of his Bilston Gallery series of photographs, back in 1960, in which he and another male subject were photographed with their mouths wrapped around opposite sides of the same apple. He also made a work during this time called William Tell Junior – a cast apple pierced by a single arrow, its puncture wound reaching back to B.E.A. Flight over East Berlin, that painted Union Jack shot up at a shooting range.
There was one final, strange nod to Bates’s New Zealand roots around this time. One of the most intriguing works he made in 1962 is the sculpture Long Life Beer. In it, a single, shot-up beer can (like the can in his Tin Star poster) stands on top of an ostensible fence post. Apple remembers that Bates, Hockney and Reg Fisher went to stay with Fisher’s family in the Midlands town of Dudley, near Wolverhampton. Bates found the piece of wood there, and his travelling companions helped him lug it back to London. In the art work Bates eventually made with it, the post is standing on a strip of artificial grass, and it’s pierced by five thin metal rods, evoking wire. It’s a portrait of the world Bates left behind, the wire fences of New Zealand’s countryside that delineate the nation’s farms. In a single surviving photo, the work is installed outside, in a lane next to the entrance to the RCA, at the back of the V&A Museum: like the artist himself, a small piece of the Commonwealth returned to the centre of the Empire, ready to change it from the inside.
Off the back of his work in ‘Young Contemporaries’, Hockney was invited to show in the summer of 1962 at the ICA, in an exhibition called ‘Four Young Artists’. He was also included in ‘Image in Progress’ at London’s Grabowski Gallery in August with other young stars like Phillips, Boshier and Jones. ‘Their sources are plain,’ Nevile Wallis wrote in his review of the show, ‘Francis Bacon and the Americans Larry Rivers and Jasper Johns are as influential as the environment of pin-ups, advertising slogans, and pinball alleys to which the wayward school alludes. The pity is that a flippant irony still takes the place of penetrating satire.’ Hockney also entered into the formal agreement with dealer John Kasmin that they hadn’t been allowed to officially sign while Hockney was a student. As confirmation of Hockney’s ascendancy in London’s art world, Kasmin was able to sell many of Hockney’s key student works in that first year of their contractual relationship.
Like Bates’s, Hockney’s work developed substantially and rapidly through the rest of 1962. Two of his best-known works were made as a kind of nose-thumbing, yet again, at the course requirements imposed on him by the RCA. The first was Life Painting for a Diploma, its title referring to the fact that all Painting students needed to submit a final work made from a life model. Hockney had been refusing to use the RCA’s life models for a while, and instead painted his own nude, based on the cover of an American male physique magazine (like the ones Mark Berger had introduced him to). He then attached a beautifully precise anatomical drawing of a skeleton to the canvas.
Hockney also made a partner work for this: Life Painting for Myself, a more Bacon-esque exploration of nudity, in which two figures – one standing, the other seated with knees raised – emerge barely formed out of grey paint and areas of untouched canvas. Both works involved pairs: the skeleton and the bodybuilder, the two (presumed) lovers. This was an extension of the pairings and reflections he’d explored the year before in works like We Two Boys Together Clinging and Mirror, Mirror on the Wall. But there was something new about them too; a hint that Hockney was moving towards the more naturalistic portrayals of gay love and relationships that would, eventually, become crucial to so many of his greatest paintings made between the mid-1960s and mid-1970s.
This approach was confirmed on Hockney’s own travels that summer. Rather than returning to New York, he headed to Italy with the American artist Jeff Goodman. In Florence, Hockney and Goodman met up with Berger and, once again, Ferrill Amacker. The pair then travelled on to Munich, and to Berlin, where they visited the Pergamon Museum. They lost each other for a while, and when Hockney stumbled upon Goodman standing in the museum’s Egyptian section with a sculpted figure, he had an epiphany of sorts. The comical ‘couple’ became the subject matter for Hockney’s painting The First Marriage (A Marriage of Styles I), 1962, in which a suited man stands alongside a seated Pharaonic figure, a single palm tree behind them. Man in a Museum (or You’re in the Wrong Movie), 1962, continues the theme, a man standing with his back turned to a more totemic figure.
