F for filing system: an interview with AA Bronson.

AAB: Well, I think FILE was very much an artwork by General Idea. It wasn't really a magazine in the normal sense of the word. It was one of our projects and was very much integral to our project as a whole. We had this idea that in a way we were our own art world--we had our own gallery, in a sense, which was the Miss General Idea pavilion, and we had our own artworks of course, and we had our own muse--which was Miss General Idea, and we had our own media, which was FILE magazine. We even had our own gallery shop--Art Metropole--which was a distribution center for artists' books and video that we started in the mid '70s.

DB: How was FILE conceived as part of that larger GI project?

AAB: I guess the model would have been the Surrealist or Dadaist magazines. It was a place where we were, in a sense ... placing our manifestos, some sort of documentation of what we doing, but not in the form of documentations, a more diaristic approach to unravelling what we were doing. At the same time we were formatting it like a mainstream magazine, so it could be as personal as we wanted it and it wouldn't matter. The format would carry it onto the newsstands no matter what was inside.

The first two or three issues were sent out free of charge to a mailing list that we compiled of I think 2,500 names (I have absolutely no idea how we did it). It was a sort of campaign to get subscribers. And we very quickly did get a good base of subscribers, including Andy Warhol and Joseph Beuys who were two of the first subscribers. And William Burroughs came soon after. So FILE was very much a word-of-mouth thing, the news about FILE travelled very quickly within a certain art world.

DB: It's interesting hearing about these images literally piled up out of the mail because a lot of the issues feel as if they have been compiled from what has been found, recycled, and so on.

AAB: There were certain kinds of images that interested us but I don't know how to describe them; they fell into categories I guess. Images of progress, the image of progress that was so evident in the magazines in the late '50s and early '60s, always fascinated us because they seemed so empty and so meaningless in a sense and so heroic. The whole "1984 project" was presented very much in terms of an ironic use of these images of progress. Obvious irony figured largely in how we chose our images.

DB: Obviously photography was the key medium for transmitting your ideas.

AAB: It was a visual magazine. There was a little window of time in the late '60s through the '70s when there was an amazing amount of collage going on using found imagery ... And there was an artist called Gary Le Nova in Vancouver who was on the periphery of Image Bank who was very involved in the profusion of collages and there was a lot of that work evident at Coach House Press [in Toronto], less so out of New York--well maybe Ray Johnson, but [his] was entirely a collage sensibility and he had all his layers of friends and cohorts about him.

We were also constantly taking photographs. Jorge was trained both as a cameraman for film and as a photographer. He did all the darkroom work. It was a diaristic approach.

DB: FILE contained many pictures of General Idea and its circle playing out various performances.

AAB: Originally General Idea was a bigger group, it started out about eight. The three of us were central, then a group who lived with us and were part of the performances and so on. At some point the group more or less disbanded, leaving just the three of us and at that point we realized that in order to have any presence in the art world people needed to know who we were, and we began to do self portraits, and that would have been about 1975. We continued doing self portraits [until] about '94.

DB: The image exchange lists in FILE include names like Anna Banana and Ray Johnson who are now closely associated with mail art. How important was the mail art scene from the Canadian position?

AAB: We were very much of that sort of [Marshall] McLuhan age. When I was in university, McLuhan was my idol and I was totally immersed in ideas about communication and communication theory was extremely hot at that moment. The Simon Fraser University had just opened in Vancouver [and] had something called the communication center, which was an absolutely new concept. So any ideas about communication, about media, about mass media, about how information travels through society, through the culture, were essential ideas for us and mail art became for us a sort of miniature version of that; it was like this little model of all that we could be involved in and [where we could] be a major player in this little community of people. It got watered down pretty fast. The group of people who were involved grew exponentially and by about '74-'75 it was more or less all over. It was so gigantic because so many people of no interest whatsoever had entered into the playing field. We were swamped at that point. But originally it was the basis on which the whole magazine was done and it was very important to us. And, of course, being in Canada in a city with a very little arts scene, it allowed us to play in a bigger field, and in addition to people you thought of as being in that field, like Ray Johnson and Ann Banana, there was also the whole Fluxus movement [that] overlapped; we were constantly getting mailings from Ben Vautier and Joseph Beuys for that matter, and Nam June Paik and ... Dieter Roth and Richard Hamilton. Many of these were artists for whom we had tremendous admiration, though at that moment they were still not yet very well known.

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FILE was also different from most art magazines in that it was intended for the newsstand, not for the gallery, so it was intended for places where Artforum could not be sold, for a more general audience....

DB: FILE exudes this sense of a closed community of people who read it; it's filled with in-jokes and aliases, codes for the cognoscenti. It looks forward to blogs and personal Web sites of the present day that can be both exclusive and strangely informal. Would you say this is a legacy of mail art?

AAB: Certainly Ray Johnson's work is full of the same thing, the mailings that he sent out. He would have so-called meetings of the New York correspondence school that would always somehow manage to coincide with an opening at a gallery, so essentially it would claim an opening at a gallery as a meeting of the New York correspondence school. Then he would send out a report with little drawings of all the people who had attended the opening. Most of them appeared as bunny rabbits with their names underneath. A lot of his mailings were heavily coded, a lot of in-jokes that only certain people would understand.... (2) I think there was a lot of influence from there. Actually that's a subject that could probably bear a lot of looking at. Part of it was about differentiating ourselves from the existing Toronto art world. We wanted to create something that set us apart from that. And part of it was making it seem bigger than it was, that more people were involved than really were and that it was more important than it really was--there was an artifice to it.

DB: It would seem to anyone familiar with the magazine that there was a thriving arts scene, so you succeeded in this illusion ...

AAB: The real scene it represented was quite tiny, though it grew very quickly.

DB: Looking through these issues, I get the sense of people who were reading lots of magazines.

AAB: We were always surrounded by lots of magazines; we were great magazine readers. We must have had a good fifty running feet of old LIFE magazines, most of them cut up. They were very easy to find at that time--LIFE and Fortune magazine. In addition to that we were great readers of everything we saw as having some cultural impact, everything from art magazines to fashion magazines and especially those that seemed most cutting edge....

DB: FILE existed within a network of other small magazines. This network of affiliated magazines can be reconstructed from the lists and exchange adverts inside FILE and encompasses Canadian titles as well as titles in the United States such as Avalanche and those as far away as the Netherlands and Australia. How important to you as editors was this network?