Bidlo's Shrines - artist Mike Bidlo

Art in America, Feb, 1999 by Robert Rosenblum

In his latest act of veneration for a modernist master, Mike Bidlo has produced not his usual replicas but a wealth of original works, collectively titled "The Fountain Drawings," commemorating Duchamp's epochal 1917 urinal readymade.

The religion of modern art has no worshiper more fervent or more self-effacing than Mike Bidlo. With monklike dedication, he has spent his life in awe before the deities of 20th-century art, from Matisse to Lichtenstein, while scrupulously replicating, with exact dimensions and cloned tenures, the icons of our collective faith. Since the early 1980s. he has venerated one shrine after another--Mlle. Pogany, Guernica and Blue Poles were all on his pious itinerary. From the historic storehouse of his own copious racks, he could even assemble retrospectives of Picasso, de Chirico and Leger; and with the spirit of an archeologist, he sometimes paused to resurrect Vasari-like moments from the legends of modern art: Pollock's pissing in Peggy Guggenheim's fireplace, Warhol's long-lost shop windows for Bonwit Teller. Paradoxically, Bidlo's uniqueness as an artist was always defined by his apparent refusal to create anything that had not already been enshrined in the pantheon of modern art. His position was absolute, which gave it an inviolable strength; but one also had to wonder whether in some secret moments he perhaps longed to break his vows and to dare the ultimate heresy, a work of his own.

And now, at least at first glance, Bidlo has done exactly that; although at second glance, he hasn't done that at all. His recent show, "The Fountain Drawings," a joint venture between his longtime dealer. Bruno Bischofberger in Zurich, and Tony Shafrazi in New York, was a seemingly nonstop flow of mainly freehand drawings (3,254 of them, though not all were on view). Each work is a gloss on one of the most sacred altars in modern art, the notorious urinal that Duchamp signed "R. Mutt 1917." titled Fountain, and submitted in the same year to New York's perplexed Society of Independent Artists. Duchamp's once-shocking and now canonized assault on art and propriety often figured before as a precious relic in Bidlo's work--in a porcelain re-creation from 1986 (a posthumous reprise of the eight signed replicas Duchamp himself made in 1964); as part of "St. Duchamp," Bidlo's 1997 transformation of a storefront at 304 East 5th Street into a virtual chapel for his reincarnations of Duchamp readymades; and in 1998, as a photographic image (itself a replica of the Stieglitz photo that documents the lost 1917 readymade lying helpless on its back), repeated as a Warholian wallpaper pattern in, of all appropriate places for this appropriation, a men's room at P.S. 1, where it offers a particularly piquant contrast with the real, utilitarian, right-side-up thing. Already, this allover mural pointed toward "The Fountain Drawings" in the way that Bidlo, like the Sorcerer's Apprentice, let the image proliferate ad infinitum, filling every bit of available wall space. Nevertheless, this new installation of hand-made drawings seems to be something else, reflecting the artist's apparently endless patience in inventing hymns of praise to St. Duchamp, the accumulation, in fact, of several years of kneeling at the same altar, day after day, hour after hour.

The results have both an astonishing diversity and an astonishing sameness, all the more so since, given Bidlo's former oath of absolute replication, the marks of his own hand should seem blasphemous and unimaginable. But they are here seen in an ongoing inventory of mutations, each one unique yet each closely related to its neighbor. There is even an odd parallel to displays in museums of natural history where some primal structure--a shell, a protozoan, a mineral--which is known to have astronomic numbers of variations can only be presented to the visitor in minutely small samplings.

What unites Bidlo's meticulous cloning of single works of art to this spectacular floor-to-ceiling immersion in his freehand commentaries on Duchamp's Fountain is an identical sense of subservience and veneration. Now, it appears, the god of modern art has decreed to this humble artist that, in place of fabricating a perfect replica, he dedicate himself to another kind of ritual, a potentially infinite series of different but related offerings to the same holy presence.

In keeping with the cerebral character of Duchamp's art, Bidlo's drawings, with the exception of an occasional yellow or blue paper ground, are devoid of color, restricting the visual range to a vocabulary of blacks, whites and grays. From this imposed monotony, magic spells are cast. For one, these drawings have uncommon metamorphic power, taking the unexpectedly fluid volumes of Duchamp's immobilized readymade and constantly shifting the proportions of the organic and the mechanical. In the fascinatingly Talmudic interview between the artist and his two interlocutors, Arthur Danto and Francis Naumann (included in the hefty exhibition catalogue), Bidlo comments, for example, on the way Robert Smithson once compared the urinal to a baptismal font, and then expands this allusion to the way he himself began to see in it everything from Buddhas and stupas to male and female genitals.