Situated outside a shopping mall delivery bay, Billy Apple®’s Te Tuhi Billboard Project locates the artist’s desire to become a brand amidst an ecosystem of consumables that can be inserted into the wider social space. The work exposes a timeline tracing the stages in registering his brand, making visible a process initiated in 2007 whereby Billy Apple™ went on to become Billy Apple®.
Even before his participation in the 1964 pop art exhibition American Supermarket alongside the likes of Warhol, Lichtenstein, Johns and Oldenburg, Billy Apple has consistently erased the border that separates art from life. From his alterations of art gallery spaces to the establishment of the artist’s labour in barter transactions, he works to continuously expand the notion of what art can be and explore the ownership of ideas by investigating the concept of intellectual property.
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→ Billy Apple’s Intellectual Property – EyeContact