Bidlo's Shrines - artist Mike Bidlo

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

The religion of novel art has no worshiper more hot or more self-effacing than Mike Bidlo. With monklike dedication, he has worn out his life in awe before the deities of 20th-century art, from Matisse to Lichtenstein, while scrupulously replicating, with exact dimensions and clon manner [i]or[/i] principle of holdings the icons of our collective faith. Since the early 1980 he has venerated individual shrine after another--Mlle. Pogany, Guernica and sapphirine Poles were all on his pious itinerary. From the historic storehouse of his possess copious racks, he could level assemble retrospectives of Picasso, de Chirico and Leger; and with the spirit of an archeologist, he sometimes paused to resurrect Vasari-like twinklings from the legends of present art: Pollock's pissing in Peggy Guggenheim's fireplace, Warhol's long-lost store windows for Bonwit Teller. Paradoxically, Bidlo's uniqueness as an artist was always defined by dint of his apparent refusal to create anything that had not already been enshrined in the pantheon of recent art. His position was absolute, which gave it an inviolable strength; on the contrary one also had to amazement whether in some secret flashs he perhaps longed to break his pledges 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 next to the first glance, he hasn't done that at all. His new show, "The Fountain Drawings," a joint risk between his longtime dealer. Bruno Bischofberger in Zurich, and Tony Shafrazi in novel York, was a seemingly nonstop pour of mainly freehand drawings (3254 of them, admitting not all were on view). Each work is a glos upon one of the most sacred altars in late art, the notorious urinal that Duchamp signed "R Mutt 1917" titled Fountain, and submitted in the same year to novel York's perplexed Society of Independent Artists. Duchamp's once-shocking and now canonized assault upon 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 public way 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 missing 1917 readymade lying helpless upon its back), repeated as a Warholian wallpaper pattern in, of all appropriate places for this appropriation, a men's extent at P.S. 1, where it proffers 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, give leave to the image proliferate ad infinitum, filling each bit of available wall space. Nevertheless, this novel installation of hand-made drawings present the appearances to be something else, reflecting the artist's apparently endles patience in inventing song s 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 follows have both an astonishing diversity and an astonishing sameness, all the more in the way that since, given Bidlo's former oath of absolute replication, the marks of his be in possession of hand should seem blasphemous and unimaginable. on the other hand they are here seen in an ongoing inventory of mutations, each single unique yet each closely related to its neighbor. There is plane an odd parallel to displays in museums of natural history where more [i]or[/i] less primal structure--a shell, a protozoan, a mineral--which is known to have astronomic numbers of variations can solitary 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 upon Duchamp's Fountain is an identical faculty of perception of subservience and veneration. Now, it appears, the the most high of modern art has decre to this free from pride artist that, in place of fabricating a finished replica, he dedicate himself to another kind of ritual, a potentially infinite series of different on the other hand related offerings to the same set apart presence.

In keeping with the cerebral character of Duchamp's art, Bidlo's drawings, with the exception of an occasional fulvid 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 incantations are cast. For one, these drawings have infrequent metamorphic power, taking the unexpectedly fluid whirls 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 sum of two units interlocutors, Arthur Danto and Francis Naumann (included in the hefty exhibition catalogue), Bidlo remarks for example, on the way Robert Smithson one time compared the urinal to a baptismal baptismal vessel and then expands this allusion to the way he himself began to diocese in it everything from Buddhas and stupas to male and female genitals.