General Idea: A Conversation with AA Bronson

A rare in-person conversation with artist AA Bronson. Claire Gilman, Chief Curator at The Drawing Center and Stuart Comer, Lonti Ebers Chief Curator of Media and Performance at The Museum of Modern Art, will join AA Bronson for a wide-ranging discussion coinciding with the exhibitions Ecce Homo: The Drawings of General Idea at The Drawing Center and General Idea at the National Gallery of Canada.

Aimee Good:
Come on in and find a seat. Welcome everyone. Welcome. My name is Aimee Good. I'm the Director of Education, Community, and Public Programs. Before we begin, on behalf of The Drawing Center, I acknowledge and pay respect to the Lenape peoples, their elders, both past and present, and future generations on whose unceded, ancestral homelands we gather, as well as the diverse and vibrant native communities who make their home here in New York City today. Thank you for joining us tonight. Our director, Laura Hoptman, will introduce this evening's speakers.

Laura Hoptman:
Thank you. Thank you for your concision and also for organizing this wonderful event. Hi, I'm Laura Hoptman, I'm the Executive Director of The Drawing Center. Thank you all for being here. Especially thank you to our illustrious panel, which consists of AA Bronson, Claire Gilman, our chief curator here at The Drawing Center, and Stuart Comer from the Museum of Modern Art. This convening is on the occasion of not only one, but two exhibitions. The first one that's surrounding you is called Ecce Homo: The Drawings of General Idea, and it was curated by our own Claire Gilman in conjunction with Lionel Bovier, the director of MAMCO in Geneva, where this show will travel to. The second exhibition, which I wish we all could see, and I know some of us already have, is General Idea, a retrospective at the National Gallery of Canada.
So just a little bit of an introduction for three people who probably don't need any introduction, I'm moving over here. AA Bronson, who is in the center, is a Canadian artist living and working in Berlin. He's one of the founding members of General Idea, along with Felix Partz and Jorge Zontal. This was a group that, from 1969 to 1994, lived and worked together and produced the living artwork of being together, which was presented in over a hundred solo exhibitions and countless group shows and temporary public art projects, until the tragic death of two of the three members of General Idea from AIDS in 1994. This drawing exhibition is the first exhibition of these drawings in the United States, and it was through AA's efforts that these works have come to be seen by a broader audience. And I know this for a fact because I first met you, AA, when I was a junior curator in the drawing department at the Museum of Modern Art, and you brought, in your satchel, a bunch of these drawings for me to see. Yeah.

AA Bronson:
Can't remember.

Laura Hoptman:
It was big for me, might not have been for you. So AA has worked in partnership with our own Claire Gilman, who is our chief curator here, and with, as I mentioned, Lionel Bovier of MAMCO. They also have produced an outstanding publication, which you can have a look at and maybe buy after this event is over in our shop.
I'm also happy to, very happy actually, to welcome my former colleague, Stuart Comer, to my right, who is the Lonti Ebers Chief Curator of Media and Performance at our own Museum of Modern Art. He's a longtime fan of General Idea. And whilst at MoMA, he oversees the collection and diverse programmings of exhibitions, events, and acquisitions for the Department of Media and Performance, as well as The Marie-Josee and Henry Kravis Studio, the Museum's new space dedicated to performance, music, sound, spoken word, and the expanded approaches to the moving image. Stuart's resume is a heck of a lot longer than that, but we don't have time, so you're just going to have to be a chief curator at MoMA.
Finally, we can't do these kinds of shows without help, and major support for Ecce Homo: The Drawings of General Idea and its attending publication is provided by Mitchell-Innes & Nash, Michael Ringier in Zurich, with the additional support provided by Steve Ells, Mai 36 Galerie in Vienna, Esther Schipper of Esther Schipper Gallery in Berlin, Maureen Paley of the eponymous gallery in London, the Consulate General of Canada, O Canada, in New York, and the Council for Canadian American Relations, and finally our friends, Leo and Sandra DelZotto, who are living in Toronto. Finally, a very big thanks to the Council for Canadian American Relations and the Consulate General of Canada in New York for support of this program. Take it away, Claire, and thank you again, all, for coming.

Claire Gilman:
Thank you, Laura. I'm just looking at, for those of you that are standing in the back there, I'm looking at four seats, I think, up here, and there's probably more sprinkled in that I can't see. So I guess I would invite you all, there's two in the front row and two immediately behind if you want to come take a seat, but otherwise, you are of course welcome to stand, and I apologize if we are short of seats.
So welcome everyone. Welcome AA and Stuart. It's lovely to be here with you this evening. And as Laura mentioned, this has been a very big year for General Idea; in addition to a major retrospective in Ottawa, which is going to be traveling to Amsterdam and Berlin, having this show on at the same time, I think they're overlapping by about a month or something, and then traveling to Geneva.
And I think we'll talk about the retrospective in a moment, but since we're here surrounded by all these wonderful drawings, maybe we can start here. And I would just like to start off loosely by asking you how it feels to be sitting here, how it feels to you to be seeing all these drawings together. Because I don't think you've ever... There has never been such a large assembly of these drawings. I think you were saying 50-or-so have been shown in Europe and in Canada, but never such a large grouping, and never in the US. So how is that experience seeing these drawings this way?

AA Bronson:
Let's see if I can turn this on.

