F for filing system: an interview with AA Bronson.

The artists' magazine FILE, which published between 1972 and 1989, was founded in Toronto and edited by AA Bronson, Felix Partz, and Jorge Zontal (known collectively as General Idea). Styled after LIFE magazine, FILE (like its namesake it boasted that it made the history it recorded) continues to attract admiration and critical attention among a wide variety of commentators--not least because of the critical attitude of its editors to politics and media culture. In this recent interview, AA Bronson discusses the broad context out of which FILE emerged. He recalls how the title evolved from being a documentation of the activities of the international mail art movement of the early 1970s into a unique archival project that set out, year by year, to record details of actual and fictive artworks by General Idea and their circle.

DAVID BRITTAIN: How and when did FILE begin?

AA BRONSON: In the early 1970s, we were part of a mail art network, let's call it; a very loose set of affiliations ... begun by Ray Johnson in the late '60s out of New York [City that] was called the New York correspondence school, and was picked up by the Image Bank, a group of artists in Vancouver. (1) And Image Bank started to produce a sort of newsletter in which they would list different artists' image requests and send this out to a mailing list every now and then. So you would get a list of so and so in such and such a city at such and such an address wants images of palm trees or scuba divers or whatever it might be. And people would start to mail each other clippings out of newspapers or magazines or whatever. There was a lot of mail going this way and that. In the early days of General Idea we used to get up rather late in the morning, get ourselves coffee and sit and open the mail, and opening the mail could easily take two or three hours. There was always an enormous stack of mostly clippings from other artists--like a strange sort of clipping service, though it often took the form of collages and so on and so forth. And that started to get so out of hand, the network started to get so big, that we came up with the idea of producing a magazine called FILE that would not only send out listings on a regular basis, but also present some of the results, both collaborations and correspondence between artists.

We'd been together about three years. We were basically straight out of school, totally penniless, living off welfare, most of us. We lived in two floors of a big old abandoned office building in the very center of the financial district of Toronto and the view out of our front window was a sea of secretaries in the building opposite. So how we got this idea that we should publish a magazine I'm not really sure. But Pierre Trudeau was in power at that point and there were a great many unusual forms of funding available and one of them was called local initiatives. The idea of local initiatives was that anybody could come up with an idea for something that would benefit their communities--usually that meant a geographical community, a neighborhood, but it didn't have to; they recognized the idea of a special interest community, too. They would pay salaries for the project but they did not pay any other costs. We managed to convince them--and it was true--that Canadian artists were very disconnected across the 5,000 mile width of Canada, and vast spaces in between, in a country where the nearest neighbor is always in the U.S. (I think it's 90% of the population of Canada lives within one hundred miles of the U.S. border and the next nearest city is almost always an American city); so to create some form of communication between Canadian artists was our idea. I think we got six or seven salaries out of this project--of course we didn't pay ourselves a penny. We put it all into the production of the magazine and continued to live off of welfare. That's how we did FILE.

DB: Tell me about the production of the first issue. From the first it seemed very sure of itself and curiously fully formed. How did that happen?

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AAB: I had had quite a lot of prior experience with publishing and very low budget publishing. When I was in university I designed a newsprint pyschedelia insert for the student newspaper and that would have been around '64 or '65. Then I published my own little magazine that came with a bunch of bits and pieces that would come in a plastic bag for a while. Then with a group of friends, I founded an underground newspaper, which of course was in a tabloid format. And through that got in touch with many other similar groups around the world actually--including the International Situationists, so there were a lot of ideas floating around ... So when it came time to do FILE I had this background experience and I knew we had to do it as cheaply as possible and I wanted it to look as real as possible--I wanted it, on a newsstand, to be a simulacrum of a real magazine; more than a real magazine. So we made this very cheap newsprint tabloid interior and wrapped a glossy cover around it. And we chose LIFE magazine as the look we wanted because, more than any other magazine we felt it was a visual magazine--and there weren't many magazines around that were truly visual--and the other thing was it was a magazine that didn't just report history, it sort of created history and it created images. So, for example there was a regular column in the late '60s, early '70s called "LIFE Goes to a Party" in which they would turn up at some barbeque in you know, some town in the midwest, [in] somebody's backyard, and they would document some very ordinary person's barbeque and that would be a news story, a picture story--a human interest story: I think they must have invented human interest stories. So this is what we wanted to do: we wanted to create a sort of Canadian art scene when there wasn't one. There were the beginnings of one, but there wasn't a real scene, but we thought if we could create the image of a scene then in fact it would exist. So we chose LIFE as our model and just rearranged the letters into FILE and really thought of it as a filing system of images, like file folders of images. It quickly became two things: a sort of gossip column in which 50% of the gossip was created--a lot of it was fake, but appropriate fake--and the other half was these listings, the requests. So the look used formats lifted straight out of LIFE magazine, because again, we wanted that familiarity.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

DB: According to Howard Rheingold's book, The Virtual Community: Surfing the Internet (1994), the underground press (in particular the Whole Earth Catalog) not only anticipated the virtual communities of the Web but actually played a big role (by making its Well system public) in the transition of alternative communities from being connected via print to being wired. Would you say what you were doing at FILE anticipated the networked present?

AAB: We were close friends with one of the Whole Earth Catalog people who went on to produce the Canadian Whole Earth Catalog. Yes, it's very much a database sort of approach, which is also what we were doing with the image directories in FILE and so on.

DB: So there were two functions at first: one was to create a sense of community among Canadian artists and the other was to be a catalyst for image exchange. As the years passed, how did the magazine change to become more of an archival project?

AAB: As the three of us spent more time together, and our own project evolved, FILE also became our voice for everything we were doing so there was always a lot of documentation of our own projects; and our master project was this big plan towards the 1984 Miss General Idea Pageant--it was a mythical thing. That project was always unravelling in the pages of FILE magazine as well. At a certain point we also started to open the door to artists--artists started to do projects for FILE. By the '80s, it was pretty much a magazine for artists' projects, it had taken that turn, especially the last four issues, which were formatted as artists' projects. In a way I think that was a mistake. I think the whole very personal aspect of it was what gave it its identity.

DB: Can you recall any of those projects?

AAB: The first issue [in which] we actually used artists' projects was in 1976; we did something called the New York issue. We moved to New York [City] for six months to produce the issue and we invited, for example, Les Levine--he did a project. It is interesting from that period, a lot of the pieces that we published are by artists [who] were relatively forgotten. Every here and there is one by someone who has actually become quite known.

To me a lot of the artists who did projects for the magazine weren't really aware of the magazine as a magazine but rather as a place to publish a project. So, for example, Cindy Sherman's piece consisted of a series of her black-and-white film stills--which was very nice, but could just as easily have been a set of photos; it didn't need to be in a magazine. A lot of the artists, especially the artists in New York, when invited to do something for the magazine, would do something that essentially was ... promoting the work that they would show in galleries, rather than doing a piece that I would think of for a magazine....

DB: That's an incredibly important distinction you make between the page as a sort of virtual gallery wall and more of an installation space. For me FILE absolutely exemplifies the magazine as a "total artwork"--art and communication perfectly fused, one disguising the other.