Mike Bidlo, The Anxiety of Influence, and Art History Andrea Rosen There is all this talk about

originality, but what does it amount to? As soon as we are born the world begins to influence us, and this goes on till we die. And anyway, what can we in fact call our own except the energy, the force, the will! -Goethe, quoted by Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence Mike Bidlo and the Anxiety of Influence The art and language of appropriation artist Mike Bidlo oscillates between the two poles of reverence and revisionism. In 1998, in the ultimate Oedipal act, he smashed a urinal he had modeled after Marcel Duchamps Fountain, and then reassembled it, leaving the marks of its damage evident (Fig. 1). This act came at the end of his project, Fountain Drawings; between 1993 and 1998, Bidlo executed literally thousands of drawings of Fountain, representing the urinal in every imaginable style, from realist to abstract, in a great variety of media and supports. The smashed and reassembled urinal was exhibited along with the drawings, which were installed from floor to ceiling, taking up every inch of wall space (Fig. 2). Francis Naumann sees this as, an effort on Bidlos part to terminate an obsession that threatened his ability to move forward.1 Yet the Oedipal urinal-smashing can be juxtaposed with Bidlos storefront exhibition of 1996 titled Saint Duchamp, of a number of his Duchamp copies along with a votive shrine of the type found in Catholic churches (Fig. 3). If we take Bidlos exercise as exclusively revisionistic, perhaps critical of the lionizing effect of art history, we would understand Saint Duchamp as tongue-in-cheek. Yet Bidlo considers his whole practice Duchampian, with modern artworks, rather than industrially manufactured objects, appropriated as ready-mades.2 Thus Saint Duchamp takes on a truly worshipful aura, created with the gratitude and reverence of a pupil honoring his master. Bidlos rhetoric, as well as his artwork, often switches between the two modes of critique and homage. Carlo McCormick asked him: I once accused you of hero worship

Francis M. Naumann, Apropos of Marcel: The Art of Making Art After Duchamp in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (New York: Curt Marcus Gallery, 1999), 36. 2 Mike Bidlo, interview by Anney Bonney, BOMB 45 (Fall 1993), accessed April 15, 2011, http://bombsite.com/issues/45/articles/1693. Mike Bidlo talks to Robert Rosenblum, ArtForum 41 no. 8 (April 2003): 252.

in your plagiarism of various artists, which you strongly objected to. Why? Bidlo responded: Many people assume that wrongly. It has much more to do with a toppling of the godsespecially of changing my relationship to them.3 In a later interview, Bidlo asserted the contrary: I dont see myself in an oppositional role at all.4 Bidlo gives a rationale for this apparent contradiction. When McCormick admits that hed forgotten that Bidlos original impetus was revisionistic, Bidlo answers: I forgot it as well, as it started to take on more of my history.5 As Bidlo becomes involved in a revisionist exploration of an artwork, he understandably becomes invested in it, and therefore sincerely engaged in it as well. He adds that, copying is the instinctive means of learning. Most people copy what they like, regardless of the irony involved, and notes that he has considered but rejected the idea of copying artists he did not like.6 So, we can rightfully assume that Bidlos engagement with an artwork begins from a place of attraction, no matter what revisionism then takes place through his appropriation. Bidlos art and language establish a dialectic of appreciation and rebellion. Yet critics, just like the artist himself, have had a difficult time explaining how the two can coexist. The contradictory impulses in Bidlos work often manifest in polar-oppositional interpretations. For example, art critics Robert Rosenblum and Nico Israel characterized the Fountain Drawings as reverential and mischievous, respectively. According to Israel, Far from being mere acts of discipleship, Bidlos tactics were self-consciously strategic undermining the axiological system that makes great art great.7 Israel only sees something approaching conviction in the Fountain Drawings. 8 In stark contrast, Rosenblumwho titled his review of the same exhibition, Bidlos Shrinesasserted that, the religion of modern art has no worshipper more fervent or more self-effacing than Mike Bidlo.9 Rosenblums religious metaphor pervades the review, the words icon,

Mike Bidlo, Steal That Painting! Mike Bidlos Artistic Kleptomania, interview by Carlo McCormick, in Artwords 2: Discourse on the Early 80s, ed. Jeanne Siegel (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1988), 194 4 In Dialogue: Arthur Danto, Francis Naumann and Mike Bidlo, in Mike Bidlo: The Fountain Drawings (Zurich: Edition Gallery Bruno Bischofberger; New York: Tony Shafrazi Gallery, 1998), 19. 5 Bidlo, Steal that Painting!, 192. 6 Ibid. 7 Nico Israel, review of Mike Bidlo: Fountain Drawings at Tony Shafrazi Gallery, ArtForum 37 no. 5 (January 1999): 118. 8 Ibid. 9 Robert Rosenblum, Bidlos Shrines, review of The Fountain Drawings, at Tony Shafrazi Gallery, Art in America 87 no. 2 (February 1999): 103.

vows, altar, relic, ritual and many others appearing throughout. Rosenblum sees Bidlos work, both pre- and post-Fountain Drawings, as filled with a sense of subservience and veneration.10 This could not be further from Israels understanding that Bidlos goal is to make mischief with the modernist canon.11 Despite their different interpretations of Bidlos work, Israels and Rosenblums reviews are both positive. Two reviews of Bidlos exhibition, Picassos Women, published side by side in Art in America in 1988, manifest a different contrast (Fig. 4). Joseph Masheck praises Bidlo and, consonant with Rosenblum sees perceptible devotion in Bidlos work.12 He continues: the affirmative, enthusiastic aspect of Bidlos paintings specifically precludes satire13 Masheck sees Bidlos copies of Picasso as offering the gratification of the second chance to artwork that has attained the leather-bound standing of earlier classics.14 Peter Schjeldahl, in the pendant interview, disagrees. Schjeldahl describes the sense of re-enchantment that he experienced at an actual Picasso retrospective. He found Bidlos installation, by contrast, lifeless.15 Schjeldahl sees a satirical critique of originality in Bidlos work that he finds tiresome, as such subversion has itself become conventional wisdom. In the meantime, he feels Bidlos copies lack that inexplicable quality that rightfully enshrined Picassos paintings as great art. He also picks up on the confusion of homage and rebellion in Bidlos work, noting the peculiar hysteriaa sort of groveling rage provoked by the monumental reputation of the master he is copying.16 This sort of anxiety was explored by Harold Bloom in his book on intra-poetic relationships, The Anxiety of Influence. According to Bloom, poetic history is held to be indistinguishable from poetic influence, since strong poets make that history by misreading one another, so as to clear imaginative space for themselves.17 This concept is easily extrapolated to artists, whose drives to make art may be motivated by the desire to achieve the greatness of their predecessors, particularly those who have been glorified

Ibid., 104. Israel, review of Fountain Drawings, 118. 12 Joseph Masheck, Bidlos Pablo, review of Picassos Women: 1901-71 at Leo Castelli Gallery, Art in America 76 no. 5 (May 1988): 172. 13 Ibid. 14 Ibid, 174. 15 Peter Schjeldahl, Bidlos Pablo, review of Picassos Women: 1901-71 at Leo Castelli Gallery, Art in America 76 no. 5 (May 1988): 173. 16 Schjeldahl, Bidlos Pablo, 174.
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by the art historical canon. This inspires in the artist or poet a sense of belatedness, the feeling that all that he wants to say through his art has already been said.18 He is a latecomer to the most exalted innovations in his medium, and so can never achieve the same greatness nor, perhaps, advance this tradition further. The influence of the precursor thus engenders intimidation, inhibition and anxiety, rather than inspiration. Bloom paraphrases eighteenth-century poets Edward Young and William Blake in support of his point: to be enslaved by any precursors system is to be inhibited from creativity by an obsessive reasoning and comparing, presumably of ones own works to the precursors. Poetic Influence is thus a disease of self-consciousness.19 In order to overcome this incapacitation, the poet confronting his Great Original must find the fault that is not there, a process that Bloom calls misreading or misprision: Poetic influence always proceeds by a misreading of the prior poet, an act of creative correction that is actually and necessarily a misinterpretation. The history of Western poetry since the Renaissance is a history of anxiety and self-saving caricature, of distortion, of perverse, willful revisionism without which modern poetry as such could not exist.20 By creatively (mis)appropriating the precursor, the poet/artist enacts an antithetical completion of the earlier work, so as to retain its terms but to mean them in another sense, as though the precursor had failed to go far enough.21 Yet this is not a simple act. It is an ongoing, sometimes lifelong process, which Bloom outlines in six steps he calls revisionary ratios. He characterizes the journey through these steps as an intense Freudian struggle between the poet and his precursor, a battle between strong equals,

Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry, 2nd ed (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 25-26. 18 When speaking of a singular generic artist or poet, I will use the masculine pronoun, since it is mainly male poets and artists who are canonized, and who are being referenced by Bloom, and by Bidlo and Sherrie Levines appropriations. It is also appropriate given that the Oedipal metaphorthe struggle between artistic fathers and sonsis a masculine one. Whether a male artist can experience that anxiety towards a female precursor, or a female artist towards a male one, will be discussed in detail in the section comparing gender critique in Levines and Bidlos art. 19 Ibid., 29. He quotes Young, who says that the great masters engross our attention, and so prevent a due inspection of ourselves; they prejudice our judgment in favor of their abilities, and so lessen the sense of our own; and they intimidate us with this splendor of their renown. Edward Young, Conjectures on original composition, quoted in Bloom, Anxiety of Influence, 27. 20 Ibid., 31, 30. 21 Ibid., 14.

