AA BRONSON

EXHIBITION PROGRAM 2000

AA Bronson 1969 - 2000
Gallery / Graphic Cabinet
5 October, 2000 – 26 November, 2000
Looking Glass  (Website)
 
 

AA Bronson, Felix, June 5, 1994, 1995/1999  
 

When the Canadian group of artists called General Idea exploited a painting by Robert Indiana's titled 'Love' as a composition model and substituted the old four-letter-word of the newer AIDS, critics debated not only the validity of this artistic technique but also fretted about horror being transformed into mere banality. In the mean time, two of the members of the group have died of the disease. As the only survivor, AA Bronson has to cope with the loss of a symbiotic production and living relationship. The Gallery and Graphic Cabinet are presenting works that center around the themes of the sickness and death of his colleagues and friends in the artist's first one-man-show in Europe.
 




Methodically speaking, AA Bronson carries on the technique of General Idea: the group, which was founded in 1969, delighted in confronting the public with so-called 'taboo' subjects and were to discover new facets in symbols so worn out as to become almost unnoticeable. Three poodles copulating in different positions demonstrate homosexual practices in altered form, while the fetish and commodity character of art was synthesized in a multiple in the form of a dollar sign of acryl. When Mastercard and Marlboro logos are formed on the canvas from small colored noodles, these brand names not only become the butt of ridicule but also the repeated attempts to revitalize painting with the aid of the application of objects to the pictorial surfaces. Enactment and mediation became an integral part of their work, which prompted one critic to write already in 1975: "imagine them as pop-stars, who play the media instead of guitars".
 




The end of General Idea came when Felix Partz and Jorge Zontal died in 1994. Although a number of editions of the group are being produced up to the present day, AA Bronson has decided to continue his work only as a single artist. The works shown in the Secession also represent a necessary emancipation from the connection with General Idea. Felix Partz is shown a few hours after his death and Jorge Zontal a few days before his in large close-ups: a black box with a life-size picture of himself intimates that a part of AA Bronson also died with his friends. He wrote: "Since Jorge and Felix died I have been struggling to find the limits of my own body as an independent organism, as a being outside of General Idea. Over the last five years I have found myself, much like a stroke victim, learning again the limits of my nervous system, how to function without my extended body (no longer three heads, twelve limbs), how to create possibilities from my reduced physicality."
 




Although his work with General Idea lacked palpable and biting irony and levity, it does not descend into pathos. Because the installations and large-scale prints on LKW canvases eschew any hint of the intimate or authentic as a result of their materialism, they are also equally unsuitable for repression through pity or ignorance. They confront reality and the presence of sickness and death in the same matter-or-fact and striking manner as advertising billboards: "We need to remember that the diseased, the disabled and, yes, even the dead walk among us. They are part of our community, our history, our continuity. They are our co-inhabitants in this dream city."





PUBLICATION

AA BRONSON 40 pages, 23 b/w illustrations authors: AA Bronson, Matthias Herrmann Secession 2000, ISBN 3-901926-28-3 ___________________ available in the shop

 
One-man-shows: 1301 PE, Los Angeles (1999); Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (2000). Group exhibitions: Brain Multiples, Art Metropole, Toronto (1998); Dream City, Museum Villa Stuck (1999); La Biennale de Montréal 2000, CIAC, Montreal (2000).
 

DOUG AITKEN

EXHIBITION PROGRAM 2000

For further information and photographic material please contact:
 
Urte Schmitt-Ulms
Secession, Association of Visual Artists Vienna Secession
Friedrichstraße 12, 1010 Vienna
Tel: +43-1-5875307-21, Fax: +43-1-5875307-34
presse@secession.at