Not everyone loses their mind. Not everyone gets it back. Some people were half crazy to begin with. Some were full-on crazy, but got a pass. Part of the reason why the art world is such a haven for misfits is because it can be very forgiving of its talent. At least that part of the talent pool in which ideas that are floated will giddily rise to, and remain buoyant upon, its glittering surface. There are often sharks nosing around the pool, but most of them get a pass as well. The wealthier you are, the crazier you can be. Even if we all know this, it’s worth being reminded from time to time. Of course the rich aren’t referred to as crazy. They’re eccentric, just as we want our artists to be. In a sense they may have all been typecast, and we, the audience, should be thankful that they faithfully play the parts to which they have been assigned, and that they won’t willfully play against type. A true misfit refuses to conform to the shifting contours of the world, to its expectations. Me, I’m just the pool boy. Sometimes I feel as if I’m floating face down on the surface while everyone else splashes around and glides by. At least I’m not just another forgotten castaway, lost at sea. Sometimes when Ashley Bickerton crosses my mind, especially when I’m confronted with his more ritualistic objects, I think of Marlon Brando, not really of Gaugin, and certainly not about the One-Eyed Jack, as revered as he’s become. There is often guilt, and never its opposite, by association. I think of Brando riding his own Triumph Thunderbird in The Wild One (1953). A dozen years later he’s seen leaning seductively against the motorcycle in Andy Warhol’s painting, having been passed through that screen, objectified, eroticized and young once again. Brando’s iconic image is thus re-immortalized, and remains evermore. Or Brando in Mutiny On the Bounty (1962), which came to be known as Mutiny On the Brando, both fairly and unfairly. On location in Tahiti he takes over direction, re-writes scenes and improvises his lines. Brando marries the Tahitian woman who played his wife in the film, and they have two children. Over the course of his life he fathers a total of 12 children by three wives, his housekeeper, and four unidentified women. Nominated for his performance in The Godfather (1972), Brando does not attend the Academy awards ceremony but instead sends a young Native American, in traditional Apache dress. He wins the Oscar and she refuses it on his behalf, protesting the treatment of Indians by the Hollywood system. Brando appears in Neil Young’s mid-’70s song, “Pocahontas,” in which the singer warps time and space, ending up at the Astrodome with the refrain, “Pocahontas, Marlon Brando and me.” And then there’s Brando as the cross-dressing old West psycho in the Missouri Breaks (1976) his accent shifting as unexpectedly as his gender. Brando in Apocalypse Now (1979) and in the film-about-the-film, Hearts Of Darkness, where
Fredi Fischli / Niels Olsen (eds.)
the production and its protagonists are laid bare. Brando delivers a mesmerizing monologue on bloodlust, and just as he speaks of “men who can think but can’t act,” he winces as he inadvertently swallows a bug, and the scene must be cut. Overweight, his breathing labored, Brando visits Michael Jackson’s fantasy ranch, Neverland and they drive around in a golf cart. In The Island of Dr. Moreau (1996) Brando wears an ice bucket on his head in some scenes, and is made up in whiteface. He plays the piano accompanied by his gnarly, shrunken double, seated at his own toy piano. Demented music, you might say, for two and four hands. Art Imitates Life, or Is It the Other Way Around? The first time I met Ashley, if memory serves, as my mind comes hazily into focus, he smiled broadly, a toothy devil-may-care grin, and shook my hand. It was a real handshake, the flesh pressed and fingers grasping as if actually wanting to take hold, to connect, his eyes bright and alive, perfectly in sync. There was nothing reserved about him. The other artists of the moment, Peter Halley and Jeff Koons, were totally opposite, seemingly programmed a la The Stepford Wives, explaining their work with a calm, measured delivery. Like the consummate politician, Jeff could address a question without offering any plausible reply, while Peter adopted more the stance of a Warholian “machine,” and neither faltered from the robotic talking points. Ashley, on the other hand, though just as articulate, always appeared jaunty and cavalier, and was forthcoming in his own cockeyed way. As naturally suspicious as I was of people who were overly friendly, and to some extent remain, I sensed there might be something devious behind Ashley’s jovial demeanor. The exchange startled me, since it was so completely different from those that were common to that time and place, New York in 1985. I was used to a more awkward interaction, and to the men who kept their cards close to their vest even if they were not yet in the game. So profound was the contrast that when I met Ashley, having quickly disarmed me and left me defenseless, I thought I had been introduced to a modern day pirate. It came as a surprise when I later found out that he had been born in Barbados. Ashley’s work also contrasted with the sort of piracy that had been going on in New York, with appropriation and the readymade, as practiced and re-imagined by Mike Bidlo, Sherrie Levine, Richard Prince, and Haim Steinbach. Bickerton’s work back then was lumped in with the so-called Neo-Geo artists, with Halley, Koons, and Meyer Vaisman. As shorthand for the new geometry, the term was only ever relevant to Halley, with his architectural cells and conduits, and to how his paintings related
Ashley Bickerton — Susie
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