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father and son as mighty opposites, Laius and Oedipus at the crossroads.22 It is only by completing all six steps of the struggle that a poet may emerge as what Bloom calls a strong poet, one who has overcome the anxiety of influence and become a great master in his own right because of it. The point of Blooms theory, particularly based as it is in Freudian psychoanalysis, is that the anxiety of influence acts subconsciously. The artist is not explicitly aware of the anxiety that artistic influence causes him and the effect that it has on his art. The poet or artist cannot help but be influenced, and thus imitates the work of his precursor, but cannot openly face this fact, for what strong maker desires the realization that he has failed to create himself? 23 The artist will most likely vehemently deny any such influence, as it is the need to be original, to become ones own artistic father, to beget oneselfand the impossibility of doing so, of acting without the influence of ones precursorsthat causes such anxiety.24 Rosalind Krausss essay, The Originality of the Avant-Garde, serves as an artistic equivalent to Blooms poetic theory.25 She points out the ways that modernist artists have used the grid to generate painting styles that they consider completely original, despite the fact that it is a form as old as time, and one that had been previously discovered by multiple generations of modernists. Once committed to the grid, the modernist artist will subsequently repeat it ad infinitum, creating no new forms in his art and thus terminating his originality. Krausss point is that originality, the allconsuming aspiration of modernism, never truly exists, or if it does, must come hand in hand with its much maligned opposite, repetition. Her concluding example (and a primary example of all postmodern theorists in the 1980s) is the appropriation art of Sherrie Levine. Levines re-photographs of Edward Weston point to not only Levines own lack of originality, but Westons as well, his photographs already a repetition of his

Ibid., 11. Bloom, Anxiety of Influence, 5 24 A poem is a poets melancholy at his lack of priority. The failure to have begotten oneself is not the cause of the poem, for poems arise out of the illusion of freedom, out of a sense of priority being possible. But the poemunlike the mind in creationis a made thing, and as such is an achieved anxiety. Bloom, Anxiety of Influence, 96. 25 The remainder of this paragraph based on Rosalind Krauss, The Originality of the Avant-Garde, in The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985), 151-170.
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sons body, and furthermore of male nudes throughout art history, going back to the kouroi of ancient Greece. Just as Krauss makes the point that Levines work is a perfect illustration of the thesis of her essaythat the originality of the avant-garde is a modernist mythI propose that Bidlos artwork is an illustration of Blooms theory of the anxiety of influence. This is not to say merely that Bidlo is affected by the anxiety of influence; if Blooms theory holds, then all artists, like all poets, are thus affected. Rather, Bidlos art makes that anxiety explicit instead of implicit. Though the anxiety of influence acts largely subconsciously, knowledge of Freuds theories made it possible for artists to become aware of its mechanisms, and to make work about them, as Bidlo does. In fact, one instance of Bidlos illustration of the anxiety of influence is his appropriation of another artists deliberately Oedipal gesture: Robert Rauschenbergs Erased de Kooning Drawing, 1953 (Fig. 5). In order to recreate this infamous act, Bidlo faithfully copied sixteen de Kooning drawings of women, an iconic subject matter for that artist, and then just as faithfully and painstakingly erased them, as Rauschenberg had before him (Fig. 6). Bidlo then framed and labeled the nearly blank pieces of paper, visually mimicking Rauschenbergs work by using similar white mats, gold-leafed frames and labels in a non-serif all-caps font. Rauschenbergs label read: ERASED de KOONING DRAWING / ROBERT RAUSCHENBERG / 1953. Bidlos read: NOT ROBERT RAUSCHENBERG / ERASED de KOONING DRAWING / MIKE BIDLO / 2005 (Fig. 7). Bidlos project was exhibited at Francis M. Naumann Fine Art, along with photographs of Bidlos de Kooning drawings before he erased them. Bidlo displayed the leftover eraser debris in bell jars on pedestals on either side of a fireplace, like the cremated ashes of a loved one (Fig. 8). The loved one who was killed and memorialized by Bidlos act was, of course, the artistic father, or in this case two artistic fathersde Kooning and Rauschenberg. In recounting Rauschenberg and de Koonings encounter, Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan wrote that, the young artist was engaged in a symbolic act of generational and Oedipal murder, at once comic and deadly serious. He was ridding

himself of a burdensome father.26 Robert Rosenblum called Rauschenbergs original act a landmark moment in the story of the young Rauschenbergs patricidal rebellion that would release a new generation from the oppressively weighty tradition of Abstract Expressionism.27 If this is so, then Bidlos appropriation is both an homage to this iconic act and his own patricidal rebellion against it. Rauschenbergs action was revolutionary, not only for its rebelliousness, but for its significance to the changing practices of art. Similar as Bidlos project is to Rauschenbergsthe erasure, literal or figurative, of a master artist through appropriationBidlo must lament Rauschenbergs priority, the fact that the precursor beat the newcomer to this breakthrough, fifty years earlier. Both Bidlo and Rauschenberg make work about their anxiety of influence, and by extension, about its workings in general. The anxiety of influence is exemplified not solely by conceptual actions, such as those of Rauschenberg and Bidlo. Bidlos more straightforward copies of famous paintings also betray an anxiety of influence, in the form of an inability to move past his artistic forbears. The imitation of artists that came before is not unique to appropriation art. Norman Bryson, who adopts Blooms anxiety of influence for his study of Neoclassical painting, cites an example in which a nude torso in Delacroixs Dante and Vergil crossing the Styx resembles both the Belvedere Torso and a figure from Michelangelos Sistine Chapel ceiling fresco.28 But unlike Delacroix or other historical artists affected by the anxiety of influence, Bidlo does not merely make oblique reference to a precursor painting in an otherwise original composition. Rather, he copies wholecloth the paintings of modern masters like Picasso, Cezanne, Matisse, Kandinsky, Lger, and many more, duplicating the entire composition, in the same size and, whenever possible, the same material as the original. He copies from reproductions, however, which can result in a loss of detail or change in color, perhaps a commentary on the way we mainly remember, and misremember, great artworks through their reproductions. Bidlo otherwise refuses to fragment or disguise the influence of the artists he admires,
Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan, De Kooning: An American Master (New York, A.A. Knopf, 2004), 359. 27 Robert Rosenblum, Something Out of Nothing Out of Something: Mike Bidlos Erased de Kooning Drawings, in Mike Bidlo: Erased de Kooning Drawings by Francis M. Naumann Fine Art (New York: Francis M. Naumann Fine Art, 2005), 7. 28 Norman Bryson, Tradition and Desire: From David to Delacroix (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 1.
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thereby reversing and so highlighting the way artists have historically attempted to suppress evidence of the influence of their forbears.29 This exposure of the anxiety of influence by refusing to hide it is analogous to Levines technique of exposing modernisms lack of originality by refusing to attempt to be original herself. According to Bloom, this would make Bidlo a weak, rather than a strong artist. Like Schjeldahl, Bloom would most likely dismiss Bidlos work as postmodern pasticheart that is clever, perhaps, but inferior nonetheless. Bloom claims, My concern is only with strong poets, major figures with the persistence to wrestle with their strong precursors, even to the death. Weaker talents idealize; figures of capable imagination appropriate for themselves.30 Blooms sense of the word appropriate is distinct from Bidlos. Blooms poet adopts certain aspects of the artistic father, only to so misread them as to be unrecognizableexcept to the trained criticas belonging to the precursor. What was appropriated must be distorted so as to appear to belong uniquely to the newcomer. Since Bidlo has succumbed to influence, rather than denying it or struggling against it, he has failed to complete the process of misprision, to go through all six of Blooms revisionary ratios that would make the work the newcomers own, rather than just an imitation. Bloom makes quite clear that the influence he writes of is not just an imitation of style: Poetic influence, in the sense I give to it, has almost nothing to do with the verbal resemblances between one poet and another Poets need not look like their fathers, and the anxiety of influence more frequently than not is quite distinct from the anxiety of style. Since poetic influence is necessarily misprision, a taking or doing amiss of ones burden, it is to be expected that such a process of malformation and misinterpretation will, at the very least, produce deviations in style between strong poets.31 Bloom disapproves of literal copying like Bidlos because he is, in the art historical sense, a modernist: he is still concerned with originality, and sees the anxiety of influence as a necessary path towards it.32 Yet Bloom proposes that each poem uses six rhetorical
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As Bryson says of Delacroixs imitation, the finally minor role of the Torso or the Sistine ceiling, may be the outcome of a massive effort to overcome the weight and the authority of Antiquity, of Michelangelo. Bryson, Tradition and Desire, 6. 30 Bloom, Anxiety of Influence, 5. 31 Harold Bloom, A Map of Misreading (New York : Oxford University Press, 1975), 19-20. 32 poetic influence need not make poets less original; as often it makes them more original, though not therefore necessarily better. Bloom, Anxiety of Influence, 7.

devices in relation to a precursor poemirony, synecdoche, metonymy, hyperbole, metaphor, and metalepsiseach trope correlating exactly to each stage of the anxiety of influence.33 In this map of misreading, Bloom succumbs to the overly technical practice of source studythe search for a literal relation between two poemsthat he had warned critics against.34 Nonetheless, if we were to find equivalent tropes in art history thatlike Blooms rhetorical deviceswere used in response to the anxiety of influence, appropriation as an allegorical device would most certainly be one. In The Allegorical Impulse, Craig Owens lists appropriation as the first among several postmodern techniques that constitute the return of the allegorical impulse.35 In fact, Owens mentions Blooms anxiety of influence as an example of this return. As an allegorical technique, Bidlos appropriation is itself a rhetorical device used in response to the anxiety of influence. The result is something nearly identical to the precursors art, but it is not a mere imitation. Owens points out that the allegorical artist who appropriates images rather than invents them, does not restore an original meaning rather, he adds another meaning to the image. If he adds he does so only to replace: the allegorical meaning supplants an antecedent one; it is a supplementIt takes the place of an earlier meaning, which is thereby either effaced or obscured.36 In appropriation art, the meaning of the original image is emptied out, in favor of a supplemental meaning that the allegorical artist adds through their act of appropriation. It is this added or replaced meaning that can be the misreading or misprision of the original work. Bidlo has said that his appropriation art doesnt offer new information per se but reprocesses it in a new context. It changes its very meaning and draws out aspects of the model that would otherwise not be apparent except through the critical process of appropriation.37 Appropriation as a critical process, as drawing out meanings in the original work that were previously hidden or ignored, is akin to an antithetical

