Ashley Bickerton : Recent Wurg

London : Other Criteria, 2009. First edition, new copy. Quarto, illustrated boards, pp. 36, colour illustrations. 

Ashley Bickerton challenges the popular global construction of the tropics as perfection, where surfing, drugs and parties in beachside tourist villas provide a homogenised experience of the exotic. Living on the island of Bali, he parodies this drunken myopia in his photocollages and sculptures, presenting such glut and excess as an artifice. Just as Gauguin ‘sampled’ Polynesian exotica, so do Bickerton’s caricatures ‘perform’ ideas of the tropical. An introductory essay by Nick Stillman highlights these themes in Bickerton’s work, while the artist’s conversation with artist, curator and writer Harland Miller explores the idea of the island as man, home and retreat