James Brook: We’ve spoken before about the idea of gangs and how that might relate to growing up gay, being viewed as outsiders and feeing a need to belong. General Idea seemed like a great gang to be part of and with Printed Matter you’ve created this wonderful family of outsiders, artists, writers and publishers. Was this something that happened organically or was it something that you set out to achieve when you became director?

 

AA Bronson: Yes, General Idea was a great gang to belong to: smart, sassy, fun, inventive, and always looking for a new way of looking at the world. We described ourselves as cultural parasites or cultural guerrillas, and either way we saw ourselves as beleaguered, but with a mission. We came out of the 60s, remember, and my own background was as a co-founder of a commune, a free school, and an underground newspaper, and I spoke frequently on the subject of radical education. The idea of community was radical at the time, in the alienated homogenous post-war culture of nine-to-five jobs and suburban living. FILE Megazine (1972-1989), which I co-edited with my two partners in GI, was originally intended as a community-building device, aimed at a certain kind of artist who is not necessarily living in an art centre, not necessarily fixated on the art marketplace, but interested in being part of a larger cultural network that we take for granted today—it was a kind of prefiguring of the internet. When we began Art Metropole in Toronto as a distribution centre and archive for artists’ products, it was a similar kind of network-based initiative. When I began as Director of Printed Matter five years ago, it was my community-building skills that the organisation most needed, together with my network of friends and collaborators in the world of artists’ publications. The logical next step was PM’s annual NY Art Book Fair, which brings together more than 200 exhibitors from 22 countries—it is, above all else, a social scene, a vast undulating crowd of book-obsessed artists and publishers, from zine-makers to major players, sharing their love of what they all do.

 

JB: You’ve always worked collaboratively: initially with General Idea and more recently with ‘AA Bronson’s School for Young Shamans’ and with the ‘Invocation of the Queer Spirits’ series. Why is collaborative practice so important to you?

 

AAB: To tell you the truth, it’s all I’ve ever done. I don’t know much about solo practice and it doesn’t really appeal to me. I think that solo practice comes directly out of a kind of marketing, framing the artist as ‘hero’ or ‘genius’. Music, dance, theatre, and even architecture are all collaborative practices, but somehow the visual arts is rarely pictured as collaborative, even when an artist employs an army of assistants, and is more art director than artist.

 

JB: General Idea seemed to be, in some ways, about undermining the art market: by adopting a corporate identity, working collaboratively and utilising external fabricators to produce the work General Idea eschewed the idea of the unique hand and ‘genius’ of the artist and questioned notions of authorship. How does this inform your current practice which is largely performance-based?

 

AAB: I’ve become increasingly disenfranchised from the art market. Living and working in Chelsea, where there are more than 300 galleries within a three-block radius of my home, I find myself avoiding galleries and especially openings. The marketplace system is very destructive to artists, especially younger artists, in New York City. It is expensive to be here, and the galleries lean on artists to produce a certain kind of work. Marketplace manipulation is so extreme that it is taken as the norm, and dealers talk about “releasing” works as if they are Microsoft: false scarcity is a given. I began moving back towards performance in a kind of self-defence, trying to retain the creative impulse that has always given shape to my life. Without realising it, I have returned to the kind of art-making that we were doing in the early days of General Idea. Performance is perhaps a misleading term: the work is performative and collaborative; it spits out a kind of detritus that might or might not be art; and projects bleed one into another, so that sometimes it is difficult to know what is a “work”, or at least where the edges of the work are positioned. Ambiguity reigns.

 

JB: As well as working collaboratively, you have also lived communally; in the 1960s in Winnipeg; later in Toronto with the experimental living and teaching co-operative, Rochdale College and, of course with Jorge Zontal and Felix Partz as General Idea. In ‘Make Everything New: A Project on Communism’, published by Book Works, you mention that you were quite young when you started experimenting with communal living: this must have been an amazing and formative experience. Do you see any equivalent contemporary experiments in alternative living?