Claire Gilman:
I think it should be on, I didn't do anything to mine.

AA Bronson:
Hello, hello, is it working?

Aimee Good:
It's working.

AA Bronson:
Well, of course I've seen them lying on tabletops.

Claire Gilman:
Right, right. Yes, very true.

AA Bronson:
And it is a bit strange to see them all separated from each other in frames. Feels kind of unnatural.

Claire Gilman:
In a good way, I hope?

AA Bronson:
No, I'm very happy with the show. I like how it looks and I love the frames, but the drawings you're seeing are from a period of time from '85, which is around the time we started looking for a place to live here in New York, until '94, which is when we left New York. Jorge and Felix both had AIDS by the time we left, and both died in the first half of...

Claire Gilman:
1994.

AA Bronson:
Oh, '94. No, so we left here in '93. So these drawings only go up to '93. They're all done by Jorge Zontal. And he had this habit of drawing whenever we had meetings. And being a collaborative team, anybody who's worked in a collaborative situation knows you have endless meetings, right? Hours and hours of meetings to make the smallest decision. And so Jorge never really said much at those meetings, he just drew, and these are the things he drew.
So I have drawings going all the way back to the very early '70s, and they are like a strange kind of resume of our life together. And one doesn't always know what they're about, but every now and then things suddenly become clear and I think, "Oh my God, that's what that was about." And they're a wonderfully rich... What? Memory bank. In many cases, I can remember where Jorge was sitting. I know that these ones, for example, on the green wall, were all made during a holiday in Key West. And I think they're kind of a cross between a poodle and a flamingo, something like that.

Claire Gilman:
Right, you had to point that... When I saw them, I thought they were DNA or something, but I was very pleased-

AA Bronson:
Maybe [inaudible 00:09:17].

Claire Gilman:
... to discover that they were poodles. Then I saw the poodle. Yeah, I think I see the bird, the poodle, and the DNA, all of those things in them. So yeah, I think you were saying that Jorge made drawings from the very beginning, but there was a change in regularity starting in around 1985, '86, in the types of drawings he was making. And it sort of became more codified, in a way.

AA Bronson:
It was when we moved to New York, and I don't know why it happened at that moment, but we had been trying to encourage Jorge to use proper paper, and to save the drawings, and to not write phone numbers on them. Most of the earlier drawings are covered in doodles, and phone numbers, and people's names. And it turns out that he was doing that already when he was about five. Any surface nearby, that was paper, he would cover in drawings. So his mother was always complaining because every magazine in the house was covered in drawings.
And when we moved to New York, I don't know whether he gave in or he made a decision. We had been buying him all these notebooks that he refused to use, and he suddenly started using them. He found the one he particularly liked, and then 90% of these drawings are all done in the same notebook. And they all have dates on them, but I have to warn you that he dated them about four months before he died, from memory. And they're totally inconsistent. Sometimes there's two drawings that you're absolutely sure were made the same day and he's got them three years apart.

Claire Gilman:
Oh, okay. I didn't realize that, I thought... But they do also span dates, the same motif.

AA Bronson:
The same motif he might have worked on over a period of even 10 years. So you can't tell from the motif what the date was. Although I do know that those poodle flamingos were all made in Key West.

Claire Gilman:
And I think those are all consistently dated. Those poodle flamingos, [inaudible 00:11:30].

AA Bronson:
Probably he would have that one accurate. So they're a kind of autobiography of General Idea, in a way.

Claire Gilman:
Right. And then it's also true that I think then, shortly before he died, he dated them and then he signed them GI. Or he signed some of them GI, is that right? The ones that he felt he wanted to officially become part of General Idea?

AA Bronson:
Well, the other confusion about dating them is he felt no qualms about going back and adding things to them.

Claire Gilman:
Right.

AA Bronson:
No, even five years later. And so at the end, he dated them all, but only the ones that he considered to be finished. And if they were not finished, he did not date them and he did not initial them. And I think he didn't date them because he thought he might continue working on them. So there's 850 drawings of this type from this period, of which about 400, 450 are signed and dated, and the others are, presumably, still incomplete.

Stuart Comer:
Maybe you could talk a little bit about the relationship of the individual to the collective in General Idea, and the fact that Jorge technically authored these, but from the beginning saw these as part of a collective effort. And even the degree to which the drawings themselves are kind of shape-shifting across the wall, I feel like that is what General Idea did; it shape-shifted constantly. And the degree to which any one component of these drawings might repeat itself feels somehow pertinent to the way the three of you were working together and reconsidering authorship in a very different way than other artists were, then and now.

AA Bronson:
Well, when we started, we didn't actually realize we'd started. That was the first thing. We were living together and we were doing things, we were entertaining ourselves. Back then, art didn't make money and art was a rather ephemeral kind of thing, and one just did it as a form of self-entertainment. But once we started using the name General Idea, which was about a year into the relationship, we made a kind of rule that nothing was complete unless all three of us agreed that it was complete. So it had to be a unanimous decision.
Then, about in '70... When did it happen? 1971, I think. We made the decision that we would work together until 1984, the George Orwell year, because we realized that groups came together and broke up very easily. But if we gave ourselves an end date, then when we came across troubles, we could always say, "Oh, well, it's only another eight years," or, "It's only another five years." "It's only another three years." By the time we got to the "It's only another one year," we were so much in sync that it was like a bad habit. We obviously were not going to break up. And then we realized that all of us had so internalized the process by which we made decisions that anything by any one of the three of us was a General Idea work just kind of automatically. So then we shifted our rule.
So that's when these were brought into the fold. All of these drawings were automatically General Idea drawings, even though they were made by one individual. And there are other drawings by Felix or by me or by more than one person, but the majority of them are these ones by Jorge.

