Alex Asch and the art of bringing structure to world of chaos
Essay by Sasha Grishin
Emeritus Professor Sasha Grishin AM, FAHA
Australian National University

The circumstances of Alex Asch’s childhood, as well as his temperament, made becoming an artist almost inevitable, but it took him more than twenty years to realise this.  Much of the make-up of his art - the morphology of his art making and the tendency to build up tiers of cultural associations in his work - can be traced back to his childhood.  His work is analytic in character, it is seamlessly crafted and draws for its imagery and references on a great number of disparate sources, including the pop vernacular, Freudian and Jungian theory, socio-political, religious and environmental concerns, together with a huge range of art from the Americas, Australia and Europe.  If Asch creates in each of his constructions, tableaux or installations a little microcosm, which relates to a much broader universe, the individual aspects of this microcosm are open to analysis through anthropological, sociological and psychoanalytical processes.  They are works that possess a profound cultural resonance and while many of the sources relate to childhood experiences in New England, they also open up to much broader and more universal interpretations.

Alex Asch’s maternal great-grandmother, Sylvia, who belonged to the New York Wurlitzer family who made musical instruments and jukeboxes, married a Russian Jew, George Weinstein, with whom she moved to Russia in 1895.  With the outbreak of the Great War, they fled Russia and returned to New York, where Alex Asch’s grandmother, Alice, was born and where she married Peter Wood, an architectural photographer, who later became an architect.  It was their daughter, Patsy, who was Alex’s mother and who carried with her a rich heritage of New Yorker Jewish culture.  Patsy Wood grew up in New York in ‘The Garden’, an experimental housing development in Manhattan, where there were shops at either end of the block and there were four storey buildings on either side, with an inner courtyard, which had been designed as a children’s playground. Patsy’s parents divorced when she was eleven years old and her mother remarried and they moved to Florida.  

Alex Asch’s paternal grandfather was Joseph Asch, an Austrian Jew who grew up in New York, but who had returned to Austria to study psychoanalysis with Sigmund Freud and then set up a practice in New York with many artists and musicians as clients.  In New York he met and married Marjorie Bellows, the great niece of the famous American artist, George Bellows.  Their son, Alex Asch’s father, Tim Asch, was born into this cultured Jewish milieu, but by the time he had turned three, Tim Asch’s father had died.  Both of Alex Asch’s parents were Harvard University graduates and lived in Cambridge Massachusetts, on Frost Street, parallel with Massachusetts Avenue between Harvard Yard and Porter Square.  It was here that Alex Asch was born on the twentieth of February 1965, in the old part of town with the old two and three storey wooden weatherboard houses and the Shingle-style dwellings.

Alex’s father was an ethnographic filmmaker and an anthropologist, who moved around quite a bit for his work to what some would have regarded as ‘exotic’ locations, such as Trinidad, for fieldwork, where Alex spent six months as a one-year-old.  Although he has no personal recollection of his stay there, it did enter into his make-up as part of a personal mythology with tales of giant flying cockroaches, which would get stuck in the mosquito netting above the bed.  Family summer holidays were usually spent on Block Island, about twenty kilometres off the coast of Rhode Island, with its wooden houses, where the family would spend the summer living as hunter gatherers, surviving on their own and largely relying on their own resources.  His childhood was spent in this highly cultured background of Jewish intelligentsia (although they were not practicing Jews, nor did they identify themselves particularly as Jewish), a home with Goya aquatints up on the walls and where Sigmund Freud was part of a personal family history.  The physical environment included the tall New England wooden houses, designed to withstand the elements and the extremes of the seasons and which were to play such a significant role in Alex Asch’s art.  He had an older sister Caya, and a younger sister Kim, who had been adopted from Korea, where his father served during the Korean War.  He also had an older brother, Greg Asch, with whom he particularly bonded and who found work as a DJ and subsequently became an electronic composer.  Tim Asch, his father, died in 1996, when Alex was thirty-one years old.

