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AA Bronson: Reflections on
the Person in the Mirror
by Diana Nemiroff
“After Jorge's and Felix's
deaths in 1994, I found myself examining my own identity, photographing
myself for several years, in mirrors, in anonymous surroundings,
without clothes or context. On August 6, 2000, I dreamt of finding
a freshly flayed body in a river, unconscious, barely alive. It
was me, the remains of who I used to be. I hauled the body out
of the river and buried it in the damp green forest.
From this moment my identity as a survivor
began, as a survivor of trauma, and as a witness to the violence,
sickness and death that have engaged my community. Recently my
investigations have turned to other manifestations of trauma:
Auschwitz, child abuse, multiple personality. These are the themes
of the work I am currently developing.”
It is not easy to encapsulate AA Bronson's achievements
as an artist over the past 32 years, or to define succinctly his
contributions to the Canadian art world. This is not only because
of the many forms his work has taken, although this is part of
the challenge. It is also because he deliberately challenged received
notions about artistic identity during the 25-year collaboration
that constituted General Idea. His work, both alone and as part
of General Idea, has been a bellwether of cultural trends that
extend beyond the borders of this country.
AA Bronson was born Michael Tims in Vancouver in 1946. In the
sixties he studied at the School of Architecture at the University
of Manitoba and participated in a variety of activities bound
up in the social and cultural ethos of the time, including an
underground newspaper and radical education workshops. There he
met Ron Gabe in 1966 and later, in Vancouver, Jorge Saia. The
trio came together in Toronto in 1969, and by 1970 had begun to
identify themselves as General Idea, a fecund symbiosis of artistic
identities that survived until 1994, when Saia (a.k.a Jorge Zontal)
and Gabe (a.k.a. Felix Partz) died of AIDS-related causes. Initially
immersed in the counter-culture of the sixties and armed with
a sophisticated understanding of culture informed by Roland Barthes'
structuralist analyses and Marshall McLuhan's acutely perceptive
writings on media, AA Bronson and his cohorts embarked on the
creation of an artwork that took the form of an extensive fiction:
the “myth” of General Idea, which offered an inverted
mirror of the cultural activity of the time. This mirror reflected
a network of interconnected experiments that were drawing Canadian
artists out of the relative isolation and indifference that had
long enveloped them. It included Intermedia in Vancouver, the
mail art network, exchanges of visual information through Image
Bank, and performance and experimental theatre in Toronto.
General Idea (the expression was borrowed from William Burroughs)
conceived their fiction on the model of a virus that inhabits
a host, using its host's structures to mutate the original
organism. Their intention was to invade and transform their environment,
both the popular media and the art world. This they achieved not
only by means of their work in an incredible array of media —
performance, video, photography, sculpture, installation, printmaking
and painting, as well as multiples and artist's books —
but through “work” of quite another order. They gave
their activities a mainstream form with FILE Megazine, a cultural
parody of the picture magazine LIFE, and in 1974 created Art Metropole.
Here they exhibited, published and distributed artists' books,
multiples and videos. Significantly, Art Metropole was the first
artist-run centre in Canada to build a collection as an explicit
alternative to, and extension of, the usual museum collection.
This collection now resides at the National Gallery of Canada,
due to the generosity of a wealthy benefactor and to AA Bronson's
sense of its historical importance as an alternative record of
the artistic activity of the period.
From the beginning, General Idea situated themselves in the critical
lineage of Marcel Duchamp, questioning both authorship and the
myth of the artist. Their personas and their collective nom de
plume, which aligned their work with conceptual art, reflect an
important understanding of the fluidity of artistic identity and
many of their statements address this issue: “Being a trio,”
they asserted, “frees us from the tyranny of the myth of
the individual genius. It leaves us free to assimilate, synthesize
and contextualize influences from our immediate cultural environment.
Our three sets of eyes perform a single point of view.”1
The critique central to their practice took the form of parody
and ironic inversion. From the outset of their collaboration,
General Idea delighted in a broader, media-oriented cultural perspective,
which they inverted and adapted to their own ends. Viewing the
art world as a system of signs in the way Roland Barthes had analysed
the “myths” of popular culture, they announced their
intention to inhabit the role of the artist with disarming candour.