Bloom, Map of Misreading, 70, 84. The profundities of poetic influence cannot be reduced to source-study, to the history of ideas, to the patterning of images. Poetic influence, or as I shall more frequently term it, poetic misprision, is necessarily the study of the life-cycle of the poet-as-poet. Bloom, Anxiety of Influence, 7. 35 References in this paragraph to Craig Owens, The Allegorical Impulse: Toward a Theory of Postmodernism, in Beyond Recognition: Representation, Power, and Culture, ed. Scott Bryson et al (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 52-69. 36 Ibid., 54, 64. 37 In Dialogue, 55.
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completion, a misreading of the precursor. For example, in the Fountain Drawings, Bidlo sees himself as bringing a symbolist aspect to the piece that I think was always implied but never really acknowledged by Duchamp himself, by discovering primal imagery, such as mandalas, stupas, Buddha, the Virgin Mary, and male and female genitalia, through the free association of drawing.38 Bidlo is suggesting that there is a great deal of meaning to be found that the original artist himself never explicitly intended or revealed. Duchamp failed to go far enough, and so Bidlo takes it upon itself to correct his precursor. Yet Bidlos misprision of his predecessors goes beyond a mere hunt for errant symbolism. Bidlo not only makes copies of the canons most memorable modern artworks, but also often reenacts their creation, with attention to details such as material, process, the body, dress, and persona of the artist, and how long the original artwork took. For example, Bidlo performed the painting of Pablo Picassos Guernica in the windows of Larry Gagosians gallery in Los Angeles in 1984, emphasizing that this project was less about the finished product than about the act of painting it in a space visible to passers-by, thereby highlighting the public nature of political mural painting.39 As an indication of Bidlos conscious replication of the original artists process, he stresses that the project took him four weeksabout the same time it took Picasso.40A similar echoing of time and process comes up in Bidlos recreation of Andy Warhols Brillo Boxes in 2005. Bidlo referenced Warhols Factory, in which a group reproduces identical objects under the direction of an artist, by teaching a printmaking class at Rutgers University how to screen-print Brillo Boxes (Fig. 9). As with the Picasso mural, Bidlo emphasizes that it took them about the same amount of time as it took Warhols team.41 Through the performance of the original artists practice, Bidlo highlights not only the formal aspects of the artwork, but the external conditions that elevated it to the level of masterpiece. For example, as will be discussed in greater detail later, his performances, paintings and installations about Jackson Pollock and Andy Warhol reveal
In Dialogue, 19, 38, 39. Bidlo talks to Rosenblum, 192. 40 Ibid. 41 Asked & Answered: Mike Bidlo, interview by Nadine Rubin Nathan, T Magazine, July 2, 2010, accessed March 14, 2011, http://tmagazine.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/07/02/asked-answered-mike-bidlo/
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that it is the mythology surrounding the artists, as much as their art, that canonizes them. By changing our perception of what caused modern masterpieces to enter the art historical canon, thus subverting or critiquing widely accepted narratives, Bidlo demonstrates to the viewer, and moreover to himself that categorization as masterpiece is not inherent in an artwork but imposed from without. His appropriation is thus a creative correction to the original that allows him to paradoxically escape the overwhelming influence of the precursor he copies, by finding fault with his historicallybestowed greatness, bringing the exalted back to earth. Bidlo once spoke of his art in terms of demystification and empowerment.42 Demystification is Bidlos deconstruction of the canon, his removal of famous artworks from their elevated pedestals. This empowers him to make art in the face of the intimidating reputations of the artists enshrined by the canon. Bloom identifies this kind of personal revisionist impulse as a necessary drive to achieve creativity despite the anxiety of influence. This is distinct from an academic policy of revisionism, a discourse that critiques the teaching of a canona policy that Bloom disavows. It is easy to see how the anxiety of influence is based on the existence of a Western canon. Simply the list of names Bloom cites as examples of the poetic anxiety of influenceMilton, Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, Tennyson, et ceteraare enough to demonstrate this, as is his emphasis on strong, i.e. great, poets. It is the canon, the enshrining of certain artists and artworks as great, that causes the anxiety of influence. Bidlos project, recreating those modern masterpieces of the canon most likely to be sources for the anxiety of influence, illustrates how those canonical masters exert influence on not just him but on all artists. In fact, many of Bidlos appropriated artists have exerted the anxiety of influence on each other. It is the attempt to overcome that influence that produces the next phase, the next movement, the next innovation in art, most especially in the history of modernism, which is Bidlos focus. Accordingly, Bidlos art is an illustration of not just his own anxiety of influence but its workings in art history in generalhow it in fact contributes to the making of art history. Bidlo not only participates in the lineage that the anxiety of influence creates; he illustrates it, making

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Bidlo, Steal that Painting!, 194.

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apparent the fact that the anxiety of influence has been one of the driving forces of modern art history. The author of a book titled The Western Canon, Bloom truly believes in a set of objectively Great Books that form the backbone of Western literary tradition. Bloom includes four women and two Latin American men among his list of 26 canonical authors in The Western Canon; all the rest are white men from Western Europe. The anxiety of influence, an Oedipal neurosis that is therefore seen primarily to affect sons in relation to fathers, works to perpetuate this overwhelmingly white male canon. Bloom even provides the cryptic, and perhaps disparaging, prophesy, that, the first true break with literary continuity will be brought about in generations to come, if the burgeoning religion of Liberated Woman spreads from its clusters of enthusiasts to dominate the West. Homer will cease to be the inevitable precursor, and the rhetoric and forms of our literature then may break at last from tradition.43 Yet Bloom is not optimistic about this inevitability. He is disturbingly antagonistic towards the attempt by a group he calls the School of Resentment to expand the canon to include female writers, writers of color, and writers from outside Europe and America.44 Bloom believes this would admit works of inferior quality and importance. Blooms stance on the canon, contrary to the revisionists he critiques so harshly, is that it should exist and should not be revised. So where does Bidlo stand? As stated above, Bidlos work is to a certain extent canon critique, but is also reverential. He copies artists he loves, artists who hold a certain exalted position in the modern art canon, but he picks apart the reasons they attained that position, sometimes revealing their canonization as largely the result of their persona and not their art. Does this mean Bidlo believes their canonization was not justified, or that there should be no canon? It would seem not, as based on his reaction to Rosenblums questioning of his copies of Giorgio Morandi, the least iconic artist in his oeuvre: I wanted to reevaluate Morandi because he deserves to be included in the pantheon For me his images are just as iconic as Warhols or Pollocks.45 In this case, he clearly does not aim to destroy the canon, but to add to it an artist he believes is deserving. This
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Bloom, Map of Misreading, 33. The School of Resentment includes Marxists, feminists, African American Studies scholars, New Historicists, and poststructuralists. Harold Bloom, The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1994). 45 Bidlo talks to Rosenblum, 193.

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presumes the canonical artists he copies are also deserving, that there is no inherent problem with the canon except for the exclusion of certain artists that Bidlo likes. Do Bidlos attempts to revise the canon extend to those excluded from it on the basis of their gender, race or sexuality? As Morandi is the only example of Bidlos revisionism, it is hard to say. He has never appropriated an artist of color. The only female artist he has appropriated is Georgia OKeeffe.46 In the case of Sherrie Levines appropriations of all male artists, it is recognized that it is the very condition of the canon being nearly-all-male that she comments on.47 That interpretation is based on her statements to that effect, but also comes somewhat automatically because Levine is female. Could it be said that Bidlo makes the same comment on the male canon? Or does his gender prevent him from accessing this critique? It does not, but because he is male he would have to make this critique far more explicit to be read; it is not inferred automatically in his work as it is, for better or worse, in the work of a female artist like Levine.48 Since neither Bidlo nor his supporters have ever mentioned the fact that he nearly always appropriates male artists, it would seem that Bidlo does not consider this an important concern. Aware as I am of the problematic aspects of the anxiety of influence and the canon from which it derives, I must clarify that my focus on the anxiety of influence is not meant to argue that art or literature must always proceed in such a way, only that thus far it seems it always has, and that is the lineage Bidlos art illustrates. Since the 1980s, and in part because of the pointed critique in the art of Levine and others, the canon has started to expand to include more historical artists who are not male or white, and certainly the contemporary art world has made enormous leaps forward in diversity. Yet it does not seem that Bidlos work has progressed to accommodate these developments.
I have found one other possible exception: in a 1985 studio photograph, next to a copies of Duchamps bicycle wheel and Man Rays Object to be Destroyed, 1923, Bidlo has a cup, saucer and spoon arranged just like Meret Oppenheims Object (Le Djeuner en fourrure), 1936. It does not seem complete however; it is not fully covered in fur. Photograph in: Edition Gallery Bruno Bischofberger, Mike Bidlo: Masterpieces (Zurich: Edition Gallery Bruno Bischofberger, 1989), unpaginated. 47 A lot has been made of the fact that many of the artists you appropriate, in fact all, are men. I guess this is for a number of reasons. One is you choose well-known, iconic figures from the history of modern art, most of whom happen to be men, and secondly, you are commenting on that very condition. Constance Lewallen, Interview of Sherrie Levine, Journal of Contemporary Art 6 no. 2 (Winter 1993): 68. 48 [I]f the invoked artist is not perceived as socially and/or culturally other, he or she has but limited access to this transformative alterity; if he or she is perceived as other, he or she has automatic access to it. Hal Foster, The Artist as Ethnographer, in The Return of the Real (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), 173.
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Part of the difficulty is his fading from the public eye; he has not shown new work in a solo exhibition since 2005. Some of his most recent works depict female genitalia, as in Origins of the World (Courbet/Klein), 2007, which appears to be the imprint of a womans vulva and upper thighs, made with black acrylic paint on paper (Fig. 10). The images title and content make reference to Gustave Courbets Origin of the World, 1866, an erotic close-up of the same subject matter, and Yves Kleins Anthropometries, the 1960 performance and paintings in which the artist directed nude women to slather themselves in blue paint and press themselves against a canvas (and which Bidlo recreated in the 1980s). I have difficulty deciphering Bidlos intention with these paintings. I am slightly disturbed that Bidlos representation of the female form proceeds from the appropriation of artworks by male artists who objectified the female body. Yet, as I will explain in greater detail, Bidlos work often critiques the aggressive masculinity of many modern masters; certainly an aspect of this masculinity would be the objectification of women, and so these paintings could be considered another aspect of that satire. Certainly Bidlos style has shifted away from direct copying towards more oblique appropriations, as in Origins of the World and the Fountain Drawings; yet he continually revisits the same artists he has long appropriated: the male masters of modernism.

The Anxiety of Influence and Art History I have described the anxiety of influence as an impulse, one that exists within most, if not all, artists, poets and other creators. I would like, however, to also explore the anxiety of influence as a force that not only acts on art history through the actions of artists, but is read as a part of the narrative of art history, as told by art historians. A certain lineage of the Western art historical canon, despite attempts to revise its hierarchical mode of thinking, still dominates our conception of art history. Whether or not we acknowledge it as such, we often conceive of this lineage as proceeding via the anxiety of influence, with each artist or movement attempting to both adopt and improve uponto misreadthe achievements of predecessors for the sake of advancing the Western tradition. The anxiety of influence is of course just one among many ways of

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interpreting art history, and it is indeed one that privileges a hierarchical, narrative flow that focuses on white, straight, male artiststhe fathers and sons of Blooms theory. Nonetheless, the anxiety of influence has been productive for some art historians, who have applied it to various historical periods and styles. I will summarize a few examples of the anxiety of influence in art historical texts and references, in order to demonstrate its widespread use in art history, and to bring up terms and ideas that can be useful in its application to appropriation art. I will then go on to demonstrate that Mike Bidlo illustrates the effect the anxiety of influence has had on our conception of modern art history. It is a fact of the history, theory and criticism of various arts in the twentieth centurythe visual arts, literature, music, theater, dancethat the same methodologies can be applied within these fields otherwise isolated from each other in the academy. The methodologies that have been so universally applied throughout the arts come from other academic disciplines in the humanities: philosophy, linguistics, psychology, and sociology. It is perhaps more rare that a theory introduced within just of one these arts, such as literature, comes to be applied to another, such as visual art. Such is the case with Harold Blooms Anxiety of Influence, written as a theory to be applied exclusively to poetry. Its relevance to other arts, particularly visual art, was soon recognized. The reasons are twofold. Firstly, Blooms theory was based largely on Freudian psychoanalysis, whose application was already in use in the visual arts as well as in literature. Secondly, Blooms anxiety of influence represented the naming of a neurosis (again, based in psychoanalysis) that affects all human beings; as he argued, it afflicted poets more acutely than others, but then so could it be said to afflict artistsindeed, anyone involved in creative productionjust as acutely.49 I will highlight a few key texts and art historical moments, but to trace every instance of the application of the anxiety of influence in art history would be a tedious and futile task. This is even truer if we want to trace the genesis of the phenomenon itself, before it was named by Harold Bloom or even by Sigmund Freud. Once again, fundamental as it is to human nature, the influence of our predecessors must have always affected creative output in some way, and so art historians have detected influence in
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Bloom, Anxiety of Influence, 10.