These works would quickly, over the course of 1963 and 1964, evolve into his double portraits of gay men in domestic scenes. But there is one more intriguing work from 1962, and it was included in ‘Image in Progress’ that August: In Memoriam of Ceccino Bracci. It is another of Hockney’s shaped works, this one a coffin, constructed from two parts. Lying in the coffin is a body swathed in white fabric, its hands folded across its chest. Resting on its torso is a wreath, and inside it, in block letters, is the dead man’s name – ‘Ceccino’. The work is a reference to the teenager Ceccino Bracci, who had worked for Michelangelo and was known to be extraordinarily beautiful.
Michelangelo subsequently designed the boy’s tomb, and wrote epitaphs for him. Hockney inscribed one of them on the painting:
If buried here those beautiful eyes are closed
forever. This is now my requiem:
They were alive and no one noticed them.
Now everybody weeps them dead and lost.
The inference is clear: Michelangelo, the great gay hero of the High Renaissance, was in love with the boy. The forbidden relationship between man and teen resembles the graffiti Hockney had scrawled on The Third Love Painting: ‘my brother is only 17’. More than this, though, the work exemplifies the qualities that would come to define so much of Hockney’s best work in the coming years: genuine love, and not just physical encounters, between men; his continued obsession with literature; and his lifelong grappling with the most important figures of European art history.
When Bates touched down again in New York in July 1962, he did so armed with a crucial introduction from Richard Smith. It was to the artist Robert Indiana.
Indiana was seven years older than Bates, and had begun to establish himself as a significant figure in the New York art scene. Bates met Indiana at the warehouse he shared with fashion designer John Kloss in Coenties Slip. He was deeply impressed by Indiana, but impressed most of all by his work, particularly his seminal ‘EAT/DIE’ series of paintings, which date from 1962. Apple remembers that the very first pair in the series was in the studio when he visited. The existential diptychs were stark statements, with each word painted in block letters on a canvas, inside a circle. For an artist as committed to conceptual reduction as Bates was, they were a revelation – they did, in his opinion, everything an art work needed to do.
There is another aspect to Indiana’s influence on Bates: he was, like Rivers, an artist with a fabricated name. In Indiana’s case, he’d taken as his surname the state he originated from. As Apple has always said, this was a little like calling yourself ‘William of Orange’ – a name as geographic identifier. It was, nonetheless, another forerunner to Bates’s own eventual transformation.
Indiana then made Bates an introduction to Jasper Johns. Again, Bates visited the older artist in his studio, and Apple remembers that Johns had one of his iconic Map paintings propped on cans against a wall. Apple recalls a funny exchange in which Johns asked Bates about what he’d been working on. Bates pulled out an idea for a work: seven 7 Up logos, taped together, in a row. Apple says Johns asked him why he needed seven of them. Bates replied that it was because it was 7 Up, as though the answer was self-evident. Johns, according to Apple, didn’t see the need for the multiple. The difference says something about the generational shift that was starting to occur in the early days of American Pop art, from the uniqueness of Johns’s paintings of targets and flags and maps, to the embrace of the multiple, of corporate logos and commercial printing techniques by Warhol and Apple, among others.
Johns asked Bates if there was anyone else in New York he’d like to meet. Bates replied instantly: Leo Castelli. Castelli, who represented Johns, had opened his commercial gallery in 1957, and was clearly the most interesting art dealer in New York. Johns went over to the wall-mounted phone and put in the call. Castelli said Bates should ring him the following Monday, which he duly did. The dealer and the young London artist met up, but the significance of that meeting with Castelli wouldn’t be fully felt until Bates returned to New York, in 1964, as a completely different person. In the meantime, Apple says, Johns drove Bates back uptown in a white Jaguar.
Meeting Indiana and Johns left an undoubted and profound imprint on Bates. But there was one more artist he met on that same trip: someone who, like him, had a background in commercial art and an interest in found images, had worked for Herb Lubalin, and was starting to use multiples and printing processes to make his work. His name was Andy Warhol.
