‘Heresy or Codswallop’ at Gajah Gallery
By Tanya Singh

Gajah Gallery is welcoming 2021 with a blockbuster solo exhibition by Bali-based American artist, Ashley Bickerton, currently on view in their Singapore space at Tanjong Pagar Distripark. The show, titled ‘Heresy or Codswallop’, is best described as a stage for the artist to display his neon-coloured narratives and outlandish forms from a distance, both literally and in the context of his multi-faceted artworks.

Ashley Bickerton, ‘Apex Species, Apex Moment. Before the Fall. Mother.’, 2018, oil and acrylic on canvas, 210 x 197 x 8.5 cm. Image courtesy of the artist and Gajah Gallery.

The exhibition, with its range of mediums and styles, looks like a group show on the surface, and features works mostly dating from 2018 to the present, with the exception of two earlier ‘TITNW’ ones from 2011. The devil is in the details, and in these assemblages, we see the unusual incorporation of traditional and unusual materials acrylic, digital print, bamboo, wood and fibreglass. The versatility of Bickerton’s practice is recognisable the moment one steps into the gallery, from the riot of colours on canvas to the melange of materials in the three-dimensional works. Put together, the works in the show present the artist’s recent observations of his adopted home, Bali, where he has lived for nearly three decades.

Having spent an earlier chapter of his artistic journey in New York as part of “The Hot Four” alongside Jeff Koons, Peter Halley and Meyer Vaisman, Ashley Bickerton moved to Bali, Indonesia, in an attempt to recapture the nostalgia of his younger days spent by the Barbados coast. Within a decade, despite living the life of an “outsider” in Bali, his artworks had transformed. They became more figurative and adopted a radically different, tropical colour palette made up of both deep earthy hues and bright neon paints. Moving away from Commodity Art and Neo-Geometric Conceptualism that he was affiliated with in New York, Bickerton has adopted a contextual way of artistic production that is more in line with the making of Southeast Asian contemporary art, which tends to be introspective rather than commodified.

Gregory Galligan, in his essay for the exhibition catalogue, likens Bickerton to Truman Burbank, the protagonist in the American film ‘The Truman Show’ (1998) and this quote from the movie is the best way to begin reading Bickerton’s current oeuvre of works: “We accept the reality of the world with which we are presented”. It is the context within which ‘Heresy or Codswallop’ is presented. The exhibition rethinks Bickerton’s position as an “outsider” and welcomes his work as an insider’s visual representation of narratives about the deculturising effects of tourism and fetishisation of the exotic in the Southeast Asian landscape.

Ashley Bickerton, ‘Codswallop & Doggerel’, 2019, oil and acrylic on canvas, 179.5 x 169 x 5cm. Image courtesy of the artist and Gajah Gallery.

‘Codswallop & Doggerel’ (2019) is displayed as an introductory piece in the gallery. A ghostly image of the “atheist Madonna” as the artist refers to it – modelled after a matrilineal common ancestor of all humans – reaches out, as if to provide the disclaimer: “It’s just heresy or codswallop, doggerel”, a phrase imprinted on the artwork. In simpler terms, the phrase suggests that the experience about to follow is either violently contrary to popular belief or a set of comically irregular ideas. It prepares the visitor to discard assumptions about the artist’s ethnic background and expectations of a superficial exoticisation of regional culture. Juxtaposed against the backdrop of the visual disclaimer stands ‘Brain, Variation 3’ (2020). The work is a sculptural representation of a brain bound in neon-coloured rope, which can be seen as another attempt to break the viewer out of the cliched line of thought about “outsiders” and their agendas in this part of the world.

Ashley Bickerton, ‘The Bar’, 2018, oil and acrylic on jute in artist-designed wood frame inlaid with Mother of Pearl, bamboo and found objects, 238 x 276 x 13cm (with frame). Image courtesy of the artist and Gajah Gallery.

