Allan Bridge
Encyclopedia
Born in Falls Church, Virginia
Falls Church, Virginia
The City of Falls Church is an independent city in Virginia, United States, in the Washington Metropolitan Area. The city population was 12,332 in 2010, up from 10,377 in 2000. Taking its name from The Falls Church, an 18th-century Anglican parish, Falls Church gained township status within...
, Bridge attended the University of Chicago, where he earned a Bachelors degree in fine arts. Returning to the Washington, D. C. 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
Corcoran Gallery of Art
The Corcoran Gallery of Art is the largest privately supported cultural institution in Washington, DC. The museum's main focus is American art. The permanent collection includes works by Rembrandt, Eugène Delacroix, Edgar Degas, Thomas Gainsborough, John Singer Sargent, Claude Monet, Pablo...
. 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 he gets "caught" and his 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.
Bridge sold rights for a film and novel. Mr. Apology by Campbell Black
Campbell Armstrong
-Life:Campbell Armstrong graduated with a degree in Philosophy from the University of Sussex, England He taught creative writing from 1971-74 at the State University of New York; from 1975-78 he taught at Arizona State University.He worked for some years as a fiction editor with various London...
was published by Ballantine Books
Ballantine Books
Ballantine Books is a major book publisher located in the United States, founded in 1952 by Ian Ballantine with his wife, Betty Ballantine. It was acquired by Random House in 1973, which in turn was acquired by Bertelsmann AG in 1998 and remains part of that company today. Ballantine's logo is a...
in 1984, and this was adapted by screenwriter Mark Medoff
Mark Medoff
Mark Medoff is 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...
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
Lesley Ann Warren is an American actress and singer. She has been nominated once for an Academy Award and Emmy Awards and five times for Golden Globe, winning one....
).
In 1993, Bridge was the subject of a long article, "The Confession," by Alec Wilkinson
Alec Wilkinson
Alec Wilkinson 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 "literary journalists... of Naipaul, Norman Mailer and Agee." He is the author of nine books: "Midnights," , "Moonshine,"...
, published in the October 4, 1993 issue of The New Yorker
The New Yorker
The New Yorker is an American magazine of reportage, commentary, criticism, essays, fiction, satire, cartoons and poetry published by Condé Nast...
. Wilkinson's article was reprinted a decade later in Mr. Apology and Other Essays (Houghton Mifflin, 2003).
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 GEnieGEnie
GEnie was an online service created by a General Electric business - GEIS that ran from 1985 through the end of 1999. In 1994, GEnie claimed around 350,000 users. Peak simultaneous usage was around 10,000 users...
, 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
Jet Ski is the brand name of a personal watercraft manufactured by Kawasaki Heavy Industries. The name is sometimes mistakenly used by those unfamiliar with the personal watercraft industry to refer to any type of personal watercraft; however, the name is a valid trademark registered with the...
er. Lydia Nibley wrote about this in her essay "All Apologies" (December 16, 2004):
- The man's heavily accented voice hesitated only briefly before he confessed to multiple murders: "I want to apologize. I don't know if even what I did was wrong or right, but when I was in Israel for six months, I killed six Arabs at night with a gang of other Jewish settlers. At the time we thought -- I believed -- we were fighting for our homeland to keep it from the Arabs. But perhaps now that I'm here in America, I realize that maybe killing is not the right way, and I want to apologize."
- 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.
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 ProjectThe Laramie Project
The Laramie Project is a play by Moisés Kaufman and members of the Tectonic Theater Project about the reaction to the 1998 murder of University of Wyoming gay student Matthew Shepard in Laramie,...
.
Exhibitions
A bank of phone booths were installed for Bridge's 1981 show at the New Museum, enabling guests to pick 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 JarreMaurice Jarre
Maurice-Alexis Jarre was a French composer and conductor.Although he composed several concert works, he is best known for his film scores, and is particularly known for his collaborations with film director David Lean. Jarre composed the scores to all of Lean's films since Lawrence of Arabia...
's music score.