Tour with AA Bronson

Mythmaking, fiction and bold claims have always been part of General Idea’s artistic practice. Challenging dominant notions of authorship, the trio imagined new ways of collaborating, producing and publishing works– after all, three heads are better than one. 

Berlin based artist and founding member AA Bronson will give a tour through the largest retrospective to date on the collective’s complex, inventive and pioneering work. Extending the generosity that is at the core of General Idea’s practice, AA Bronson will reveal secrets and behind-the-scenes stories – while probably creating new ones. 

AA Bronson is an artist living and working in Toronto and Berlin. In the 1960s, he left university with a group of friends to found a free school, a commune and an underground newspaper. This led him into an adventure with gestalt therapy, radical education and independent publishing. In 1969, he formed the artists’ group General Idea with Felix Partz and Jorge Zontal; for the next 25 years they lived and worked together to produce the living artwork of their being together, undertaking over 100 solo exhibitions, countless group shows and temporary public art projects. They were known for their magazine FILE (1972–1989), their unrelenting production of low-cost multiples and their early involvement in punk, queer theory, AIDS activism and other manifestations of the other. In 1974 they founded Art Metropole, Toronto, a distribution centre and archive for artists’ books, audio, video and multiples, which they conceived as the shop and archive for their Gesamtkunstwerk: the 1984 Miss General Idea Pavillion, a kind of meta-museum. From 1987 through 1994, they focused their work on the subject of AIDS.