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artists work since the beginning of art critical writing. Norman Bryson points out key moments of the anxiety of influence in art history, such as Plinys anecdotes of ancient Greek artists attempting to surpass each other in their accurate depiction of nature, or Giorgio Vasaris biographies illustrating a narrative of progress from artist to artist.50 Vasari in fact is a key figure, both for his influential conception of art history as progress, and for the artistic moment he represents, and its significance in terms of the anxiety of influence. As Barry Schwabsky, in his interview of Harold Bloom for FlashArt, points out: one canonical beginning for modern art criticism would be Vasaris Lives, and its interesting that that happens at precisely the moment of Mannerism, when the question of belatedness with regard to the achievements of the High Renaissance becomes pressing.51 Indeed, Vasari declared Michelangelo the apotheosis of artistic perfection, and recommended that all artists strive to learn from his example, stressing his own relationship to the master as both a student and a trusted friend.52 The narrative Vasari the art historian constructs of the progression of painting from Cimabue and Giotto to Michelangelo promoted the idea of art as progress, and therefore the need for each artist to be new, to be better than his precursors. However, for Vasari, Michelangelos achievement of perfection made the future uncertain; what could possibly be done next?53 Surely we could not say this was the beginning of the anxiety of influence exerting itself in art, but this was perhaps a turning point, after which the anxiety of influence in art experienced a new stage of potency. The eighteenth-century art historian Luigi Lanzi named Vasari, as a painter, the chief author of a decline in art that Lanzi was the first to label Mannerism, though seventeenth-century art historians had noted the same phenomenon, describing it with the term maniera (style, a term used by Vasari himself).54 According to Lanzi, Mannerism

Bryson, Tradition and Desire, 7-9. Harold Bloom, interview by Barry Schwabsky, FlashArt 143 (November/December 1988): 66. 52 Giorgio Vasari, Michelagnolo Buonarroti, Painter, Sculptor, and Architect of Florence, in Lives of the Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, trans. Gaston du C. de Vere (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996), 642, 747. 53 Bryson, Tradition and Desire, 9. 54 Michael Bury, "Mannerism," in The Oxford Companion to Western Art, ed. Hugh Brigstocke, Oxford Art Online, http://www.oxfordartonline.com/subscriber/article/opr/t118/e1583 (accessed November 11, 2011).
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arose through the over-idealization, and therefore imitation, of one great master: Michelangelo in Florence, Raphael in Rome, Tintoretto in Venice.55 Yet this art of influence represented a decline because only select qualities of the masters art would be imitated, hence the new art demonstrated a misunderstanding, an incomplete interpretation. In other words, he attributes Mannerisms perversion of High Renaissance ideals to a kind of ignorance, in the sense of both a lack of knowledge and a stupiditya misunderstanding that is clumsy, not willful. He does not consider that this misunderstanding, or rather, misreading or misprision, might be intentional (consciously or unconsciously), that they might have taken and exaggerated some aspects of Michelangelos style, while leaving others, in an interpretive departure from their imposing forbear. Of course, Lanzi does not consider that Michelangelos followers could have been simultaneously motivated by aggression as well as admiration, by the ambivalent antagonism towards the father that would only come to be understood with the advent of psychoanalysis. Nonetheless, this example demonstrates that the anxiety of influence existed not only in the art that predated Freud, but the art historical analysis as well. In fact, Harold Bloom adopts an ancient Greek term, agon, in association with the anxiety of influence. In ancient Greece, agon meant a literal athletic or artistic contest or competition, as in the Olympic Games or music or theater festivals; it also came to refer to the formal convention of a debate between two characters in a drama (the protagonist and the antagonist).56 Bloom reinterprets the term in The Western Canon to be something closer to the anxiety of influence, and uses the word as the title of one of many follow-up books to The Anxiety of Influence.57 Though he never explicitly defines his usage of the term, it quite clearly refers to the struggle between a writer and his literary precursor, as in the title of a chapter about such a struggle, Joyces Agon with Shakespeare.58

References in the rest of this paragraph to Luigi Lanzi, The history of painting in Italy: from the period of the revival of the fine arts to the end of the eighteenth century, trans. Thomas Roscoe (London: Henry G. Bohn, 1852), 1:176-177. 56 Dictionary.com, s.v. agon, accessed November 11, 2011, http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/agon. 57 Bloom, Western Canon, 185-186. Harold Bloom, Agon: Towards a Theory of Revisionism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982). 58 Bloom, Western Canon, 413-432. Perhaps the closest thing to a definition of agon that Bloom proposes: The spirit portrays itself as agonistic, as contesting for supremacy, with other spirits, with anteriority, and finally with every earlier version of itself. Bloom, Agon, viii.

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Rona Goffen adopts Blooms use of agon and its relation to the anxiety of influence in her book about rivalry among artists during the High Renaissance. According to Goffen, agon is an opposition or confrontation to surpass ones rival.59 She notes that this is also caught up in imitation: perhaps rivalry is inherent in imitatio; certainly imitatio is inherent in rivalry. Once poetry and the ancient works it may describe are taken as models to be imitated, they become challenges to be surpassed.60 Renaissance artists agon with their contemporaries, as well as with antiquity, often took the form of a borrowing or repetition of motifs, no longer merely quotation or the observance of tradition, but a possibly combative or hostile declaration of rivalry.61 Even in the Renaissance, as in appropriation art, imitation could be not only a form of homage but an agonistic gesture, meant to surpass the rival by improving on their model. Just as the newcomer in Blooms theory reworks the precursors text in order to complete it, Renaissance artists appropriated motifs from their contemporaries in order to prove that they could do better. Goffen professes her debt to Blooms Anxiety of Influence in the acknowledgments of her second edition, but not the first, perhaps suggesting that she was so familiar with the term and idea, that she used it in her first edition without being explicitly aware of Blooms authorship of the concept.62 This would speak to the prevalence of the anxiety of influence within art history, for Goffens book is only one of many examples of art historians application of the idea to their scholarship. The anxiety of influence is used so frequently in the field that it often appears in reference books dedicated to terms and concepts in art history. The Anxiety of Influence is cited as further reading for the concept of influence in Jonathan Harriss Art History: The Key Concepts, and Harris explains the concept in his entry on originality.63 In the anthology Critical Terms for Art History, edited by Robert S. Nelson and Richard Shiff, Stephen Bann quotes Bloom on the relationships between texts in his essay on

Rona Goffen, Renaissance Rivals: Michelangelo, Leonardo, Raphael, Titian (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), 3. 60 Ibid. 61 Ibid., 26 62 She uses the phrase, anxiety of influence, a few times throughout the book, and even makes a Freudian comparison of the childhoods of Raphael and Michelangelo to explain their differing attitudes towards the anxiety of influence (the former accepting and appreciative, the latter resentful and antagonistic) Goffen, Renaissance Rivals, 172-173. 63 Jonathan P. Harris, Art History: The Key Concepts (New York: Routledge, 2006), 162-163, 224.

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Meaning/Interpretation, and Shiff cites The Anxiety of Influence as further reading for the essay on Originality.64 In two texts I found, the anxiety of influence had its own entry. Part of a series of dictionaries on various topics published in India, the Academic Dictionary of Arts includes a 120-word entry on the anxiety of influence, with a brief summary of Blooms theory, its relation to Freud, and a few examples of its application in art history.65 In Anne DAllevas Methods & Theories of Art History, in which the author attempts to present a digestible primer in methodology for the beginner art history student, Blooms anxiety of influence gets its own sidebar entry within the chapter on Psychology and Perception in Art. To demonstrate its potential use as a methodological tool, DAlleva uses the anxiety of influence as the basis for a sample essay question that examines Yasumasa Morimuras appropriation of Edouard Manets Olympia, demonstrating the artists indebtedness to both Manet and Cindy Sherman.66 Bann, the Indian dictionary and DAlleva all cite Norman Brysons Tradition and Desire: From David to Delacroix as a primary example of the application of Blooms theory in art history. I have already cited some passages from Brysons text, including an example of Delacroixs imitation of antiquity and Michelangelo (see page 7) and the evidence of the anxiety of influence in art histories narrated by Pliny and Vasari (see page 15). In essence, Brysons proposition about painters and viewers is the same as Blooms proposition about poets and readers: to the painter it may well seem that the tradition has grown too wealthy to need anything further the painter is condemned to work within a tradition which may already have said everything he has to say. And though the viewer who loves painting will properly seek to be flooded by the images of the past, if the painter yields to the same desire he risks disaster, for in that flood his own images may drown: if he yields to that invasion he will cease to be who and what he is, a painter, and become the being he must always fight to overcome, that is, only a viewer.67

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Steven Bann, Meaning/Interpretation, and Richard Shiff, Originality, in Critical Terms for Art History, ed. Robert S. Nelson and Richard Shiff, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 135, 142 , 158. 65 Ramesh Chopra, Academic Dictionary of Arts (Delhi: Isha Books, 2005), 36. 66 Anne DAlleva, Methods & Theories of Art History (London, Laurence King, 2005), 110, 118. 67 Bryson, Tradition and Desire, 4-5.

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Brysons main departure from Bloom is that his analysis is based less on Freudian psychoanalysisthe Oedipal competition with the precursor artist as imposing father figurebut on semiotics, on the recognition and repetition of signs. 68 Western representational art, the tradition he calls Zeuxian painting after legendary ancient Greek artist Zeuxis, is meant to portray the artists unique vision of nature. Yet even if he paints a landscape that has never before been painted, the artist wants his audience to recognize his subject, and is therefore dependent on a preexisting language of signs already in common usage. The artist must use signifiers that refer, not only to nature, but to the history of how nature has been portrayed in painting. Thus the subject of a representational painting is, always and inevitably, other paintings. Bryson theorizes Neo-Classical painters as the most acutely affected by the anxiety of influence because their goal was supposed to be the repetition of tradition, which negates the right to war with tradition at all.69 So the artist is doubly stifled by influence, forbidden to use the creative deformation that would allow him to make this tradition his own. Brysons focus is on how David, Ingres, and Delacroix attempted to overcome that barrier, by discovering subversive stratagems with which to outman uvre the premises of Neoclassicism.70 As Bloom, Bryson and others demonstrate, it was not always considered anathema to be influenced by ones predecessors. In literature, Bloom cites the example of Renaissance playwright Ben Jonson, who valued the choice and imitation of a worthy predecessor, thus for him influence was not an anxiety but a healthy artistic impulse.71 In art, Bryson uses the examples of the schema in E.H. Gombrichs Art and Illusion, and the importance of copying the Old Masters as preached by Sir Joshua Reynolds at the

