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Hans Ulrich Obrist interview with AA Bronson, General Idea


[In a taxi]

HUO To begin at the beginning, I want to ask you my only recurrent question in all of my interviews, which is about the unrealised project: can you talk about some of your favourite General Idea projects that have been too big to be realised, or too small, or too expensive?

AAB One that comes to mind is the The Tunnel of Love, which is a kind of maze we proposed for a big exhibition in Montreal in1986. We thought that it might be refused for the exhibition, because it is explicitly sexual in reference, and in fact it was. It was a maze of plywood, a modular system with glory holes based on the kind of maze that one found in gay steam baths in the seventies. I recently proposed that piece for the Canadian Pavilion in Venice. [note: GI was not chosen for Venice].

HUO That is very interesting because a similar thing happened with Felix Gonzalez-Torres in Venice, in the American Pavilion.

AAB
The other unrealised piece was in the early eighties for Toronto's baseball stadium. We proposed to make a photographic satellite map at the latitude of Toronto all the way around the world. So it went through Milan, it crossed the Great Wall of China three times and so on. It would have been a visual record of the surface of the earth. The stadium is so large that if one put this map around the outside, the City of Toronto itself would be the size of a silver dollar. You could actually see the Great Wall of China and so on. Most of the map would be water, so it would have created an interesting metaphysical relationship to the world. They started to build the massive light boxes for the piece and then turned them into advertising instead.

HUO It was a wrongly-realised project! Are there other unrealised projects in your locker?

AAB There are actually a lot of unrealised General Idea projects, but most of them were unrealised because we never got to them: Jorge and Felix died before they could happen.

HUO To begin with the beginning, I was always fascinated that General Idea started in almost the same month I was born, in 1968. I wonder if you could tell me how it all started. Was it a marriage of convenience?

AAB [Laughs] Yes. It started in a very accidental way. We met through a common friend, Mimi. She was Felix’s girlfriend and Felix was visiting Toronto from Winnipeg, but she wanted to keep him in Toronto. She found this little house right downtown and she proposed that a group of us should rent the house and live together, we could live very cheaply. And Felix’s big complaint about Toronto was always that it was too expensive. So we did that. The little house had had a store window put in the front and now it was back to being a house again. So we were living in a storefront. We were all unemployed and Jorge, Felix and I, to keep ourselves entertained, would go and raid the garbage of neighbourhood businesses. So we found, for example, boxes and boxes of books, nurse romances, you know, Harlequin nurse romances. We began to make fake stores in our living room, for example one that specialised in nurse romances. Gradually these projects became more involved and more like exhibitions. We developed this reputation in Toronto for these strange projects that appeared in our window and that is how it began.

HUO Through those window displays.

AAB Yes. There’s a couple of things to mention. First, we were finding things from commercial garbage and we were working in a storefront. So it became a reflection on consumerism and commerce in the very first days and continued that way to the end. And secondly, it was a commune in a way.

HUO And what about the idea of production of reality? We discussed your work with Pierre Huyghe and he is very interested in your work and there has been a lot of discussion about the production of reality. When you did this stuff at the beginning it wasn’t about representation, I suppose.

AAB No.

HUO I think that is different than previous approaches; pop was not so much about bringing that into art, but General Idea seemed to me more about production of reality. Can you maybe talk about this because I think that is what made your work so important for my whole generation in the nineties.

AAB Our idea was that we didn’t quite fit into the world around us and we also didn’t fit into the art world. We started to fabricate a parallel reality that was our reality, with our own media, which was FILE Megazine, and our own museum, which was the Miss General Idea Pavillion, and our own shopping experiences with Art Metropole and our various Boutiques. We saw it very much as a parallel reality and for that reason we could never really be successful in the art world, because what we were doing was not intended for collectors or even for museums, it was rather to create a world for ourselves.

HUO So is it more to put a world into the world?

AAB Yes. Exactly. To put a world into the world. That’s a very nice expression. I like that.

HUO In terms of putting a world into the world, at more or less the same time in London, Gilbert and George started to put a world into the world.

AAB We were actually in communication with them, starting in about 1970.

HUO That’s what I wanted to ask, because there has been a stunning parallel. You made your own publication, your own distribution, your own dissemination, and put your world into the world and so did they. So what was the contact zone?

AAB The early 70s was a time when artists were sending each other things through the mail. We would send Gilbert & George our mail projects and publications, and they sent us theirs: their little greeting cards, and their books. And then, I think it was in 1973, Jorge and Granada, who was part of General Idea at the time, went to London and somehow the relationship with Gilbert and George became about going dancing. In 1977 we had our exhibition at Canada House in Trafalgar Square, which is a very boring place but the people who came to the opening were interesting: Gilbert and George, Richard Hamilton, Alan Jones, Genesis P. Orridge, and Derek Jarman. And Gilbert and George took us all dancing to a trendy gay club. Their way of dancing was to take each of us by our hands and twirl us round and round until we went flying, knocking over tables and so on. [Laughs] So the relationship with Gilbert and George, for me, came about through the mail and through dancing rather than through the usual production of art.