Stuart Comer:
And maybe slightly to that point as well. One of the really extraordinary moments for me in the show in Ottawa, which I really encourage everyone to see if you can, it's probably the best attempt yet I've seen to create coherence out of what was a strategically incoherent project, in a way, and it's a really, really stunning show. But very early in the show, there's a work called Evidence of Body Binding, which I would've thought was from the '90s, after General Idea. In fact, it's 1971. And so the degree to which AA appears in the photo, I believe, is it?

AA Bronson:
Yeah, yeah. I'm the model. [inaudible 00:16:06].

Stuart Comer:
That's what I thought. But obviously someone did the binding, so that suggests some sort of collaboration to begin with. But then I see that work relating really strongly to these drawings, and also to your larger investment in a lot of different spiritual practices, including tantrism. And when I first saw these drawings, it was in a show you curated at the Witte de With in Rotterdam, and that was in the context of a lot of work you'd been doing recently, including the Gwangju Biennial in Korea, where you were investigating shamanism. But this question of ritual comes up again and again, much earlier than I thought, in GI's practice, and very profoundly in your own solo practice since Jorge and Felix passed away, and I just wonder if you could speak to this question of the repetition, the daily practice of drawing, the daily political will, as you will, as it states in one of the drawings, and how this relates to a broader investment in ritual and spirituality.

Claire Gilman:
And you could also talk, in that context, about yours and Jorge's trip to take the teachings with the Dalai Lama, which directly influence, I think, this series of drawings.

AA Bronson:
Well...

Claire Gilman:
Those are the Yamantaka.

AA Bronson:
Yes, there's a lot of drawing...

Claire Gilman:
Yeah.

AA Bronson:
Anyway. Well, we didn't really travel to take... What happened was we were invited to be in the Sydney Biennial in '83, I guess. And at that time, we were living in Toronto in '83, and the cheapest way to fly to Australia was to get an around the world ticket at that time. So we were very excited, we got an around the world ticket. And a friend of ours in Amsterdam, Louwrien Wijers, an artist in Amsterdam, was publishing a book of interviews with the Dalai Lama. And she said, "Oh, let's meet in Dharamshala, and you can do the portrait of the Dalai Lama for the cover of the book."
So that's what we did, we went to Australia, and we got on the plane and went to Delhi, very different in '83 than it would be now. And then we got a train north, and then we got from a train to a bus, and then the bus broke down.

Stuart Comer:
That sounds like Delhi now.

AA Bronson:
It's one of those dramas of traveling in India. Anyway, we did end up there, and we were beset by a strange... Am I too close to this?

Speaker 6:
[inaudible 00:18:38].

AA Bronson:
Oh. I don't know how much detail to tell this story, but anyway...

Claire Gilman:
It's a good story.

AA Bronson:
We arrived in Dharamshala, Jorge and I, Felix went off to the beach. He said, "I'm not going into the mountains, I'm going to the beach." But we went off into the mountains to meet the Dalai Lama. We had an appointment. And when we arrived, instantly, our friend Louwrien just appeared, she didn't even know what day we were arriving, but she found us within about two minutes of our arrival.
And right behind her was a nun, a Tibetan nun. And she came running up to us, before we'd even had a chance to properly say hello, and she said, "Oh, you're here. And I have the feeling that there's a ritual about to start, and you should be there for it." And she gave us a white prayer flag, and she went running off to the senior... What's it called? The senior tutor of the Dalai Lama, who said, "Yes, these people should be in that ritual where there's otherwise no westerners allowed." So we were very shaken by this, in a way. And we went into this kind of big hut. The room was smaller than this side, and it was full of these enormous Tibetan lamas throat chanting.
And now I'm going to cry. Sorry. And I think I'll skip over the next part or I might be crying for too long. Anyway, it was a very, very amazing experience. And the Dalai Lama was 10 days late for our appointment, as Dalai Lamas are allowed to be. And his sister, in the meantime, I guess we were recognized as being something, you know? The Dalai Lama's sister assigned her driver and her Jeep to us, and each day we were given a tour of something. So tour of the school for young monks, like five-year-old monks, or the new library they had just built, and so on and so forth.
And then at a certain point, we were asked... The same nun came back and she said, "There's a teaching coming up and it's being given by the living incarnation of the Yamantaka, and he's very, very old, he won't live much longer, and we think you should take it." We should do this... And so we said, "Sure." So we went to the office where you had to fill out some paperwork and they said, "Absolutely not, this is for advanced practitioners. What are you even thinking?" And sent us away again. And then the nun did the same thing with the prayer flag, and went to the senior tutor of the Dalai Lama and came back and said, "No, no, no, it's confirmed that you should take this course." So we took the course, we sat for three days. There were a few other English-speaking people there, so there was a translator. And they warned us, they said, "You will have no idea what this is about, but don't worry about it." And it was a very mysterious three days of ritual.
And then after, to cut the story short, two days later, the Dalai Lama arrived, we had our photo session, and we left. And in a way, the photo session with the Dalai Lama was really, peculiarly, anticlimactic compared to everything that had already happened to us. Although he was a lovely guy, as he is.
Oh, and then the same nun came back to us and said, "There's going to be a teaching in Italy outside of Florence. It's a one month teaching of the Yamantaka, which you've just taken the initiation, and you should go there because it's the same guy, the living incarnation is going to be giving the course," and so on and so forth. And so we went back to Toronto with all that information, and I couldn't face it. I think I was scared. I didn't know what one month of that would be like.
And Jorge went without me, and he never really said a word about it. He went, he came back. And it's only after he died that I realized that a lot of the drawings are drawings of the Yamantaka, especially the ones that combine the male and female elements, the penis and the vulva and so on and so forth. Those are all Yamantaka images. The...

