The text component of this work reads: ‘If you wipe a dirty spot off a wall you’ve removed it, but you haven’t eliminated it. You’re stuck with a dirty cloth you didn’t have before. 1 March 1971’. This typed statement accompanied Billy Apple’s action of cleaning a wall in APPLE, the not-for-profit space the artist operated at 161 West 23rd Street in Manhattan between 1969 and 1973. It was restaged for the first time in Auckland in 1995 at the artist-run space Teststrip. Since then, the work has been included in exhibitions in Wellington (Adam Art Gallery, 2009), Rotterdam (Witte de With, 2009) and London (The Mayor Gallery, 2013).