 

AAB: All of these situations were urban. The major urban squats and co-ops of Copenhagen and London, for example, seem to be past their prime (correct me if I am wrong). And the commune movement of the 60s exists only in a few sad, mostly rural, remains. There are the radical faeries, and the queer rural gathering spots, but these involve short term, rather than long term, coming together. The only similar phenomenon that I can think of is the ‘houses’ of the ball culture, especially in New York and Baltimore. Each ‘house’ is led by a ‘father’ and a ‘mother’ (both men, of course), and queer youth of colour join a house (usually named after a fashion designer, such as the House of Balenciaga) in order to ‘walk’ at dance events in which they compete to win various titles, each a kind of description of a cultural hybrid, for example ‘lumberjack with a twist’—which might inspire a very butch outfit with feminine gestures. It’s an extraordinarily interesting subculture within a subculture.

 

JB: There’s a lot of humour in General Idea’s work, I’m thinking of the self-portraits: ‘And Baby Makes Three’ and ‘P is for Poodle’. There’s also humour in your recent work: the butt plugs with rooster feathers in ‘Invocation of the Queer Spirits’ are hilarious (though you may not agree, AA). How do you see the role of humour in your work?

 

AAB: Humour in General Idea always came out of ambiguity. The more densely layered the possible readings of a work, the more ‘humorous’ it became, but also the more profound. We were particularly enamoured of readings that could only rest in a kind of uneasy truce with each other. And of course we loved to poke fun at our own image as the artist, to pump ourselves up into a kind of mock simulation of ‘artist as genius’. In my own work, with the butt plugs and rooster feathers, for example, it is not so different. I like to wring all of the meanings that I can out of an image, no matter how contradictory those meanings might be. And the image of the artist as shaman or healer is of course rife with connotations of the artist as con man, as well as that of the artist as a maker of magic, of artifacts of power, and of community.

 

JB: In 1976, Time-Life Corporation sued you (the suit was eventually dropped) for the use of a logo modelled on the ‘Life’ magazine logo that appeared on ‘FILE’, the ‘megazine’ published by General Idea, between 1972-1989. Recently, all of the editions of ‘FILE’ were re-published in one volume by JRP/Ringier. What was the impetus for this project? How do you think the meaning of ‘FILE’ has changed since it was first published?

 

AAB: It’s difficult for me to see what FILE has become. I know that it has an iconic presence now; it is a piece of cultural history. But for me, it was always in the process of becoming, and that is how I think of it still, as an integral part of our 25 years together, talking, laughing, fighting, and making art.

 

JB: Like the other members of General Idea, you changed your name. You were originally called Michael Tims, a name that sounds, to my mind, so much more timid and librarian-like than AA Bronson, a name that always makes me think – somewhat obviously – of Charles Bronson (as in both the macho film star and also the ‘notorious prison inmate’). How much of Michael Tims still remains or, in changing your name, did you completely reject your past?

I think each of us is made of many selves. In 1969, I wrote the porn novel Lena with my friends A.S.A. Harrison and a group of pre-GI housemates. We sold the book outright to a small porn publisher and the book appeared in sex shops with the author’s name as A.L. Bronson. The book was quickly banned and burned, and my friends started calling me AA Bronson as a kind of joke, but it stuck (the transformation from A.L. to AA seems to have come from a remark about being at the beginning of the phone book). I was astonished how easy it was for the very polite, private, sincere, and modest Michael to become a somewhat outrageous, public and ‘out there’ AA. Of course Michael still hides behind the mask, whoever Michael might be. But in truth AA has taken over, although AA is given to transformations of image, as I indulge in the constant practice of reinventing myself.