Ibid., 20-23. Ibid., 28-29 70 Ibid., 31. 71 Ben Jonson still sees influence as health. Of imitation, he says he means: to be able to convert the substance or riches of another poet to his own use. To make choice of one excellent man above the rest, and so to follow him till he grow very he, or so like him as the copy may be mistaken for the original. So Ben Jonson has no anxiety as to imitation, for to him (refreshingly) art is hard work. But the shadow fell, and with the post-Enlightenment passion for Genius and Sublime, there came anxiety too, for art was beyond hard work. Bloom, Anxiety of Influence, 27. He later revises the idea that the anxiety of influence was not a problem for Renaissance figures, citing Shakespeares anxiety towards Christopher Marlowe. Bloom, Preface: The Anguish of Contamination, in Anxiety of Influence, xi-xlvii.
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Royal Academy.72 To these figures, copying was a shortcut to previous advances in art. Rather than starting from scratch, each student could learn the visual solutions previously discovered in the pursuit to imitate nature. Once those techniques were mastered, the artist was freed from having to rediscover these solutions for himself, and could move on to whatever unique contribution he would make to arts tradition. Bryson points out that this optimistic model of influence is not free from anxiety, since it inevitably leads to the question that most induces that anxiety in an artist: what is left to be done? If it is true that the anxiety of influence could, as Bloom suggests, be less pervasive when imitation was commonplace and even encouraged, then that anxiety must have experienced a significant increase in potency with the advent of modernism. With the importance within modernism of the cult of originality, fine art education ceased its emphasis and reliance on copying. From then on, to appear to be copying, or even to be influenced by, a predecessor would disqualify an artist from greatness. To be a true master of modernism was to invent; more specifically, it was to invent a new stylistic idiom, proposed in answer to some challenge suggested by the modernist projectfor example, flatness, as championed by Clement Greenberg, though this was not the only project modernism set itself. As both Bloom and Krauss pointed out, modernism made it necessary for artists and writers to (appear to) be originalto be not only their own starting point but the starting point of all to follow.73 As Bloom points out in the case of literature, the anxiety of influence became more acute in American poetry after Ralph Waldo Emersons polemic against the very idea of influence, his insistence that going alone must mean refusing even the good models, and so entails reading primarily as an inventor.74 This kind of rhetoric of originality makes the anxiety of influence more severe, since an artist cannot help but be influenced, and yet must psychically deny that he is, and so do all he can in his art to appear not to be. If we were to find a similar moment in American art history we might look to New York in the 1940s, when Abstract Expressionist artists became the new torchbearers of advanced art, wresting that designation from war-torn Europe by attempting to

Bryson, Tradition and Desire, 13-14. Bloom, Anxiety of Influence. Krauss, Originality of the Avant-Garde. 74 Bloom, Map of Misreading, 24.
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generate an avant-garde that was distinctly American.75 As we have seen from the art history I have illustrated so far, the importance of originality in art did not belong exclusively to modernism. As Bryson demonstrated, the challenge to Neo-Classicist and other Zeuxian painters was how to make something new and powerful out of the preexisting repertoire of Western art. In contrast, modernists were searching for, a literal origin, a beginning from ground zero, a birth.76 Their goal was not to create the new based on what already existed, but to create the new in complete opposition to what already existed. Instead of adding to the history of Western imagery, they attempted to efface any reference to it. As Krauss demonstrates, this is something they ultimately failed at, a project that is in fact impossible. Nonetheless, it was the driving force of avant-garde art practice for most of the twentieth-century. As such, it generated an anxiety of influence towards not only artists more distant forbears in the Zeuxian tradition, but to their more immediate predecessors and contemporaries. Though modern artists clearly were influenced by each other, they often registered that influence through interpretive departures or misreadings. Though this narrative is not exclusive to American modernismKrauss cites F.T. Marinettis Futurist Manifesto as an example of the promotion of the importance of originalityI will focus on mainly the lineage of the postwar American avant-garde. Abstract Expressionism is considered a canonical beginning of that development; as such, subsequent artists looked to New York artists of the 1940s and 1950s as their forbears, the imposing presences with the power to provoke the anxiety of influence. In particular it is Jackson Pollock more than any other who has exerted influence on a great many artists who have come since. Mike Bidlos appropriations of Pollocks work highlight that fact, demonstrating the impact the anxiety of influence has had on the formation of postwar American art history.

Modern Art History, According to Mike Bidlo and the Anxiety of Influence Mike Bidlo appropriates the masters of modernism in such a way as to illuminate the anxiety of influence they exert, not only on him but also on each other. This is
Serge Guilbaut, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art: Abstract Expressionism, Freedom, and the Cold War, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983) 76 Krauss, Originality of the Avant-Garde, 157.
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particularly true of the first artist Bidlo appropriated, Jackson Pollock, an originary figure for postwar art in the United States, whose influence was felt in every major modernist movement, and continues to be felt today. Jeanne Siegel wrote a book on precisely this topic, titled Painting After Pollock: Structures of Influence, calling Pollock the paternal burden to which all painters (even all artists) of the Modern and Postmodern eras, as a rite of passage, must react.77 There is always the sense of Pollocks work having achieved something that made the previous tradition of painting an irrelevant one, and so it was to his work that artists must respond. Furthermore, it is Pollocks position as begetter, as the creator of a completely new visual language and way of making art, to which artists aspire.78 Pollock exerts a double anxiety of influence, due not only to the newcomers wish to be original and thus to escape the precursors influence, but his wish to be, like Pollock, the origin, to create something so new that everyone after cannot help but follow. Even Pollock himself was tortured by his inability to create anything new after his discovery of the drip techniquea torment to which many have attributed his premature death.79 The anxiety of creating or discovering the new occurs even in appropriation art in which the originality of imagery is immaterial. Instead the particular appropriation technique and the discursive commentary it provides (which constitutes the meaning added to the appropriated artwork, the creative misreading or misprision) becomes that which must be original. Obviously appropriation is a technique that has existed since Duchamps ready-mades, if not before, but each inheritor of that tradition, Warhol, Sturtevant, Bidlo and Levine, seeks a way to take the technique further than his or her predecessors did. Bidlo attempts to distinguish his art from others by saying, My work is perhaps an extreme example of this strain of art which references other art because it directly mirrors the image, scale, and materials of the original.80 Scholars like Howard Singerman have also attempted to distinguish between the style of Bidlos and Levines
Jeanne Siegel, Painting After Pollock: Structures of Influence (Amsterdam: G&B Arts, 1999), 4. I would say Pollocks originality or risktaking was an inspiration to all artists that followed Pollock, who went directly to the canvas with paint, eliminating that first step of making drawings or sketches, personified the singular original vision. Siegel, Painting After Pollock, 8-9. 79 Pollock was also subject to the anxiety of influence, particularly that of Pablo Picasso. See Jonathan Weinberg, Picasso in Pollock, in Ambition & Love in Modern American Art (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001). 80 Bidlo talks to Rosenblum, 193.
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appropriations, and to justify one (inevitably Levine) as somehow better than the otheras more original or more effective, at least within the realm of ideas.81 And so postmodernism reveals itself as just as concerned with originality, individualism and quality as modernism was, even if the meaning of those terms has shifted. Siegel examines Pollocks influence on a few major movements that followed: the Color Field painters, with Helen Frankenthaler foremost among them; the Neo-Dadaists Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg; Pop artists Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol; a suite of painters and sculptors from the sixties and seventies; and more.82 All these artists could be said to have enacted a misprision of Pollocks work, taking up certain aspects and extrapolating from them a new technique or style. Perhaps the first such example is Frankenthalers adoption of Pollocks pouring and working on the floor to create her staining technique. Frankenthaler, as a Pollock disciple, attempted to honor Pollocks contribution by taking his innovation even further than he himself did. Siegel quotes her as saying, His work simply seemed to resonate Of all the work of the first generation New York School that I was exposed to, Pollocks painting really made me want to investigate and understand his work and his methods. My concern was always where would one go from there?83 Indeed, Frankenthaler misreads Pollock by letting the chance action of the paint on raw canvas, rather than the artists diaristic gesture, determine the composition. This is somewhat critical of the idea of the Abstract Expressionist painting as an expression of the artists psyche; the stain painting is instead primarily an expression of gravity and capillary action. Most of the artists that Siegel lists take a more openly mocking stance towards Pollock. Johns use of expressionist brushwork over ubiquitous images like targets and flags and Rauschenbergs slopping of paint over a pillow and sheets in Bed, 1955, more explicitly parody Abstract Expressionisms gestural representation of the personal. Cy

Howard Singerman, Sherrie Levine: On Painting, RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics 46 Polemical Objects (Autumn 2004): 202-220. This will be addressed further in the following section. 82 Mike Bidlo is included for some reason in the chapter on 60s Pop artists Lichtenstein and Warhol, perhaps because of appropriations of Warhol as well as Pollock, and because of this chapters title: Pop Painting: Action as Content. Siegel, Painting After Pollock, 57-65 83 His work simply seemed to resonate Of all the work of the first generation New York School that I was exposed to, Pollocks painting really made me want to investigate and understand his work and his methods. My concern was always where would one go from there? Helen Frankenthaler, quoted in Siegel, Painting After Pollock, 40-41.

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Twombly transformed the heroic gesture of Pollocks all-over technique into the juvenile and aggressive scribble of a petulant boy. Lichtenstein and Warhol turn the expressionist brushstroke into a cartoon simulacrum and the ejaculatory drip into the action of urine on copper, respectively. Just as a Pollock disciple like Frankenthaler nonetheless experiences some resentment of the precursors priority, these derisive parodies express an anxiety of influence towards Pollock; if they were not somehow affected by his reputation, they would not imitate him at all. Whether or not they actually admire his work, these artists must somehow respond to his colossal status. It is interesting that most of them attempted to do so by denigrating the precursor through parody. It is as if the easiest way to combat, to overcome, and to misread Pollocks monumental legacy, is to mock it. Siegels analysis of influence generally avoids such psychological conflict. She mostly discusses what techniques or stylistic terms each artist learned from Pollocks example, and not the inner conflict that might have motivated that imitation or a departure from it. Though Siegel insists that the influence she means is not mere imitation of technique, her analysis does not follow through on this promise.84 She analyzes each artists Pollock influence only by finding those visual terms or art-making techniques that they lifted quite literally from Pollockall-over patterning, pouring paint, horizontality, et cetera. To Siegel, the aspects of the newcomers art that are unlike Pollock are simply where Pollocks influence failed to reach, or where his influence ended. She does not consider that these departures are just as much the result of influence as imitation is. Misreading Pollocks work is a deliberate, anxious attempt to escape that influence. It is Siegels blindness to influence that does not literally adopt the terms of Pollocks painting that causes her to overlook a major Pollock disciple, Allan Kaprow. It is Kaprows misreading of Pollock, the transfer of his action painting into the realm of performance, that is particularly relevant here, as it is similar to, and paved the way for, Bidlos. Kaprows misprision was famously expressed in his essay, The Legacy of Jackson Pollock. Kaprow seems aware of the anxiety of influence that Pollock inspires, saying the examples of his life and revolutionary style are increasingly, and not always

It may be helpful to define what good influence is not. It is not mere imitation or borrowing. It is not just a look. Nor is it just a source. Siegel, Painting After Pollock, 2-3.

