Allan Bridge was a visionary, way ahead of his time. It’s only now, 25 years after his death, that we can begin to grasp the magnitude of what he accomplished. He began the Apology Line as a simple art experiment in October 1980, putting up posters around New York City challenging criminals and wrongdoers to call and apologize for their misdeeds. Not really sure what to expect, he set up a telephone answering machine in his loft to record their messages.
Almost immediately the calls started pouring in and they continued to do so for the next 15 years, during which time, Allan kept pushing the project forward, sometimes in entirely unexpected ways, moving well beyond the boundaries of the conventional art world. For one thing, soon after he started, Allan began splicing together the more interesting messages he had recorded, along with his occasional commentary, to create a biweekly series of 15-minute audio programs. In effect, these audio programs were the world’s first podcast, which he broadcast as the outgoing message on his answering machine. Mind you, this was a decade before Internet 1.0 had come into being.
His innovation didn’t stop there. Before long, the Apology Line also became interactive, and blossomed into one of the world’s first virtual communities. This came about when Allan realized he could use his answering machine to facilitate an asynchronous discussion among the callers. From one program tape to the next, callers would exchange messages back and forth, sometimes supportive, sometime critical of each other, in precisely the same way we have come to take for granted when we join groups on Facebook or LinkedIn. Again, Allan had anticipated the development of social media by more than 20 years, launching a version of a moderated Internet chat group using the rudimentary technology of his answering machine. The Apology Line community thus embarked on its exploration of the virtual world even before Mark Zuckerberg had been born.
But what’s most remarkable and profound about Allan’s work are the voices of the Apology callers. They were the raw material out of which Allan built his masterwork -- and believe me, many of those voices were quite raw indeed. As much as possible, we’ve tried to give them pride of place in the podcast as well. Given Allan’s training as painter, he thought of the calls he recorded as a form of portraiture -- portraits which the callers themselves directly participated in creating. As Allan wrote in one of his unpublished manuscripts:
Arguably, I achieved not merely artistic distance or reserve, but actual non-interference with the callers and the recordings they made. My approach seemed esthetically right; and this was the basis of my unstated but implied claim that the project was indeed art. My decision not to put my imprint on the messages was an esthetic decision. I thought of it as a scientific esthetic; that is, make an experimental setup, then stand back and record what happens.
Beyond the scientific and esthetic detachment, there is an even more important spirit that lies at the heart of Allan’s work. Ned Rifkin, who was the curator of the first Apology Line exhibit at the New Museum in 1981, explains it this way:
If you were to try to define a spiritual element of Allan’s work, it is through the generosity of his project. There is an incredible spirit of generosity in giving the opportunity to people to express their regrets and remorse and to place that at the center of your work.
Whether we understand it as a work of art or as a virtual community (or a combination of both), Allan's spirit of generosity was the foundation on which the Apology Line was built.
One last point I want to make about Allan and his work. Scientific and esthetic detachment may have been Allan’s original intention, but as the Apology community came to life, it proved to be an impossible ideal for him to maintain. The more the Apology community flourished, the more the voices of Apology sprang to life, the more Mr. Apology himself became drawn into his creation. This points us in the direction of the ultimate outcome of Allan’s life story, which has much in common with the myth of Pygmalion, albeit far more tragic and somewhat in reverse. In Allan’s case, even as the work he created came to life, it was the artist who ended up being subsumed in his work.
It’s a remarkable story about a remarkable man, and I hope you’ll find our podcast well worth your while to listen.
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Allan, I should add, has had an enormous influence on my life, even though I never had the chance to meet him in person. I think it’s fair to say I would most likely never have started writing and translating poetry if not for Allan -- not that this would have been any great loss as far as the world is concerned, although it has made a world of difference to me.
In any event, I want to close out this blogpost with links to a few of the poems I have written about Allan and Apology over the years.
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In October of 1980, a thirty-five year old artist named Allan Bridge plastered hundreds of handbills in the streets of Ne...
Apology Line on Exhibit at the New Museum in 1983 October 2020 will be the 40 th anniversary of the inception of the Apolo...