Ashley Bickerton, artist who mocked consumerism, dies at 63 – ARTnews.com
Ashley Bickerton, an artist who became the toast of the New York art world in the 1980s only to leave the scene in a surprise move during the ’90s, died Wednesday at 63 in Bali, Indonesia. Last year he was diagnosed with ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease, which affects the nervous system and can be debilitating.
A representative for Gagosian, the mega-gallery that Bickerton began representing earlier this year, confirmed his death. Gagosian is planning a show of his work for 2023.
During the 80s, Bickerton became known for a seductive work that parodied consumer impulses. He made mixed media pieces that he called self-portraits, yet they were only composed of logos for TV channels, car companies, cigarette manufacturers and more. And at one point he even trademarked himself, SUSIE (full name: Susie Culturelux), which he said would act as an “Index/Name Brand/Artistic Signature” for future art historians.
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But as his style changed, he began to elude critics, and in the early 90s he left the city entirely for Bali, where he continued to run a studio until the end of his career. Thanks to the efforts of galleries such as Lehmann Maupin, Various Small Fires and Gagosian, as well as to artists such as Damien Hirst, Jordan Wolfson and Jamian Juliano-Villani, Bickerton’s work has enjoyed a critical revival in recent years.
During the mid-’80s, Bickerton became a market sensation in New York. He was featured in a famous 1986 show at Sonnabend Gallery that reinforced the Neo-Geo movement, which revived geometric abstraction with a new postmodern bent, and with his compatriots Peter Halley, Meyer Vaisman and Jeff Koons stood up.
The works he was known for at this time were bizarre metal compositions fitted with elements such as leather covering and aluminum pieces. Some have used the visual language of modernist abstraction, only to suggest that it has lost any transcendence and become corporatized, as Bickerton did in Abstract Painting for the People #3 (1985), in which images of bathtubs, urinals and toilets in profile is accompanied by the word “SUMMARY” repeated four times.
Smooth and highly polished, these works looked as if they had just rolled off the assembly line. He called them “contemplative wall units”; others have sometimes grouped them under the vague label “commodity art,” which is used to refer to the many artists who have incorporated brands into their work.
Asked to explain what pieces like this one were about and why he included so many ideas in them, he told Artforum in a 2003 interview, “My work was culture.”
© Ashley Bickerton / Courtesy of the artist and Gagosian
Critics viewed these pieces with suspicion, even as the market fell hard for them. “Despite his deconstructionist skills, Mr. Bickerton’s bumptious self-awareness sometimes seems like little more than the latest version of the sage aesthetic that has always had a place in American art, as in, for example, the work of William T. Wiley and HC Westermann,” said Roberta Smith in a Wrote 1987 New York Times review. “Similarly, it is possible to detect the same masculine adolescent posture beneath its cool hands-off surfaces that permeated much Neo-Expressionism.”
But by the mid-90s, Bickerton signaled that his work was moving in a very different direction. He expressed concern about the natural environment, especially the way humans have subjected it to their own means. Then, when the art market bottomed out in the midst of a recession, Bickerton effectively began by leaving New York for good.
Ashley Bickerton was born in Barbados in 1959. His father was an anthropological linguist, his mother a behavioral psychologist. Because of his father’s line of work, he experienced an itinerant childhood, spending time in South America and Africa. When his family finally moved to the U.S., they ended up in Honolulu, which he said in a recent Brooklyn Rail interview was a “completely different thing” than the rest of the country. He did not become a naturalized American citizen until the 80s.
“Is it politically safe in our current climate to say that my work has always been about identity in one form or another, but given my unfashionable age, race, gender and orientation, it hasn’t really been encouraged to be seen or discussed that way won’t be?” he said in that conversation. “In reality, it has always been about that, because being born in the Caribbean and raised on four continents as the child of academics and almost always the racial other, my situation is special in that I never understand race in America. like Americans understood it.”
© Ashley Bickerton / Courtesy of the artist and Gagosian
Bickerton attended the California Institute of Arts as an undergraduate, and later was a student at the Whitney Independent Study Program. He remained in New York in the years that followed and would establish a following there.
After making his career with the consumer works, Bickerton began to push his art in strange directions that were even more difficult to analyze. He made a group of sculptures that appear to function as propulsion devices; they were emblazoned with the name of his SUSIE alter ego. And he began to focus on the myth of artistic genius, which he exposed as something empty and patriarchal.
In 1993, Bickerton’s work took a sharp left turn when he moved to Bali, where, as he said in the Brooklyn Rail interview, postcolonial concepts began to occupy his mind. There has been a shift away from the consumerist imagery, towards concerns about what people have done to the paradisiacal nature that can be found in places like Bali.
He began making paintings that seemed to capture materialism pushed to the extreme – they were filled with mostly nude figures who seemed completely oblivious to their surroundings, peeing while smoking cigarettes and often looking monstrous. In one, Bickerton represented himself, with his body looking less like a man’s and more like a snake’s.
Sonnabend’s 1996 Bickerton show, his first in New York since moving to Bali, was wild. Smith, writing in the Times, called some of the new paintings “unbearably awful” while conceding that others “dwell with unusual precision into an American heart of darkness.”
© Ashley Bickerton / Courtesy of the artist and Gagosian
The initial reaction to these pieces in New York was one of confusion, but Bickerton said that Indonesian audiences were equally confused.
Works from the past two decades have continued this deliberately ostentatious aesthetic, imploding any separation between good and bad taste. Recent pieces have taken on the tourism industry in Indonesia, portraying foreign visitors as grotesque, blue creatures riding mopeds.
Writing of these works’ appearance at O’Flaherty’s in New York earlier this year in Art in America, critic David Ebony said: “The implications are, as always, ambiguous, as the images suggest the demise of what was otherwise an island paradise would be. —which the artist seems to claim by his prominently plastered signatures.”
© Ashley Bickerton / Courtesy of the artist and Gagosian
There were also works about the sea, which the artist presents not as a peaceful expanse of water, but as something emblematic of humanity’s worst tendencies: a picturesque place filled with rubbish.
In 2021, Bickerton was diagnosed with ALS, and he announced it publicly shortly after. However, he refused to let his illness consume him. “Life is about living and going with it, and I’m busy—too busy—for that,” he told Los Angeles Magazine.
Speaking to ARTnews earlier this year, he noted that since his diagnosis, his art has been “natural [been] seen through the prism of my mortality—gazing at the infinite. The work I do now will probably be even more. There is something kind of spooky about it. I have no problem talking about it, but I don’t want to be known or judged by it.”
But more than anything, what has long motivated his art-making was a desire to include every part of life. He said: “I want to be able to address whatever the hell is going on in the world: a sour breakup, a beautiful view, a tender moment, a wistful sentiment, or some political outrage which engulfs the nation.”
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