We know, we know, you kids have been eagerly awaiting part two of our The Youth Issue interview with Canadian artist/legend, AA Bronson (pictured by Chris Clary). Well, the moment's finally here.

When we left Bronson with that scoundrel Andrew Belonsky, Bronson had just said he's constantly sabotaging himself - an irksome habit perhaps born from guilt over the deaths of his General Idea partners, Jorge Zontal and Felix Partz. The conversation picks up where it left off - charting into Bronson's childhood in the wilds of Canada, his father's death and the idea of leaving a legacy. Oh, and there's even some mention of another The Youth Issue subject, Terence Koh.

If you've been lagging, read part one here. Then come back to have your socks knocked off, kiddo.

Andrew Belonsky: What’s the last piece of art that you made?

AA Bronson: Well, I’m making one now, but it has no material existence.

AB: It’s just in your head?

AA: Not exactly. It’s for an exhibition in Toronto that’s on right now. They have posters [announcing] that from January 9 through February 9th, I’m giving free healing sessions as my participation in that exhibition. Of course, I’m here, not there, and the posters are there, so it’s a little sneaky of me, because nobody here knows about it.

AB: So are you going to go there?

AA: No. They have to come here. In fact, I’ve had a few bookings. There’s a huge Canadian population in New York City.

AB: I’ve noticed that.

AA: And the art scene is very mobile between Toronto and New York – the Canadian art scene, that is. It’s quickly leaked out here in New York – I’ve actually booked quite a lot of appointments for the next month.

AB: How do you feel about America?

AA: Well, New York of course is a special place. I’m really a Canadian at heart and all the social aspects of Canada – same-sex marriage and health care – I’m very proud of and obviously I’m totally against the Bush government and everything they stand for. But, at the same time, as an artist working internationally, there’s very little for me in Canada, really, whereas New York is a place where I can be a part of that international world. I’ve been going back and forth since 1986 – a long time: twenty years, so I obviously love it.

AB: How do you feel about the rising art scene in New York, like Dash Snow, Ryan McGinley, Terence [Koh]?

AA: You know Terence used to be my assistant. I love the energy of the younger art scene here. The predominance of the market place [is] super disturbing, but I like that somebody like Terence can totally play with it and play it back on itself.

AB: He certainly is playful.

AA: In a way he doesn’t care. So many younger artists, I think get hooked into the seduction of the market place. Terence is great because he never lets that get to him.

AB: The market place is overshadowing the art.

AA: It is…

AB: Do you think that’s going to change anytime soon?

AA: I can’t really tell. It feels to me like there’s some seismic shift going on where the art scene is becoming something totally different than it used to be. It used to be a more intellectual activity and now it’s really becoming part of the entertainment industry. I find it very difficult to figure out what’s going on… It’s very peculiar.

AB: It’s a very scary time that we live in. Do you get scared?

AA: Yeah, I’d say I do.

AB: I almost feel like Americans – the world, really – are sort of in arrested development right now. Maybe we’re regressing, if that makes sense…

AA: I think it’ll take another ten years to really have a proper perspective on it. Things are shifting so rapidly these days that it’s hard to get any sort of perspective…

AB: 9/11 took away America’s collective youth. Now we’re teenagers.

AA: Maybe there were a few too many teenagers before that. It’s a very teenage culture. I mean there are good and bad things to every event. The interesting thing I find [is that] post 9/11 is that New Yorkers are much more thoughtful to each other. In that way, they’re more adult than they were before.

AB: Yeah, but it’s starting to slip.

AA: [Laughs] Yeah.

AB: Do you think trauma’s essential to living a full life?

AA: It probably is – it’s like, you know, to make a really good quality knife blade you have to pass it through fire. I know for myself that having gone through that final period with Jorge and Felix and through [Felix and Jorge’s] deaths, I’m so much stronger than I was before. It shifted my life in a good way, as difficult as it was. Very, very difficult.

AB: What about your parents? Are they still alive?

AA: My mother’s still alive. She’s 94. My father died about twenty years ago. I was with him when he died. He was the first person I was with when they died. He died just before my friends started to die from AIDS, so it was a strange thing. I was never on particularly good terms with my father – I was on okay terms with my father, but I was never close with my father. Just before he died, somehow all that shifted and I became very close to him in the actual moments of death. It was a very strange and wonderful experience.

AB: Did he have a terminal illness?

