Hanged Man, 2002 AA Bronson The Quick and the Dead There is something unnerving about what we apprehend of the spiritual realm. It can seem both close at hand and otherworldly in an intense environment of competing surface values and commercialized emotions. Death surrounds body and soul as one, and many cannot escape the stress of a legion of unknown fears associated with death. AA Bronson has spent the past decade exploring the paralyzing personal effect that death has had on his voice and vision as an artist. Separated in 1995 from his life-and-artworld companions, Felix Partz and Jorge Zontal, his co-creators in General Idea, he had to forge a new relationship with ideas and forms of representation to give renewed resonance to his work. The process has ultimately renegotiated his perception of dying and the language used to describe death, which has become for him less about destruction than about encouraging an acute awareness of that which is transmuted into a communion with the dead. The figures of death and the moments of transcendence near death and at the moment of death express the incessant conquest that is the life of art - whether to defy death or not, it dedicates one to the Greek gods, to Christ, or to the service of Bronson's art alone. Bringing together significant early photographic works such as "Evidence of Body Binding" (1971) and "Mirror Sequences" (1969-70), in the collection of the National Gallery of Canada, and recent and new work such as "Hanged Man" (2002) and "Untitled (Bubble Machine)" (2003), "The Quick and the Dead" is Bronson's first solo exhibition in Canada since the demise of General Idea. The affinity we tend to discern between the reconstitution of work from Bronson's past and the new pieces suddenly becomes less baffling. It is as if the early forms are finally being informed by its spirit. The imitation of nature is completely absent. What is being called into question is the value of the world of appearances: appearances identified with illusion, like Sung Dynasty "landscapes" composed of water and mountains. Like Chinese landscapes, Bronson's recent work does not produce "scenes" but visions charged with intimations of divinity, while the impure body landscapes are but earthbound fragments of the world of appearances. Bringing together both worlds is the transformative activity that aims to transfigure the world. Is this not the aim of the healer? "When my father died, I had the strangest and most clichéd of experiences. I was sitting, holding his hand, and as I sat there I found myself in a long tunnel with a very bright white light at the end, and I was proceeding along it with my father, hand in hand. Then a sort of loud and booming voice came, not in reality but in some other dimension, and told me that it was not my time yet, that I had to turn back. I did turn back, and found myself again sitting next to my father, and he was unconscious. He died shortly after". "Yes, the feeling of translucency.... I think that is the mark of the truly empathic. In moments of heightened awareness, the translucency sets in. When Jorge died, I had exactly the feeling you are describing. Yes, it is like an aura at the edge of unconsciousness; one must slip out of one's head and fully into one's body to perceive it.... The effort is exhausting and stays for days afterwards". (Excerpt from an email conversation between Robert Morris and AA Bronson, 2003, to be published in the catalogue for AA Bronson's forthcoming Power Plant exhibition, The Quick and the Dead). Bronson received a Governor General's Visual Art and Media Award in 2002, a Lifetime Achievement award from the Toronto Friends of the Visual Arts, and the Canada Council Bell Canada Award in Video and Media Arts in 2001. He currently divides his time between Toronto and New York. Exhibition: December 12, 2003 - March 7, 2004 Gallery Hours: Tue-Sun noon-6 pm, Wed noon-8 pm Closed Mondays. The Power Plant 231 Queens Quay West CAN-Toronto, Ontario, M5J 2G8 Telephone: +(416) 973-4949 E-Mail: powerplant@harbourfront.on.ca www.thepowerplant.org |
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