Claire Gilman:
The fire in the belly was also...

AA Bronson:
The fire in the belly was what he was training to do. He was, for the one month, they were practicing, it was in the middle of winter, it was December, they were practicing building fire in the belly, with the idea being that you could sit in a cave in the mountains for a month in the cold, and you didn't need any other heat. So that's that very long story about an aspect to these drawings that I wasn't aware of for a very long time, that they're really about the Yamantaka, and they all relate to that one visit in '83.

Claire Gilman:
But it's interesting also that you're saying these transforming genitals, or penises becoming vulva, and all these things becoming other things, and the masks, and this kind of idea of transformation came out of that visit, except those were things that you were always interested in as well, right? So it was almost like maybe you were supposed to take those teachings, because they knew that these were the kinds of ideas that inspired you. It wasn't that one led to the other, but it was all kind of part of something that had been part of you from the beginning.
And another interesting point to that, I recall you were telling me, that, very early on, Jorge directed a film, I think, that the three of you are in, where he used these same principles of one thing becoming another thing, and the same sort of sequencing that you see in the drawings. So that, again, that kind of ethos of transformation, and one thing becoming another was there in other forms, and maybe there from the very beginning, and in all of you, in a sense.

AA Bronson:
Yeah, I guess that's always there, the transformation of images, or images becoming other images, that's in everything we did, I suppose. Not sure what I can say about that, except that yes, it was there.

Claire Gilman:
Yeah.

AA Bronson:
It was the most peculiar, most peculiar time, that time in Dharamshala. Very, very strange.

Claire Gilman:
Well, I think it's interesting just to think that, again, speaking to this idea of collective authorship, that yes, these were penned by Jorge, but those same impulses in these drawings, again, were kind of there. It's very hard to separate, in a way, because Jorge directed this film, and then that film of course influenced all of you, just as each of you started, generated something, and then influenced him. So I think you really do see them as a collective work, even though he physically drew them.

AA Bronson:
Yeah, well, part of the thing is just the process of how you work as a group. And we weren't a collective, we were a group.

Claire Gilman:
Oh, okay. Stand corrected. Noted.

AA Bronson:
Have you ever seen a rock band that was a collective?

Claire Gilman:
True.

AA Bronson:
And part of the thing about working as a group is that you're constantly playing off each other, and because we had this idea that we would never do anything until all three of us agreed upon it, the only way to move an idea forward was to let it go through various transformations. That was, in fact, the process that we arrived at. And if we were unable to let it go through that process and come to a final form, then we would do something we just called putting the idea back on the shelf behind us. We had a visualization of shelves behind us with unfinished ideas lined up along them. And every now and then, we would resuscitate one of them, take it out again, and work it through again, and it might indeed then work out in a way that it hadn't before. So yeah, transformation was basic to everything we did.

Stuart Comer:
Another revelation for me in the Ottawa show was a work, I guess, called Tour de Force, which was actually a binder full of images, that was almost like a portable exhibition, that you would carry around in true glamorous style. It was covered in snake skin. But that was a really early example, I think, of the really radical models of alternative distribution that you were considering all along, in some ways. And I probably met you either at Art Basel or at a Book Fair, where you were always committed to this practice of different economies for publishing, and for getting images and information out into the world, not through the usual channels. And I wonder, were the drawings ever considered in that manner? Obviously they're works on paper, and a lot of the material you've made has been ephemera, but I think they may function quite differently from the editions and the multiples and what you did with Art Metropole and so many other publishing platforms that you've created over the decades.

AA Bronson:
Well, I think, in a way, the drawings were a way of thinking. The process of making a drawing was a way of letting something pass through the mind. I don't know, it's not a very solid description, but I'm not quite sure how else to say it. We weren't really so concerned about the finished drawings as we were about the process of drawing. And we really treated them badly, they were always lying in heaps everywhere. And if you could take them out of the frames, you'd find a lot of them have things on the other side as well. So, trying to remember... Am I answering your question? I can't...

Stuart Comer:
Maybe a simpler way of asking it is how were these exhibited over the years? Again, I saw a cluster of them in Rotterdam, but I don't really... This is such an extraordinary opportunity to see a large percentage of them, but I'm just curious how they've appeared in the world.