When Alex was ten, in 1975, the family, all six of them, moved to Canberra in Australia, where his parents found work in the Anthropology Department at the Australian National University.  Four years later, Alex was sent back to America to attend boarding school at Buxton School, an alternative coeducational school in Williamstown in the Berkshire Mountains in Massachusetts. This was a mistake and it was not a happy experience with Alex expelled two years later. By this time his father had a job in Los Angeles, while his mother remained in Canberra and Alex joined her and for a while he attended Narrabundah College in Canberra, but this also proved an unsuccessful experiment.  For the next few years he drifted around the United States, on occasion staying in Los Angeles, Chicago and New York, where dyslexia, together with a lack of a specific purpose contributed to a general malaise.  When his brother went to Purchase College, part of the State University of New York (SUNY) at Purchase in upstate New York, to study music, performance and dance, Alex came along and found a certain freedom there, living on campus, which was forty minutes out of town, in an institution with porous borders between workshops.  Between 1984 and 1985 he had a job working at the local Grill Bar, while he ‘squatted’ in the sculpture department and started to audit classes in photography.  In a school of more than ten thousand students, there were no questions asked concerning an extra student and in 1985 he even participated in a two-artist exhibition at the Fireside Lounge of the university, where he exhibited some photographs (mainly of his brother as a carpenter and of the architecture staff), a box-like sculpture and a monoprint.  

Alex’s father had given him an Olympus camera and, as a professional ethnographic filmmaker, had instilled in his children a love of quality black and white photography, including that of Edward Weston, Ansel Adams and Minor White.  He had also apprenticed his children, while still adolescents, to work as his assistants in family darkroom and photo albums were frequently made.  These have remained for Alex a cherished possession and serve as a valued resource in his future art making.  While visiting his father in Los Angeles, Alex Asch spent a few months making photographs at the University of Southern California, in a way building up a portfolio of work as well as exhibiting his photographs in three group exhibitions held at the university gallery.  In 1986 he travelled to Northern Italy to meet up with his family for Christmas, while visiting museums, churches and medieval towns along the way.  Subsequently, he went on with his brother to Paris and Amsterdam, roughing it, sleeping in train stations, on boats on canals and in artists’ squats, while intensely visiting art museums and exploring the old cities.  By the time Alex Asch had returned with his brother to his art school in Upstate New York, the die had been cast and he had decided that he wanted to be an artist.

In 1987 two very significant events occurred in the life of Alex Asch and in his development as an artist.  The first was that he decided to study at the Canberra School of Art (subsequently known as the Canberra Institute of the Arts and then as the Australian National University School of Art), where he applied for admission in an Associate Diploma in Printmaking and was accepted.  The second, and perhaps more significant, he met a fellow artist in Canberra, the brilliant Ecuador-born artist, Mariana del Castillo, whom he married in 1997.  As was the case with a number of his fellow students, Asch found the teaching of the Head of Printmaking, Jörg Schmeisser, internationally renown for his finely detailed multi-plate colour etchings, too rigid and he spent much of his time working from his house in Campbell, in suburban Canberra, on his three-dimensional pieces.  These he exhibited at his first solo exhibition at Dorette’s Café in central Canberra, a modest venue where a number of emerging artists launched their careers.  

Although drawing heavily on his family heritage and experiences from childhood as sources for his art, the formal language devised by Alex Asch points to the work of both American and Australian artists.  Joseph Cornell with his boxes and collages created some of the most beguiling and entrancing intimate creations of 20th century art and through the unexpectedly juxtaposed elements created compositions of startling originality and of considerable meditative power.  Another American artist belonging to the Beat Generation, Edward Kienholz, championed a form of grotesque funk art to make powerful ethical and political statements.  One was the quintessential introverted East Coast artist exploring a new spiritual order, the other was the rather brash West Coast artist for whom art was the conscience of society, who together with his wife, Nancy Reddin Kienholz, continued to make confronting pieces until his death in 1994.  Both Kienholz and Cornell contributed to Asch’s artistic vision.  In Canberra, he also encountered the work of Rosalie Gascoigne, who as an artist in her fifties first received attention in the 1970s and by the time Asch arrived in Canberra was at the peak of her recognition having represented Australia at the Venice Biennale in 1982.  This Canberra-based artist sought out materials which had been weathered by the elements, such as road signs, discarded packing crates and chipped and rusted enamel pots and plates, and then arranged them in such a manner as to give the materials a voice.  Another Canberra-based artist of some importance for the development of Asch’s formal language was Ingo Kleinert, who was also one of his advisors at the school of art.  Kleinert at the time was exhibiting his assembled icons and landscapes, which brought together found materials, particularly wood and galvanised iron.  

