Paul O'neill and Aa Bronson

PAU L O ’ N E I L L A N D AA B R on S on New York, 2004–2006 PAUL: Maybe we could start by tracing the beginning of the history of General Idea? AA: General Idea happened by accident. It was the late ‘60s in Toronto and our friend Mimi (who was Felix Partz’s girlfriend) found this old house, 78 Gerrard Street West, and convinced us to move in together to save rent. There were about eight of us and we were all more or less straight out of school. We moved in to the house, which at one point had been turned into a shop. It was the late ‘60s, the pop era, there were flowers painted on the street, and now the street had more or less died down and the action had moved to some other part of town. We moved into this rather forlorn house, which had a store window punched into the living room; we were all unemployed, mostly artists, and we were a little bored. We began rummaging through the garbage of the various neighboring businesses, and we began to AA Bronson (right) and Mark Krayenhoff (left) assemble fake stores in our store window. We did window Printed Matter, 10th Avenue, New York, NY, 2005 displays essentially. We didn’t think of it as art at the Photo: Paul O’Neill. time, we were just entertaining ourselves. Sometimes the displays got out of hand. We would have to give up are sort of illuminated today in particular ways, but I our living room to them; we did immense displays that won’t get into too many of them. took up the entire ground floor. There was usually a little Felix was trained as a painter; Jorge and I were trained sign on the door that said “Back in five minutes.” It was as architects. Jorge had also studied acting and had really Felix, Jorge Zontal, and I who involved ourselves experience as a filmmaker—he actually made his money in these projects, the three of us, and I think that’s how working as a cinematographer. At the time we first met, we developed our collaborative venture. Our activity I was working for a theater, doing graphics and some together became, in a way, a critique of consumerism stage design and so on. We started to do performances, because the material consisted of the dregs of consum- one-night performances, happening-like sort of things, erism and the venue had the outer aspect of a store. It usually in a theater context because we knew a lot of didn’t really occur to us to think of it as a gallery. We theater people. We would involve friends and so on, but just thought of it as a store. I think today in a similar there were always the three of us in the center. situation, in the East Village, somebody inhabiting a We were only in that house for a year and an amazing store would be more likely to open up a gallery there. amount happened in that year. Toward the end of that year However, we started doing these… [Doorbell rings.] It’s we began to do something that could be called exhibi- funny, I have told this story so many times, and when tions, right in the storefront. For example, we purchased you tell it many times it starts to narrow down to a par- the entire contents of a women’s dress shop that had been ticular narrative. But as I am telling it this time I am closed since 1948, everything, the mannequins, and the thinking of all the loose ends that tend to get lost, they entire inventory. We recreated the store in our storefront, PAUL O’NEILL & AA B R on S on 1 with everything actually for sale, and we called it Betty’s. AA: Yes, we were quite involved in the beginnings of That was probably one of the first projects that we really mail art, and would begin every day around a big table, thought of as an artwork as opposed to just entertain- talking, drinking coffee, and opening the mail, which ing ourselves. We got the front page, a full-page article, was substantial. We received mail from all over North in what was then called the “Women’s Section” in the America, Europe, Eastern Europe, South America, Japan, national newspaper, but as a fashion article. You know this Australia, and occasionally even India. Mail came from was the very early 1970s; it was before the whole idea of Gilbert & George, Joseph Beuys, Warhol’s Factory, Ray retro and before used clothing had any cultural position, Johnson, various Fluxus artists, and so on. At a certain really before any of that had actually happened. It was point we realized that we were building an enormous on the cutting edge of that wave of interest in recycling backlog of material, and, in an effort to share it with other clothing and culture. Anyway, that’s how we began, and artists, we began FILE, which we saw as a kind of link we very quickly got a sort of reputation around Toronto. between artists, much like mail art itself. We designed We traveled everywhere in a big gang, and although it FILE to look like LIFE because we wanted it to act as a was the tail end of the hippie era, we were always more kind of parasite within the magazine distribution system. on the glamour side of things, and we quickly became a We knew that if it looked familiar, people would pick it fixture around Toronto. up, and they did. We thought of it as a kind of virus within the communication systems, a concept that William PAUL: You were called General Idea at this stage? Burroughs had written about in the early ‘60s. (He once told me that he considered Kodak’s signature yellow to AA: We called ourselves General Idea for the first time in be a kind of virus.) June 1970. We were invited to be in our first real art exhibition, a group show of Conceptual art at the Nightingale PAUL: What were the terms of discourse that General Art Gallery, which later became A Space. There were a Idea used at the time to configure what they were doing? few Americans in the show like Vito Acconci and Denis Would you have thought of yourselves as an artists’ group, Oppenheim and then mostly Toronto artists. Actually a collective, or a self-organization? the project we developed for that exhibition was called “General Idea” and somehow the name glommed onto AA: We thought of ourselves as an artists’ group and us; it stuck from then on. it’s interesting because now almost anybody who writes In our first few years together we had a big interest in col- about us calls us an artists’ collective. We never thought laboration and in pulling other people into all our various of ourselves as a collective, because we really modeled projects as collaborators. Some of these projects took the ourselves on the idea of a rock band. We wanted to be the form of something more akin to group exhibitions, but Rolling Stones of the art world or something like that. We self-organized, not organized through a gallery. Others thought of ourselves in really pragmatic terms as a group. were more innovative, and took other forms. In 1972, FILE I think if any of us had played instruments we would have Megazine really came out of that sort of activity. We had formed a proper group, and I think that’s an interesting this idea of doing some sort of magazine, that bypassed model, you know, the model of a rock band; it’s a model the normal art press. Rather than creating value for art that’s not really used in the art world. So we didn’t think by recognizing it in the magazine, FILE was more about of ourselves as a collective. artists themselves, creating some sort of mythology as On the other hand we all came out of a sort of ‘60s era, much as anything. We published FILE until 1989 and it particularly me. I came from an “alternative” background: went through various shifts over the years. Toward the with a group of other people I had founded a commune, end it became much more institutionalized, in the sense an underground newspaper, a free school, and so on. that it was more like we were commissioning artist’s So in particular I had a very developed philosophy that projects for the magazine. This was a more conventional involved horizontal structure, inclusion and consensus, but also, frankly, more manageable approach, because in that sort of thing, and that became the foundation of the beginning FILE was so freeform and so collaborative General Idea. We always made decisions by consensus: that it really took over our lives completely. if anybody was unsure about something, we would just not do it. That meant that we always had a lot of ideas that PAUL: The origins of FILE Megazine came out of your were, as we used to say, on the shelf, ideas that remained interest and participation in a mail-art community, but also undeveloped. We would pick them up sometimes two an interest in consumer-culture appropriation? years later, five years later, ten years later, when every- N D P # 3 2 0 0 6 thing had changed or we had some other perspective on to postcolonial museological discourses and ideas of col- what the idea was, and we would pick it up and continue, lecting cultural knowledge.

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