Bates visited Warhol at 1342 Lexington Avenue, the house Warhol shared at the time with his mother Julia. Apple remembers entering the living room and seeing some of Warhol’s early paintings. He remembers Warhol’s Telephone, 1961, and a Campbell’s soup can with a can opener sticking out the top – which is very likely to have been Big Campbell’s Soup Can with Can Opener (Vegetable), 1962. That very month, July 1962, was when Warhol was having his first solo exhibition, of thirty-two soup can paintings, at Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles – widely regarded as the first show of Pop art on the West Coast. There were clear affinities between the two men and their work. With Warhol, Bates also met the art critic Gene Swenson, who would go on to write some of the crucial early texts on Warhol’s practice, and the curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Henry Geldzahler (who, later, would also become close with Hockney). Both of them were, give or take a few months, Bates’s exact contemporaries.
In the space of just a month, then, Bates had met three of the most important artists in New York’s contemporary art scene, all of them older than him: Johns by five years, Warhol and Indiana by seven. There had been his Paris visit in April to Larry Rivers, too. And he’d seen key works by all of them, not in museums or galleries but during studio visits (if Warhol’s living room can count as a studio). He’d also been introduced to three crucial art-world figures in Castelli, Geldzahler and Swenson. The entire experience was confirmation enough for the New Zealander that he was on the right track, and that his work belonged alongside theirs. In fact, it wouldn’t be long before his fruit sculptures were shown in New York, at Allan Stone Gallery, in a group show called ‘Nuts & Bolts’.
But although it seems star-studded in hindsight, the importance of Bates’s second trip to New York can be fully understood only when his first is taken into account. All of these men – Johns, Indiana, Rivers, Warhol – were using the images of their day: trying to paint their times rather than their lives, and spearheading a change in American art in the process. But Bates was slightly different, still deeply committed to an ideas-based approach that he’d picked up on Madison Avenue, in his conversations and collaborations with Ann Quin, and in his deep interests in jazz and the language of Hip. Like those artists he met in New York, he was a man of his time. But he also wanted to be ahead of it. The moment had arrived for a more radical change. So on 22 November 1962, Barrie Bates disappeared forever.
As the London winter set in, Bates, back after that second New York trip, was staying with Richard Smith at the Bath Street loft. On a November afternoon, he began to tell Smith he’d been thinking about rebranding himself. He had been talking to Victor Musgrave about having an exhibition at Musgrave’s Gallery One. The tiny gallery in fact already had New Zealand connections. Kasmin, the dealer then riding the Hockney wave, had lived in New Zealand for a while in his late teens, and on returning to London worked for Musgrave briefly. The New Zealand writer Kevin Ireland, a friend of Kasmin’s, worked there too, to be replaced eventually by the New Zealand artist Michael Illingworth. But rather than wanting to make anything to do with his homeland, Bates saw a rebrand as potential subject matter for the show.
As Apple remembers it, Bates and Smith thought up his change together. Smith had a notepad, and they began to brainstorm new names. Both of them, of course, knew Robert Indiana. But Bates wanted to do something more extreme. He’d been interested, for example, in Malcolm X as a figure (which seems consistent with his wider interests in African-American culture: in jazz, Hip, James Baldwin, and Norman Mailer’s ‘White Negro’ controversy), seeing the X as a remarkable piece of self-branding, in both senses: as a ‘brand name’ but also an indelible burn on his personhood, which had its own violent undertones given X’s motivation to abandon his slave surname. At the more absurd end of things, Bates also liked the name of Peter Pears, a well-known British opera singer and the partner of composer Benjamin Britten. Bates was also keen that his new name should sound instantly like a product – like Babe Ruth, or Hershey’s.
The pair came up with a list. Apples had been present in Bates’s practice for a while, and particularly in recent months with his bronze sculptures. He also had that prominent Adam’s apple he’d cast from bronze. And he liked the idea of the apple in the Garden of Eden being the world’s first product; the very beginning, in a sense, of advertising as temptation. As a child, he’d had a teacher who’d called him ‘Billy the Pirate’ – a reference to the pirate Billy Bones in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island. Bates was supposed to have worn an eye-patch to correct a lazy eye. He’d refused to wear it, which meant his optic nerve didn’t develop properly.
