Jacki Apple (1941-2022) was an American artist, writer, composer, producer and educator based in New York and Los Angeles. She worked in multiple disciplines such as performance art and installation art. As well as art making, Apple was also a writer, penning around 200 reviews and critical essays on topics such as performance art, media arts, installation art and dance. Her writing has appeared in publications such as Performing Arts Journal, Public Art Review and The Drama Review.
Her work deals with memory, history, and the interface between nature and culture, the relationship between matter and consciousness, and historical, biological, and geological time, as well as political and social issues. Loss, disappearances, and dislocations are often underlying themes.[1]
The interdisciplinary performance The Amazon, The Mekong, The Missouri and the Nile (1985), a discourse on the nature of colonialism was conceived by artist/writer Jacki Apple, choreographer Mary Jane Eisenberg, and composer/musician Bruce Fowler.[2]
Beginning in 1990, she explored subjects such as species extinction (The Culture of Disappearance) and natural disasters (You Don't Need A Weatherman). Archaeology, paleontology, theoretical and astrophysics, earth sciences, and the politics of culture, music and dance have been influential sources. Apple chose physicist David Bohm's Wholeness and the Implicate Order upon which to base her performance spectacle Fluctuations of the Field., "and it is nothing less than a demonstration, in the language of avant-garde performance, of the nature of reality in both its physical and social manifestations."[3]
Apple worked on inserting the artist's voice into mass media as well as creating works for installations and performances. Her text/sound/music audio and radio works consist of layered intersecting textual and sonic narratives, and have been broadcast worldwide. She has approached aural space as a multi-dimensional place equivalent to three-dimensional visual space, and radio as a performance space. She creates hybrid forms—talking pictures, orchestrated texts and sonic architecture, to create a perceptual shift and transport the listener to someplace unexpected. The recording studio has been her compositional instrument, and she views producing as a compositional art form.[4]
Works commissioned by New Radio and Performing Arts for New America Radio include the collaborative six-part radio series Redefining Democracy in America 1991–92. In Parts 1, 2, & 3: Episodes in Black and White (1991) Apple and collaborating writer/performers Linda Albertano, Keith Antar Mason, and Akilah Nayo Oliver explored issues of race, sex, money, power, drugs, family, children, violence, language and censorship, and raised questions about who speaks, who is listened to, who is heard, who is silenced. Parts 4 & 5: The Voices of America 1992 produced with KPFK-FM, Los Angeles, posed the questions "What would you say to your fellow citizens if you were running for president? What should we aspire to and how should we get there?" providing a forum for Americans across the political and cultural spectrum to speak to fellow listeners. In Part 6: A Leap of Faith (1992) with writer, performer Keith Antar Mason, a white American woman and an African-American man born in America in the middle of the twentieth century on opposite sides of the dividing line, take an imaginary journey through time.[5]