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benignly, influential85 Indeed it seems that Kaprows goal in this article is to resolve the conundrum of what could possibly be done after Pollock destroyed painting (italics in the original).86 The solution he provides is to focus on a certain reading of Pollocks work as a field of action, similar to Harold Rosenbergs theory of action painting. Because the painting extends beyond the edge of the canvas, and invites spectatorial participation through the awareness of the drips of paint as the indices of bodily gestures, Kaprow sees Pollocks work as an environment. As such, it shifts our focus from the autonomous work of art to the outside world: Pollock, as I see him, left us at the point where we must become preoccupied with and even dazzled by the space and objects of our everyday life we shall utilize the specific substances of sight, sound, movements, people, odors, touch. Objects of every sort are materials for the new art87 This interpretation is quite antithetical to the Greenbergian conception of Pollock as the creator of formalist, autonomous works of art that focus on flatness, paintings exclusive area of competence. Rather, Kaprow uses his misreading of Pollock to conceive of an art that transcends traditional categorization by medium, instead taking the form of environment, assemblage and Happening. As Amelia Jones put it, Kaprows essay formed a pivot between the static Pollock of modernism and the performative Pollock who would be spoken as one of the many origins for postmodernism.88 Jones sees it as ironic that Pollock should be the source for the kind of performative work that was largely a critique of modernist formalism, and takes it as evidence that postmodernism was not truly a break from, but rather had its origins in, modernist practice. I would add that this is an example of a postmodern movement reacting to an anxiety of influence towards a modernist one, the latter so misread as to create something antithetical to it, something both new and critical of its source. Jones uses the term Pollockian performative to reference the interpretation of Pollocks painting as performance, an interpretation encouraged by Hans Namuths photographs of Pollock painting, Rosenbergs theory of action painting, and
Allan Kaprow, The Legacy of Jackson Pollock, ARTnews 57 no. 6 (Oct. 1958): 24. Ibid., 26 87 Ibid., 56. 88 Amelia Jones, The Pollockian Performative and The Revision of the Modernist Subject, in Body Art/Performing the Subject (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 56.
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Kaprows essay. The Pollockian performative is also caught up in a performativity of gender, as the supposedly universal Cartesian subject performing the action painting is presumed straight, white and male. Jones explores the ways female and queer performance artists have subverted and thus critiqued the masculine heroism associated with the drip technique. Bidlo makes a similar critique of heroic masculinity in his performance work, though as I have already started to express, his work is generally not conducive to feminist or queer readings. Just as Kaprow and the artists cited by Jones were influenced by the performativity of Pollocks painting, so too was Bidlo. His performances, in which he paints a Pollock painting for an audience, are a perfect illustration of the influence that Pollocks performativity, as well as the documentation of his process, have had. In 1982, in a performance called A Chicken in Every Pot and a Pollock Over Every Couch, Bidlo painted a copy of Pollocks Blue Poles, 1952, in front of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and allowed viewers to take a small square of the finished painting home with them (Fig. 11). With his public reenactment of Pollocks technique, Bidlo demonstrated how Pollocks process has been as art historically significant as the product, particularly to the lineage of performance art that made Bidlos action possible. As in Rosenbergs theory of action painting, or Kaprows evaluation of Pollocks legacy, it is the physicality of the act of painting that becomes the subject of both Pollocks and Bidlos work. Essential to the new conception of art as performative action, as Jones notes, was the widespread dissemination of Namuths photographs and film of Pollock at work.89 Bidlo highlighted this in 2004 by exhibiting photographs of his 1982 Blue Poles performance, along with Namuths film and a clip from the 2000 Ed Harris film, Pollock, that recreates the making of Namuths film (Fig. 12 and 13).90 Bidlo rarely exhibits the documentation of his performances; that he chose to in this instance demonstrates his interest in the lasting

Jones, Pollockian Performative, 53-55. Maaike Bleeker, Nostalgia for an age that never existed: Over Life, Once More, accessed November 18, 2011, http://www.dewitteraaf.be/DWRartikels/wr114maaikebleeker.htm. See also, Sven Ltticken, ed., Life, Once More: Forms of Reenactment in Contemporary Art (Rotterdam: Witte de With, Center for Contemporary Art, 2005). According to the text in this catalogue, Bidlo made his own re-creation of Namuths film in the early 80s, though I have not found mention of this anywhere else. It is also interesting to note that Bidlo served as a consultant for Ed Harriss film, teaching him how to paint like Pollock.
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historical significance and influence of Pollocks process and the documentation of that process, both so mythic as to prompt recreation in a Hollywood film.91 As Barbara Rose points out, Namuths photographs of Pollock were not only instrumental in the formulation of performance art, but in the formulation of Pollock as a culture hero. Rose emphasizes how the image of the artist, bodily and mentally engrossed in his work, fueled the idea of Pollock as divinely-inspired genius in touch with the Sublime, a trope that has long been a major feature of artistic myth, especially his.92 Yet it was also the portrayal of Pollock as brooding, rebellious and virile, often prompting a comparison with Marlon Brando or James Dean, that contributed to his mythologized persona.93 This is another aspect of the historicized Pollock that Bidlo makes clear in his appropriations and performances. In a 1982 performance at P.S. 1 called Jack the Dripper at Pegs Place, Bidlo directed actors to recreate the incident, infamous in the art world and later recreated in Harriss film, in which Pollock urinated into Peggy Guggenheims fireplace (Fig. 14). Bidlo saw this performance as providing insight into the drip technique, an equation of urinating and action painting that Andy Warhol also made with his piss paintings (urine on canvas, 1961) and oxidation paintings (urine on copper metallic paint on canvas, 1977-78).94 Both Warhol and Bidlos appropriations of Pollock seem to highlight and critique the aggressive masculinity inherent in Pollocks mythology as well as his ejaculatory technique.95 Bidlos performance illuminates how, along with his painting, Pollocks masculine, rebellious, drunken persona captured the publics imagination, contributing to his fame and thus his place in the canon of art history.96

Bidlo and Bonney discuss how there is almost no documentation of his performances. Bidlo, interview by Bonney. 92 In picturing a new image of the artist in the grip of impulse, driven by inner forces, Namuth, following his own unconscious intuition, provided the material necessary for the creation of a cultural myth of the artist as an inspired shaman Barbara Rose, Introduction: Jackson Pollock: The Artist as Culture Hero, in Pollock Painting: Photographs by Hans Namuth, ed. Barbara Rose (New York: Agrinde Publications, 1980), unpaginated. 93 This comparison has been made in many sources. See especially Ellen Landau, The Wild One, in Jackson Pollock (New York, Harry, N. Abrams, 1989). 94 Bidlo talks to Rosenblum, 192. 95 Guilbaut, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art, 176. 96 Siegel, Painting After Pollock, 148.

91

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Like Bidlo, Warhol made parodic misreadings of Pollock throughout his career.97 His Dance Diagrams of 1965, canvases displayed on the floor depicting the well-known footstep diagrams of Arthur Murray, adopt the idea of Pollocks horizontality, working on the floor, and stepping into the canvas, but replace modernist formalism with populist kitsch. In 1961, the same year as his piss paintings, he also lay out a canvas on his doorstep, so as to collect the traces of his visitors footprints. His Disaster series of 1962, emphasized the most debased journalistic prying into the pain of anonymous lives and, though never announced as such, the celebration of famous deaths, for the two most important car crashes in Warhols experience were those of Pollock and of James Dean.98 As Rosalind Krauss points out, it was Warhols obsession with fame, whether by car crash or action painting, that caused his admiration of, and I would say anxiety of influence towards, the mythic Pollock persona. That would explain his desire to create works that parody those aspects of Pollocks fame. It is telling that Bidlo appropriates Warhols appropriations of Pollock, recreating the Dance Diagrams and the oxidation paintings. Bidlo thus emphasizes Warhols anxiety of influence towards Pollocks fame, while expressing his own anxiety of influence towards both of them.99 In a desire to reenact, to step into the role of Warhols famous persona, Bidlo put on a party/performance in 1984 called Not Andy Warhols Factory, in which he dressed and performed as Warhol, with his East Village artist friends taking various other roles from Warhols famous social group (Fig. 15). An interviewer asked him, Is it a goal for you to be as big as Warhol someday? He answered, Yes, and added cryptically, This is a huge Rosetta stone. Its also a hall of mirrors where each is reflecting each other.100 He may mean that the search for fame, and later the fallout from it, is an artists quest and burden. He also seems to be speaking to the complications of attempting to become famous by appropriating the art of a famous
Rosalind Krauss, The Optical Unconscious (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993), 269-277. Siegel, Painting After Pollock, 57-58, 63. 98 Krauss, Optical Unconscious, 275. 99 In a telling anecdote, both Warhol and Bidlo at different points befriended Ruth Kligman, Pollocks lover and sole survivor of his fatal car crash. Krauss, Optical Unconscious, 270, and Artnet Auctions, Mike Bidlo: #36,1947, Over Study for Lavender Mist, Sellers Description, accessed November 18, 2011, http://www.artnet.com/auctions/Pages/Lots/Private/16147.aspx?lotId=16147&q=ArtistId%3D553025%26S pecialSale%3DTrue%26sortby%3Dsoonest%26scroll%3D0%26page%3D1%26view%3Dbrief. 100 Bidlo, Asked & Answered.
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artist who claimed to make art in order to become famous, who himself appropriated the art of another famous artist to do so. Bidlos method of simultaneously referencing multiple artists and multiple relationships between them is a perfect illustration of the connection between the postmodern text as described by Roland Barthes, and the poem as anxiety of influence described by Harold Bloom: all three are a tissue of quotations.101 To add another level to this dizzying web of appropriations, Julian Schnabel once said, there are three great American artists in this century. Pollock, Andy, and me. And Andy would agree.102 Schnabels arrogant boast, whether genuine or purposely provocative, reveals his desire to promote himself as possessing the machismo that was the subject of Pollocks myth and Warhols parody. Schnabels aggressively masculine, fame-seeking persona explains Bidlos appropriation of himan anomaly in Bidlos oeuvre, which is otherwise focused only on predecessors, not contemporaries.103 As in his appropriations of Warhol, Bidlo may have been attempting to attain the fame of Schnabel, one of the 1980s art markets most profitable stars. Nevertheless, Bidlos 1983 appropriationtitled The Original Schnabel Simulacrum in reference to the popular theory of another 1980s art star, Jean Baudrillardis mainly mocking, not admiring.104 His recreation of Schnabels plate painting, The Death of Fashion, 1978, emphasizes how Schnabels smashing of plates and expressionist brushwork reference the violence and masculinity of Pollocks action painting. This virility is emphasized by the addition of an actor dressed as a police officer, standing menacingly on guard in front of the finished painting (Fig. 16).105 Bidlo seems largely unaware of the critique of masculinity inherent in his work. In an interview, Anney Bonney pointed out to Bidlo that many of the artists he appropriates are seen as legendary, heroic, and rebellious. He responded that he had not

Roland Barthes, The Death of the Author, in Image, Music, Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Noonday Press, 1977), 146. Bloom: Influence, as I conceive it, means that these are no texts, but only relationships between texts. Bloom, Map of Misreading, 3. 102 Krauss, Optical Unconscious, 270. 103 Rosenblum: Was it because of the superstardom of the 80s that you chose him? Bidlo: That may have been part of it. Bidlo talks to Rosenblum, 192. 104 Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, trans. Sheila Faria Glaser (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994). 105 Carlo McCormick called this a commentary on the superficiality that exists within the drama of the original act of creativity and on the fascist presence of the museum guard. Bidlo, Steal that Painting!, 194.

