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ZIGGURAT : GENERAL IDEA 1968–1994 AA BRONSON HANS ULRICH OBRIST ZIGGURAT GENERAL IDEA 1968–1994 4 The Ruins of the 1984 Miss General Pavillion, 1977 ZIGGURAT GENERAL IDEA 1968–1994 AA BRONSON ZIGGURAT AS FRACTAL : THE VISUAL ECONOMY OF GENERAL IDEA HANS ULRICH OBRIST IN CONVERSATION WITH AA BRONSON GENERAL IDEA ZIGGURATS NEW YORK CITY MITCHELL-INNES & NASH This catalogue was published on the occasion All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be used of the exhibition General Idea : Ziggurat, or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written November 30, 2017 to January 13, 2018 permission from the copyright holder. Mitchell-Innes & Nash ISBN: 978-0-9986312-3-3 534 West 26th Street, New York, NY 10001 Available through DAP/ Distributed Art Publishers 212 744 7400 www.miandn.com 75 Broad Street, Suite 630, New York, NY 10004 Co-published in part by Maureen Paley, London ; Tel. : 212 627 1999 Fax. : 212 627 9484 Esther Schipper, Berlin ; and Mai 36, Zurich. Publication © 2017 Mitchell-Innes & Nash Essay © AA Bronson and Hans Ulrich Obrist All works © General Idea Design : Matthew Polhamus and Fritz Grögel Printing : Phoenix Litho, Philadelphia, PA Publication Director: Cassandra Lozano Editor: Courtney Willis Blair ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank Lucy Mitchell-Innes and David Nash for Agustín Pérez-Rubio, Artistic Director of MALBA, Buenos encouraging me in this endeavor with humor and patience. Aires, who brought attention to the long-neglected Ziggurat I am especially grateful to Hans Ulrich Obrist for his inter- Paintings and championed them in his touring exhibition view, which I know took focused research and attention : General Idea: Tiempo Partido (2016-17). his deep knowledge of General Idea is always inspirational. This project would not have happened without the pa- Courtney Willis Blair and Cassandra Lozano were both key tient and ongoing support of Mark Jan Krayenhoff van de in making this publication happen ; I thank them for diving Leur, my husband, who propelled me in this direction, and into the editorial complications without complaint. Matthew first introduced me to Lucy Mitchell-Innes and David Nash. Polhamus has been a saint in his generous attempts to carry out my vague and contradictory requests in the design of this The book in your hands has been conceived as an hom- tome. Tymberly Canale, Kevin Choe, Lucy Dew, Elizabeth age to the Yale University Press publication of 1960, Katsura: DiSabatino, Robert Grosman, Isabelle Hogenkamp, Jeffrey Tradition and Creation in Japanese Architecture. Designed by Horne, Sheldon Mukamal, Isobel Nash, Josephine Nash, and Herbert Bayer, with texts by Walter Gropius and Kenzo Tange, Peter Tecu, I thank all of you for your part in bringing this and photographs of Katsura Palace by Yasuhiro Ishimoto, the book and the accompanying exhibition into being. book is an important milestone in visual publishing. Hans The Ziggurat Paintings were first shown at the Carmen Ulrich Obrist and I discuss Katsura near the beginning of our Lamanna Gallery, Toronto (1982); Galerie Montenay-Del Sol, interview on page 11: it is the book that marks the beginning Paris (1986); and International with Monument, New York of my interest in book design, visual publishing, and book- (1986). making as community building. As unlikely as it sounds, it led I would like to thank the gallerists who most recently directly to endeavors like General Idea’s FILE Megazine and have been instrumental in bringing General Idea into the the founding of Art Metropole, and, as Hans Ulrich says, it is light: Frédéric Giroux, Paris ; Victor Gisler of Mai 36 Gallery, “a book by architects and artists,” a partnership central to Zurich ; Maureen Paley, London ; and the indefatigable Esther General Idea. Schipper, Berlin. From my own team, I thank Fern Bayer, Fritz Grögel and Sholem Krishtalka. A special thanks goes to — AA Bronson 7 Going Thru the Motions, 1975 ZIGGURAT AS FRACTAL : THE VISUAL ECONOMY OF GENERAL IDEA Wednesday 18 October, 3 : 50 am Over the next 25 years the leitmotif of the ziggurat was woven into our daily lives. The elaborate semi-fictional reality I am sitting in the dark at 3 : 50 am in my apartment on that we created for ourselves over time was replete with zig- Fasanenstraße in Berlin-Charlottenburg, where artists once gurats, structured by ziggurats, but also decorated with zig- lived when West Berlin was a walled island. From here, my gurats. Our 1984 Miss General Idea Pageant was a platform view into my own past is a distant one. I peer over the bar- presented on a platform of ziggurats ; the 1984 Miss General ricades of time, trying to remember what happened when, Idea Pavillion, our own private (but very public) museum, was