Saturday, November 30, 2019

The Apology Podcast Coming in 2020


Apology Line on Exhibit at the New Museum in 1983
October 2020 will be the 40th anniversary of the inception of the Apology Line, the ground breaking conceptual artwork created and operated by Allan Bridge for 15 years, until his untimely death in August 1995. So next year is a double anniversary of sorts – a chance for us to acknowledge the birth of Apology and the death of Mr. Apology in the very same breath.

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.  

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