This biography from the Archives of AskART:
|  Known as the onetime star of "Neo Geo," Ashley Bickerton, a resident of Bali, Indonesia where he was born, later switched to hyper-realist large scale painting. His media are wide ranging and include in his words "everything from bubblegum and cigarette butts to traditional oil painting on panels."
For many years a New York artist, Bickerton settled in the late 1990s in Bali, where, according to available reports, he divides his time between surfing and focusing on his artwork which includes recent pieces, Jack Blaylock, an airbrushed portrait of a local hodaddy, and Nia-Toni, which depicts a jungle Venus given the face of the artist's son. Both images are surrounded by an orderly montage of flotsam collected from the beach -- coconuts, driftwood, old flip-flops.
Ashley Bickerton's work is in the collection of the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota. He comments about his piece, Minimalism's Evil Orthodoxy Monoculture's Totalitarian Esthetic #1, 1989, steel, concrete, glass, rubber, plastic, soil, rice, coffee, peanuts; 96 x 156 x 12-1/2"
"To me Minimalism suddenly revealed itself as a progenitor or accomplice to the same logic that produces monoculture row planting in national forests, and saturation bombings. . . . I wanted to do an acrobatic leap between the piety of the Minimalist project and the real world effects of that kind of thinking."--Ashley Bickerton, 1989
This work contains six cast-concrete boxes with soil and crop samples from Africa, Asia, and South America, areas where monoculture--the widespread cultivation of a single cash crop--has become a common practice. Bickerton compares this restrictive farming method with the aesthetic of Minimalism, in which the singular use of primary forms to create works whose impact depends on their sheer physical presence outweighs any allusions to the outside world.
Bickerton critiques what he sees as the single-minded thinking underlying both Minimalism's relentless pursuit of pure, efficient form and monoculture's emphasis on specialized crop production. In the narrow pursuit of a single goal, monoculture willfully ignores the harmful implications--dependence on chemical fertilizers and pesticides, hybrid crops with a diminished resistance to weather and disease, and the depletion of the agricultural gene pool.
Sources:
http://www.thepander.co.nz/art/theory/cchapman5.php
http://www.walkerart.org/uia-bin/uia_doc.cgi/query/1?uf=uia_foOeUx
http://www.artnet.com/magazine/reviews/robinson/robinson6-4-02.asp
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