HUO Maybe we should move in and get coffee. But it is nice that this is an interview on the move.

[Break in interview; resumed inside building]

Part one of the interview was in a taxi between the Hilton and the Bulgari Pavilion at Art Basel. Hopefully we do another one tonight on the way to John Baldessari's 75th birthday party.

I wanted to ask you about the notion of the group. Recently Rem Koolhaas undertook a project on Metabolism, so we went to interview the members of the group of Metabolists, the architects but also the engineers and critics. They didn’t have a manifesto but they said by the sixties it became passé to do manifestos, maybe neo-avant garde but not avant garde, and now manifestos seem anyway a very remote thing but still a fascination. I was wondering if you could talk about General Idea, manifestos and how it related to the old avant-garde and the new avant-garde.

AAB From our point of view, because we were so interested in mass media, the newspaper editorial had replaced the manifesto. When we started File Megazine in 1972 we thought of it as our own mass media, and the editorials became the place where we made our statement of the moment. Then, also, in the Glamour Issue in 1975 we published ‘Glamour’, which is a kind of a manifesto but we saw it as occupying the format of the manifesto.

HUO So almost a parody?

AAB It’s a kind of a parody, or imperfect simulacrum, but at the same time it is serious. It’s based on an essay by Roland Barthes, the final essay in Mythologies. He talked about myth and we talked about glamour: our idea was that as myth is to reality, so glamour is to myth. That was the idea of our manifesto. But the editorials, if you look at them, are recurring statements of position: there is an editorial about the re-objectification of the art object and so on. They are attempts to make statements about where we were in relation to art today. They are always a little bit tongue-in-cheek but at the same time absolutely truthful.

HUO Obviously the manifesto is very much related to the idea of changing the world and to the idea of utopia. How would you define the relationship of General Idea to utopia?

AAB In a way that’s what creating our own reality was about. The current reality wasn’t sufficient for us, or we didn’t feel we belonged, so we had to create our own world, which was a kind of parody, an imperfect simulacrum of a perfect world. But I would like to backtrack a little and talk about the sixties. In the mid-sixties I was part of a group in Winnipeg that founded a commune, a free school, a free store, an underground newspaper and so on. Again, a whole world. The commune had the philosophy that anyone who came to the door could move in. Decisions were made by consensus by everybody equally, whether they had arrived there that day or been there all along; there were house meetings once a week and we always shared one meal together daily. These all became precepts of General Idea six or seven years later. There were eight people when we started the commune; there were sixty-five people when I moved out a year later. It was wall-to-wall sleeping bags. So this commune was very much an idea of utopia but the result was a house of sleeping bags. With General Idea we had to take it in a different direction.

HUO You took it in the direction of the pavilion and the pavilion was also a house in a way. It also connected your practice to architecture. So could you tell me about the pavilion?

AAB The pavilion. It’s odd, actually, that Jorge and I both went to architecture school. The theme of architecture underlay everything we did. The 1984 Miss General Idea Pavilion emerged in 1971 and we planned to build it for 1984, so we allowed ourselves thirteen years. It was a sort of parody of architecture and the idea was that we could build a decentralised building, we would build fragments of architecture that would exist in museums around the world and collectively they would be the 1984 Miss General Idea Pavillion. So whenever we had an exhibition in a museum, we turned that museum into a wing of the Miss General Idea Pavillion. We appropriated the museums as part of our architecture.

HUO The way you define time, maybe that is something to talk about. It seems the Miss General Idea project continued for years, it didn’t stop.

AAB Oh yes. Our whole relationship to time was, I think, unique, because we were building the 1984 Pavilion already in 1971, in 1977 we came up with the notion that the pavilion would burn to the ground during the 1984 Miss General Idea Pageant, and we began to simultaneously create the ruins and rooms of the Pavilion. So there was a point at which the past, the present and the future all coexisted and we moved between the three producing art works that might relate to any of those three themes at any moment. It was only when we moved to New York in 1986 that that had to stop. We had to make that very complex narrative less visible because it was too confusing for America.

HUO So with the Pavilion, the destruction of the building happened before the building was born. It was in limbo.

AAB Exactly, exactly, yes.

HUO The work seems to oscillate between architecture and exhibition design. Richard Hamilton once said that exhibitions are only remembered if they produce some sort of new display feature. I always thought the Pavilion idea was a display feature idea that you pushed further into mobile structures. With the ‘Going Through the Notions’ exhibition (1975), suddenly it’s a kind of a building on the move.

