Print Matters: An Interview with AA Bronson
Published in Elephant magazine, issue 35, 2019. Photography by Kristin Krause.
It’s early in the morning when I visit AA Bronson at his apartment just off Berlin’s busy Kurfürstendamm. He moved to the city with his husband—the architect and designer Mark Jan Krayenhoff van de Leur—and set up near Galerie Buchholz, which represented Bronson’s infamous art collective General Idea (GI) in the 1980s. Opening the large, ornate wooden door to his home, Bronson is unmistakable: impressive white beard, rounded glasses and kind eyes. I regularly see him from afar at Berlin’s art book fairs, carrying tote bags loaded with printed material.
In fact, Bronson is often referred to as the “Grandfather of Zines”, as Van de Leur points out, while I browse the artist books stacked neatly on the living room table. After participating in the early days of Canada’s radical underground publishing scene, Bronson lent his knowledge of publishing networks to GI’s mischievous foray into magazine making and later to New York’s Printed Matter bookstore, where he was director and subsequent founder of the New York and LA Art Book Fairs. Today he publishes regularly under his own imprint, Media Guru—he’s currently got three zines at the printer, he tells me. With my interest in publishing piqued, Bronson dashes past his cluttered white desk, covered in mail, to grab a stack of GI’s File magazine. Van de Leur brings us coffee—lots of it—and Bronson starts at the beginning.
Born Michael Tims in Vancouver in 1946, Bronson’s first move into independent publishing was in Winnipeg after a stint studying architecture. During the early sixties he founded a commune with a group of fellow dropouts; together they edited an underground newspaper in a distinctly un-hierarchical way. “We’d all get stoned, sit around on the floor and put it together—it was a quilting bee approach to publishing,” remembers Bronson. “Although the word ‘network’ didn’t really start being used until the seventies, that’s what this was: the underground papers were people outside mainstream society, all in touch with one other and sending each other work. It meant that in this little city in Canada we had contact with the international situationists.”
In 1968 Bronson moved to Toronto to participate in the Rochdale College experiment, a notorious commune that functioned as a student-run free school. He also began an apprenticeship at the experimental publisher Coach House Press, where he acquired skills for letterpress and book design. “In the meantime,” he explains, “General Idea started with all of us moving in together.”
In their home at 78 Gerrard Street, Bronson and fellow GI founders Felix Partz and Jorge Zontal sent chain-letter mail art projects out into the world and in 1972, they started publishing a magazine to document it all. According to Bronson, File wasn’t simply a magazine but an artwork by GI, integral to its project as a whole. They appropriated Life magazine’s red and white logo and reordering its name, a decision that spurred Time Inc to threaten to sue. “That was great publicity for us,” he chuckles. File was parody and performance, but perhaps most vitally, a Trojan horse. It flaunted its glossy, colourful cover on the newsstands, artfully disguising the cheap newsprint inside. “It was a parasitic thing,” says Bronson. “It could go into a certain system, into the distribution network of bookstores and so on. Because of that cover, it could go where smaller magazines from the time might just disappear.”