What Lingers with Mike Bidlo
Mike Bidlo has made his career recreating and appropriating the art of other artists, replicating the work of everyone from Jackson Pollock to Marcel Duchamp to Henri Matisse to Julian Schnabel. Though the popular revival of appropriation-based art (1980-90’s) has passed, the practice continues to be relevant in part because of its reliance on the idea of re-contextualization. While other artists – such as Bidlo’s contemporary Sherrie Levine – make vast changes to the original work, Bidlo’s reproductions seek to imitate precisely the image, scale, and materials of their source. What’s more, he does not work from the original, but from reproductions, making his pieces twice-removed from their selected source material.
Bidlo’s Not Robert Rauschenberg: Erased de Kooning Drawings, featured in our current exhibition, are novel only in their complex way of commenting on the hegemony of art historical influence. By meticulously reproducing Rauschenberg’s bold erasure of an actual de Kooning drawing (1953), these works disrupt the notion of a historical canon by independently asserting whom from the past we should – or should not – consider our creative forebears. Bidlo, here, is asserting which historic works are contemporarily relevant.
Rauschenberg, with his gesture, called the precious nature of art into question and challenged the status of proposed masters such as Willem de Kooning, who was at the height of his career at the time the piece was made. Bidlo, on the other hand, seems to want to re-instate the combined significance of Rauschenberg and de Kooning in the contemporary moment, offering, through the new piece, a kind of double-bind of anarchy and reverence.
The last day to view Love & Theft is tomorrow, February 13, between noon and 5 p.m. For more information about this exhibition and other events at White Flag Projects, visit www.whiteflagprojects.org.
-Lynna Borden, Intern
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