Thursday, April 21, 2016

Ashley Bickerton at Kayu

Ashley Bickerton at Kayu
(link)

A sliver in the engorged tumescence of art's moral decorum, Bickerton is an artist in need of a retrospective. Transmuting trash into violence and like the syphilitic artist followed, spreading souvenirs of exploitation. Containing no tasteful reserve, to be pulled by an onion from hell, but indefensible. Unpleasantness, gratuitously. Bickerton predating recent ready-made surrealists (of an after-internet sort) by a large fraction of a century that this looks so much like. Predates the internet they were supposed to be after. And that the vogue for distempered Magazine-ready surrealism looks a lot like overtly colonialist art is something someone should be paying attention to. Of course in curating a retrospective of Bickerton a curator would have to admit to, at least in some small part, liking it.