Asch’s early constructions in quite a remarkable manner created powerful and evocative shrines, which symbolically denoted a reality beyond the one presented through the physical structure.  In 1995 he wrote concerning the general orientation of his art “I have constructed shrines to the historical and the natural transformations of the landscape: to what is lost when old hand-built buildings, with all the human skills that made them, burn down, as well as to what is lost through deforestation, extinction and land erosion.”  They are shrines to loss, whether this be lost histories, lost environments or lost skills, and an evocation of something which was once there, but which has subsequently vanished, but somehow traces of the earlier reality survive.  In a solo exhibition at the Ben Grady Gallery in Canberra in 1994, he also exhibited a series of landscapes, crafted out of bits of rusted corrugated iron, which bear the traces of their earlier life, the ageing, dents, the corrosion and signs of destructive fire, and these were offset against wood and then immaculately framed as art objects.  In his exhibition catalogue at the time he observed: "The landscapes represent the transformation of the land since colonial invasion: erosion, rising salinity, loss of topsoil, deforestation and general land degradation.  They are like premonitions, or warnings.  The materials we take from nature we use and abandon.  Nature in turn transforms them back into replicas of the land we have changed through our industry."

Although the idea of associative realities is common to the work of many artists, where you look at a found object and see in it something quite different, what is remarkable about Asch’s art is his ability to give voice to an inanimate material, which bears witness to a different reality.  The Italian philosopher Italo Calvino once provocatively wrote: "Think what it would be to have a work conceived from outside self, a work that would let us escape the limited perspective of the individual ego, not only to enter into selves like our own but to give speech to that which has no language, to the bird perching on the edge of the gutter, to the tree in spring and the tree in fall, to stone, to cement, to plastic …”  Asch in his early rusted landscapes and shrines has moved into this metaphysical realm, so that his newly created objects seem to tap into ancient truths with the artist appearing more in the role of a conduit, revealing that which exists in the material, rather than in the role of omnipotent creator, who makes something out of nothing.  This process of art making may in fact find a certain parallel with Rupert Sheldrake’s concept of ‘morphic resonance’, where this English scientist, philosopher and explorer in the realm of the parapsychology has argued that “memory is inherent in nature” and that materials may carry with them echoes of a forgotten past.

Shrines in Alex Asch’s art also frequently have an anthropomorphic dimension and in their vertical orientation can literally be viewed as figures and carriers of symbolic human values.  In 1997 he completed a series of three water shrines, each over two metres tall, with a galvanised box interior containing a suspended mirror and pumped water flowing down the mirror surface.  He called the series Rhythm of light and had it displayed in the Australian Capital Territory Legislative Assembly Building.  He wrote at the time: “To me these shrines are like people.  The exterior shells (or architectural structures) represent subtle but significant differences through their reference to different religious iconography.  It is not the contrast between the pieces, but the ambiguity within each piece that reflects the complexity of a multicultural society.  The window in one, for example, has a Catholic feel, while the other two seem more Islamic; the shape seems to resonate with Zen Buddhist architecture, while the roofs are more Mongolian. The pieces are held together and decorated with copper nails that resemble Aboriginal dot paintings.  These features are intended to reconcile our differences and honour the multiple possibilities within ourselves.”  The artist’s explanatory note provides a context for interpretation, which may not be apparent even to the most dedicated viewer, however it does signal many of the multi-tiered levels of thinking that engaged him at this time.  Shrines, signs and materials were all designated as signifiers of other realities and these could be read by different people who had access to different codes, whether these be religious, tribal or environmental.  The growing scope of Asch’s artistic vision could absorb his father’s collection of vintage toasters, a selection of Los Angeles road signs or a collection of family photographs, into a personal artistic morphology, which in his art came to stand for many different symbolic realities.

After about a decade in Australia, one can perceive something of a growing radicalisation in Asch’s imagery coming to an early culmination in his Tools for genocide series which was exhibited in Sydney at the Access Contemporary Art Space in 1998.  The installation took the form of three wooden boxes made from old redwood scavenged from a derelict farm house on the southern tablelands.  Each box is like a medieval chest and sealed with an old padlock with the keys prominently suspended on a chain below.  On unlocking the first box, in the words of the artist, the viewer “is confronted with an old brown turps bottle with the raised letters ‘diggers’ across the top.  There is a murky liquid hidden within the bottle (‘a night on the turps’).  The bottle itself is suspended within a block of sweet-smelling wax. It is the first step in the disenfranchising and colonisation of an Indigenous group.  The wax is like a sugar coated handshake.”  The second box contains a crucifix made out of .303 shell casings and related to Christianity and the gun as the main tools of the colonisers.  The third and final box has a brass plaque under a coat of wax which reads ’10 point plan’.  Asch continues: “This is our final tool in this ‘civilised’ land.  A ‘clean’ attack of words, legislation and justification.  A mean hearted attempt at disallowing Indigenous Australians to interact with their land, an intervention which is so central to their physical and spiritual being, and crucial to our collective survival.”  The veteran Sydney artist and art critic, Elwyn Lynn, noted the growing politicisation of Asch’s art and observed that “his didacticism is presented with discrimination, but not genteel taste.”

