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As
part of our grand opening event on Saturday, November 6, 2010, Plug In ICA
and AA Bronson present a new series of life- size
self-portraits, over-sized silkscreen prints based on his collaborative
project [UTF-8?]“Invocation of the
[UTF-8?]Queer Spirits.â€
The work refers to the Joseph Beuys
self- portrait of 1972, [UTF-8?]“La
rivoluzione siamo [UTF-8?]Noi.†Like Beuys, Bronson inhabits the multiple
personaes
of artist, educator, activist, and shaman to challenge the dominance of the
marketplace in a consumerist society. [UTF-8?]Influenced in the late 60s by
[UTF-8?]Beuys’ prodigious output of low-cost multiples and his performative
and
often collaborative approach to making art, AA Bronson went on to found
General Idea with his collaborators Felix Partz and Jorge
Zontal in 1969. They worked and lived together for 25 years until his
[UTF-8?]partners’ death in 1994. Bronson now lives in New York City, where he
is
the President of Printed Matter, Inc. and the Artistic Director of the
Institute for Art, Religion and Social Justice at Union
Theological Seminary.
Between 2006 and 2009, AA Bronson
collaborated with artist and academic
Peter Hobbs on the project [UTF-8?]“Invocation of the Queer
[UTF-8?]Spirits,†a series of
[UTF-8?]ï¬ve [UTF-8?]“performances†in [UTF-8?]ï¬ve cities, in which a
group of gay
men gathered in a secret location at an unannounced time
without documentation or an audience. The rituals that resulted are evoked,
and invoked, in Plug In [UTF-8?]ICA’s new book, [UTF-8?]“Queer
[UTF-8?]Spirits,†Bronson and
[UTF-8?]Hobbs’ diaristic and imagistic exploration of the project co-published
with
Creative Time, New York (forthcoming, January 2011). Together they explored
the various social forms of group therapy, ceremonial magic, the sweat
lodge, [UTF-8?]witch’s covens, gay heart circles, and 19th century
spiritualist
séances to create the queer hybrid they entitled [UTF-8?]“Invocation of the
Queer
[UTF-8?]Spirits.†The fourth of these was commissioned by Plug In, and was
held in
the abandoned United Army Surplus store in its last days, before it was torn
down to make room for the new building that houses Plug
In today.
“We are the
[UTF-8?]revolution†presents an image of Bronson photographed by
Winnipeg [UTF-8?]ï¬lm-maker and Plug In President Noam Gonick moments before
the performance began. The prints are applied with
diamond dust.
The portraits are presented in Plug In
[UTF-8?]ICA’s new galleries, so that
Bronson is in fact standing in almost the exact location where the photograph
was
originally taken.
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