An Interview with AA Bronson of General Idea

Ger Zielinski

Origin: Static Issue 08
Content: Text

The name ‘General Idea’ gently teases us. It is rather coy. At first glance we may wonder, whether it refers to some debate in metaphysics, perhaps a military designation and highly ranked official, and even a multinational corporation. The phrase’s excessive, slippery signification, it turns out, is thoroughly intended and welcomed by the members of this group of three artists, themselves sporting their own noms-de-guerre: AA Bronson, Jorge Zontal, and Felix Partz, together took it as their collective name in 1969, rather accidentally. The three met one another at or around art school in Winnipeg, Canada, in the late 1960s, while participating in the vibrant counterculture movement of the time. Their collective work extends over fifteen or so years, including an extensive exploration of the multiple primarily through editions, ephemera, as well as installation and performance. To be sure, their work also engages the general and generic in their persistent use of multiples in a unique critical post-POP approach to popular culture and high art, with characteristic ambivalence. Their multiples, through mechanical reproduction and “viral” circulation (borrowed from Burroughs), spread far and wide to produce a type of induced generality of object or image. The name ‘General Idea’ manifests the general in its deliberate anonymity, with corporate intimations. The feigned embodied sense of the name, as a (military) general called ‘idea,’ hints at a personified, pervasive power and authority, namely one which suggests at times the cogency of that which is general (in contrast to the singular).

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Contributor:

Ger Zielinski is a postdoctoral fellow in the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University. He recently completed his doctoral dissertation on the cultural politics of lesbian and gay film festivals in the Department of Art History and Communication Studies at McGill University in Montreal. He has published on contemporary art and cinema in various journals, including Parachute, C Magazine, Lola, European Journal of Cultural Studies, Canadian Journal of Film Studies, among others. He continues to act as a commissioning editor for Alphabet City (MIT Press).