Newsday from New York, New York • 35

F-Sif I gjfi.nl -tf-NTSf Phone Items to (212) 303-2850 MANHATTAN CLOSEUP Hes Not a Forger, Hes an Appropriator through a screen and found it looked a lot like a Robert Rauschenberg collage. So Bidlo decided to be original in another way: take over other peoples ideas. He mounted a bicycle wheel on a stool, like Marcel Dudiamp. He Bilk-screened Andy Warhols soup cans. He splattered paint on canvas with basting syringes and two-by-fours, to recreate the gesture of Jackson Pollocks paintings.

No one is mad enough to try to recreate each paint drip. To Bidlos surprise, his stuff sold. He sold his first Pollock knock-off for $650 in 1981. In 1983, at the PS 1 Institute for Art and Urban Studies in Long Island City, Queens, he recreated a legendary scene from Peggy Guggenheims salon. Pollock, tine story goes, made a painting that was 6 inches too tall to fit in Peggy Guggenheims living room.

Marcel Duchamp cut the top of the painting off so it would fit. Pollock, infuriated, urinated in the fireplace. Bidlo made a fake salon, with a friend playing the part of Pollock and a Pollock fake on the wall. The installation was a hit. They kept it up for a year because it was so good, Bidlo said.

He made more Pollock fakes: Autumn Rhythm, Lavender Mist, Blue Poles. One day, with 40 friends, he recreated Andy Warhols silver-foiled Factory at PS 1. He recreated the 1959 body art of the French conceptual artist Yves Klein at the Palladium in Manhattan. Bidlo, wearing a tuxedo, supervised as nude models covered with blue paint rolled on paper. Then he moved on to Picasso.

For the past two years, Bidlo has labored over the canvases in his 600-square-foot studio in Midtown. Bidlo worked mostly from reproductions he hasnt even seen the originals of some of the paintings he has appropriated. But copying the originals is not the point. They are not Picassos, he said. Ive made them my own.

The quality of the paintings is Bidlo. The strokes are Bidlo. The color is Bidlo. Its not supposed to be compared to Picasso. If it doesnt cause a controversy, its not worth a hill of beans.

What next? I hope someone copies his copies, said the conceptual artist. An tin. By Clara Hemphill Some say Mike Bidlos paintings arent very good, but his defenders say if youre worried about quality, youre missing the point. The works in question 80 full-size copies of Pablo Picassos works are on display at a very good gallery downtown, Leo CastelUs on Greene Street. They include knockoffs of Guernica, Les Demoiselles dAvignon and Gertrude Stein.

People are flocking to see them. Some people are angry. Some are amused. Some are even buying them. The prices range from $3,000 to $20,000.

Is it a sham? Of course it is! said John Blee, a New York painter who visited the show last week. There ought to be a law! said a disgusted Danny Seagren, a puppet maker. To think people would pay for them! said Tom Evans, a painter. Bidlo shrugs off the criticisms. He shrugs off comments that the paintings are flat, the colors are not true and the lines are not like the originals.

If Marcel Duchamp in 1917 takes a urinal and signs it and calls it art whatever the artist deems is art has to be considered and dealt with as art, he said. And Bidlos work is being taken seriously. Barbara Jakobson, curator of the exhibit and a trustee at the Museum of Modern Art, said Bidlo has de-sanctified the past, made a kind of forbidden desire attainable. Blee said the stature of the gallery is a sign of just how important the work has become. If this is Leo Castelli, it means theres lots of bucks behind it, he said.

If it is in Leo Castellis, it doesnt mean hes trying to sell you something thats new. Hes trying to sell you something thats already here. They are not really close to the originals. That bothers some people, said Lorenzo Pezzatini, a painter and sculptor who visited the exhibit last week. But thats not the point.

If you get caught in the quality matter, youre missing the point. They are speaking to you, if you want to understand. Bidlo started doing appropriations he doesnt call them fakes after years of struggling with conceptual art, performance art, collages and neoconceptual art; Nevada? Sunn Pailcy Mike Bidlo with two of his creations or re-creations: Marcel Duchamp's Bicycle Wheel" and Jackson Pollock's Lavender Mist painting on bedsheets, pushing paint though metal screens and using his own blood as paint. I started making things which I thought were unique and original, and then discovered someone else had done it, he said. It was frustrating.

Like the time he pricked himself each day and made a kind of calen dar of bloody dots on paper. That seemed to be an original idea. But then he discovered that the American artist Eleanor An tin had done the same thing, or nearly, with her The Blood of a Poet. Or the time he made domes based on African sculptures and discovered Eva Hess had done the same thing. Or the time he pushed paint sioner of social services and was executive director of the Emergency Financial Control Board during the citys fiscal crisis.

The conference is free. It is sponsored by the Partnership For the Homeless, the countrys largest private shelter organization for the homeless. GREENWICH VILLAGE School To Host Homeless Forum Action Day, a conference on the homeless, will be held Jan. 30 in the auditorium of the New School for Social Research, 66 W. 12th St.

The annual conference, which will be the sixth of its kind, will address housing needs of homeless people with AUKS, programs for the mentally disabled homeless in the streets, and grassroots and TiMtifinal empowerment strategies fur the homeless. Registration will begin at 8:45 a.m. The conference concludes at 3 p.m. Stephen Berger, executive director of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, will be keynote speaker. Berger is a former state commis five centures, ranging from the bubonic plague of the Middle Ages to the maladies of the current time notably acquired immune deficiency syndrome are on display through March 13 at the museum, located at Central Park West and West 79th Street.

In Time of Plague, as the exhibit is called, focuses on the human response to contagious diseases, shown chronologically through scores of prints, artifacts and photographs. Once its run at the museum is completed, it will travel throughout the nation under the auspices of the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service. Museum hours are 10 a.m. through 5:45 p.m. Monday, Tuesday, Thursday and Sunday; it is open until 9 p.m.

on Wednesday, Friday and Saturday. For further information, call (212) 769-5800. t.ir I i i --t a UPPER WEST SIDE Exhibit Highlights Times of Plague Cholera, smallpox and tuberculosis, among other medical scourges of the past and present, are the subject of an unusual exhibit under way at the American Museum of Natural History. The portrayal of infectious diseases over the past .1. .4.

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