Mike Bidlo talks to Robert Rosenblum - '80s Then - Interview - Biography

ROBERT ROSENBLUM: Today you're thought of as the artist who makes replicas of twentieth-century old masters, from Cezanne and Picasso to Warhol and Lichtenstein. But at the beginning of the '80s, you could've been billed as a performance artist, with your Jackson Pollock performance piece at P.S. 1 and your public re-creation of Guernica In Los Angeles In 1984.

MIKE BIDLO: I don't see a dichotomy between performance and artmaking. For me performance adds another component to the work; it's a way to create a context for my paintings and sculptures. For instance, the story about Jackson Pollock peeing in Peggy Guggenheim's fireplace--which was the basis for Jack the Dripper at Peg's Place--offered some interesting insights into Pollock's drip technique. The performative element of the installation was there to help illustrate the connection I was making between urinating and action painting. It also helps the viewer relate to the art on a more visceral level.

RR: And later you were Involved with the Jackson Pollock movie.

MB: Right, the film directed by Ed Harris. They asked me to be a consultant, to talk Ed through the process of painting a Pollock.

RR: Was he hard to teach?

MB: No, not at all, he was a natural. I'm sure the connection between action painting and method acting had something to do with it. I was particularly impressed with his scene where Pollock paints Mural.

RR: And how did you learn to paint like Pollock?

MB: It's not as easy as it seems. I practiced a lot after seeing the Namuth film. I also tracked down as many actual Pollocks as I could find so that I could closely examine how they were made. In trying to replicate his gesture, I discovered his line is a kind of cursive penmanship that could be learned like the Palmer method. After a year of trial and error, I learned to control viscosity, layering, and the different ways paint hits and is absorbed into the surface of the canvas.

RR: You used the same kind of paint and colors as Pollock?

MB: Since Duco is no longer available commercially, I had to use enamel paint from the hardware store and approximate Pollock's palette for each painting.

RR: And then in '84 you replicated the making of Guernica in public.

MB: Yes, I wanted to show Guernica as a work in progress, but I needed a space large enough to accommodate the twelve-by-twenty-five-foot canvas, so Larry Gagosian generously offered his LA gallery for the project. It was a great experience. We rented scaffolding and mounted the canvas directly on the wall and started to paint my version of Picasso's masterpiece right in the gallery. People would walk or drive by and see the painting lit up like a diorama through the double garage doors. They could watch the development of the painting, almost like a time-lapse photograph.

RR: How many weeks did it take?

MB: Four weeks--about the same time it took Picasso.

RR: After it was done and your performance was over, what happened to the picture you made? Were people Interested In the finished painting then, or were they more interested in watching you do it?

MB: I don't know. I just remember I was kind of relieved to have finally finished it, and exhausted from synthesizing this masterpiece. I remember we hired two guards to stand on either end of the painting for the opening. That was kind of funny.

RR: What other performance pieces did you do in that decade?

MB: Well, the one that was the most exciting was the re-creation of Andy Warhol's Factory in the attic of P.S. 1 in '84. It was my version of a dada ball, in which invited guests were asked to impersonate their favorite Warhol "superstars." David Wojnarowicz as Lou Reed sang an amazing version of "Heroin." The previous year I reconstructed Julian Schnabel's plate painting Death of Fashion [1978].

RR: Of all the artists you copied, was Schnabel the closest to you In age? Because the artists you copy are usually from earlier generations. Was It because of the superstardom of the '80s that you chose him?

MB: That may have been part of it. Also the fact that recently Schnabel himself had copied a Rodchenko as part of a larger piece. I thought it would be interesting to appropriate a work by another appropriator, so in a way I just kept the proverbial snowball rolling. In fact, the working title of the piece was The Original Schnabel Simulacrum [1983].

RR: And didn't you also do some kind of performance/installation piece about a mythical Clyfford Still?

MB: Oh yeah, that was the show curated by Alan Jones. The piece was based on the time Clyfford Still was asked to take part in a museum exhibition of regional work from California. Still claimed he didn't want to compete with other artists, so he suggested that his contribution be a six-by-ten-foot unprimed canvas. I found this story in the Metropolitan Museum s Clyfford Still catalogue. The idea of the blank canvas fascinated me. So many other artists have used blank canvases to make aesthetic statements, but Still's gesture seemed to be the most nihilistic, a true act of anti-art. When we installed the piece in the Philippe Briet Gallery in SoHo, I included the text from the catalogue in a frame next to the painting.