AA Bronson:
Well, I think as part of an attempt to get Jorge to take his own drawing seriously, Felix and I curated a selection of them for an exhibition at a gallery called A Space, which was the early artist-run space in Toronto. And that was, I think, around '76, so very early, we did this exhibition of his drawings. They were just pinned to the wall. There were quite a lot of them, they tended to be very small. And it didn't have the slightest effect on him, we thought it might get him to take it more seriously as a practice. It didn't have any effect.
But then we were showing with Grita Insam in Vienna at the time, and she loved these drawings, so she decided she wanted to do a show of the drawings. So we all traveled to Vienna for a AA and Felix curate Jorge, and that was the second. I don't know how many drawings there were in that, maybe about 60 or 70? But mostly quite small. And then for the Vienna show, we did a set of six very large drawings, which were about seven feet high or so. I was determined that Jorge would do some big drawings, and we did them onsite because they were too big, because we couldn't afford to ship them. And he just got very stubborn and refused, so I did them for him. And I think I did very well at producing a number of Jorge drawings at very large scale.

Claire Gilman:
So were you consciously trying to draw in his style?

AA Bronson:
I took specific drawings that were small and blew them up, still trying to keep them in the spirit of the originals. And when people see them, they assume that he drew them. So I think I did them pretty well.

Claire Gilman:
And, for the-

AA Bronson:
But, one moment, but then they got put away again, and not taken out until Jorge died. And then he died in '94, in January of '94. And oddly enough, the Stedelijk Museum came forward. We had our first museum show ever at the Stedelijk Museum, so we've had a kind of lifelong relationship to the Stedelijk. And they came forward and wanted to do an exhibition to honor Jorge, on International AIDS Day it opened, and they showed 50 drawings. And then a few years later, the National Gallery of Canada did exactly the same thing with a different set of drawings. And actually Sherrie Levine put together a group of 50 drawings just after Jorge died, and shopped it around to all sorts of dealers in New York trying to get a show in a gallery. But nobody was interested.

Claire Gilman:
Which is shocking to me, just because how amazing are these drawings? But anyway...

Stuart Comer:
One last quick question is, I'm also just thinking about... You're frequently positioned as part of or heirs to conceptual art, and the degree to which I see this as a kind of atlas along the lines of Hanne Darboven or Richter or so many other artists who have produced atlases. And it's a very personal one, and a more intimate one, maybe, than some. But again, I just wonder how that works, do you think, within the broader history of General Idea or Jorge's own... I don't know, life?

AA Bronson:
I think it's a good description. When I look at the drawings, I always visually see where we were sitting, what we were doing, they're little... Like Darboven's, even though they sometimes have the wrong date on them, they're like a memory imprint of our time together. And yeah, I think that's quite a good way of looking at them.

Stuart Comer:
Because by this point, they function very differently than conventional conceptual art or how we think of it.

AA Bronson:
Yeah, yeah.

Stuart Comer:
But the degree to which you did queer it or shift it in some meaningful way just feels like that then continued throughout, until the end of the period these were made.

Claire Gilman:
Yeah, and I also wonder, I know, as you said, Jorge had been making drawings from the very beginning, although they did assume a more codified form, I guess, around 1985, 1986. But when we were putting together this show, you, from the beginning, were very much clear that you were thinking of that as the starting date for this show, and I don't think it was only because the drawings had assumed a regularity. I think it also, well, it had to do with things you specifically talked about, but the fact that you were making this move to New York, but it was also a time when AIDS was becoming this pervasive presence in your lives. And do you see these drawings, I guess, as somehow marking a moment of shift in General Idea's practice?
I think that there is a huge amount of pathos in this... There's humor, there's all the mischievous play that was present in General Idea from the beginning, but I think that the pathos element, and the specter of death, and the gravity starts to come into General Idea more in the '80s. So do you see these drawings as marking a shift in that way? And then a part two to that question, I'm curious if that shift was something that you were thinking about very consciously when you were putting together the retrospective, how to make that... Because I felt that shift in the retrospective as well.

AA Bronson:
Okay, where does that happen in the retrospective? Let me think. With the AIDS, when you shift from the poodles to the AIDS Room.

Claire Gilman:
And then you've got the pills installation.

AA Bronson:
Yeah, yeah, I know.

Claire Gilman:
The big installations after that, and I feel like the drawings are part of that second half in a way. Although there was the decision not to include any drawings in that retrospective, which is also an interesting choice, but...

AA Bronson:
Yeah, I've never been able to figure that one out.

Claire Gilman:
Okay.

AA Bronson:
Adam can tell us about that.

Claire Gilman:
Yeah, Adam can talk about that. But anyway, a lot of questions there, but do you see the drawings as representing a kind of movement shift?

AA Bronson:
Well, it was the beginning of a period of AIDS, and the first person we knew who had AIDS was the Canadian cultural attache at the Canadian Consulate here in New York.

Claire Gilman:
Oh, wow.

AA Bronson:
And we lived in an apartment on West 12th, right next door to the hospital. What was it called? The...

Stuart Comer:
St. Vincent's.

AA Bronson:
St. Vincent's, right, which was the primary AIDS hospital. Now I'm going to cry.

Claire Gilman:
Okay, okay. We can skip forwards too.

AA Bronson:
So yes, right from the beginning, AIDS was very, very present for us as soon as we moved to New York. He died quite early. And so the seven years that we spent in New York was dominated by a disease.

