F for filing system: an interview with AA Bronson.

AAB: The real background for us, in terms of magazines, came out of the background of the underground newspapers; when we actually started FILE there wasn't anything like it. Impulse was a poetry magazine that later became an art magazine under Eldon Garnett--there was a lot of publishing going on in Toronto. Image Nation had been the Rochdale College (3) newsletter and it became a photography magazine. In fact we have work in the 1970 issue of Image Nation. But it was very much, from our point of view, a very straight photography magazine. What else? Impressions came later--another photography magazine; Canada's arts magazine was called Artscanada and around '69-'70 it got quite interesting because it was published in a plastic bag as a series of elements: a little bit like Aspen magazine in a box, a similar concept. But primarily it was a pretty straight art magazine. The difference with FILE was it was thought of as a picture magazine, not as an art magazine; it wasn't a photography magazine, it was a picture magazine. And it was a magazine that had some sense of history to it. Documenting on the one hand and making history on the other. [Warhol's] Interview started a few months before we did and we very quickly teamed up and became friends. Interview was originally mostly type--it was film criticism essentially, and it was a quarter-tabloid with a photo on the front, and as soon as they saw FILE Andy said, "Oh, we should do that." And the next issue I saw was a half-tabloid with the full-page photograph on the front cover. He shifted quite quickly.

There were whole families of magazines that appeared after FILE was well underway that acknowledged FILE as their inspiration: there was a magazine, in fact, called Picture Magazine that came out of New York ... it was very large format, just images, no words. Then there were things like Wet magazine; there were magazines like Real Life and New Observations, and so on, that were not influenced by FILE and we didn't really have a connection with them. Art-Rite we did have a strong connection with; I am not exactly sure why. We were quite different but we were good friends. We covered some of the same ground but in very different ways.

DB: How many issues did you publish?

AAB: We published twenty-nine issues over seventeen years--so not many, in fact.

DB: What were the circumstances surrounding the closure of FILE in 1989?

AAB: In '86 we moved to New York [City]. We were having increasing problems understanding how we could continue to produce FILE because printing costs were getting so much higher. The previous three or four issues had been quite problematic, getting them out. And we thought that since we had now moved to New York, we should change the whole idea of the magazine, we changed to a smaller format and we organized it much more tightly around artists' projects. We hoped to make it more journal-like and to have a longer shelf life consequently, and hopefully a different, more expanded type of audience and maybe more of an academic audience as well.... Those hopes were a failure because essentially our inner nature, and FILE's own identity, still were the driving force. It became so expensive to produce that we couldn't manage it anymore. Another thing was that our careers as artists made it very difficult to put time into the magazine, especially when it came to things like advertising. By '89, I don't think that either Felix or Jorge had been diagnosed yet with AIDS, but we had friends who had died and the whole impetus of creating work that related to the AIDS situation was really driving all that we did and we didn't feel that FILE could really help with that project. So we purposely let it die at that point. (4)

NOTES 1. Image Bank was founded in Vancouver in 1970 by Michael Morris and Vincent Trasov as a "bank" for the deposit and withdrawal of material for mail art. The term "image bank" was borrowed from Claude Levi-Strauss. Morris commented, "Image Bank implies the mechanics of a collective creative consciousness." 2. The early editions of FILE contain many references to members of the mail art network known by their aliases or nicknames: Michael Morris styled himself Marcel Dot (a.k.a. Chairman Dot, Marcel Idea); Vincent Trasov was Mr. Peanut; Glenn Lewis became Flakey Rosehips; Robert Fones, Candy Man; Gary Lee Nova, Art Rat; Eric Metcalfe and Kate Craig, Dr. and Lady Brute. AA Bronson is also known as Michael Tims; Jorge Zontal as Jorge Saia; and Felix Partz as Ron Gabe. 3. For an account of Rochdale as an experiment in alternative education see http://archives.cbc.ca/IDC-1-69-580-3204/life_society/hippies/clip11. 4. This interview is compiled from the unpublished transcript of a video interview with AA Bronson and a subsequent exchange of emails. The author is grateful for AA Bronson's help.