AAB Yes. I think we even used that expression in File somewhere, ‘the building on the move’. You are talking about the ziggurat costumes?

HUO Yes.

AAB We built these costumes for the contestants. Of course, because the 1984 Pageant hadn’t happened yet—it was still nine years away—our performances became public rehearsals of the Pageant. In order to hide the identities of the contestants we built these architectural ziggurat forms. In a way it harks back to the competition for the Chrysler building where they had these costumes. You remember?

HUO Yes.

AAB It harks back to that and we saw these costumes also as architectural models for the pavilion itself.

HUO You also have architectural links in drawings such as the proposed seating arrangement. You called it Form Follows Fiction in the mid seventies. Can we talk a little bit about this FFF series?

AAB [Laughs] Yes, Form Follows Fiction. That was what we were talking about, creating an alternative universe for ourselves but at the same time, of course, we didn’t have the capital to build everything we wanted to build. So there was a fictional reality that we constructed through architectural drawings, but also through video and performance. There was a narrative that ran through all our work from 1969 up until 1986 and it continued in a reduced state to 1994.

HUO Architecture is there in this Form Follows Fiction series but also in an interesting way in the portraits of General Idea, it’s almost like -

AAB - we became architects.

HUO You became architects. I am interested in this bridge between art and architecture. It seems to be a very interesting moment when suddenly you are planning the future.

AAB Yes. The idea of planning the future comes out of magazines of the post-war period. If you look at Fortune magazine of the fifties you will see images of progress and of building the future. And there are consistently pictures of three men working together: three architects, three engineers, three guys in a corporation, but they are always poring over papers, planning the future. It’s a little bit like the Three Blind Mice and the Three Little Pigs or Three Men in a Boat. Images of three men run through popular culture. So we began to make portraits of ourselves, first as architects. A little later we became archaeologists sifting through the ruins, and we made portraits of ourselves as archaeologists. And with the AIDS work, we made a self-portrait as doctors. So there is always this relationship between what we are doing and the way we represent ourselves.

HUO There seems also to be a reference to Futurism, the 1984 Miss General Idea Vehicle in front of the Toronto City Hall is almost like Marinetti.

AAB Yes, it is quite like Marinetti. [Laughs] But it is a futurism that comes out of the popular culture of the fifties, and that is itself a reference back to something earlier. Popular culture tended to be the source of most of our imagery until the mid-eighties, when we started referring more directly to art itself.

HUO Can you tell me about the Vehicle?

AAB The 1984 Miss General Idea Vehicle was a full-scale drawing in graphite and silver paint on brown paper. Our generation had a very uncomfortable relationship to the car because in the search for utopia you absolutely have to get rid of the car. Architects and planners over the decades have dealt with it in different ways and our way was to mythologize the car, to make it an abstraction. The Miss General Idea Vehicle, our ultimate ideal car, is just made out of pencil and paper. It doesn’t use a lot of fuel!

[Interruption to recording; resumed in a taxi]

HUO So this is part three of the interview and actually when we began this morning it was with the same taxi driver but now we are in Zurich and we are starting out from Beatrix Ruf’s kitchen, and we are going to Ringier’s house in Kùsnacht. It’s difficult to make the link to this morning. Where were we?

AAB I don’t quite remember.

HUO I am working a lot on the space between art and architecture. Many young artists now have an urbanist practice and you came from architecture. Have you ever re-entered that field of urbanism and architecture?

AAB I was in a competition in Vienna for a monument to the gay and transgender victims of the Austrian Nazis of World War Two. I collaborated with my partner, Mark Krayenhoff, an architect, and we proposed a kind of enormous disco ball made of pink and black glass triangles over a dance floor in a park. We were one of the three finalists but we lost. The proposals were shown to community groups and the gay groups all complained about the theme of the disco ball. [Laughs]

HUO And that meant it was unrealised.

AAB Yes. So that is the most recent thing.

HUO A lot has been written about your pavilions and I remember when I was a child in St Gallen we always talked about your pavilions and I have a really strong childhood memory of that but I never read about General Idea cities.

AAB Cities. Wow!

HUO I wondered if you ever ventured into urbanism and if there exists such a thing as a General Idea city.

AAB Actually, I’m ashamed to say there is no such thing as a General Idea city [laughs] but I really wish there were. I think urbanism would have been a perfect subject, but no, we never did go that way, no.

HUO I was asking you this morning about exhibition design. Were there other exhibition designs you could mention? Duchamp invented coal bags, the ropes; these are perhaps his most radical, well-known display features. Richard Hamilton had the moving walls.

