Interview made at the Basel Art Fair, 1992

A A Bronson/General Idea

A A Bronson is the surviving member of the three-person art collective General Idea

Peter Hill: General Idea is a fictional construct that finds its subversive outlets across a range of media including film, performance, installation, video and photography. It is twenty-four years since the three of  you invented it. How close have you remained to your original vision?

A A Bronson: I don’t think there was anything we would call an original vision as such back in ‘68, and we didn’t actually use the name General Idea until 1970 when we used it for a particular project. Later we established a program for ourselves that would last us until 1984. When that date came around we had to decide whether we would continue to work together or whether we would stop. Our original intention was to close the project in 1984.

PH: Was that an Orwellian notion? 

AA: It was. Back in 1970 looking ahead to 1984 seemed so far in the future that in a way it was like saying we would work together forever. In fact it was only fourteen years away. But by then we’d developed this bad habit of working together and we didn’t know how to stop. So here we are another eight years later and still working together.

PH: When did (Miss), in parenthesis, General Idea come in to being.

AA: The whole idea of (Miss) General Idea evolved pretty rapidly in 1970 through 1971. We put our work in that context until 1984 and in fact we still use it in some projects. The original idea was that we saw General Idea as a microcosm of the art world and General Idea were the artists while the (Miss) General Idea Pageant represented the process of creation. At one time we saw (Miss) General Idea as the artist’s muse and the ultimate work of art. The (Miss) General Idea Pavilion was the museum or the gallery. And then we had one other category which we called ‘the frame of reference’ which referred to the mass media, and we published our own magazine for many years called File Magazine which played the part of the public media.

PH: What is the history of File Magazine?

AA: File Magazine  started in 1972 and we really saw it as a microcosm of the world of art publishing and the critical response to the artist. It was produced as an artist project but veiled in the guise of a more objective venue for our ideas. Initially, it was modelled after Life Magazine and of course uses the same letters in its title. We were interest in Life Magazine  because they were the first magazine to create news rather than just report it. They would take fairly mundane events and turn them through the photo-story process in to news stories. They had a regular section for years called ‘Life Goes to a Party’ where they would go to a very ordinary party at someone’s suburban home in the mid-West and use it almost like visiting African natives or something, it was quite odd. So we were interested in the fact that Life was cognisant of their ability of creating news. We modelled ourselves after that because we wanted to create an illusion of an art scene which in reality didn’t exist. Over the next ten years or so through File we built up a whole mythical world, and only the tip of that iceberg existed in reality.

PH: Each of you brings special skills to your project but do you have a particular way of making group decisions?

AA: Our decision making has historically been done just through talking. The three of us have lived together for years and we would just sit around the table and talk. The projects would then gradually emerge out of those group discussions. The other very important thing is that our projects tend to be additive. We tend to build on old projects and take fragments of old ideas and turn them in to new projects. We are quite happy to be self-referential. Through time, and through this additive process, the whole world of General Idea has been built. Over the years there has been a kind of General Idea- speak
that has emerged. We have such a group language now of how we talk to each other that it feels as if any one of us could sit down and work on a project individually and represent the group entirely. We seem to think in unison – consciously and subconsciously.

PH: In his writings on your work Joshua Decter invokes ‘the street’ as an urban system of, and I’ll quote here, “as an urban system of spacio-architectonic organisation that operates as a linkage structure between disparate institutional edifices.” When I read that it made me think about  Krzysztof Wodiczko’s comments on the city. Does General Idea differentiate between ‘the gallery’ and ‘the street’ as venues for your projects?

AA: We actually wrote about that very thing in 1975. We think of the gallery as a sort of garage where we can tinker with our car and polish it up and present it in a different way. Then we can drive it through the streets as a completely different sort of experience. So our art has a different relationship to the gallery as it does to the street. But they both have their uses to us.

PH: How fair would it be to say that General Idea operates in a less confrontational way than say the Dada-ists and more like a virus quietly infiltrating society?
It is as if your ideas lie there within the host body of society awaiting some kind of trigger.

AA: I think that is absolutely, exactly how we think of ourselves. The virus is a metaphor we have always used and we first took it from William Burroughs who talked about ‘the image as virus.’ It has been an instrumental metaphor in the formation of our work over our entire career. Obviously with the AIDS projects that becomes a lot more literal.

PH: Can you talk a little more about that?

AA: It began with an invitation to donate a work for the first Art for Aids fundraising campaign in New York in 1987. About sixty-five galleries took part and a certain percentage of sales went to the cause. That’s when we took the Robert Indiana painting of the word ‘LOVE’ and repainted it as ‘AIDS’. Immediately after that we did our first poster project in which we turned the same image in to a silkscreened poster and put it up on the streets of New York. And, yes, we really saw the poster as a sort of virus entering the streets, or the bloodstream, of New York. We have done many such projects since and we always try and put them in to the context of the communication system or a transportation system. So, for example, we’ve done the posters on the New York subway system, we’ve used advertising boards in Times Square, we’ve done them on the sides of trams in Amsterdam and Seattle. We’ve now completed some forty-five projects in various venues.

PH: And have most of those projects related to the Robert Indiana painting?

AA: They all have, they’ve all used the same image. We also designed a logo for the German AIDS Foundation which is a variation on this theme in that it uses the colours of the German flag.

PH: Were there any copyright problems in this project?

AA: No there weren’t. One of the reasons for using that image is because of its history. Robert Indiana never copyrighted it himself and in the US at that time there was no automatic copyright for artists. His image was then stolen by a number of commercial manufacturers who cocktail napkins and key-rings and every imaginable gift item out of this image. So it was an image that had already entered the public realm and circulated there and become known by a non-art public. So we find even now that teenagers in Germany, for example, know that it should say ‘LOVE’. It is an image that has spread through the entire Western world.