‘Billy Apple’, then, became the choice. Bates decided to mark the transformation using the same product he, Hockney, Berger and Amacker had fooled around with in New York in the summer of 1961: Lady Clairol. He went blonde again, and bleached his eyebrows this time too. Smith photographed Bates’s transformation, culminating in one of the most well-known images of Billy Apple: the twenty-six-year-old, looking into a mirror, seeing his new self for the very first time. He was, essentially, a new man – a subject without a past. As Apple said to me in 2012, on Apple’s fiftieth ‘birthday’: ‘The brand was also a way to get away from the New Zealand connection. Suddenly, you’re from nowhere, you’re brand new. I became British – I was created there in 1962. I could say: “Billy Apple was born in London,” and a lie detector wouldn’t twitch.’
In 1974, London’s Serpentine Gallery staged a mid-career retrospective, called ‘From Barrie Bates to Billy Apple’. In the accompanying catalogue, Apple reproduced Smith’s image of that first moment of self-revelation. ‘In London in 1962’, Apple wrote,
I began an extended work which was part of an effort to break down the separation between ‘art activity’ and ‘life activity’. I decided to use my own identity as the vehicle with which to explore the concept of the artist as ‘art object’. This began by my changing my name (identification) and my physical appearance. Recreating myself became the art work. I relinquished my given name Barrie George Bates and chose the name Billy Apple to replace it. Then I assumed a new appearance which was Barrie Bates’s conception of Billy Apple’s image …
At this point the art process-work-object and the artist became interchangeable. This change of identity which was done initially as an ‘art act’ became a life situation and as such is a continuing process. During the time between the conception of the idea and its execution, the invented identity evolved into the actual identity.
Like Robert Indiana and Larry Rivers and even Malcolm X, the change, in other words, was for good. Apple cut himself off completely from his past to such an extent that Bates’s mother Marija, in Auckland, had to contact London’s Metropolitan Police to track him down to make sure he was still alive. Which he was, and wasn’t.
The creation of Billy Apple was one of the most radical art works of the early 1960s. Its importance partly lay in its permanence: this was no act of masquerade, nor was Bates assuming an artistic alter-ego. He was replaced, and never appeared again. In his place stood one of the most complicated art objects of the era – a living human being who was simultaneously subject, verb (because he was also the actor-creator) and object. In that sense, Billy Apple was a perfectly formed, and perfectly embodied, ‘art-political statement’.
The emergence of Billy Apple was unquestionably informed by Bates’s experiences on Madison Avenue: his deep awareness of the power of branding on the way we perceive and desire products, and the notion that the best visual expression of an idea is often the most stripped down. Apple became all three – the brand, the product and the idea – starkly realised, with no embellishment, just a shock of blonde hair and the eyebrows to match. That the transition was marked by the same product that had changed Hockney – Lady Clairol – is significant but not so much for the parallel between the two. More important is that it was, at the time, one of the archetypal products of mass consumerism, and a carrier of mass communication’s ability to commodify our unconscious anxieties about self and our sexual desires. There was an aspect of morbidity here, too: America’s most iconic blonde had died just three months earlier: ever since, Marilyn Monroe has occupied the popular and mythic consciousness both as an image and an object. Warhol, unbeknown to Bates/Apple, had begun to make his ‘Marilyn’ silkscreens. Another factor that made Bates’s transformation different from Hockney’s was that Apple’s blonding was only ever used to mark the transition. In December, Smith’s friend Robert Freeman photographed Apple as a blonde from the front and back. But that was the last time he bleached his hair.
One of the most complicated aspects of Billy Apple as art work is the fact that, in his creation, he was so ambivalent: unlike the Pop paintings made by many of his peers, it was impossible to know whether Apple’s creation, when it came to the politics of mass communication, was an act of celebration or critique. By the time Apple emerged, McLuhan had published The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man. Whether Apple knew that text by then or not, he crystallised many of McLuhan’s ideas about the consequences of typography and reproduction, and the profound shift the world was undergoing as televisual technologies created the ‘global village’. ‘Today we live on the frontier between five centuries of mechanism and the new electronics, between the homogeneous and the simultaneous,’ McLuhan wrote. Indeed, new technologies – television, neon, lasers, Xerox and others – would come to define much of Apple’s work in the 1960s and 1970s. (The two men would eventually meet when Apple had an exhibition in Toronto in 1970.)