Claire Gilman:
Yeah, and I feel like there is... I don't know, for me, I see that in the drawings, and I don't know if that's... And even in the urgency of their production, in a certain way, it feels like there's this sense of... And there's the one drawing that I start with, or it's on the opening wall, and I know it's a joke, in a certain sense. It's sort of quoting a panhandler or something, "I've lost my job, I've lost all my money, I'm just trying to survive." But I feel like, in a way, it does kind of set the tone, a lot of these drawings feel like this push to create as an urgent will to survive, in a certain sense.

AA Bronson:
Yes, and at the same time, it's very autobiographical in the sense that it was a piece cardboard we found at the front door to our apartment, just outside.

Claire Gilman:
Right.

AA Bronson:
It was an actual homeless person's sign, and it seemed to fit, somehow. There was a man who was always, we were at number 12, we were a few doors from the corner, and there was a man who was always sitting at the corner panhandling, who's had AIDS and who had had to give up his apartment to pay for medication. Break for crying again. And then one day he disappeared. So there's also this relationship between homelessness and illness that was particularly poignant at the time.

Stuart Comer:
Just back to the question of survival, and I'm wondering if you could bring up the slide of the Donald Trump piece, if we have one to [inaudible 00:39:50]? We may not have it, but if not, maybe AA could tell us a little bit... There it is, yeah, that's the one.

AA Bronson:
Oh yeah.

Claire Gilman:
Yeah?

AA Bronson:
Yes. This is another version of the homeless sign. We decided to transform it into one of the signs on the outside of Trump Tower. So this is fabricated using exactly the same materials as all the signage at the entrance to the Trump Tower, but it's a reproduction of the homeless person's sign that we found outside our door.

Stuart Comer:
But just thinking about this relationship of survival and resistance in your work, and again, not to get too personal, but when I saw the drawings in Rotterdam, as I was looking at one on that wall over there, I learned that a very close friend had died of HIV-related complications. And so just to quote Gregg Bordowitz, who's written brilliantly about your work, "The AIDS crisis is not over." And I think your work makes that point as well as anything I've ever seen, and that it insists on your survival as artists, but it highlights that viruses survive. We're dealing with a pandemic that is more than surviving at the moment, two pandemics, in fact, if not multiple.
And I guess the work is not cynical, it's just accurate, you know? I think it actually highlights consumerism and capitalism are still surviving very, very well too. And I think all of these systems are somehow converging in interesting ways, and I just think that the way the work continues to be extremely relevant is quite powerful. But maybe if you could just talk a little bit too about... I know there was resistance to the AIDS virus work early on. It was seen as introducing humor, which was verboten at that moment, at a moment of intense activism. And if you could just talk about even how that work... The perception of it has shifted over the last 30 or 40 years?

AA Bronson:
Well, we were illegal immigrants, so we couldn't take part in ACT UP because we might have been thrown out of the country. We couldn't take part in any demonstrations for the same reason. And also, we were in our forties already by then, and the downtown ACT UP scene was mostly in their twenties, and saw us, in a way, at least initially, as the enemy, that they thought we were cashing in on AIDS, although we didn't actually sell anything, but they imagined that we were selling these pieces and making lots of money out of their despair. So there was a lot of negative feeling towards us here, nowhere else, only in New York, and only in the early years. And then most of those people came around after a while, as they aged themselves.
But the other thing I want to mention is that Jorge was born in a concentration camp in Italy in the tail end of the war. And he was Sephardic Jew, which is a particularly swarthy, North African, Spanish history. And he loved being extras in movies, and he loved doing that in New York, he would apply to be... They would always make him a terrorist, or he could be Arabic, he could be North African, he could be... Whenever there was a bad guy, who's usually a person of color, then Jorge, he was a good actor, and he would get these bit jobs being a mean, difficult person, which was his favorite role.
So they eventually, after the war... Oh, they escaped from the, I'll tell you the whole drama, they escaped from the concentration camp. The men held back the soldiers, and the women and the children escaped on a bus, actually, that had somehow been prearranged, and which took them to some contact point where, after that, they were taken in backpacks, the children were all in backpacks, and they were taken on smugglers' paths over the mountains to Switzerland. And the fathers stayed behind to fight off the soldiers, whatever, the guards, and they all ended up in Auschwitz. So his father ended up in Auschwitz.
And after the war, he was left famously uncircumcised, one of the few uncircumcised Jews around. And after the war, his mother came, she'd left him on a farm, she came and collected him. They went back to Yugoslavia, which is where they'd originally lived, and to Serbia. And the father turned up too, the father had survived. His secret to survival was eating every piece of moldy bread that he could find. That was his secret to survival. It was the mold that made him survive, not the bread.
And then they eventually, it took several years. He was eight before there was a country that would take them in, and there was Venezuela. But the way they got into Venezuela was by pretending they were Roman Catholics. And he had an uncle who went to Canada, an architect, and eventually, Jorge's way of escaping his family was to say he wanted to be an architect. And he was allowed to go to Canada to study architecture in Halifax, which is where his uncle lived. And from there, he became part of the Canadian scene and eventually met us.
But so all these drawings also, they carry that history in them, that it's not three white guys in Canada who have never suffered, you know? There's this history of suffering through his life experience and through his people too, I suppose. And I think that's also quite evident in these drawings.

