KEY POINTS:
This is as good as it gets," says Billy Apple, his eyes twinkling from under his baseball cap. "Don't write that."
I wouldn't, except he'd said the same thing to me the evening before, when we arranged a time for the interview. It's not just that The Bruce and Denny Show at Two Rooms looks good, no question about it.
It could also be the fact that in the interests of promoting brand Billy Apple (which he has now trademarked), Apple got the Bruce McLaren Trust to loan him a million-dollar racing car, the same one Denny Hulme drove to win the 1968 Canadian American Challenge Series.
Bruce McLaren won it the previous year and Team McLaren took the quinella in so many races the press started calling the Can-Am series "The Bruce and Denny Show".
As well as the car, the exhibition/installation includes canvases and works on paper of McLaren and Hulme's racing numbers, and the outlines of the tracks the races were run on.
In the back room, there is film of the race at Mossport in Ontario won by Hulme in 1967. While much of its appeal for non-motorsport fans may be retro, it's still a lot more exciting than most video art.
The show includes all the usual Apple elements: a relatively simple concept carried through with fastidious attention to detail, lots of research and a big team behind the scenes to make it all happen.
Underneath the surface, there are concerns about the signifiers and transactions of the art world. There is also spectacularly good typography. When it comes to spacing type, Apple is very, very good - a legacy of his early training under Herb Lubalin and his years earning a crust in Madison Avenue advertising firms.
"I loved doing these works," he says. "I feel very comfortable doing these works. It's like everything I know about it earlier on has come out with the use of typography."
Apple often won type director awards in New York. "I used to bury all this stuff. I never wanted to make too much of it. I didn't want that [art] world to know about my other activities," he says.
Now he doesn't care who knows. After all, he is now a brand. Billy Apple. He can do anything. He's even got Saatchi & Saatchi helping him, taking his specifications and turning them into billboards for Radio Live. But that's not a return to advertising.
"It's a straight commission. It's an artist being asked to do something, Billy Apple being asked. They wanted my brand on it, so I am endorsing Radio Live. They are financing my brand on all these billboards.
"I love the idea of piggybacking a brand on a brand."
Actually, he's endorsing Marcus Lush, who has his own artistic and typographic pedigree, rather than the whole Radio Live stable. He fulminates against Michael Laws, who vetoed a plan to change the name of Bates St near Wanganui's Sarjeant Art Gallery into Apple St, an echo of the artist's career-defining name change in the 1960s from Barrie Bates to Billy Apple.
Back in Two Rooms, the talk turns to when to make choices and when to let the content dictate the form.
"The FIA specification for the roundels is the cars had to have a 17-inch circle, with the number 12 inches high and no more than 2 inches thick, so that's how it would be on the racecar. That was an important given to get the process going."
The orange is dirtied up to be as close as possible to the McLaren livery. Hulme's number is not black at all but a deep shade of blue. The green is one Apple uses often, "nothing special", which he calls Apple Green.
The typeface is not in the FIA book. It's Futura, a modern sans serif type Apple has chosen to work with over the years. "It's elegant and simple and beautiful. It has perfect circles and points."
Because many of the tracks changed from season to season, or have disappeared completely under subdivisions and golf courses, Robert Thompson, who has done all of Apple's CAD work for the past 20 years, went back to old satellite imagery to recreate the outlines as they would have been when McLaren and Hulme were racing. In the process, he determined true north for each track, so they are presented in a rule-based way.
"It's not a question of aesthetics, that it will look better this way or that," Apple says.
"In each painting, the top of the lettering defines the square above it, conforming the golden section. That means if the square is removed, the rectangle below has the same ratios as the original. I love using the golden section because it is such a classic proportion. It gets over the business of what do you do."
The pricing is also conceptual. It's a Group 7 racing car, so the prints are in editions of seven at $7000 each plus GST. The paintings are $40,000, because it's the 40th anniversary of the event. The dealer cut is just over 38 per cent, to conform to the golden mean.
Apple says this could be his last dealer gallery show, although he has a full schedule of public gallery events and installations over the next year.
"I'm not that interested in doing dealer shows. I have to be able to be free of that. I've got real ambitions outside all this. I'm a brand and I have now got a product for the brand and I'm going to go global."
EXHIBITION
What: The Bruce and Denny Show, by Billy Apple
Where and when: Two Rooms, 16 Putiki St, Newton