It has always been difficult to draw Apple on the full psychological complexities of Bates’s disappearance. But it seems clear that there was something in it to do with escaping his New Zealand past – the idea that he was born in London, that a ‘lie detector wouldn’t twitch’. There’s no question Bates had aspired to transcend his Commonwealth roots ever since he arrived at the RCA in 1959. Quin’s writings for him, from late 1961 and early 1962, also show an artist grappling with his past: nostalgic reflections about his grandfather and New Zealand’s black-sand beaches, counterbalanced by the idea that he was a young man on the verge of change. The confusing lack of hospitality he encountered from his Yugoslav relatives may also have contributed to his sense that it was time to move on. The sheer fact he took the trip in the first place, under his own steam rather than at the request of his mother Marija, suggests he may have been unconsciously searching either for familial connection or finality.
By the time Apple emerged, Bates and Quin were well and truly through – Apple thinks they had drifted apart before he went to New York on his second trip in July 1962. But it seems reasonable to suggest they left a lasting impact on each other. Quin wrote in London Magazine that she finished Berg – her novel about a hair-tonic salesman who changes his name to kill his father and thus erase the cause of much of his past trauma – before she left her job at the RCA. She gave her notice on 26 November 1962 – just four days after Apple had been created.
The most intriguing through-line between Berg and Billy Apple is the influence on both ‘art works’ of R. D. Laing, and specifically his idea of ontological insecurity. It’s already been noted that Quin’s novel is full of reflections and reversals, objects, images and doubles, ultimately embodied by Nathaniel Berg’s dummy. It feels no accident that the most iconic image of Apple’s emergence is of the young man looking at his new self in the mirror. Hockney had used mirrors and doubles extensively at the time, too. This is where Laing’s existentialism becomes significant: because it changed, dramatically, the dynamic between the interior and exterior self, introducing a new understanding that identity, subjectivity and madness were formed in relation to a culture, rather than strictly within a subject’s unconscious. This intersected neatly with McLuhan’s ideas about the ways in which the products of mass consumerism and mass communication were reshaping the sense of self, both at a collective and individual level.
From the moment Bates became Apple, he was as much an artist ‘done to’ as one in control of his own destiny. He regularly used his own body to examine the forces of technology that were reshaping wider society. In one of the long case studies Laing used to illustrate his theories in The Divided Self, he described his treatment of Peter, ‘a man of twenty-five and … the picture of health’. Peter’s and Bates/Apple’s stories are very different, but in Laing’s diagnosis, there are intriguing parallels between Peter and the psychological ambiguities of Apple-as-art-work. Peter, Laing wrote, had developed a method of ‘uncoupling’ as a way to cope with the world, a way to ‘sever the ties that related different aspects of his being together’. Central to this was Peter’s relationship with his own body. As Laing wrote:
The body clearly occupies an ambiguous transitional position between ‘me’ and the world. It is, on the one hand, the core and centre of my world, and on the other, it is an object in the world of the others. Peter tried to uncouple himself from anything of him that could be perceived by anyone else. In addition to his effort to repudiate the whole constellation of attitudes, ambitions, actions, etc., which had grown up in compliance with the world, and which he now tried to uncouple from his inner self, he set about trying to reduce his whole being to non-being; he set about as systematically as he could to become nothing…. He belonged nowhere. He was going from anywhere to anywhere: he had no past, no future. He had no possessions, no friends. Being nothing, knowing nobody, being known by none, he was creating the conditions which made it more easy for him to believe that he was nobody.
Apple may not have been quite so anxious or nihilistic as Peter, but he did, at that moment of creation, become ‘nobody’: a man without a past or future. And he would, like Peter, soon become a wanderer, leaving London for good in 1964.
