Lever House
390 Park Ave. at 54th St.
Through September 11
Admission: free
www.leverhouseartcollection.com
flickr slideshow
As Walter Benjamin noted nearly seventy-five years ago, “In principle a work of art has always been reproducible.” Andy Warhol built much of his artistic legacy around this idea, appropriating pop-culture images, from Elvis Presley, Marilyn Monroe, and Mao to Campbell’s Soup cans and Brillo Soap Pad boxes, and creating multiples, most of which were untouched by his own hand yet eventually sold for record prices. Since the 1980s, Chicago-born artist Mike Bidlo, who lives and works in New York City, has been appropriating iconic images by the likes of Marcel Duchamp, Jackson Pollock, Roy Lichtenstein, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, and Warhol himself, producing exact replicas of the original. No mere art forger, Bidlo works from reproductions, furthering the theoretical and physical distance between himself and the initial artist, questioning the entire nature of art and the creator. At Lever House on Park Ave., Bidlo has installed his 2005 work “Not Warhol (Brillo Boxes, 1964),” a replica of the original 1964 Warhol piece that consisted of forty-seven wooden boxes that in themselves replicated the cardboard packing boxes Brillo used to ship its product. “I thought it would be interesting to appropriate a work by another appropriator,” Bidlo explains in the exhibition handout, “so in a way I just kept the proverbial snowball rolling.” Bidlo’s pyramidlike construction rises in the northeast corner of the Lever House lobby, its bright red, white, and blue color scheme bringing light to the dark corner. Of course, it is rather appropriate that the appropriated piece is in Lever House, continuing the work’s connection to commercialism and the art world, as William and James Lever started their company in 1885 by making soap products. It all combines for a dizzying prospect, but it helps that the sculpture is really cool to look at, regardless of its history and the grand statements behind it. “Not Warhol (Brillo Boxes, 1964),” which includes an original Brillo packing box in a nearby vitrine, will be on view at Lever House through September 11; Warhol fans will also want to check out “Andy Warhol: The Last Decade,” at the Brooklyn Museum through September 12.