Claire Gilman:
We have, I think, kind of a hard stop at seven. I wonder if we should just offer the opportunity for some members of the audience to ask questions if they have them. And if not, we can ask. Okay. Maybe you try without the mic to speak loudly, or you're close enough.

Speaker 7:
I taught drawing to children, and it was always a pull between authenticity and what the lesson was about. I'm very curious to know, I have 20 million questions, but I'm very curious to know in these drawings, because you talked about taking himself seriously, is there a hierarchy that you consider certain drawings more serious or more developed? And is there a hierarchy in the way, we see these all in frames now, and they have a certain presentation, but you see them in groups of things. And so is there a hierarchy that you think about? This is more like the Dalai Lama... I'm not putting this question exactly as I would, but the thing is, it's about drawing and drawing as a language, and this is really amazing.

AA Bronson:
No, I think I take them all as kind of equal to each other. And if they weren't dense enough, if they weren't full enough of meaning, then he would go back to them and add extra layers. So I think they are a kind of language, a conversation, you know? A conversation between Jorge and his own thoughts, and also what was going on in those meetings where he was drawing. Because when we weren't in a meeting, he didn't bother drawing.

Claire Gilman:
Maybe he got it all out of his system.

Speaker 8:
Thank you for keeping them. They're just so beautiful and the colors are just so vibrant. The question that I have is that, as a group, which is not how the gallery world deals with artists, they were individuals, and you had, always, a political undertone to the work that was very serious. But when they were both gone, and you just had the work, how did that affect you, AA, in the kinds of work that you started to do post? And is it still General Idea, or is it AA Bronson?

AA Bronson:
Well, after they died, first of all, I couldn't do anything at all, it took five years before I could do anything at all, because I had this idea that there was a body of work and that it should have a beginning and an end, and that I shouldn't interrupt it in any way, or I should just let it be. But then I didn't know what to do, because all my adult life, I had been doing General Idea, I didn't know how to do anything else. And then eventually the solution I found was to collaborate, mostly with younger generations, I did a lot of collaborations with a lot of other people. And then I started to bring in a kind of, let's say, the language of healing, and to work, I suppose, with my own healing around all of that. And then at a certain point, I found myself returning to completing a lot of the General Idea projects at the same time as doing my own, let's call it "my own", it's really very difficult to separate what's mine and what's General Idea's, rather, it's difficult.

Claire Gilman:
I see you raising your hand in the back there.

Speaker 9:
I have two questions. What was your impetus to moving to Germany? And can you tell us about how you came to be associated with the Book Fair when you were...

Claire Gilman:
Yes.

AA Bronson:
Okay. Germany, I was offered a fellowship from the DAAD. It's called the [German 00:51:06], and they invite, I think it's 12? Or it used to be 12 artists, I think it might be six now. They used to invite 12 artists to come to Berlin for a year, and they give you a studio and an apartment and German lessons and a bank account and a monthly subsidy. It's an extraordinarily generous program. How could we say no to that? So my partner and I went to Berlin, and about nine months into it, we kind of looked at each other and said, "It feels like we're not really supposed to go back."
But we still had an apartment here. So we came back, we got married, in one hour that we could spare, which was a fascinating experience too at City Hall, with all the other people who only had an hour to spare, and packed everything, and sent some stuff back to Toronto and other stuff to Berlin, and moved back to Berlin and there we've been ever since. And I just love Berlin, and it does seem to be the right place for me at this time. I could go on about that for hours, but I won't.
As for the Book Fair, after Jorge and Felix died, this has to do with partners, I guess... I'm going to get all the names tangled together. My current partner is Mark Krayenhoff van de Leur, Canadian architect, we met in Toronto. He had always wanted to live in New York, and I felt that I should go back to New York. We'd gone back to Canada for the health system because it was so much easier than being a Canadian in New York. And it also meant that Jorge and Felix both had their care at home, the doctors and the nurses and everybody came to our home. It was just a wonderful setup there.
But anyway, ready to come back to New York, so we moved here and the General Idea founded Art Metropole in Toronto, which is kind of similar to Printed Matter, in '74, and it continues to this day. And I had always been friends with Printed Matter, always involved with producing books and magazines and all being sold at Printed Natter. And at a certain point, they approached me and asked me if I wanted to be on the board of Printed Matter, so this was around 2000, I guess, I'm not exactly sure which year. So I went on to the board. And then... What year did 9/11 happen? What year was that?

Stuart Comer:
2001.

Claire Gilman:
2001, yeah.

