Holding a Mirror to Human Tragedy

In a loose paraphrase of Shakespeare, the actor’s role is to mirror humanity, revealing what is intrinsically genuine and affirming in life. AA Bronson thoughtfully and movingly takes up the Shakespearean mantle as a visual artist. He explores the questions of human suffering and identity in the context of the global AIDS pandemic in his exhibit “Mirror Mirror” at MIT’s List Visual Art Center.

Bronson’s odyssey as a visual artist is central to the exhibit. Along with Felix Partz and Jorge Zontal, Bronson founded the Canadian conceptual art group General Idea. The collaborative was more than just the exploration of media bombardment in the modern age, an omnipresent theme in their work. Rather, all three members doffed their former identities and names to form an all-encompassing way of art and life that lasted from 1969 until 1994. In 1994, General Idea dissolved when Zontal and Partz, so integral to Bronson’s artistic and personal life, died from AIDS- related causes.

Bronson took a five year absence from the art world, as he reclaimed his identity and artistic voice. The show at MIT, his first solo exhibition in New England, presents his current work, pieces from the collaborative and earlier solo work. All are centered on the larger themes of the formation of personal identity within the cyclic processes of life and death.

As the exhibit opens, Bronson embraces the idea of the mirror as representing distorted reality. Through the simple display of a ceremonial Tibetan mirror, Bronson has begun to allow himself “to see into the smoky realm of its possibilities.” The simplicity of the mirror provides for an appropriate austerity and confusion befitting the larger question of identity.

From the spiritual center of the Tibetan mirror, he moves into the physical representation of self with mirrors. Bronson’s series of earlier pre-General Idea photographs, “Body Binding” and “Mirror Sequences,” are powerful statements of the body’s indefinable role in the initial representation of self. The images present an insect-like segmentation of the body, to the point of almost being indistinguishable.

Bronson’s work relies on perspective abnormalities that seem to openly assault the conventions of perception. This theme is continued in his most recent photographs, “Hotel Series.” Bronson’s nude photographs of himself in the transient context of a hotel indicate his struggle as he asserts himself in the face of tragedy, despite the continued haunting of time past.

Bronson then taps into a graphically charged confrontation with death and life. His own nude image in a black casket-like box stands as a memorial to his past, and as a memorial to his own image as he moves into heartfelt works regarding the process of death. The sheer magnitude of “Felix, June 5, 1994” elevates the image of the dead Felix Partz to “a public icon standing for all the people who we have lost and as a tribute to the army of their caregivers,” according to List curator Bill Arning. Brightly colored objects surround Partz in stark contrast to his lifeless, emaciated face, testifying to the harrowing disease of AIDS.

Bronson continues the juxtaposition of life and death with the equally large “Anna and Mark, February 3, 2001,” picturing Bronson’s partner and their newborn daughter. Bronson, in an eloquent delineation of purpose, states that “each of us is dying and each of us is being born, each of us is bearing anew, and each of us is a fragment carried along in this river of love we call life.”

The movement to an earthy sepia red walled room brings with it the organic distillment of the constant connection between Bronson’s own life and the greater significance of the global AIDS crisis. Three life-size portraits of General Idea’s Jorge Zontal, weeks before his own death, rest against the wall. Zontal’s father was an Auschwitz concentration camp survivor, and Zontal believed that his gaunt, diseased ravaged body must have resembled his father’s own broken visage on liberation day. Bronson “had to act as his mirror in order that he could look ‘normal,’” as Zontal’s blindness in the later stages of disease prohibited his artistic input.

The elevation to a worldwide theme is crystallized in terms of Auschwitz. Scrawled on the walls are descriptions of SS officers killed by gypsy and Jewish inmates in a desperate attempt to alleviate their own insurmountable suffering. The silk-screened natural linen colored tablecloth that elegantly drapes over a simple table in the room’s center serves as a symbolic burial cloth of all those who have suffered, physically and emotionally. As the final connection, the Auschwitz portal inscription “Arbeit Macht Frei” / “Work sets you Free” is constructed of convex mirrors echoing Bronson’s earlier self-portraits which used such mirrors in complex distortions of perspective.

Bronson believes that the illumination of the mirrors is really just the illumination of the spectators beholding themselves in these words and mirrors. Bronson calls all his audience to understand human suffering. Yet in some way Bronson exorcises the demon of suffering by attaching himself to his work, in a positive perversion of the mocking Nazi motto.

“Grief and trauma are buried in the ongoing onslaught of wasting and death, the continuous interweaving of care-taking, funerals, memorials, anniversaries, and more deaths,” Bronson states in the final room’s wall text. In this exhibition, Bronson creatively weaves though loss, identity and the specter of AIDS to present a work that successfully speaks in a quietly dramatic manner on the human condition. The work leaves a feeling not of sorrow, but of humble gratitude for the gifts of life, art and humanity.

visual arts

Mirror Mirror

AA Bronson

MIT List Visual Arts Center

Through Mar. 31