To some extent, the extreme conservatism of the long and bleak Prime Minister John Howard years in Australia’s social and cultural history cast a shadow over the work of many artists in Australia.  In 1996, not only was the Howard government elected to office, but Alex’s father also died.  Two years later, he took out Australian citizenship.  In a catalogue simply titled Asch, published in 1999 in conjunction with the Access Gallery in Sydney and dedicated to the memory of his father, in her introductory essay the Sydney-based arts writer, Drusilla Modjeska, observed that Asch’s “technical skills and his sensitivity to the nuance of cultural experience have fused with such harmony that they are impossible to separate.”  She concluded “that is what makes his work art.”  By the turn of the century, the thirty-five year old artist had established his own distinctive artistic identity and had received a modest degree of recognition and critical acclaim.  Building on a rich family cultural heritage and having digested a range of artistic sources, in Asch’s subsequent work he did not steer a new course, so much as refine, intensify and focus his vision.

Asch’s meticulously wrought miniature houses increasingly became inhabited, inviting the viewer to participate in an almost private and voyeuristic spectacle of spying on people within these constructions.  An early expression came with an extensive exhibition at the Australian National Capital Artists (ANCA) Gallery in Canberra in 2004 with major pieces including, the first of the ‘Holy rollers’ with a church on wheels that came complete with its stained glass windows and metal roof and with a congregation inside.  Life in the blue barn, 2004 and Black rock, 2003, continued with this series of enigmatic edifices relating to the sturdy weatherboard creations experienced in his childhood which withstood the gales coming from the Atlantic.  As he recalls “there were wild rumours and stories about older and more reclusive residents.  They were the Boo Radleys of my childhood.  At night we would sneak around and dare each other to peak through the old windows.”  The reference to Harper Lee’s To kill a mockingbird (1960) was something contemporaneous with his childhood as well as a comment on the worlds concealed behind the shutters of these houses.  Asch’s houses increasingly play with the idea of façade and content, where the peeling paintwork and the weather-beaten exteriors conceal the gritty and sometimes sordid reality on the inside.  These became interiors which could be explored with the eye or inhabited by the imagination.  Each installation is a symbolic tableau or an assemblage which has been exquisitely crafted from weathered materials which bear traces of their former existence.  The pieces have a piercing dry wit, but more often than not evoke a sense of profound pathos as they touch on issues, including the militarism of the new world order, prisoner abuse in Iraq, violence against women and the presidential elections in the United States.  

Access to a larger studio at ANCA, and later at his new house in Queanbeyan on the outskirts of Canberra, did enable Asch to work on a bigger scale with quite large houses, over two metres high, included in Sculpture by the Sea at Bondi in 2007 and 2008, Cottesloe in Perth in Western Australia in 2008 and at Sculpture by the Sea in Denmark in 2009.  A major piece to appear at this time is In the holy roller the saints worship the pagan god, 2009.  Observing that it was the 200th anniversary of Darwin’s birth, the holy roller appears on a considerable scale and is made up of weathered building materials, while inside there is a little diorama where small plastic apes, sourced from various garage sales, celebrate a strange ritual.  Asch writes: “Within the ‘holy roller’ our ancestors, the apes and monkeys adorned with wings and halos gather around the altar. The back wall of the church houses the image of the messiah himself, Charles Darwin.  The image is held to the wall by a clipboard fitting and adorned with a gold halo.  The church is on wheels reminiscent of the mobile preachers who roam the bible belt of North America seeking to convert, heal and swindle.”  For Asch, describing himself as a “good moral atheist” and the son of an anthropologist, this installation becomes as quasi-comical account of what happens to atheists after death.  These intimate illuminated tableaux increasingly involve us in detailed narratives, frequently involving ethical themes as he observes with the impartial gaze of an anthropologist the urban jungle inhabited by greedy rats consuming an increasingly large amount of irreplaceable resources.  His recycling of materials in some ways could also be conceived as a process of regeneration, as he observed in 2010  “When seeking the materials for my art practice I have always been drawn to the weathered and worn; the man-made placed into Nature’s hands covered with her patina of muted rust; the echoes of sweaty prints and urine stains; the marks of tools that have in turn marked the hands and bodies of the men and women who have used them.  I am particularly fond of old painted boards that have been ripped from their resting places and thrown in piles like amputated limbs, their rusty nails twisted and hardened arteries.  In my workshop – all gathered – these entities pass through a process of reincarnation – constructed again into the form of the house.”  