 

JB: You’ve set up healing practices in New York and Toronto. As part of these healing sessions you offer full body massages including butt massages which initially sound humourous (to British minds, at least) but have a serious intention and a profound effect on your clients. From what I’ve read and from what I know of you, people seem to respond to your generosity of spirit and to your gentleness and, I guess, for someone to allow you to work on their arsehole they would have to really trust you. Can you tell me more about the healing sessions? In particular, how does it feel for you, it seems like the process is exhausting, both physically and mentally? Can you tell me more about how you came to religion/spirituality and how this affects your life and practice?

 

AAB: Well, first of all, it is never an exhausting process. When a client comes to me, we agree to embark on a collaborative process. When I lay my hands on someone, I get information. The body talks to me. I tell the client what I sense or hear and that begins a conversation. In effect, I facilitate a conversation between a person and their own body. You mention the infamous butt massage: the asshole is the most secret part of the body, the part we cannot even see ourselves. It is the place we hide the aspects of ourselves that we cannot deal with, it is the classic place where trauma hides, but sometimes much more mundane qualities: American straight men, for example, tend to hide their tenderness there. The sphincter muscle is a powerful place to work. It is the site of the root chakra, and the source from which Kundalini flows. A healing session is a kind of narrative: it has a beginning, a middle, and an end. It can be very dramatic; and it is very subtle. I try to bring the client home to who they really are, to allow them a safety in which their public persona can fall away and they can experience the reality of their own full being. I am a conduit, through which information and energy passes. I find the process extraordinarily life-giving; at a time when I was experiencing deep grief and an inability to see a place for myself in the world, this capacity to heal revealed itself to me. Occasionally I find a client who is exceptionally challenging; perhaps our stories are too similar and my own body starts to participate in the narrative: I experience this as a kind of heaviness in my body, a darkness. Sometimes there are astonishing side effects, for example a series of large bruises that materialized up and down my arms. Then I need to withdraw, shower, drink water, and cleanse myself of whatever it is that I have taken on.

I have always been deeply spiritual. I see all religions as manifestations of the same godhead, for lack of a better word. Brought up in a family tradition of Angicanism (my great-grandfather was the first missionary to the Blackfoot tribes), I turned my back on Christianity at an early age, and immersed myself in eastern religions, the occult, and mysticism. The architecture of Greek temples, Shinto shrines, and the Egyptian temples all caught my attention, all of them essentially performative. Like the Beatles, I was initiated into Transcendental Meditation. An encounter with a white witch in Caracas introduced me to the practices of the African diaspora, which continue to engage me. And an encounter with the Dalai Lama in 1983 led me into a deep relationship with Tibetan Buddhism. I was lucky to be taught, if briefly, by the old generation of lamas from Tibet before they died. Now I have been made faculty at the Union Theological Seminary, where I am also a student. Through the Institute of Art, Religion, and Spirituality, which I founded last year, I am trying to open up a conversation between art and religion through the lens of social justice.

 

JB: I’m interested in your ideas about image as virus. General Idea’s work ‘AIDS’ of 1987, which appropriated Robert Indiana’s 1966 ‘LOVE’ painting, was used not only in its original format as a screenprint, but became a kind of virus when it entered the public domain in multiple formats – as magazine covers, stickers, stamps, posters and multiples. Like Indiana’s ‘Love’, the image achieved a ubiquitous presence: in 1989, an ‘AIDS’ poster was installed in every second carriage in the New York City subway system, bringing the idea of AIDS into the public arena. What are your current thoughts on image as virus given the incredible changes that have occurred in the way images are disseminated with the advent of the Internet?

 

AAB: We began working with the idea of image as virus in the early 70s; it was an idea we picked up from William Burroughs. So of course when AIDS came along it was at once fortuitous and ironic that we had developed a language and a method with which we could tackle the disease: you could say we invented viral advertising. For seven years our work as artists took the shape of a kind of publicity campaign, a campaign for a disease, which was otherwise being ignored.

