Death is laid bare in the current show at MIT’s List Center, and for a culture like ours, which prefers to keep the messier bodily processes under sanitized wraps, the result is painful to deal with yet hard to turn away from. But this is not an exhibition solely about death — AA Bronson examines death as it defines existence and spurs creativity, and he looks for continuity and self-affirmation even as he (and we) struggle to endure pain and loss. His search traces a very human path, fragmentary and at times faltering; his work is particularly moving taken as a whole, since it paints an intimate portrait of a man picking up the pieces.
For 25 years, Bronson was a member of the Canadian artists’ collective General Idea, which he formed together with Felix Partz and Jorge Zontal around 1970 in Toronto. Bronson (who was born Michael Tims) and his collaborators adopted new names and personas as part of their strategy to explore and create media myths and to challenge fixed notions of what was real. For Bronson, the fictional identity helped him step out of his innately shy self to act on a public, political stage as well as an artistic one — the three were known for their use of mass-media formats, and for their public-art projects, which appeared in various forms including staged beauty pageants, a punk-rock magazine called File, advertising billboards and posters, and even mass-produced souvenirs. The trio worked and lived together until 1994, when both Jorge and Felix died of AIDS-related causes.
Resuming life is difficult for anyone grieving over a loved one, yet for Bronson, the process of continuing on with his life as well as with his art was complicated by the fact that " AA Bronson " had never actually existed as an individual artist. The painful process of saying goodbye to his friends and of finding his own artistic voice is set out in this show. In the first room, an ornamental 17th-century Tibetan mirror stands alone on a pedestal, and uneven black handwriting painted directly on the wall states: " Sunday, August 6, 2000, I dreamed that I found a freshly flayed body in cold running water, a river. It was unconscious but still living, barely alive. It was the remains of who I used to be, almost gone now. We hauled the body out of the river where it had lodged between the rocks and buried it in the damp green forest. "
With this recounting of one of his dreams, Bronson begins to reveal the process by which he’s come to terms with his own suffering and loss and tried to find a way for his own creative spirit to re-emerge. In town for the opening of the show, he explained that this dream signaled the first time since the death of Jorge and Felix that he was ready to start making artwork on his own. The scrawled dream fragment touches on many of his recurring themes: the transformative power of decay in nature; the co-existence of decay with rebirth; the significance of dreams and the unconscious in guiding our waking actions; the resilience of the battered body; and a feeling for ritual as a healing act. For Bronson, his own " flayed " self, which had sunk so low, had to be symbolically buried before rebirth and renewed creativity could take place.
The exhibition is sparely laid out, and that’s a blessing, because you need a lot of extra space for your own emotional baggage as you go through. It alternates primarily between modest-sized photographs Bronson has taken of his own almost perversely healthy body as he searches for answers to personal questions of identity and huge photographs in which he commemorates the wasted bodies and intimate final moments of Felix and Jorge. At the heart of the show beats the 10-foot-high portrait Felix, June 5th, 1994, which Bronson took of his friend a few hours after his death. Felix died from extreme wasting, so that at the end there was so little flesh on his bones that his eyes could not be closed. The portrait is horrific and captivating; though Felix’s eyes are sunken and his teeth protrude in an unworldly expression, his moustache is trim, his dapper, wildly patterned shirt is neatly arranged, and he is surrounded by colorful pillows and blankets, cigarettes and a remote control. It is a vibrant memento mori, artfully arranged in style and pattern to recall Gustav Klimt and the artists of the Vienna Secession. Its scale intentionally recalls a billboard (in fact, it has been shown on billboards in Europe), in a reference to General Idea’s large-scale commercial work.
Next to this image is another oversized photograph, Anna and Mark, February 3, 2001, taken of Bronson’s spouse and his at-that-time newborn daughter, who had just survived a traumatic, premature breech birth. To me, the juxtaposition of these two events is distracting, the pairing of new death with new life just a bit too heavy-handed, one of the few moments where thoughtful restraint is not in evidence in this heavy, emotional show.
The emotions Bronson is grappling with are unique to him but also universal, since everyone at some point confronts the death of a loved one. Yet there’s a greater resonance here. Bronson is interested not just in individual loss but in mass trauma — that is, in times when large elements of a population undergo loss. This leads him to make connections between issues of loss in the gay community from AIDS and loss in the death camps during the Holocaust.
In three huge sepia-toned photographs of Jorge taken about a week before he died, Bronson responds to his friend’s request that he take these pictures to document the similarity between Jorge’s gaunt body and that of Jorge’s father upon his release from Auschwitz almost 50 years earlier. In a touching wall text, Bronson notes that Jorge was blind when these photos were taken, and that Bronson had to act as his mirror in order that he could look " normal. "
Across from these photographs, Bronson has used 133 convex circular plastic mirrors to spell out " Arbeit macht frei, " ( " Work will set you free " ), the German phrase that infamously welcomed prisoners to Auschwitz. The mirrors hark back to a series of Bronson’s earliest photographs in which he holds a circular mirror in one hand and a camera in the other, creating distorted, rather Escher-like photographs of his own naked body, and obscuring his face as if the solution to the puzzle of multi-faceted identity were to be found elsewhere. The question of what it is to be free looms large here, and it’s reflected back to each spectator over and over again in these small mirrors. Bronson also might be asking whether work — in his case, returning to the work of creating art — can be liberating.
Throughout " AA Bronson: Mirror Mirror, " disturbing large works are quietly stitched together by smaller work he’s created over the past 30 years — some of it predating his participation in General Idea, and almost all of it addressing his own body. This smaller work feels like the core of Bronson’s effort to find the solo artist within himself, one distinct from his former partners. The line he seems to be drawing, as he revisits his own early works and connects them with his most recent, shows him holding mirrors that mostly distort or obscure, or making tracings that fragment and misrepresent. Identity remains an elusive thing, perhaps more so as we experience loss and try to cope with what remains.
A larger if no less intimate piece, the video collaboration Nayland and AA, June 20, 2001 between Bronson and artist Nayland Blake (on view in the gallery across the hall from the main exhibition) shows the men coating each other’s bearded faces in chocolate and vanilla Betty Crocker frosting. A close-up of each artist’s face occupies the two video monitors; they look like tribal mud men, or pampered spa guests. A third, larger projection shows the two painted men engrossed in a long, involved kiss. Both artists are bearded and frosted; they mirror each other in that way. Yet one is chocolate, one vanilla; one is older, one younger. Again, the visual mirror is a distortion, an untrustworthy record. This piece feels more daring than Bronson’s solo work across the way. It’s clear his gift for collaboration remains strong — perhaps his most significant contributions continue to lie in that direction.
