Jesse David Harris
The northeast corner of the lobby at the Lever House was recently taken over by a large, pyramid-shaped stack of Andy Warhol Brillo boxes.
Not.
In fact, the Brillo boxes, dead ringers for those Warhol first showed at the Stable Gallery in 1964, are by the artist Mike Bidlo. The title of the piece? “Not Warhol (Brillo Boxes. 1964) 2005.”
“Mike is underappreciated and under-known as an artist,” said the curator Richard D. Marshall over the phone, adding that he has admired Bidlo’s appropriation art since the early ’80s.
Along with numerous Warhols, Bidlo has created exact replicas of sculptures by Brancusi and Duchamp, and paintings by Picasso, Matisse, Yves Klein, Pollock and others. He was even a consultant to Ed Harris for his 2000 film, “Pollock.” “His expression is the extreme of appropriation,” Marshall explains. “He is completely removing his hand and becoming the artist. It’s a homage.”
The geometric stack, reflected in the lobby’s highly polished floor, is poetic inside the Gordon Bunshaft-designed landmark building, not least of all because it breaks up the grid, but passers-by will need to stop and read the fine print to understand that this is not a simple case of a Pop Art masterpiece inside a modern masterpiece.
The moment caught up with Bidlo, 57, at the Lever House to talk about emulating Andy Warhol.
Q.
What would Warhol have thought of this installation?
A.
I don’t know. I remember one day, when I had a studio on 42nd Street between Seventh and Eighth Avenues, I was looking out the window and I saw Andy Warhol across the street looking up at my studio. I was shocked because I had [a replica of] his “Dance Diagram 5. Foxtrot” piece up on the wall and I don’t know if Andy heard about it or was just walking down the street and saw it. I stepped away from the window. Back then I was a kid. I was nervous of Andy.
Where do you currently live?
I live in Midtown. So it’s not too far to go. I forgot that this area has become so nice. I usually go straight to the Museum of Modern Art, but in the last week or so I’ve kind of re-explored this area and all of a sudden New York seems to have become a lot more pleasant than it used to be.
You also recreated Warhol’s Factory in the attic at P.S.1 in 1984. Did he see that work?
No, but he wrote about it in the Diaries.
Did you ever meet him more formally?
Yes, at a party at Jean-Michel Basquiat’s loft. There was a big group of people there, but I knew he knew who I was. It was a little awkward.
What about Gerard Malanga?
I was with him on a Brillo Box symposium in Nuremberg, Germany [in 1999] with Arthur Danto and others. He might come to the opening. To me he’s the expert.
Speaking of Danto, he has said that when he saw Warhol’s original Brillo Boxes it made plain for him “that the philosophy of art must move on.” Is that a message the art world needs to hear now too?
At the time that they were shown, the Brillo Boxes were underappreciated. It’s only now, with the patina of history, that we can really see these masterpieces in a clear light. This is a different context and a different audience, but it’s a great opportunity for so many people to see them. This brings me back to my origins as a young artist when I did a lot of window displays in storefronts in Chelsea and the East Village. It’s a nice circle for me to do another window installation.
What inspired you to make appropriation art?
Richard Marshall did this show called “Art About Art” in 1978. I remember seeing that when I was first coming to New York [from Chicago]. That was an amazing show for me. In the ’80s, many people were making art about art. Lichtenstein, Warhol himself, George Segal, Marisol, who did “The Last Supper.”
How did you come to make this work?
I was invited to make it in 2005 as part of a student project for the gallery at Rutgers University. We decided to do a stack of Brillo Boxes as a printmaking class. Students got experience silk-screening a three- dimensional object. Each side takes two silk screens, and each box has to be flipped 10 times. That means about 500 times in all.
I read that it took Warhol, Gerard Malanga and Billy Name nearly six weeks to make the original 80 boxes. How long did it take to make 47?
It took us about the same, but of course some of the time was spent on teaching.
Warhol’s signature is on the bottom of his Brillo Boxes. What’s on the bottom of yours?
They are labeled “Not Warhol (Brillo Boxes. 1964) 2005,” so the work doesn’t say that it’s something that it’s not. Then they are signed and stamped with my handprint. I started doing the handprint because Pollock used to use handprints, so when I did Pollock I started putting handprints on the back and it’s continued to the present time.
If your Brillo Boxes shouldn’t be considered a simple substitute for the originals, what should New Yorkers be looking for?
There are so many more layers. When you start peeling back the layers you see that Warhol did all these different versions himself. There’s the Stockholm version, there’s the Pasadena, the original Stable gallery version. So really it’s about learning about the different providences of the piece, the situations that they were made for.
So you see yourself as an art historian?
History is about loops and continuums. I’m adding another loop to the continuum of the Warhol phenomenon, another level of connoisseurship. In order to become a master, you need to emulate. If you’re going to be as big as Warhol has become in art, then you have to have younger generations who are exploring your work and trying to understand it like a language. It has a lot to do with Walter Benjamin and “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Warhol’s answers were like Benjamin’s questions.
How do you go about choosing a work to replicate?
Just what I find engages me, something that I’m interested in spending that kind of time with. It’s like a person. Before you spend time, you want to make sure it’s going to be interesting. I like the relationship between the master and the student. Each piece has new problems and each is different. They’re all an indentured servitude. There’s that subjugation that you have to put yourself under. It’s a give and take. There is work involved and during that time the greatest things are revealed.
The art historian Robert Rosenblum has called you ”a committed visionary,” yet your work sometimes causes outrage too. Why do you think appropriation angers some people?
I don’t see the necessity for good cop, bad cop scenarios, but I think a lot of people do. This piece can pull [people] in and educate them about Warhol, and maybe make them explore why people are emulating him. Everybody contributes a slice of the pie to the general cake.
What if New Yorkers who are hurrying past this installation just assume these are Warhol’s Brillo Boxes?
I wouldn’t want to misrepresent. It’s not my intention. But I think that the visual could serve as a net to make them want to explore Warhol a little more, so it could prove to be helpful.
Is it a goal for you to be “as big as Warhol” someday?
Yes. This is a huge Rosetta stone. It’s also a hall of mirrors where each is reflecting each other.
Mike Bidlo’s “Not Warhol (Brillo Boxes. 1964), 2005” is on display in the lobby of the Lever House (390 Park Avenue at 53rd Street).