In the catalogue for their first international touring show they
wrote: “The image of the artist is easiest to inhabit. Because
of its historic richness, its ready but empty mythology (berets,
paint brushes, palettes, in a word, form without content), the
shell which was art was simple to invade. We made art our home,
and assuming appearances strengthened by available myth, occupied
art's territory. Thus we became glamorous, made art, made
ourselves over in the image of art.”2
During the 1970s General Idea drew on the opposed discourses
of architecture and fashion — functionality at the service
of frivolity — to construct and demolish their own myth of
artistic glamour and success with nimble irony. A mythical subject,
The 1984 Miss General Idea Pavillion, was the focus of the work,
which they intended to be read metaphorically as an allegorical
mirror of the art world. The never-to-be-built Pavillion was memorialized
in the work Reconstructing Futures (1977), an archeological reconstruction
of the artists' Green Room which — so the story goes
— alone survived a fatal fire during one of the rehearsals
for the 1984 event. In the 1980s, glamorous and internationally
successful on a scale unprecedented for Canadian artists, General
Idea mined their myth to offer an array of sophisticated commodities,
responding to the art world's inflated and voracious appetite
like publicists with sensibilities well-honed in the art of presentation.
Their work of this period is elegant and intelligent. Increasingly,
though with an antic frivolity that belies its seriousness, they
explored the identity of General Idea in a series of self-portraits
as interlocked babies or copulating poodles that stressed their
symbiotic identity, while emphasizing their sexuality.
In the final phase of their work as a trio, sexuality as a privileged
subject receded as they turned to address the AIDS crisis, spurred
by the cultural presence of the disease, which was especially
evident in New York, where AA and Jorge were living. The iconography
they developed — the AIDS logo based on Robert Indiana's
LOVE painting, the pharmaceutical meta-phors of illness and wellness
contained in the AZT capsules, the self-portrait as baby seals
that appropriates Caspar David Friedrich's disaster painting
The Sea of Ice (The Wreck of the ‘Hope') (1823-24) —
combined cultural readability with a camp sensibility, allowing
their work to slip easily between the worlds of high art and popular
culture.
Arguably, General Idea's accomplishments rest on their chameleon-like
ability to inhabit the available cultural forms, whether this
be the street or the museum, and to turn them to their own ends.
Their street-savvy intelligence told them which way the art world's
wind was blowing, and they never ceased to parody it mercilessly.
As gay men and as Canadians, they were acutely conscious of not
being at the centre of power, and they turned this “marginal”
perspective to critical advantage throughout their career, addressing
the structures of the art world, issues of identity and the blind
spots of popular culture, in order to stretch and redefine each
one.
Since Jorge's and Felix's deaths, Bronson has worked
as an artist in his own name, that is, as AA Bronson, both a part
of General Idea and separate from it. A sense of mourning and
of healing pervades his work. It is marked by the need to articulate
an individual identity, by an acknowledgment of the necessity
of ritual in this process and by the centrality of memory. The
new work builds on some of the mass media references he had explored
as part of General Idea, for example, the billboard format of
his deathbed portrait of Felix, which is as heroic and shocking
an image of death as any battlefield photograph. But for the most
part, his large-scale photographic portraits of Felix and Jorge
dead and dying, and of himself in the mirror, a middle-aged man
searching for himself, convey a new intimacy and melancholy. Texts
accompany them, full — not surprisingly — of images
of birth and death. While most of us experience only one of each,
Bronson in a way will have experienced three.
As a survivor, AA Bronson has had to come to terms with both
his loss and the legacy of the cultural experiment he helped to
engineer. In some ways, the contrast is extreme. Where, as part
of General Idea, he was preoccupied with the creation of personas,
role-playing and multiple readings that mirrored mainstream cultural
discourse, alone he has turned the mirror onto himself and his
relationships with Jorge, Felix and others. The narratives that
accompany these images are confessional and psychologically naked
in tone and content. Once charmed by the surfaces of things, he
now produces mirror images that constitute moments of self-recognition,
similar to the child's process of discovery of himself as
a separate person explored in the psychoanalytical writings of
Jacques Lacan. They probe the limits of the self through the surface
of the body. Desire and disappointment, birth, aging and death
are the timeless themes that run through his work. Somehow, looking
back on General Idea and Bronson's scattered activities before
General Idea, one can see that they were always there, under the
surface. Bronson continues to mine them, albeit in a darker vein,
with a new depth and maturity.
Diana Nemiroff is Curator of Modern Art (formerly Curator of
Contemporary Art) at the National Gallery of Canada. She has many
exhibitions and publications to her credit, including Melvin
Charney / Krzysztof Wodiczko (Canada, XLII Biennale di Venezia,
1986), Jana Sterbak: States of Being (1991), Land, Spirit,
Power: First Nations at the National Gallery of Canada (1992),
Crossings / Traversées (1998), and Elusive Paradise:
The Millennium Prize (2001).
NOTES
- General Idea 1968 – 1984, (exh. cat.), Eindhoven,
Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum, 1984, p. 25.
- General Idea: Fin de siècle, (exh. cat.), Stuttgart,
Würtemburgischer Kunstverein, 1992, p. 16.
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