PH: Have you seen Juan Davilla’s version of it? I saw it in Hobart a few weeks ago and the letters spell out ‘SIDA’.

AA: I’ve heard about it but I haven’t seen it. Interestingly though, Robert Indiana was planning on making a painting that said ‘FUCK’ and one of his friends, an abstract painter I think, talked him out of it and persuaded him to do ‘LOVE’ instead.

PH: Have General Idea’s recent advertisements in magazines grown out of this initial AIDS project? I’m thinking of the ads I’ve seen of the three of you dressed in white coats as doctors with stethoscopes, and also the ones of the seal pups.

AA: They are all related. We’ve done a number of other gallery installations that obviously relate to AIDS. One is called fin de siecle  which is this huge installation of sheets of styrofoam and three artificial baby seal pups based on the white harp seal and obviously that is a sort of ‘victim’ piece and in a sense a self-portrait too with three seals instead of three artists. Another series of installations is based on the form of the capsule pill and the most directly related is called one year of AZT and it consists of one thousand eight hundred and twenty-five white vacuum-formed plastic seals, sorry white vacuum-formed plastic capsules with a blue stripe down the centre which is in fact what the AZT pill looks like. And this is in fact the number of pills you would take in a year at the current standard dosage. There is also a piece called ‘One Day of AZT’ comprising five free-standing pills a little larger than the human body.

PH: Are they the ones that I read as being described as ‘tomb-like’?

AA: That’s right. And at Gallery Montenay in Paris we showed a piece called ‘Blue Cobalt Placebo’ and it consisted of 81 small pills and three large pills in variations of red, green, and blue combinations. The same colours as the AIDS/LOVE logo.

PH: Could we talk about the idea of the placebo in relation to fiction and fact? Stephen Schmidt Wolflen in an essay called ‘Between Faith and Hope’ equates the placebo to reality. If this is the case, what is it seeking to subvert?

AA: In a way this is Schmidt Wolflen’s idea more than ours.  I think what he was trying to do in that essay was to relate the placebo series to our work of the seventies and the early eighties which was involved with the whole fictional structure of (Miss) General Idea and the (Miss) General Idea Pageant. He was trying to show how that structure is still apparent in the recent work even though it looks more sculptural. He is trying to show that there is a fictional level to it.

PH: How did you come to use the term placebo?

AA: To start with it comes from the Latin, from the verb to please. This seemed oddly appropriate to art work which in most cases is intended to please. For a collector to buy an art work and put it in their home it makes them feel they’ve done something, it makes them feel good, it gives them this jolt of pleasure. It makes them feel culturally involved when all they’ve done really is hand over some money. We were interested in that function of art in relation to society. It’s a little bit cynical on that level. Of course, there is the other serious level to do with issues of health. But the term ‘placebo’ was really a comment on the market place.

PH:  And there is also the aesthetic level.

AA: Yes. But with all of our works including the placebo series there is this interest in the market place and the structures of the art world. A lot of people don’t realise that all of these projects are not just about AIDS but there is this other level of content that can be pulled out of them.

PH: You spoke earlier of the additive nature of your projects. What is currently growing from your stable of ideas?

AA: We are working on a series of projects based on the same capsule form but using inflated, customised, vinyl balloons filled with helium. We have just made an installation of these inside a glass atrium in Vienna  which is both an entrance to a train station and a subway station. It used 4500 inflated Mylar pills in red, green, and blue.

PH: Do they also relate to condoms?

AA: Yes, they do. As they deflate and come down people can pick them up and take them home as a souvenir of the project. And they have text printed on the side. But yes, people have started calling them the used condoms once they’ve deflated because that’s actually what they look like. We will soon be doing a similar project in the Santa Monica Centre in Barcelona on one whole floor of the museum.

PH: I am curious if you feel any bonds with other artists working as groups? I did an interview recently with IRWIN and was interested how their work emerged from fictionally parallelling real government departments within Slovenia. There are, of course, so many other artists working as groups, not unlike garage bands in some cases, but historically stretching, say, from Gilbert and George in England to Seymour Likely in Amsterdam. 

AA: We’ve found that there are an awful lot of young groups, in France in particular, who seem to have had some sort of inspiration from us. So we’ve been following their
progress with some interest. I think it’s too early to tell in most cases how similar they are or how deep their commitment runs. Will they spend their entire careers together, and does it matter?

PH: It’s a bit of a curatorial dream putting all these groups together. There was the show Team Spirit which of course General Idea was in...

AA: Yes, it’s still touring North America. There was one stop in Canada and the rest were in the States. It was put together by the ICI, Independent Curators Incorporated in New York.  But most of the groups in that show tended to be working as couples rather than groups. I think the process of two people working together is very different than the process of more than two. I won’t get in to my critique of that show. We did a site-specific installation for each of the many venues and it was quite exhausting.

PH: Finally, one phrase jumped out at me from one of your recent catalogues and that was ‘the end of certainty’. My own research interests touch on various philosophies of science, particularly that of Karl Popper and his falsificationist methodologies which encourage one to advance through doubt rather than certainty. Are you sympathetic to those ideas?

AA: I think so. A central notion to our work since the beginning has been that of ambiguity. We have always deliberately built conflicting ideas in to the same project.
The more levels of ambiguity there are in a project the more pleased we are with the final result. That’s an aspect of our work that is hard to make understood in America. They don’t understand the notion of doubt, or as you say advancement through doubt, at all.
They are always trying to find a single solution to our work. The more they try and pin it down the more it slithers around and escapes them. A few people like Joshua Decter have figured it out, but generally the notion of doubt is one that is alien to the American mind.

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