AA: Yeah, he had cancer – lung cancer. I was actually in Basel [Switzerland] at the art fair and I got a phone call that he was dying – he’d been sick for a year and a half or so. It took me twenty-four hours to get to where he was on the west coast of Canada. Suddenly, in the meantime, he’d had a miraculous recovery and was sitting up in bed. My brother, mother and I went back to my parent’s house to sleep and an hour later they called us and said, “Oh, he’s dying, again”. It was a false reprieve. I guess he waited for me to come is what had happened, which was amazing and it was on my birthday.

AB: How many people have you been with when they died?

AA: Four people.

AB: Do you feel like they’re still with you?

AA: I did for a long time. My father seemed to hang around for quite a long time. Jorge and Felix – with Jorge, I expected him to hang around, [but] he seemed to vanish very quickly. Felix, I still sometimes feel his presence. And then there were other friends that I wasn’t with them at the moment of their death, but I saw them [just] before their death and one of them –he died about two months before Felix and Jorge, so late ’93 - I still feel his presence sometimes now, which is so strange.

AB: When you were little, did you have any premonitions? Or do you now? I know that in that BUTT interview, I think you said that you feel more psychic now than you ever did.

AA: Well, it’s like I know how to recognize and go with it now, whereas back then I never trusted it. I would get those sorts of feelings, but I would never know what to do with them. And, also, I would be so much in my head that I would analyze what it was I was feeling and turn it into something other than the pure experience. Now, with a client, if something comes in my head, I just try to say it as quickly as possible before I have time to think about it, because if I start to think about it, it will start to change into something different.

AB: Do you want to leave a permanent legacy on this planet?

AA: I don’t know whether any legacy is permanent.

AB: I suppose you’re right. In theory, would you like for people to look at your work for the rest of human history?

AA: I don’t know. In a way, I quite like the idea of doing an invisible project. I like that more than having something very concrete. I don’t want to build any monuments to myself, that’s for sure. But, on the other hand, I put together the General Idea archives and [placed] them in the National Gallery of Canada so that they can be used for research purposes – that sort of legacy, yeah: The legacy of the intellectual life.

AB: Something that’s more interactive?

AA: Yeah. But there are General Idea works all over the place. I’m still in the process of placing them.

AB: What’s a memory that sticks out from your childhood?

AA: I guess because of our conversation, I have this image of me lying on the bed surrounded by books. [But] my earliest memories are humorous because they’re almost too Canadian for words – [the first involves] falling off of a dog sled.

AB: Were you in a snowfield?

AA: We lived up North when I was very young – near the Northwest Territories on the Alaska high way. It was an air force base [with] these little post-war houses. It was just one of the dog sleds had been hooked up to take the kids for a ride through the houses and I [fell] off the back. I still remember that vividly, it’s funny.

The other thing was [in] the garbage dumb, which was very near by, was the place where the bears used to hang out, so we were never allowed to go there and I was discovered playing in the garbage dump and taken home and spanked and put to bed.

AB: How old were you?

AA: I must have been four at the time.

AB: Do you miss Canada?

AA: I do. I actually miss it a lot, but I back there fairly frequently, not usually for very long, but I do miss it in many ways. I get homesick.

AB: That’s something no one can grow past.

AA: For Christmas I went to visit my mother and my brother and my partner’s parents live not so far away, just by coincidence. So we were there and you can settle into what feels like a natural way of being: you don’t have to think about anything, because it’s the way you always were, it feels extraordinarily familiar.

AB: Is there anything that you did as a child that you still do?

AA: I always lie facing the window. I have no idea why. A similar thing, when I was in school, I would always have to sit in a desk next to a window.

AB: Do you feel younger now than you did in 1995?

AA: Sometimes I feel very old – older than I am, but other times I feel extraordinarily young. I feel very much alive. I don’t have the same levels of depression that I had – there were about ten years when I was extraordinarily depressed.

AB: Do you not believe in anti-depressants?

AA: I don’t at all, because I know that my particular abilities rely on a sort of sensitivity that gets interrupted by the drugs. If I’m going to be depressed, I’d like to deal with it, I’d like to feel it and move through it. I’d like to hit bottom and come up again, rather than being suspended. I’d rather go through it, rather than be anesthetized.

AB: Is that the key to you – to living a full life – to allow yourself to suffer?

AA: Yeah.

AB: What do you fear the most?

AA: I guess I’m still afraid of failing – after all these years, you’d think I’d get over that. Performance anxiety’s still high on my list. I mean in terms of as an artist: appearing publicly, putting myself out in the public.

Images:
Chris Clary, "Hero", 2005
AA Bronson, "AA Bronson*Healer", 2005 (Before and After Views)
General Idea, "Playing Doctor", 1993
General Idea, "Karma Sutra Poodle", 1983-1984
AA Bronson, From "Mirror Sequences," 1969-1970.