AAB In fact all through the seventies we were collecting books about exhibition design, especially books from the twenties and thirties about design for trade fairs. A lot of those ideas were put into the pieces themselves. The pieces incorporated the idea of display into their structure, for example the Cocktail Bar from the 1984 Miss General Idea Pavillion, and of course the Boutique from the Pavilion, and another group of works on the theme of transgression, all from the late seventies..

HUO One of your pieces that was a huge influence throughout the nineties was your icescape piece, something which Pierre Huyghe always liked, Fin de Siècle. Was it 1992?

AAB 1991, I think. We were invited to do an exhibition at the Wurttenbergische Kunstverein in Suttgart and in the back is this enormous room that is 40 metres square, with no interior columns and with a grid on the ceiling. Somehow this grid of illuminated panels inspired this construction of several hundred sheets of styrofoam and three reproduction baby harp seals, a kind of abstraction of Caspar David Friedrich's The Wreck of Hope. The seals were considered an endangered species and had enormous media visibility, primarily because Brigitte Bardot led a campaign to save them. In Canada they are considered to be over-populating and endangering the cod population, so there is actually a price on their heads. As for the styrofoam; it has highly reflective qualities and also a strong smell, so when you enter the gallery you are overwhelmed by white light and the smell of styrofoam. It is the only plastic that is 100% recyclable; on the other hand it will exist for all of time: it is 100% non-biodegradable. So it is an ambiguous material.

HUO Can you tell me about how the piece was triggered? It is such an iconic piece.

AAB The three baby seals are obviously a sort of victim figure and Jorge and Felix had AIDS at the time, so in a way it was a self-portrait of the artist as victim, but I don’t think that was what triggered it: it was somehow the ceiling of light. It came out of nowhere; it was fully formed.

HUO As Whistler would say, ‘Art happens’.

AAB Art happens, yes. It’s very mysterious, that piece.

HUO Richter has the atlas and many artists have a fund of images—Hans Peter Feldmann, Gilbert and George have an incredible archive of images. I have never read about your archive. There was obviously your different structures of distribution, you had FILE Megazine; a lot has been written about that. But I wanted to focus on your atlas, how you file stuff. There is some kind of filing aesthetic in the work. There are, for example, the show cards.

AAB The show card series consists of over 300 silk-screened cards, like oversized index cards, each with a photograph, usually of a found image, and a handwritten text. They were a way of filing images that we found inspirational towards future projects.

HUO Where do you file your stuff, is it chaotic or is it orderly?

AAB It’s very, very orderly. We were obsessive archivists. Part of it I still have and part of it is at the National Gallery of Canada. The primary sources were popular magazines from the forties and fifties. And of course books, we collected books. Fortune Magazine seemed to be particularly rich with images that reflected on post-war society, progress, and in particular images of three men: three men working together, architects, engineers or whatever, which I mentioned this morning.

HUO I wonder if you could talk a little bit about your link to writing and General Idea’s writing practice. Was it a daily practice?

AAB I think we were always writing something and the way that we wrote was additive. One person would start a text and pass it to the next; the next person would edit it and add and subtract, and then the next person and so on. So it would get passed around and around and around.

HUO Almost like a palimpsest?

AAB Yes, in a way, very much. And of course we would have big fights about it sometimes. [Laughs]

HUO And has there ever been a book of collected writings of General Idea?

AAB No, there hasn’t.

HUO And that leads to books. If you go to London or to New York or any big city on a specific day and you want to see a book by Gilbert and George or by General Idea or by any other important artist of our time, it is not necessarily given that it is on display in any museum but you always find hundreds of books in bookshops and people’s houses. So Gilbert and George were saying that they really think that the true presence is somehow books. I was wondering about your approach to books. You have almost always designed your own publications. What is your favourite from all the General Idea books?

AAB XXX Voto, the last book we did. The text was written in ’93 and the idea of it was put together in ’94 and it was actually published in ’95. It’s based on Yves Klein’s Prayer to Saint Rita, the saint of hopeless causes. XXX Voto is a goodbye text, because Jorge and Felix were dying. It is a thank you to the Spirit of Miss General Idea and for everything that she gave us. It’s a lovely text, and a beautiful book, printed in Klein's signature blue, pink and gold.

HUO A very last question, which is maybe the most embarrassing question I could think of, but I am always curious to ask it. Rainer Maria Rilke wrote a lovely text which is Advice to a Young Poet. I was wondering today, in 2006, what would be your advice to a young artist in the environment of market dominance and all of that.

AAB I really don’t know what to say. I know so many young artists. Most of my peers died, so most of my friends these days are in their twenties, which is rather strange; they have all come of age in negotiation with a commercial world. I find the current state of the art world surreal: I don’t have an answer to this question.