101

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thought of that, and asked, Do you think thats one of the elements of being an artist in contemporary society, that you have to have this personality? 106 His performative works seem to embody exactly this aspect of the modern art canon, even if he does this unconsciously. In addition to being somewhat blind to this critique of masculinity, he is also unaware of, or avoids, the queer subversion of that masculinity that were important to the work of both Duchamp and Warhol. Yasumasa Morimura, who creates selfportraits in the guise of famous artists, artworks, historical figures and movie stars, provides a counterpoint. As a male artist who often cross-dresses as female for these portraits, his drag performance is doubled when he places himself in the Man Ray portrait of Rrose Selavy, Duchamps female alter ego (Fig. 17). He emphasizes this doubling with the title, Doubleonnage (Marcel), and with the extra set of hands and hat. Morimuras work emphasizes the complexities of gender, its basis in performativity and not biology, and its resistance to a binary interpretation. In contrast, Bidlos sexual references are binary and biologically determined. Even though he points out that Duchamps urinal is paradoxically both male or female genitalia (see page 10), there is still a binary distinction: male or female. Furthermore, he presents the urinal as heterosexual male genitalia in The Origin of the World, 1995-6, which juxtaposes Bidlos appropriations of Fountain and Red Canna, c. 1924, by Georgia OKeeffe (Fig. 18). The title of Bidlos installation refers to the erotic painting by Gustave Courbet of a close-up view of a womans genitals. The Courbet reference calls attention, in case it was missed, to the genital form in the juxtaposed phallic urinal poised to penetrate the painting behind. The installation recalls Alfred Stieglitzs 1917 photograph of Duchamps Fountain installed at Stieglitzs gallery 291 in front of a Marsden Hartley painting (Fig. 19). In Stieglitzs photograph, the painting being penetrated by the phallic urinal had been that of a homosexual man, but Bidlo re-normalizes the sexuality of this juxtaposition by replacing it with a vulvic painting by a female artistStieglitzs wife. By alluding to the romantic and sexual relationship between OKeeffe and Stieglitz, rather than any implied sexual relationship between the cross-dressing Duchamp and the homosexual Hartley, Bidlo avoids and erases the potential presence of queer sexuality.

106

Bidlo, interview by Bonney.

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As I stated before, this appropriation of OKeeffe is Bidlos only appropriation of a female artist. Perhaps it is because female artists are rarely viewed as having the megalomaniac or eccentric personalities of their male counterparts. Furthermore, most female artists were traditionally excluded from the qualifications for greatness, and therefore excluded from the qualifications to be copied by Bidlo.107 On both these counts OKeeffe seems like an understandable exception; both her art and her life are arguably more iconic than those of any other modern female artist of the early twentieth century.108 Bidlos sin of omission is disturbing, and betrays perhaps an intentional avoidance of the issues of sexism and heterosexism in modern art history.

Mike Bidlo and Sherrie Levine Jeanne Siegel interviewed Sherrie Levine for the catalogue accompanying her 1991 exhibition at the Kunsthalle Zurich. The interview title, The Anxiety of Influence Head On, was based on Levines assertion in the interview that she saw her work as a head-on confrontation with the anxiety of influence.109 This connection was also made in a brief brochure for a Levine exhibition in Florida and, in greater detail, in an essay by Ann Temkin on the Philadelphia exhibition Newborn, of Levines appropriations of Constantin Brancusi.110 Temkin relates Levines anxiety of influence to her gender, and the gender of the artists she appropriates: While Levines ultimate route to originality was far different, she too was wrestling with her own relation to influence. Although a woman, she was heir to the Oedipal pressures described by Bloom.111 This is a drive Levine herself often acknowledges: A lot of what my work has been about since the

107

Linda Nochlin, Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists? ARTnews 69 (Jan. 1971): 22-39, 67-

71. OKeeffes rival for this title, Frida Kahlo, did not emerge as such until the 1980s, a result of the revisionist efforts of Blooms so-called School of Resentment. Griselda Pollock, et al., "Women and art history," in Grove Art Online, Oxford Art Online, accessed December 19, 2011, http://www.oxfordartonline.com.ezproxy.library.tufts.edu/subscriber/article/grove/art/T092072. 109 Sherrie Levine, The Anxiety of Influence Head On, interview by Jeanne Siegel, in Sherrie Levine (Zrich: Kunsthalle Zrich, 1991), 21. 110 Richard E. Spear, Taking Pictures: Sherrie Levine after Walker Evans (Gainesville, FL: Samuel P. Harn Museum of Art, University of Florida, 1998); Ann Temkin, Newborn, in Sherrie Levine: Newborn (Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1993). 111 Temkin, Newborn, 33-35.
108

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beginning has been realizing the difficulties of situating myself in the art world as a woman, because the art world is so much an arena for the celebration of male desire.112 The anxiety of influence has actually never been mentioned in relation to Bidlos work. My attachment of Blooms theory to his work is new, despite the fact that it has easily and often been attached to Levines similar appropriationist practice. This essay began with a comparison of several reviews of Bidlos work, in which the reviewer either saw Bidlos work as reverential or critical, but never as both at once, as if only one tendency may exist in the work at a time, or at least in the perception of the viewer/reviewer. Evaluations of Levines work have never had this problem; critics of Levines work often comment on the coexistence of both impulses. Temkin, for example, says: her gesture can be read as one of irony, homage, humor, critique; the readings are not mutually exclusive, and are individually incomplete her works are rich because of the ambiguities presented in this variety of relations.113 In comparison, even Bidlos supporters see his work as relatively one-dimensional. This disparity could be due to the fact that Levine has been the subject of far more detailed and scholarly analysis. Most writings on Bidlos work are exhibition reviews and interviews; if present in a scholarly article, he is only mentioned in passing, often in comparison to Levine. In contrast, Levines work has been the primary subject of many scholarly articles, most by University of Virginia art historian Howard Singerman, whose full-length monograph on Levine was released in late 2011.114 What is it that has made Levines work a field rich for scholarship and criticism, when Bidlos is not? What are the differences in meaning, and in the depths of meaning, between the two artists, whose practices at least initially seem similar? It is significant that Levine, not Bidlo, appears as the primary example in some of the most important texts that theorized postmodernism in the 1980s. As was already mentioned, Rosalind Krauss considered Levine a perfect illustration of her postmodern theory that art has never been original. Craig Owens, when
112

Sherrie Levine, After Sherrie Levine, interview by Jeanne Siegel, in Artwords 2: Discourse on the Early 80s, ed. Jeanne Siegel (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1988), 249. 113 Temkin, Newborn, 39. 114 Howard Singerman, Art History, after Sherrie Levine (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012). The question of Levines popularity in 80s criticism, compared to the eventual obscurity of Bidlo, is a topic Singerman explores in this book at length. Like me, he attributes it at least partially to Levines use of photography versus Bidlos use of painting, the former seen as postmodern critique, the latter seen as regressive.

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he first brings up appropriation as an example of a contemporary allegorical technique, mentions Levine, along with Troy Brauntuch and Robert Longo, neither of whose names have had the longevity in the art world that Levines has had.115 She makes similarly central appearances in contemporary texts from Benjamin Buchlohs Allegorical Procedures: Appropriation and Montage in Contemporary Art, to Douglas Crimps Photographic Activity of Postmodernism.116 The topic of Crimps essay is particularly telling, as it is perhaps the importance of photography to postmodern theory that made Levine a star, and Bidlo a footnote. Bidlo uses photography only to document his performances, and then sparingly. In comparison, it is Levines re-photographs of photographs by Edward Weston, Walker Evans, and others that are most often the subject of postmodern theorists attention. Crimp begins with the statement: That photography had overturned the judgment-seat of art is a fact that modernism found it necessary to repress, and so it seems that we may accurately say that postmodernism constitutes a return of the repressed.117 He continues that postmodernism is about arts dispersal, its plurality the plurality of copies.118 As a mechanically reproducible medium, photography has far more potential to critique originality, as Krauss proposes, or artworks aura, as Crimp, via Walter Benjamin, proposes.119 As Singerman puts it, painting is the medium against which the work of appropriation performs its critique, or its refusal.120 Therefore, he believes Levines work is far more effective at this critique. Bidlo is more complicit in that which he is supposedly critiquing: painting and its celebration of the originality of the artist. This might explain Bidlos reviewers confusion between critique and homage. In particular, Bidlos use of painting aligned him with Schnabel and the other neo-expressionists, whom many critics saw as cynically reviving the fetishistic commodity of painting in

Owens, The Allegorical Impulse, 54. Benjamin Buchloh, Allegorical Procedures: Appropriation and Montage in Contemporary Art, Artforum 21 (September 1992): 43-56; Douglas Crimp, The Photographic Activity of Postmodernism, in On the Museums Ruins (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993). 117 Crimp, Photographic Activity of Postmodernism, 108. 118 Ibid. 119 Krauss, Originality of the Avant-Garde, 156-157, 168-170; Crimp, Photographic Activity of Postmodernism, 112; Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, in The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media, ed. Michael Jennings, et al. (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, Harvard University, 2008). 120 Singerman, Sherrie Levine: On Painting, 203.
116

115

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order to get a piece of the fame and fortune that was the 80s art market. In contrast, Levines use of photography is often read as a critique of the neo-expressionist promotion of artwork as commodity. In addition to Levines use of photography and Bidlos lack thereof, the two artists often use materials differently. With some exceptions like the Fountain Drawings, Bidlo copies the original materials and appearance as closely as possible. His paintings are oil on canvas or linen; his Brillo Boxes are screen-printed; his Duchamp urinals were at first found objects, but did not quite match the original, and so he took to sculpting them in porcelain (an adaptation Duchamp himself made when trying to recreate Fountain after it had been lost). When it is not possible to copy the exact material, Bidlo uses what he can to mimic the appearance and texture of the original. For his Pollock copies, Bidlo used hardware store enamel paint to approximate the viscosity and palette of Duco, the automotive lacquer that Pollock used that is no longer commercially available. Bidlos Not Brancusi, (Mlle. Pogany, 1913) is marbleized plaster, perhaps because Bidlo does not have the skill to carve marble.121 Levine always slightly alters the material of the original. She casts her Duchamp urinals in bronze and finishes them to a high, almost tacky polish; these too have been read as commodity critique. Her Newborns are made in frosted glass, in reference to Duchamps Large Glass and emphasizing the connection between the two artists; they are placed on shiny black pianos, in homage to Brancusis incorporation of the base of the artwork, while also referencing the decorative place an artwork takes in a collectors home (Fig. 20 and 21).122 Levines paintings are, likewise, not exact copies. She uses painting in her neo-geo works, generic abstractions taking simple patterns like those of game boards, in a parody of geometric abstraction. For these she uses casein paint on wood or lead, giving the paintings a milky diaphanous quality in which the support shows through, in perhaps purposeful contrast to the solidity of typical oil painting. When she does appropriate a modern master painting, like those of Kandinsky or Mondrian, instead of oil paint she uses watercolor, with its feminine associations emphasizing how her belatedness in relation to these masters is heightened by her gender.

