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.

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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.

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?

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.