The tussle between the artist’s position as an “insider” or “outsider” becomes more obvious with ‘The Bar’ (2018), the highlight of the exhibition. The painting showcases Bickerton’s signature blue man, two of his silver ladies and a new character, the green man, seated in a typical bar setting with a large number of beer bottles. It functions as a satirical commentary on the behaviour of the “alien in paradise”, as the wall text refers to the blue man. One begins to wonder whether the blue man is truly a self-portrait or a comical critique of what is expected of Bickerton as an “outsider”. The blue man appears in several other works in the show, each one a criticism of the stereotypical Western traveller with his hedonistic tendencies enjoying what the nightlife has to offer in Bali. Three of Bickerton’s blue man paintings rendered on jute are housed in customised wooden frames embellished with locally-sourced materials like Mother of Pearl and bamboo. The exquisite frames result in a unique cross-pollination of aesthetics in the artworks. At the same time, they demonstrate the artist’s appreciation of local materials, further challenging his position as an “outsider”.

Ashley Bickerton, ‘Turquoise Woman’, 2020, oil on canvas with artist made frame, 145 x 132 x 5cm. Image courtesy of the artist and Gajah Gallery.

The silver woman, modelled after the artist’s wife, Cherry, who is Balinese, also stars in a number of “head paintings” – as the artist refers to his portraits – scattered across the gallery. Rendered in splashes of vibrant pinks, blues and oranges, and adorned with necklaces made of orchids, the portraits are a satire of what is considered exotic by “outsiders”, with their sun-kissed skin tones, almond eyes and full lips. The attention to detail once again comes through, and in the care that the artist takes to perfect every element, we can appreciate his familiarity with not only the physicality of his characters but also their values and way of life. The silver paint applied only in parts of the face reveals bursts of colour as if divulging the subject’s true personality, which the viewer can try to decipher.

Ashley Bickerton, ‘TITNW2’ and ‘TITNW5’, 2011, acrylic, digital print, bamboo, wood, fiberglass. Images courtesy of the artist and Gajah Gallery.

A more obvious critique of the deep, dark underbelly of the tourism industry beneath the bliss of tropical life is presented in ‘TITNW2’ and ‘TITNW5’. TITNW stands for “twisting in the neon wilderness”, and these sculptural works take the form of giant corals, punctured with large nails securing clippings of neon-lit street signs and other imagery typical of Southeast Asian tourist hotspots. The violent portrayals of the dive bars reflect a displeasure typically associated only with an “insider”. Created along similar lines are the ‘Flotsam Paintings’, which are composed with objects that the artist found along the beach. The crushed plastic bottles and disintegrated rubber slippers are laid out on vibrantly coloured backgrounds, and look like incoming waves, each one bringing with it a sense of sorrow for the state of the ocean, increasingly infested with pollution. Again, in this realisation, we observe Bickerton not portraying Bali as an island utopia as an “outsider” might, but laying bare the true state of his immediate surroundings, like a local would.

Bickerton seldom indulges in the contextualisation of his artworks, but rather seeks to engender conversation through them. In our interview with the artist, he says, “My desire is not to proclaim any meaning so much as it is to throw things into question.” And that is the beauty of ‘Heresy or Codswallop’. The artist does not ask to be seen as an “insider” by delving into the meanings of his works but instead gives the viewer space to contemplate them and come to their own conclusions.

Here is the interview with Bickerton in full:

Could you tell me about your process for making the ‘Head’ series of paintings? How does this differ from the making of sculptures? What is planned and what is intuitively developed?
I am not really comfortable as a solely painter, a sculptor, or a photographer, but find enormous satisfaction when I am working in the overlap of all three. The more hats I can wear to complete a given artwork, the happier I am.

The ‘Head’ series came about precisely out of a desire to realise this balkanised form of working. For the clay-based heads, I needed to be a hands-on sculptor kneading great lumps of clay. Next, whether the model was clay or human, I got to become a painter, happily slapping paint around and messing with pure Chroma. Then it’s back to clean clothes and photography and lighting followed by several days of technical Photoshop. Lastly, it’s back to painting, but not of the slapdash expressive variety I had done earlier. This time, it is a highly controlled and exacting form of Photorealism. So basically, while the overall process is planned, there are many, many instances where accidents and happenstance can change the entire direction of the artwork.

