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| Apology Line on Exhibit at the New Museum in 1983 |
Having been out of operation for almost 25 years now, the
Apology Line nonetheless remains a work of art that feels very much of the
present moment. It is one of those
artworks that will never lose its hold on our imagination. Which is funny because inside the art world
Allan Bridge and the Apology Line are still virtually unknown – a strange fate
for an artist of such extraordinary vision and talent. Even more remarkable when you consider that
Allan is one of a small handful of modern artists whose work, over the years,
has been the subject of enormous media coverage, including hundreds of
newspaper and magazine articles, countless radio interviews, and an HBO movie. In fact, Allan Bridge is right up there along
with Vincent Van Gogh and Jackson Pollack in terms of the level of interest
that Hollywood has shown in his career, and yet to date, Allan’s work has never
amounted to more than a footnote, if that, in the vast body of criticism and history
that’s been written about 20th
century art. Allan’s diverse body of painting, sculpture and conceptual work has not been displayed in a gallery or museum show in more than 35 years. For now Allan remains something of a prophet
without honor in his own land – a modern artist whose work may be more familiar
to viewers of late night television than to the patrons of fine art museums and
galleries.
One reason Allan’s work remains undiscovered and unknown by
the art world is that he more or less turned his back on the art world, at
least when it came to the Apology Line.
When he started the project in 1980, he was still thinking and working
in the framework of a traditional artist, looking for opportunities to display his
work to the public in a museum show. He began the Apology project by setting up
an answering machine attached to a dedicated telephone line in his loft. Then,
he put up posters throughout New York City, inviting criminals and wrongdoers
to call and apologize for their misdeeds.
It is to the people you must apologize,
the posters proclaimed, not to the state,
not to God. Almost immediately the phone
began ringing and Allan spent the next 18 months recording hundreds of apologies
which constituted the raw material for his new work. In order to exhibit the
work, he devised an installation piece, which consisted of four telephone
booths, set up as listening stations, so the calls could be played on a loop
and heard by visitors. The first exhibit
of Apology was held at the New Museum in New York City in 1981, followed by four
more museum and gallery shows over the next two years. But then Allan had another breakthrough idea about
how to make use of the evolving answering machine technology in order to share
his work more directly with the public, outside the confines of the art
world. His answering machine could serve
as a means both to record and play back calls to anyone who wanted to
listen. So in October 1983, Allan prepared
the first in what would turn out to be a long series of program tapes, in which
he compiled a selection of the most interesting calls he had recorded in the
preceding weeks, and then played them back for callers to hear as the outgoing
message on his answering machine. In
this way, Allan found a way to share his work directly with the community of callers,
which effectively freed him from the constraints of the art world. Allan felt this means of sharing the
recordings was far preferable to a museum show.
After all, it was to the people to whom an apology was owed, not to God,
not to the state, nor to the museum-going public. It was the callers themselves with whom Allan
most wanted to share the fruits of his labor.
To say that the Apology Line outgrew its origins in the art
world is by no means to suggest that the project altogether lost its relevance
or significance as a work of art. Far
from it, in fact. Looking at the project
with the benefit of more than twenty-five years hindsight, it’s possible to see
how Apology expressed and reflected some of the most important trends of late
20th century art. The Apology
Line is a signature work of conceptual art, inasmuch as the concept of apology
and its importance in human experience lies at the very center of the entire work. Every one of the more than 200 program tapes
that Allan produced over the course of 15 years is an elaboration on this underlying
theme. The Apology Line can also be understood
as an extended piece of performance art – a communal performance piece carried
out by Allan and the callers to the Line over its 15-year live span. To think
of the Apology Line in these terms is not to diminish the gripping emotional intensity
of many of the calls. But when you
listen to the incredible range of voices Allan captured over the years, even including
those filled with desperation and great pathos, there is a performative element
to virtually all of them.
But while Allan’s work retained a deep connection to various
artistic movements of the late 20th century, the Apology Line developed
profound significance beyond the aesthetic realm. Among other things, the Line can be appreciated
as an extended psychology experiment, in which Allan plumbed the depths of
criminal and deviant behavior, and also devised a means to provide help to
those in emotional extremis through an utterly novel form of group
therapy. At the same time, the Apology Line
is distinguished as a deeply spiritual exercise – an anonymous, secular telephone
confessional that provided a well-spring of renewal for many of its
callers. “Forgiveness is an art form,”
as the writer Richard Smoley has observed. “Like all arts, it requires a subtle
discrimination, a precise understanding of one’s material, and a light touch
that strikes the balance between inadequacy and excess.” The Apology Line provided
a vehicle for practicing the art of forgiveness, for those who called and left apologies, made comments and even for those who merely listened. Allan saw Apology as a grass
roots movement that in many ways could serve as a substitute for conventional forms
of religious practice in a more secular age, a mechanism for developing our
capacity for empathy and compassion. Beyond the spiritual dimension, Allan’s achievements also extend to the realm of technology inasmuch as
the Apology Line came to function as the world’s very first virtual community;
using nothing more than an answering machine connected to the public telephone
network, Allan built a community of callers who engaged in a continuous (albeit
asynchronous) dialog for a dozen years. And finally, the program tapes he compiled are also remarkable to the extent they
represent the very first instance of podcasting – a short format audio program
distributed over a public network, in this case it just so happened to be the Bell
telephone network Allan used, which enabled him to pioneer this concept a
decade before the world wide web came into existence.
For all these reasons, Marissa and I are tremendously
excited that we are going to have the opportunity to reintroduce Allan’s work to an
entirely new audience in the coming year. And what better way to do it than by means of
a podcast – a medium that Allan himself pioneered. We’re
working with the podcasting network Wondery to develop a multi-part series that
should be ready for release in commemoration of the Apology Line’s 40th
anniversary next October. I think it’s going
to be a very unique and powerful series. For the last several months, I’ve had a
chance to take a deep dive into the Apology archive; listening to the original program tapes that Allan produced, I've been stunned by the collection of stories and
human truths stored in the calls he captured on tape. It’s a remarkable journey, an incredibly well-preserved
time capsule of American life from the 1980’s and 1990’s; but the Apology Line
is of far more than historical interest.
It is truly a celebration of the human voice and its capacity to express
the deepest emotional and spiritual truths.
I hope you will join us on the journey so you can experience the rebirth of the Apology
Line when it is brought back online next year.
Please fill out the form below to join our mailing list so we can
let you know as soon as the podcast is ready for listening.
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