Allan Bridge (February 14, 1945 – August 5, 1995) was an American conceptual artist best known for his creation in 1980 of the confessional phone system known as the
Apology Line. He went by the pseudonym Mr. Apology (a label which has since been adopted by an advice columnist) and used new technology of the time, an answering machine, to record confessions from anonymous callers.
Life and career
Born in
Falls Church, Virginia, Bridge attended the University of Chicago, where he earned a bachelor's degree in fine arts. Returning to the
Washington, D. C.
)
, image_skyline =
, image_caption = Clockwise from top left: the Washington Monument and Lincoln Memorial on the National Mall, United States Capitol, Logan Circle, Jefferson Memorial, White House, Adams Morgan, Na ...
area, he became one of the second generation of artists of the Washington Color School movement.
For a series of large-scale paintings, he used poured paint techniques and then moved on to geometric abstraction. He was championed and collected by Gene Baro, at one time the director of the
Corcoran Gallery of Art
The Corcoran Gallery of Art was an art museum in Washington, D.C., United States, that is now the location of the Corcoran School of the Arts and Design, a part of the George Washington University.
Overview
The Corcoran School of the Arts & Design ...
. Bridge exhibited at the Corcoran and many other galleries in the 1970s. He created at least 79 paintings in the years spanning 1970 to 1977. Bridge married Elinor Schiele in 1977, and they divorced in 1981.
Eventually, Bridge tired of the visual image and began making interactive machines with moral implications. The most famous best known of these is ''Crime Time'', where the viewer spins a wheel of chance and either gets away with a "crime" by receiving a marble from the machine, or she gets "caught" and her hand is held in a lock for 30 seconds. From ''Crime Time'', the next jump for his restless mind was the Apology Line, created after he moved to Manhattan in 1977.
[Apology Line: Allan Bridge]
/ref>
Bridge sold rights for a film and novel. ''Mr. Apology'' by Campbell Black was published by Ballantine Books in 1984, and this was adapted by screenwriter Mark Medoff
Mark Medoff (March 18, 1940 – April 23, 2019) was an American playwright, screenwriter, film and theatre director, actor, and professor. His play '' Children of a Lesser God'' received both the Tony Award and the Olivier Award
The Laurence ...
for the HBO thriller, '' Apology'' (1986). The film switched the sex of the conceptual artist from male to female (portrayed by Lesley Ann Warren
Lesley Ann Warren (born August 16, 1946) is an American actress and singer.
She made her Broadway debut in 1963, aged 17, in '' 110 in the Shade''. In 1965 she received wide recognition for playing the title role in the television musical prod ...
).
In 1993, Bridge was the subject of a long article, "The Confession," by Alec Wilkinson
Alec Wilkinson (born 1952) is a writer who has been on the staff of ''The New Yorker'' since 1980. According to ''The Philadelphia Inquirer '' he is among the "first rank of" contemporary American (20th and early 21st century) "literary journali ...
, published in the October 4, 1993, issue of ''The New Yorker
''The New Yorker'' is an American weekly magazine featuring journalism, commentary, criticism, essays, fiction, satire, cartoons, and poetry. Founded as a weekly in 1925, the magazine is published 47 times annually, with five of these issues ...
''. Wilkinson's article was reprinted a decade later in ''Mr. Apology and Other Essays'' (Houghton Mifflin, 2003). He died on August 5, 1995.
Confessions
Some confessions taped from the Apology phone calls were published in ''Apology'', a magazine edited and published by Bridge. The last issue was published January 1996. After investigating the notion of bringing the Apology Project to the online service GEnie
Jinn ( ar, , ') – also romanized as djinn or anglicized as genies (with the broader meaning of spirit or demon, depending on sources)
– are invisible creatures in early pre-Islamic Arabian religious systems and later in Islamic myt ...
, he was working on a book about the Apology Line and making plans in 1995 to expand the Apology confessions to the Internet.
In 1989, his second wife, Marissa Bridge, founded Marissa Bridge Studios, which became one of New York's leading decorative painting and restoration companies, with offices in Manhattan and the Hamptons. Active in boating and scuba diving, Bridge was diving in August 1995, when he was killed by a hit-and-run jet ski
Jet Ski is the brand name of a personal watercraft (PWC) manufactured by Kawasaki, a Japanese company. The term is often used generically to refer to any type of personal watercraft used mainly for recreation, and it is also used as a verb to ...
er. Lydia Nibley wrote about this in her essay "All Apologies" (December 16, 2004):
:This message was left anonymously on a phone-message service called the Apology Line, where people recorded their confessions and also listened to others admit to acts of intentional cruelty, silly screw-ups, unfortunate and unintentional mistakes and, on occasion, even murder. From 1980 to 1995, Allan Bridge ran the line as something of a secular priest, offering the potential for forgiveness through the catharsis of taped confession—until the day he was killed by a Jet-Skier who fled the scene and was never identified.
:Allan's wife, Marissa, was convinced that had her husband lived, he would have forgiven the person who hit him. But does that Jet-Skier—who was seen circling back to confirm that it wasn't driftwood, but a man in scuba gear he had hit—live the rest of his life plagued by remorse and guilt? And would confessing to someone, anyone, even anonymously, make a difference?...
:When asked if she is sure Allan would have been able to forgive the Jet-Skier who hit him—even without an apology—Marissa Bridge imagines several scenarios. "The person knew it was an accident and that it wasn't his fault," she says. "He couldn't have predicted a scuba diver would surface at that moment right in front of him. Maybe the person was really young and gave into the impulse to run away rather than to stay and face things. I'm sure whoever they are, they are sorry."
:She explains that listening to Allan's collection of tapes from the Apology Line helps her understand that the average person is in some level of pain about past actions, and that people who have bigger regrets have a larger burden to carry. "Allan was a petty criminal in his early life, and he worried that people could fall too easily into being either the predator or the prey. He lived his life to say, 'Let's see if we can be better people.'"
Several passages about Bridge and jet skis are scattered throughout ''The Unwanted Sound of Everything We Want: A Book About Noise '' by Garret Keizer.Keizer, Garret. ''The Unwanted Sound of Everything We Want: A Book About Noise'', PublicAffairs, 2010.
/ref>
Play
''Apology'', a new theatrical piece based on the life and work of Allan Bridge, is being developed by Greg Pierotti, co-writer of ''The Laramie Project
''The Laramie Project'' is a 2000 play by Moisés Kaufman and members of the Tectonic Theater Project (specifically, Leigh Fondakowski, writer-director; Stephen Belber, Greg Pierotti, Barbara Pitts, Stephen Wangh, Amanda Gronich, Sara Lambert, ...
''.[
]
Exhibitions
A bank of phone booths were installed for Bridge's 1981 show at the New Museum, enabling guests to pick up the phones and listen directly to the original Apology Line tapes.[
]
Awards
The film ''Apology'' won the Audience Award at the 1987 Cognac Festival du Film Policier, and that same year it won a CableACE Award for Maurice Jarre
Maurice-Alexis Jarre (; 13 September 1924 – 28 March 2009) allmusic Biography/ref> was a French composer and conductor. Although he composed several concert works, Jarre is best known for his film scores, particularly for his collaborations wit ...
's music score.
References
Listen to
''This American Life'', "Apology" (November 5, 2004)
The Apology Line, Wondery podcast, 2021
External links
"All Apologies" by Lydia Nibley
{{DEFAULTSORT:Bridge, Allan
1945 births
1995 deaths
American conceptual artists
Artists from New York (state)
Artists from Virginia
People from Falls Church, Virginia
Underwater diving deaths
University of Chicago alumni