In 1993-94, Edward and Nancy Reddin Kienholz completed their massive wall installation 76 J.C.s Led the Big Charade, where seventy-six wall-mounted pieces of popular images of Jesus Christ were displayed mounted on cross-shaped wagon tongues.  Completed in the year of Edward Kienholz’s death, it presented a certain culmination in this artist’s struggle to erode the boundary between high art and popular culture, the sacred and the sacrilegious and the different ways of responding to the iconography of cults and rituals.  Asch in his studio devotes a great deal of his time to experimenting with found materials and on one occasion in an extension of the holy roller idea, he had placed a plastic figure of Jesus Christ on top of a toy car and a new and unexpected creation emerged for an image of an evangelising Christ, who at the same time appeared as humorous and ridiculous and recognisably American.

It reminded Asch of the Kienholz installation, where “they built 76 individual portraits of Jesus Christ; the bodies made from axles of toy wagons, the heads framed portraits of J.C., hands and feet made from old doll parts.  Their installation is overwhelming and as a construction artist I find it very inspirational.”  Asch continues “Although my J.C.s have little in common aesthetically with the Kienholz work, I felt a kinship, a carrying on of the art baton and set out in 2010 to find 76 J.C.s and 76 toy trucks, tanks, cars and SUVs to create 76 J.C.s continue the big charade.  And thus began my quest searching through every junk shop, flea market  and garage sale throughout New South Wales.  The last 25 or so were gleaned from the Internet from as far away as Romania.  I spray painted the mobile J.C.s with enamel black paint giving the piece a unifying cohesion: a traffic jam heading to Armageddon at two miles an hour.”  Mounted on a table top, the whole parade moves forward with a slow and deliberate movement, less of a liberating celestial army and more like the seventy-six trombones of the apocalypse leading an invading alien swarm.  

In some of Asch’s most recent pieces, the three-dimensional freestanding buildings have been increasingly treated as high relief wall pieces mounted with simplified hoardings with slogans or signs such as ‘Promote yourself’’, ‘Stop’ or ‘Please proceed’, so that the buildings have become like road markers guiding one’s progress through life.  These ‘murus’ or façade pieces place an emphasis on the illuminated windows, where landscape elements, birds, fishes and suited men appear behind the panes of coloured glass.  In this sense the windows and doors act as the eyes and the mouths of his silent buildings.  One piece titled Till further notice, 2012, is a constructed façade made of ‘reclaimed retro reflective timber’ with a prominent ‘closed’ sign in the lower storey and has two suited figures peering out of the top windows with their heads composed of shredded American dollar bills.  As an installation it taps into so many associations, including Fiona Hall’s ‘tender nests’ made of shredded US dollar notes, yet maintains its own and independent voice.  The piece is like a mausoleum to an extinguished hope.  In the façade piece, The immigrants, 2012, under the sign ‘Please Proceed’, heads are crammed into a sea blue house boat.  All of his constructions, his social facades, become little meditations on our society and our values.  In this society money rules like a god, and Asch in a René Magritte-like manner hoods the faces of his collaged business men of Wall Street as they appear silhouetted against the dollar bills that they worship.  If the American dollar bill proclaims “In God we trust”, in this society the dollar becomes the new god.  Humorous, engaging and increasingly confronting, the work of Alex Asch critiques contemporary society and its values.

Alex Asch is an unusual sculptor whose art does not fit into an established mould, nor follows a defined postmodernist orientation.  His work is quirky, yet tough; humorous, yet serious; brilliantly crafted, but also naïve and understated in its use of stylistic conventions.  While only fifty years old, Alex Asch has become an original and distinctive voice in Australian art.