It’s impossible to overlook the all-Americanness of ‘Billy Apple’ as a brand; as American, Apple said in 2012, as apple pie. It was also the perfect name for Mailer’s figure of the ‘American existentialist’ – the hipster, inspired by black culture and by the radical object-ness of jazz. Much like Laing’s patient Peter, a central condition for Mailer’s figure was the necessity that he live entirely in the present – that he become a man without a past, to ‘exist without roots, to set out on that uncharted journey into the rebellious imperatives of the self’. At the heart of this condition was something Bates had been mastering and Apple subsequently perfected – Hip. ‘The unstated essence of Hip,’ Mailer wrote,
its psychopathic brilliance, quivers with the knowledge that new kinds of victories increase one’s power for new kinds of perception; and defeats, the wrong kind of defeats, attack the body and imprison one’s energy until one is jailed in the prison air of other people’s habits, other people’s defeats, boredom, quiet desperation, and muted icy self-destroying rage. One is Hip or one is Square (the alternative which each new generation coming into American life is beginning to feel), one is a rebel or one conforms, one is a frontiersman in the Wild West of American night life, or else a Square cell, trapped in the totalitarian tissues of American society, doomed willy-nilly to conform if one is to succeed.
The creation of Apple, then – with his sharp new look, his total existence in the present, his love of jazz, his American-ness – was as much about becoming Mailer’s hipster, the true American existentialist, as it was about escaping his past. It also gave literal form to the figure Ann Quin had intuited, and first described, in the manifesto she’d written for Apple’s predecessor, the late Barrie Bates.
Apple had only one major art outing around this time in London: the solo exhibition at Gallery One, in April 1963, which he’d discussed with Smith in November 1962, and which he called ‘Apple Sees Red’. The invitation that was sent out showed the back of Apple’s blonde head – one of the photos taken by Robert Freeman – facing a red ground. The exhibition also included what Apple called his ‘Live Stills’ (as opposed to ‘still lifes’), which added up to a cumulative self-portrait.
It was a mix of works made by Bates and Apple. The red set of 2 Minutes 33 Seconds, those groups of bronze apples, was included. Love For Sale – Bates’s red heart on a plinth, pinned by a butcher’s price tag – was there too. So was Relation of Aesthetic Choice to Life Activity (Function of the Subject), its neon tick glowing from the back of the room. The artificial grass that had provided the ‘New Zealand’ ground for Long Life Beer was repurposed and lifted up onto a table, where it became the cushioning for a cluster of apples, one of them bronze, presumably fallen from an absent tree of life – but also, Apple says, a reference to the way the freshest produce in markets was referred to as the ‘top brass’. And Smile, Slim – his grinning orange and his banana – was on display in the window.
But the most important works in the exhibition were definitively Apple’s: a series of twelve self-portraits, each identical, which ran along one wall. Each stretched white canvas had two Robert Freeman images on it: one of Apple’s face against a green ground; the other the shot from the invitation, of the back of his head against a red ground. It was impossible to know where the ‘real’ Apple was. He was, by this stage, not so much an individual as a product, endlessly repeatable, capable of multiplying forever (this, six decades before his cells began to do the same in an American human-tissue collection).
Apple’s expression in the images is utterly ambiguous. There is the hint of a smile, his lips parted just slightly. But there is something quizzical in his expression as well, his blonded eyebrows furrowed just enough to suggest that this is a young man wondering how he’s ended up here. There are shades of the mugshot, too; or, with the back and front portraits together, the scientific or eugenic specimen. Apple’s shoulders are bare in the shots, simultaneously making it impossible to date the images based on fashion while also suggesting something cadaverous: a young corpse on a vertical slab hung from the wall.
Critics struggled to know what to make of it, or of Apple, this man who’d come from nowhere, only to offer up a troubling and kaleidoscopic portrait of an absent subject, brought into being by multiple, and multiplying, objects. Edward Lucie-Smith, writing in The Listener, described it as ‘the oddest [exhibition] London has seen for some time.’ There was one other piece of critical feedback too. During the exhibition’s run, someone shot a bullet through the gallery’s front window: Apple, a modern-day William Tell, used for target practice.
In the same month, April 1963, Hockney was photographed by Lord Snowdon for the 2 June issue of the Sunday Times Magazine dedicated to ‘British Painting Now’. In one of Snowdon’s photos, Hockney is shown walking down a London street, his hair freshly bleached, wearing his trademark specs and white sneakers. Dangling from his finger is a gold bag, and he’s wearing the gold lamé jacket he’d worn on the RCA stage the year before to receive his gold medal.
Two golden men, fresh with new identities that London spring: two new ideas of what an artist could, and should be, at the end of a love story, striding down opposite paths.