Mike Bidlo
Exhibition Project:
Not Duchamp's Bottle Rack, 1914, 2000
(eight fabricated metal wine racks)
In the Barn Studio, Mike Bidlo exhibited an installation made up of eight wine racks arrayed on the floor, near-replications of Marcel Duchamp's Bottle Rack of 1914, one of Duchamp's landmark conceptual-art readymades. During the residency week, Bidlo also produced a number of wine-rack images using a Rorschach-like inkblot technique. These works can be seen as a coda to Bidlo's already massive homage to Duchamp, in the form of hundreds of drawings based on Duchamp's Fountain, another readymade from 1916; a series of cast-porcelain Fountain replicas; and a series of cast glass vials based on Duchamp's vial filled with Paris air (1919). Bidlo's bottle racks are themselves readymades -- bottle racks off the rack -- putting them in a more complex relation to the Duchamp original than first appears. Duchamp's first Bottle Rack was [lost or destroyed], and he later replaced it with a hand-made version. In Bidlo's eyes, his own readymade versions symbolically restore the piece to its original form -- an elegantly subtle form of rapprochement.
Over the last two decades, Mike Bidlo has mounted a sustained program of homage/appropriation
of great 20th-century artists, in both paintings and performed recreations. His subjects have
ranged from Jackson Pollock, Giorgio deChirico and Andy Warhol to Picasso, Georgia O'Keeffe
and Fernand Leger. He has recreated performances of Yves Klein's Anthropometries,
Andy Warhol's Factory, and Jackson Pollock's action painting. His work has been exhibited
or performed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and at venues in Zurich, Paris, Cologne,
Stockholm, Rome, Los Angeles and New York. His 1998 exhibitions of several hundred drawings
based on Marcel Duchamp's readymade The Fountain drew notice for the project's magnitude
and intensity.