The first wall at Glenstone that used to have Hilma af Klint drawings has been rotated. Now there is a whole row of stunning Willem de Kooning drawings of women, each, I thought the other day, more tantalizingly erasable than the next.
While contemplating this embarrassment of targets and what Duchamp guru Francis Naumann had to say about the shovel, I was primed yet unprepared to know that in 2005 Naumann staged an entire show of Mike Bidlo’s Not Rauschenberg Erased de Kooning Drawings.
According to Robert Rosenbaum’s essay in the catalogue I just got—and which seems like the only source for images of the actual works—Bidlo’s NREdKD began as almost a performance, when he erased what looked like a de Kooning in front of his shocked fellow guests at an artsy retreat in Maine in 2003. When a collector couldn’t buy it, he appealed to Naumann, who appealed to Bidlo, who agreed to make a whole show of them.
For each work, he made a beautiful Not de Kooning drawing, which he erased into a Not Rauschenberg. Each got a Johns-style label, and a facsimile FRAME IS PART OF ARTWORK frame, in a variety of dimensions. The show included documentation of the drawings, but also all the eraser crumbs, under glass, which, ngl, seems kind of corny.
Still as someone who, as I’ve already confessed here, thinks about erasing de Koonings whenever I see one, I can do naught but stan.
Mike Bidlo Erased de Kooning Drawings, Sept-Nov 2005 [francisnaumann]
previously, related riffs on Erased de Kooning Drawing: Archival Bühler-Rose