The titles of your works, such as ‘We Always Go Back’ and ‘T17nEXP’ that we see in the show are on their own evocative. How do they come about, and how do you see them enhancing your works?
Ironically, the titles are often thought up at the last moment. In the studio, we have our own names for the works that are mostly, slangy, convenient, and functionally descriptive. In the best cases, the work names itself. The title is so obvious that it does not take gymnastics to get there. Other titles fit with the larger ethos or poetic drive of the series to which the work belongs. For instance, the TITNW works are all named for the acronym, ‘twisting in the neon wilderness’.

Titles with references like ‘Apex Species’ and ‘Mitochondrial Eve’ are common throughout and come out of my deep fascination with an anthropological reading of humanity. Titles like ‘We Always Go Back’ and Codswallop or Doggerel’ are often coughed up on the spot because they just happen to be the words running through my head when looking at the just completed artwork. I do not necessarily want to understand my titles. It is like an enchanting song you hear sung in a foreign language, only to be ruined when the lyrics are translated.

“While my wife and family are Balinese, I will always remain something of an outsider despite my best efforts and intentions.”

After living for three decades in Bali, do you consider yourself an outsider or a native in Bali, and how has this state of mind come through and developed in your works? Is the blue man still a self-portrait? How has he evolved?
While my wife and family are Balinese, I will always remain something of an outsider despite my best efforts and intentions. Interesting question, because I just had an article written on my work by the brilliant young Indonesian writer Adi Hong-Tan, who placed me squarely in the firmament of Indonesian Art. He stated, “To an Indonesian, the artist is a ‘totok’, or a first-generation migrant, behind whom ‘Peranakan’, or mixed-race, culture thrives.” I was thrilled as after all these years, my work was finally being addressed in this context, a context I felt I had long belonged to.

The blue man is in no way a self-portrait, although in laughing at him and his foibles, I am able to laugh at myself. He came about in response to what I felt were rather misleading comparisons of my work to that of the great Post-Impressionist master Paul Gauguin. The blue man becomes a stand-in for the overplayed male antihero so central to the western canon of the 19th and 20th centuries. He is Gauguin and Hemmingway and Somerset Maugham, blended into every cliché that has wondered down the tropical pike from the cooler climes of Europe and the west. He has not evolved, and now finds himself adrift in a bewildering new 21st century where he is an anachronism holding on to a world that no longer exists.

“My desire is not to proclaim any meaning so much as it is to throw things into question; turn things around, upside down, inside out, and ask unexpected questions.”

In one part in the essay, Gregory Galligan says that there are “no easily identified desirable takeaways” in your works. What is your take on this?
That will always be one of the lynchpins of my thinking that runs throughout all the work and across the decades. All meaning is ultimately slippery and contextual, or as Warhol so pithily put it, “Everything is how you look at it.” My desire is not to proclaim any meaning so much as it is to throw things into question; turn things around, upside down, inside out, and ask unexpected questions.

Where do you situate your work?
I originally came out of a conceptually based line of thinking that in my case manifest itself as a group of artists often referred to as Neo-Geo. In the intervening years I have absorbed so many influences, and been so stylistically promiscuous that I end up in a place where I am hard pressed to think of any group that I actually fit in with.

Ashley Bickerton: Heresy or Codswallop is on view at Gajah Gallery Singapore from 19 January to 14 February 2021. For more information, click here.

Gajah Gallery will also be holding a conversation between the curator, art historian Gregory Galligan and the artist, Ashley Bickerton on 28 January from 5pm to 6pm (GMT+8). The conversation will also explore the ideas and process behind Bickerton's diverse body of work, and his position in the context of contemporary Southeast Asian art. Click here to sign up.