121 122

Edition Gallery Bruno Bischofberger, Mike Bidlo: Masterpieces, unpaginated. Singerman, Art History, after Sherrie Levine, 197, 200. Temkin, Newborn, 17, 29-31.

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This is not to essentialize Levine; we should be wary of always interpreting her work in a certain way just because she is female or a feminist. Phyllis Rosenzweig perhaps reads too much femininity into Levines neo-geo paintings: The shapes of the knotholes present a decidedly female imagery they suggest traditional symbols of female sexuality The knots and checks contrast the unpredictable and organic with the logical and geometric: stereotypical clichs of feminine and masculine. Yet the intimate scale of the checks, the delicacy and irregularity of the paint strokes, and the sweetness of the colors feminize these otherwise masculine images.123 Craig Owens, despite his well-meaning attempt in The Discourse of Others to correct his blindness in The Allegorical Impulse to the feminist implications of postmodernism, also essentializes Levine. Owens argues rightly that women have been denied legitimacy as the subject of representation, and instead are always the object. He claims that Levine illustrates this by always choosing images of the Other to appropriatewomen, children, the poor, the insane.124 But Owens is incorrect: Levine also appropriates images of white men (photographs after Rodchenko, watercolors after Lger, a collaged image of a Van Gogh), not to mention objects and abstractions. Singerman takes Owens to task for this misguided interpretation in Seeing Sherrie Levine. He argues, more convincingly, that Walker Evans images of the rural poor, if taken by a woman, would not have been taken seriously, as it was assumed that a female photographer could not keep her distance from her subjects.125 This is evidenced by the criticism of Dorothea Lange, whose images are similar to Evanss, but who was deemed too compassionate, her political agenda too transparent, whereas Evans is seen to maintain an aesthetic distance. Levine, by appropriating Evans images, makes that point clear, as she herself claims: Because I am a woman, those images became a womans work.126 So, it is not that Owens interpretation is wrong, but that he is wrong to say that Levine always depicts the Other, that that is always what her work is about. The problem

123

Phyllis Rosenzeig, Sherrie Levine: Objects of Desire, in Art at the Edge: Sherrie Levine, by Susan Krane and Phyllis Rosenzwieg (Atlanta: High Museum of Art, 1988), 10-11. 124 Craig Owens, The Discourse of Others, in Beyond Recognition: Representation, Power, and Culture, ed. Scott Bryson et al (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 182. 125 Howard Singerman, Seeing Sherrie Levine, October 67 (Winter 1994): 87-93. 126 Paul Taylor, Sherrie Levine Plays with Paul Taylor, FlashArt 135 (Summer 1987): 55.

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with feminist readings of an artists work is that they tend to be monolithic, ignoring any other possible content. Levines appropriation of male artists is, nonetheless, an intentional critique: CONSTANCE LEWALLEN: A lot has been made of the fact that many of the artists you appropriate, in fact all, are men. I guess this is for a number of reasons. One is you choose well-known, iconic figures from the history of modern art, most of whom happen to be men, and secondly, you are commenting on that very condition SHERRIE LEVINE: it is something artists do all the time unconsciously, working in the style of someone they consider a great master. I just wanted to make that relationship literal. CONSTANCE LEWALLEN: At the same time that your work is a critique of the referent-artists, they are artists I feel you admirea kind of homage is involved, in every case.127 Clearly a significant commentary in Levines work is that the modern art canon is nearly all male, and so she has had to struggle against the anxiety of influence of an all-male canon. As many, including Owens, Temkin, and Thierry de Duve have pointed out, it is the patrilineage of modern art that motivates in Levine a stronger-than-average Oedipal urge, to not only kill the father, but to kill the paternity that is always assumed in art. Owens writes of Levines disrespect for paternal authority, and asks [I]s her refusal of authorship not in fact a refusal of the role of creator as father of his work, of the paternal rights assigned to the author by law?128 Thus we return to Levines statement, that her work is a head-on confrontation with the anxiety of influence.129 Levine is not only participating in or illustrating the anxiety of influence, she is confronting it, challenging its presumed relation of fathers and sons. She destroys its paradigm by inserting herself, as a daughter, into its lineage, fulfilling Blooms doomsaying prophecy that the Liberated Woman has the power to create the first true break with literary
127

Levine, interview Lewallen, 68. It is interesting that, like Bidlo, the one exception in Levines oeuvre is OKeeffe, though this is only an oblique reference, not a direct appropriation. In 2007, at the Georgia OKeeffe Museum, Levine exhibited cast bronze antelope skulls, signifiers of OKeeffes famous subject matter, to accompany a series of digital prints after Stieglitz. Singerman, Art History, After Sherrie Levine, 150-152. 128 Owens, Discourse of Others, 182. See also Thierry de Duve, who says Its the daughters who interest me. For them, killing the father is not enough. They have a real stake in the reinvention of what [Amelia] Jones calls the paternal, theological origin. Mary Warhol/Joseph Duchamp, in Re-enchantment, ed. David Morgan and James Elkins (New York : Routledge, 2009), 96 129 Levine, The Anxiety of Influence Head On, 21.

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continuity...130 In contrast, Bidlo inserts himself into an already all-male lineage; he is seeking to participate in this relation of fathers and sons, not to disrupt or destroy it.131 Like Levine, Bidlo appropriates male artists almost exclusively, demonstrating that the canon is indeed overwhelmingly male. But demonstrating this inequality in the canon is not a primary goal of Bidlos work. If it was, Bidlo or his interlocutors might have mentioned it at some point. It is not that a male artist cannot level the same gender critique against the canon; Bidlos oeuvre, a survey of all the major modern masters, certainly has the potential to make this critique. The problem, rather, is that he does not seem to be conscious of this potential, nor of the importance of recognizing the historic discrimination of the canon. By doubling the canon without critiquing its gross inequalities, Bidlos work reinforces its all male bias. Levines critique is stronger and more specific. Whether or not her female identity should influence our perception of her art, it clearly does so, and so she is better able, by default, to critique the exclusive masculinity of the canon.132 More importantly, her statements make clear that a gender critique is in fact intended; her place as a woman artist in a canon of all male artists was something she had to struggle with, an anxiety of influence that has informed her art, and that she represents in her appropriations of male modern masters. Like Bidlo, Levine illustrates the effects of the anxiety of influence, both on her own work and its historical presence in art history. But the addition in Levines work of a strongly indicated gender critique not only exposes the anxiety of influence, but attempts to rupture its bias towards the agonistic relationship between fathers and sons. This, along with a critique of the commodity and a great many other possible readings, has made Levines work subject to far more scholarly attention and interpretation than Bidlos.

Conclusion I have explained that Harold Blooms theory is based on the idea that all poets and artists are influenced by their precursors. Their desire to be original makes that
130

131

Bloom, Map of Misreading, 33. the temptation of such easily acquired authorship (that is, fatherhood) was apparently strong enough among Duchamps grandchildren to have incited more than one appropriationist or simulationist to readopt a readymadewitness Mike Bidlo I wonder if Duchamp would go to City Hall to declaer Mike Bidlo is legitimate son. De Duve, Mary Warhol/Joseph Duchamp, 95-96. 132 Foster, The Artist as Ethnographer, 173

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influence an anxiety, since they fear that imitation of their precursors will make them unoriginal. The poet or artist attempts to overcome the precursors influence by creating something new through a creative misreading or misprision of the precursors work. I have also expressed the well-worn sentiment that appropriation, as a manifestation of influence so literal that it is merely a copy, demonstrates not only that the appropriation artist is not original, but also that no artists are truly original. Furthermore, I have sought to demonstrate that appropriation can be a kind of misreading of the copied artwork; that by adding another layer of meaning, uncovering previously hidden meaning, or otherwise generating a discourse that critiques the canonical reputation of the great master being copied, the appropriation artist adds something, perhaps something new, to its source. The meaning added through the critical act of appropriation is supposed to be what it is that makes the appropriation artist, paradoxically, original. As Richard Pettibone, another appropriationist, said glibly, Its a sin to copy in the art world because the whole game is to be original. It seems to me that its fairly original not to be original.133 Pettibones statement is clearly tongue-in-cheek, making fun of this very play between originality of concept and originality of imagery. Pettibone and other appropriationists may be indeed be mocking the absurd importance placed on originality, of ideas if not of imagery. Appropriation art of the 1980s was inspired by the appropriations of Sturtevant, of Warhol, of Duchamp, of Manet, and beyond. Art has always referred to other art or images; even if/when it does not, it refers to, thus appropriates, nature. The idea of appropriation is not new, any more than images can be new. Yet the original, the new, need not be completely new; as Rosalind Krauss demonstrates, originality can exist as long as it acknowledges its partner, repetition.134 Our model here could be Brancusi and Duchamp, modern masters appropriated by both Levine and Bidlo. Both artists insisted, despite creating copies of their own works, that everything they did was original, and that to repeat themselves was anathema. By re-appropriating his own artworks, Duchamp, who consciously sought to never repeat himself, used reproduction to revise his own

133 134

Quoted in: Naumann, Apropos of Marcel, 13. Krauss, Originality of the Avant-Garde.

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concept of the ready-made, and thereby create something brand-new.135 Temkin makes the same point about Brancusi; that even though he often made multiple sculptures of the same form, he considered each one an original, generated by a new impetus.136 Levines and Bidlos appropriations, while building not only on centuries of imagery but on centuries of ideas, did in fact do something new with these ideas. Their acts of appropriation self-consciously illustrated concepts that were then relatively new: namely the futility of originality, and its cousin, the anxiety of influence. The differences between the two artists, and some of the reasons that have lead to Levines fame and Bidlos obscurity, were explained in the previous section. I have pointed this out not to place greater value on Levines work than Bidlos. Indeed, my personal preference is for Bidlos work. My intent, rather, was to demonstrate the historical forces at work in the elevation of certain artists in the new canon. For it is certainly Levine, with the release of Singermans book and a retrospective exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art in late 2011, who is becoming, and perhaps already has been, the new great master of the postmodern era. Levines work is certainly more successful at generating a lot of theory, as Singerman demonstrates.137 Yet I could argue, perhaps in a whole other paper, that the materiality of Bidlos work generates more pleasure, at least for me. I explained the mix of admiration and critique of the modern masters that is present in both Bidlos and Levines work. I also explained that this dialectic is more confusing for Bidlos reviewers than for Levines, since his work seems more complicit in a celebration of modernism, whereas Levines is more successful as critique. Since the latter is what interested a certain circle of 1980s art critics, it is no wonder Levine became their hero. I have indeed indicated the problematic of Bidlos perhaps too celebratory stance towards a canon that has perpetuated the status of straight, white, male artists to the exclusion of others. Nonetheless, his appropriations of modern artworks misread their originals in such a way that the construction of the canon is exposed as a product of social factors, and of the anxiety of influence. Though not perhaps as sensitive as wed like, Bidlos work still has something to contribute to our revisionary discourse.
In Dialogue, 25-28, 57-58. Temkin, Newborn, 27. 137 Singerman, Art History, after Sherrie Levine.
136 135

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Figures

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Fig. 17: Yasumasa Morimura, Doubleonnage (Marcel), 1988

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