AA Bronson:
2001, right. So Printed Matter had been in Soho, they moved to 22nd Street, and then immediately 9/11 happened. They were no longer eligible for any government help because they were above 14th Street. And they were in big trouble.
So the president of the board, Phil Aarons, asked me if I would just come and run Printed Matter, the director resigned, asked if I would come and run Printed Matter, just for six months, to determine whether I thought it was possible to salvage it, or whether we should close it completely. And I was delighted. And actually at that moment, I was completely broke and I needed the job. And very quickly, very quickly, I realized that the secret to Printed Matter lay right there in Printed Matter itself, that Max, who's now the director, came to me one day and he said like, "There's these young guys done a zine, and he wants to release the zine, and they sell for 50 cents, there's going to be no money in it, and if we provide even water, we're going to lose money. But I'd really like to do that." And said, "Of course, we should do that."
And it was huge success, meaning that a lot of people came. And then other zinesters came forward, and suddenly we decided, "Okay, we're going to take all the famous artist books that are face up and put them on the shelves, and take all the books by unknown people, especially if they're New Yorkers, and put them face up on the tables." We totally reversed the entire situation. And things started to move in a different kind of way.
And the story of how the Fair started would be a long one, so I won't go into that, but it became evident... The game plan was that if we could get... Our big advantage was New York City itself, the glamor and allure of New York City. And by setting up a book fair, we could get publishers from many different places to come in here. And we decided it should be art publishers and not just artist book publishers, because that would give us a bigger network of connections to work with and make the whole project more serious, in a way.
And rather than having to guess, from looking at bad pictures of books, whether we wanted to order them for the bookstore or not, we could actually see them in person. So we could go from table to table ourselves and do our own shopping, get people to leave us inventory. And with one fair a year, we could stock a lot of extra, fascinating material that we never would've been able to get otherwise. And at the same time, there was this physical experience of community, which is what the art publishing community is about, you know? And in New York, New York is such a city of commerce that one's normally only aware of galleries, and you're aware of a certain layer of artists, and a certain layer of financial exchange. But as soon as you go to the book layer, it's not a different community, but it's a much, much bigger community of artists and of art audience.
And so the first year we did it, which is in the same location we're doing it now, tomorrow, the old Dia building, we had no idea how successful it would be, or how many... We thought maybe if we're really lucky, 500 people would come in. And we had 5,000. And by the time it shifted to PS1, we were getting 35,000 people. In fact, we got more people through PS1 in the one weekend of the Book Fair than they had for the rest of the year, which Klaus was very appreciative of. It changed all his figures for fundraising. Okay.

Claire Gilman:
Yeah. And I'm sure most of you know this, but the Book Fair is going on, I guess it opens officially tomorrow night, I believe? And then it's on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday in the old and new Dia buildings in Chelsea on 22nd Street. And yeah, I think both on 22nd Street. And there's going to be some programming...

AA Bronson:
There's lots and lots of [inaudible 00:59:00].

Claire Gilman:
... they're honoring AA, in fact. And there will be a panel on Friday that myself and Adam, the curator of the National Gallery show, along with Alex Kitnick, who has written an essay for that catalog, will be participating in. Then I think you are talking with Nayland Blake on Saturday, is that right?

AA Bronson:
That's about the history of Printed Matter.

Claire Gilman:
Right, what time is that event?

AA Bronson:
That's at 6:00... No, let me think. No, that's at 5:00, that's at 5:00, at Hauser & Wirth.

Claire Gilman:
Okay.

AA Bronson:
And the hour before that, I'll be signing books, but they haven't told me where yet.

Claire Gilman:
Okay, okay. Although the talks are all on the website, but anyway, 3:00 on Friday, if you want to hear more about and from the AA, 3:00 on Friday, and then Saturday at around 5:00. And then we're having, also, another program here on October 27th. Unfortunately, AA will be back in Germany at that point, but we're having a wonderful group of artists, I think some of them are here tonight, Nayland Blake, Wayne Koestenbaum, Leidy Churchman, Maryam Hoseini, and Paige Bradley, and they're going to be choosing one drawing each to talk about or discourse on. And we will have a video of that, so that AA and others will be able to watch that.
So also, we do have wonderful publication for this exhibition. We also have the publication for the National Gallery show for sale in our store. If anyone is interested in purchasing those publications, I think AA is very happy to sign them...

AA Bronson:
Sure.

Claire Gilman:
... tonight. So, if you have some time to do that. We also have wonderful t-shirts that I'm wearing. I just love this so much, so I have to... It's actually a t-shirt that was designed by Jorge, I don't know the year, but...

AA Bronson:
I'm not sure the year, the original was done as a gift to a friend of ours who then...

Claire Gilman:
Right. Who still has it, and so we-

AA Bronson:
Who still has it.

Claire Gilman:
... scanned it and made these incredible t-shirts.

AA Bronson:
I think it's probably early '80s, that one.

Claire Gilman:
It seems '80ish, yes, to me. But anyway, thank you all so much for coming and yes, please come again.

Stuart Comer:
Could I just...

Claire Gilman:
Oh yeah.

Stuart Comer:
I just wanted to quickly thank and congratulate Claire and Laura and the entire team at The Drawing Center, this institution is such a treasure, as is AA Bronson, and it's just extraordinary to have the opportunity for this show right now. So thank you, very much.

Claire Gilman:
Thank you. And thank you, AA.

AA Bronson:
Thank you.

Claire Gilman:
Thank you. All right. [inaudible 01:01:55].

Stuart Comer:
Fabulous, yeah.

Claire Gilman:
Really good.

Speaker 11:
Bravo. [inaudible 01:02:06].

Speaker 10:
Pretty sure that's [inaudible 01:02:11].

Claire Gilman:
[inaudible 01:02:12] of you to say that. Poignant at first. [inaudible 01:02:14].

Laura Hoptman:
Thank you so much, Stuart.

Stuart Comer:
No, thank you!

Laura Hoptman:
[inaudible 01:02:17].

Stuart Comer:
[inaudible 01:02:19].

Laura Hoptman:
[inaudible 01:02:21] I cherish how [inaudible 01:02:27] truly [inaudible 01:02:29].