where, and to whom. I have promised to write about the zig- framed by ziggurats. Not only was the Pavillion built of ziggu- gurats, from the time when they entered our lives in the late rats, but the floor plan of the Pavillion was structured of inter- sixties, in the first days of what later became General Idea, to locking ziggurats to form 1,984 seats ; the upholstery on those those days frozen in time in 1994, when Felix sat hunched seats, and the carpet on the floor, were all decorated in the over a little desk, drawing ziggurats on a daily basis as his same ziggurat pattern. We invented costumes for the semi- death loomed up about him. The story of the ziggurat is the fictional participants—the infamousVenetian Blind Gowns— story of General Idea. in the form of ziggurated costumes, which functioned also as Felix painted the earliest ziggurat paintings in Winnipeg, architectural studies for the Pavillion. So the ziggurat was a Canada, before he moved to Toronto in the summer of 1969. kind of fractal, existing at every scale. He had returned from a no doubt druggy trip to North I had an acid experience on the floor of our little store- Africa with his friend Steve, and brought with him the ziggu- front at 78 Gerrard Street West, Toronto, our first home, in rat. Whether it was the stepped structures of Mesopotamia 1969, the year of the ziggurat paintings, in which my field of and Egypt or the woven intricacies of tribal carpets is unclear; vision was filled by an interlocking expanse of dancing Donald but the pattern had established itself in his mind. Felix was Ducks, with no negative space. As the ducks danced, they wrestling with painting at the time, doing his best to escape it. filled my complete field of vision. They were, in a sense, just With the early ziggurat paintings he sidestepped many of the a more animated version of the ziggurat paintings. I still hear conventions of painting : no ground (no gesso), no mixing of Felix’s voice in the background, wondering if they should take paints (straight from the can), no fancy artists paints (sign me to the hospital—I was apparently in a coma. But Jorge painter’s paints and house paint), no foreground or back- opted for procrastination, and eventually I emerged from my ground, no subject, no object. The dayglo paint was a sure swamp of dancing ducks/ziggurats. signal of the period : LSD. The brain reduced to dancing cel- In order to weave these ziggurats into our personal his- lular structure where positive and negative space each erase tory and our personal mythology, we realized we had to name the other. them. And it felt right, and good, to name the paintings after 9 10 our beauty queens : Mimi, Miss General Idea 1968, who had we went we completed a second series of ziggurat paintings, brought us all together on the heels of the summer of love ; based on the original drawings of 1968, six squares and five Granada, Miss General Idea 1969, who lived across the street, shaped canvasses, and we gave them extra thickness, that ex- and quickly became part of our gang, and then of our history; tra “object quality” that Jean Christophe Ammann had identi- Honey, Miss General Idea 1970, the star of our first beauty fied as characteristically General Idea. The paintings, built on pageant performance ; and Marcel, Miss General Idea 1971, a four-inch grid, now became four inches thick as well. who we crowned Miss General Idea through to 1984 in order And then began the adventure—quite literally—of our to avoid having to organize another pageant. Pascal was a lives. From 1986 through 1994 we devoted ourselves almost home-less glamour queen who moved in with us in 1971 and entirely to the subject of AIDS, at first through our Image Virus whose multi-octave vocal stylings dominated the 1971 Pag- series of paintings, posters and temporary public installations, eant at the Art Gallery of Ontario ; we named her “the an- and then through the image of the capsule pill, which pro- drogyne bomb of the Canadian art scene,” and she too was liferated into vast medical landscapes of AZT or unnamed immortalized by a ziggurat painting, or is it vice versa? One medications. By 1993, we had regrouped back in Toronto, painting remained, horizontal and stolid : we named it after where Felix and Jorge, both now living with AIDS, spent their our Toronto dealer, Carmen Lamanna. These six paintings last days making art : in the Toronto medical system, those were shown, unstretched, pinned to the walls of the Carmen who chose to die at home had the doctors and nurses sent to Lamanna Gallery in 1982. (Two more, the largest, remained them. Our last year was perhaps the most productive year of untitled and rolled up under Felix’s bed, too large for the our twenty-five years together.

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