Bidlo's Shrines - artist Mike Bidlo

Art in America, Feb, 1999 by Robert Rosenblum

As for the latter, one may recall that Duchamp already wrote in The 1914 Box that the exclusively male object, a urinal, was associated with female imagery, thereby producing something androgynous; and this sexual double entendre, also familiar from Georgia O'Keeffe's flower close-ups (another group Bidlo has replicated), is one of the exhibition's recurrent themes. But the altarpiece registers, too, as a subliminal motif suitable to Bidlo's own remark that these drawings were like daily meditations; and in many cases, the surrogate fonts and shrines almost glow with an unearthly light, like rows of votive candles. And appropriate to this constantly elusive imagery, one of the most insistent configurations here recalls inkblots and Rorschach tests (with the central crease that marked their creation quite visible), an evocative chaos that relates Bidlo to the virtual Rorschach revival of the last decades that would include works by Warhol, Conner, Taaffe and many others. Within such a context, the urinal, lo and behold, can even resemble an X-ray of a pelvis, its triangular pattern of six circular drains becoming fissures in a skeleton.

Astonishing, too, is the sheer diversity of paper chosen for these drawings, which, in addition to the rags and riches of coarse-weave corrugated paper and expensive rice paper, also includes seemingly random pages from the telephone directory as well as appropriately selected pages from standard Duchamp catalogues and a text illustrating the Mona Lisa or, in keeping with the aura of religious hush, a fragment from a requiem mass. And no less dumbfounding is the encyclopedic inventory of a draftsman's vocabulary, with Bidlo moving from inky splatters a la Pollock or brushy chiaroscuro modeling to the precision of an engineer's drawing or the refinement of the most thinly pointed white-ink calligraphy.

The abundance and variety are awesome, revealing not only an exceptionally fruitful imagination in an artist who presumably had none at all, but evoking an almost mystical environment of cumulative, repetitive worship at Duchamp's shrine. And lest we think that the 1,610 rosary beads sent to Shafrazi were sufficient tribute to Duchamp's miracle, we should immediately be reminded that the pilgrimage route extended simultaneously to Bischofberger in Zurich, where the artist's missionary work generated yet another floor-to-ceiling installation encompassing nearly all 1,644 additional drawn prayers. And it should be added that, with two noteworthy headlines in November 1998, the urinal has made news elsewhere as both treasure and blasphemy. The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art announced its acquisition of one of the eight 1964 replicas of Fountain; and an artist in Tarascon, France, was ultimately fined $53,000 for being so outraged upon seeing another of these historic replicas in a 1993 exhibition at Nimes that he pissed in it and then smashed it with a hammer. Apparently, the mental waters of Duchamp's readymade are still flowing.