As far as the dissemination of images on the Internet, I’m particularly interested in the recent phenomenon of tumblr.com, a site for visual blogs that invites reblogging and in effect completely does away with the idea of copyright. One can track images travelling from blog to blog as they “infect” the tumblr community. The tumblr method seems particularly sympathetic to the pornographic and the erotic: sexual imagery travels through tumblr at an incredible rate, both commercial and “amateur”. As a lot of visual artists have blogs on tumblr, there is much imagery that is less amateur than it is casual. By registering yourself on the system and “following” your favourites, you in effect construct your own blog, a visual avalanche of images from cyberspace.

 

JB: In ‘Untitled (Media Guru 003)’, 2007 and ‘Untitled (Media Guru 008)’, 2009, you made a series of works that use found images from gay male dating sites, of anonymous naked men in sexually explicit poses. Gay men use dating sites to present images that aim to transmit an idealised version of themselves, but that fantasy image can become scrambled as the receiver projects their own particular chimera onto that image. Do you think that Internet cruising sites and apps such as ‘Grindr’, are changing the way gay men respond and relate to each other, potentially in a negative way?

 

AAB: Yes, the way that gay men relate to each other has in fact already been transformed by the Internet. I was chatting with a young man on a sex site recently and he was wondering how men met up before the Internet. He somehow presumed that bars must have been the only venue. I am sad that so many social situations built around cruising have vanished. That rich territory is much depleted these days. On the other hand, the electronic world is increasingly rich. To go back to tumblr.com for a moment, although it’s not a queer site specifically, I think it allows people to reveal the quirkiness and complexity of their human individuality and collectivity, and brings a way of sharing, quite literally, into the game. There are a few tumblr blogs made up entirely of self-images, and those particularly fascinate me. Unlike the usual sex site, with its quota of a certain number of self-images, tumblr encourages one to participate in a continuous act of revealing the self. I’m sure this is just the beginning of something much more profound. Most of the amateur sexual social sites have been based on print media, but as the truly electronic reveals itself, the internet will become much more a site of expression, of revelation.

 

JB: The theme informing this issue of Kilimanjaro is ‘celebration’. You were recently awarded the Order of Canada, an honour for merit that is the highest order in the Canadian system of honours, a fantastic celebration and recognition of your achievements. You are a role model within the art world and beyond. For many, because of your honesty and openness, you are a gay role model. How do you feel about having these roles?

 

AAB: At the ceremony at which I received my Order of Canada, the Canadian Governor General spoke of celebrating those who have had the courage to speak the truth in situations in which the truth was not welcome. Or, as one of the recipients said, “Hey, we’re all a bunch of troublemakers here!” I do try to live my life as openly and as transparently as possible. I suppose that I have collapsed the private into the public, and this is what makes me a gay role model. I like having that role, and I try to wrap it into my role within the art world, to allow my sexuality to speak to the other aspects of my living: I think that our sexuality can bring magic into our lives.

 

JB: Finally, AA, what are you currently working on? What’s next in your busy schedule?

 

AAB: Oh, I am astonished to find myself working on a series of sculptures made of conventional materials—bronze, stone—in the tradition of neolithic standing stones, or Brancusi, or the granite lingams of southern India. I told Esther Schipper, my dealer in Berlin, that after a long career highly critical of the marketplace and of the gallery system, I find myself producing something that looks just like gallery art. My image of myself is a little shaken by this turn of events. On the other hand, I am in the midst of producing Queer Spirits, a collaborative book with the Canadian artist and academic Peter Hobbs, built around our series of performances Invocation of the Queer Spirits. The Invocations melded aspects of 18^th century séances, ceremonial magic, witches covens, group therapy, queer heart circles, not to mention social rituals like quilting bees and circle jerks. The book will be published by the public art initiative Creative Time in New York, in collaboration with Winnipeg’s quintessential artist-run gallery, Plug In ICA, and we hope to release it at the NY Art Book Fair this coming November.

 

James Brook is an artist and graphic designer, based in London. www.jamesbrook.net