Ashley Bickerton talks to Steve Lafreniere - '80s Then - Interview

ArtForum, March, 2003

STEVE LAFRENIERE: In 1986 you were in the infamous neo-geo show at Sonnabend with Peter Halley, Meyer Vaisman, and Jeff Koons. It seemed as if the critics wanted to cast the four of you in total opposition to both neo-expressionism and the Pictures artists.

ASHLEY BICKERTON: That was probably all that united us. We were cool--or cold--and we were against "them." The angry young men rebelling, and like all rebellions it was about taking control.

SL: Did the four of you have the idea of being shown together?

AB: No. It didn't even have to be the four of us, it just turned out that way. That package was the result of quite a bit of maneuvering.

SL: What was your relationship with the others?

AB: I was probably the only one on speaking terms with all of them. Halley was looking at the situation from a much more ideological perspective. Vaisman was a great operator. And Jeff was always just Jeff, gone off and away into Jeffdom. To him we were all just a blur. [Laughs.]

SL: Would Haim Steinbach have made it into that group?

AB: Haim is actually a year older than Joseph Kosuth, who'd had his moment in art a full twenty years earlier. Haim is essentially a workhorse. He just went at it and went at it until he crossed the path of something that was erupting, and when that moment was over he didn't adjust. Whereas someone like Jeff, and I hope myself too, we're just making art.

SL: You make it sound as if that show were inevitable.

AB: Yes. What we were doing had fully crystallized in the adjunct fishbowl of the East Village, so it was just a question of how it was going to be transposed into the voracious and all-too-ready SoHo machinery. We'd all been in various group exhibitions, but the idea of putting on a whirligig--flashing lights--manifesto show was quite appealing to several big dealers: everyone from John Weber to Mary Boone to Ileana Sonnabend. At one point Mary was going to do it, but she was going to throw in Philip Taaffe and Ross Bleckner--the latter to contextualize him, with all his early East Village slummings.

SL: So who got the ball rolling?

AB: Meyer was an orchestrator of things at that point. He ran International With Monument and was pushing for the Sonnabend thing. His argument was somewhere on the side of angels and some kind of moral imperative. Which strikes me as really funny right now. But that's how we saw it then. Ileana had essentially jumped a generation--she wasn't mixed up with any of the neo exers. So Sonnabend seemed like the right place.

SL: We hear so much about the gallerists during the '80s. Did the critics wield much power at the time?

AB: Less so than before and after. It was really the collectors' moment. The machine had been put in place by the neo-exers and was grinding along at full tilt by the time we got there in the late '80s. But I have a problem with authority figures and never had the ease with critics that some artists did. Conversely, I never had a problem with dealers or collectors. I saw them as coconspirators.

SL: Why?

AB: Because the critical apparatus had become displaced by that machine, with the collectors waiting for us at one end and the dealers pushing us in at the other. As a critic, you could either get on the juggernaut or not, but there wasn't much you could do to inflect things. The artists themselves were much less manipulative than the media gave them credit for, actually.

SL: How had criticism become so beside the point?

AB: The art wasn't exactly inaccessible. It wasn't nut jobs running around the Yucatan with mirrors and dirt, completely inexplicable to collectors, and dealers not knowing what to do with the work. Critics didn't need to explain big things with four sides that fit onto an eight-foot-high wall. It wasn't hard to understand. Especially with all the name-branding.

SL: Give me an example of the latter.

AB: Stella's stripe paintings becoming logos for the corporation called Stella.

SL: But didn't that begin to backfire pretty quickly?

AB: Yes, we got associated with and were made immobile by our own product.

SL: It's interesting that collectors were wild over such theory-driven work. I can't picture most of them poring avidly over October. Did you read it?

AB: We said we did. I carried around Foucault's Power/Knowledge for years, and I did skim it. The words "power" and "knowledge" worked on my brain for sure, and then certain ideas were just in the air. We had access to them via osmosis. But I remember Sherrie Levine later telling me, "Whatever Douglas Crimp was saying, I couldn't understand a word of it. But it seemed to work!"

SL: Your work was as interested in the "real" world as the mediated one, and didactic about things like ecology ....

AB: I wasn't so interested in ecology, really. I was just trying to make landscapes. But I thought, How the hell can you make landscapes now without asking the question of what's happening to the earth now? So I looked into a lot of that radical Green shit, but a lot of other stuff too--geological time, plate tectonics. I was never trying to be some pontificating pulpit pounder. Unfortunately they thought I was. Peter Schjeldahl once wrote, "I no more want to hear Ashley Bickerton giving dissertations on industrial farming than I want to hear a bunch of farmers discussing Kiefer."