BY Andrea D. Fitzpatrick

Jorge, February 3, 1994 was created by AA Bronson and Jorge Zontal, two artists who, along with Felix Partz, were members of the Canadian art collective General Idea. For a quarter of a century (1967-1994), they worked together as a symbiotic “organism” to create art, a brilliant career, and a glamorous, star-studded life. [1] General Idea created a unified, triadic identity in their artworks, a parodic brand of queer self-portraiture in which they assumed many guises: the fornicating poodles in Mondo Cane Kama Sutra (1983); the gothic graduates in Nightschool (1989); the cherubic, naughty boys in Baby Makes Three (1992); and the AZT clinicians in Playing Doctor (1992).

Always together. Never solo. By contrast, Jorge, February 3, 1994 is a startling confrontation that unfolds between only two members of the group. In this remarkable series of photographs, taken in their Toronto penthouse apartment shortly before Zontal’s death, Zontal is shown suffering from the late stages of AIDS-related illness, and Bronson acts as the camera-man. Zontal is blind, while Bronson is sighted. Zontal has undressed to expose the frailty of his emaciated body, while Bronson, who remains hidden outside the frame, bears witness to the traumatic, tragic scene. These members of the group face each other in relative solitude, one on either side of the lens. Only one artist will ever see the final work, unprecedented in their career, and unrepeatable.

Six years after Zontal’s death, after transforming the photographic sequence into a monumental, triptych portrait (its structure surely referencing the three members of General Idea), Bronson began to exhibit the work. The original black and white photographs were sepia-tinted, enlarged to six feet by three feet each, and then transferred onto mylar to offer a panorama of viewpoints spanning the walls of the galleries where the piece was shown.[2] In contemporary art, this documentary-style, collaborative portrait is an exceptional instance in which a dying man takes such an active part in his own representation. Because of the way a dialogue is captured verbally and visually, it openly demonstrates transactional qualities and a balance of perspectives, which is rare in photographic portraiture of any kind. The work is made further complex because, although it appears to expose Zontal’s vulnerability, it also demonstrates his inherent agency, even heroism. The display of embodied vulnerability and emotional suffering – as critical sources of agency – are important artistic strategies in the 1980s and 1990s, and seen other artists experiencing serious illness, namely, Jo Spence, Hannah Wilke, David Wojnarowicz, and Bob Flanagan. Here, I would like to explore some qualities specific to the Zontal-Bronson project, in particular, how the photographic medium might give dynamism to such a vulnerable subject as Zontal, despite the way it has been theorized as reducing its subjects to a mere two dimensions by “mortifying,” “embalming” or “archiving” those who come before the lens.[3]

 

Temporality

The display of Zontal’s body with signs of AIDS-related illness emphasizes the threat of mortality. Despite this unveiling, there is no eroticism to Zontal’s body; his state of undress exposes only his skeletal thinness. His knees seem to knock together and his rib and collar bones create concave gullies rather than contours. The incongruity of a winter hat worn indoors suggests a man who needs warmth. The slippers suggest a minimal degree of softness for a body with so little insulation. Zontal’s posture is bent awkwardly in a number of areas, and the placement of his feet lacks stability. Like a military badge on a decorated officer, a catheter pierces his near-fleshless chest, with its intravenous tube dangling and disconnected from the source of medication. These details mark his body as medically compromised – an anomaly from the former, robust countenance so well known to the public through the many self-portraits that characterized General Idea’s work.

An avalanche of connections are being made in this magisterial, encompassing artwork. In all the contexts in which Jorge, February 3, 1994 is exhibited or published, Bronson provides extensive background information as an integral component, some of which is as follows:

A week before Jorge died, he asked me to take these photographs. Jorge’s father had been a survivor of Auschwitz, and he had the idea that he looked exactly as his father had on the day of his release. He wanted to document that similarity, that family similarity of genetics and of disaster. It has occurred to me since that the moments in history are rare when entire communities are erased, leaving surrounding communities intact. The gay community suffered ongoing losses through the late eighties and most of the nineties; the Jewish community suffered similarly during the Holocaust. [. . .] Jorge was blind when I took these photographs. I had to act as his mirror in order that he could look ‘normal.’ ‘Should my eyes be like this?’ he asked. ‘A little more open,’ I replied, ‘No, not quite that much.’[4]

Connections are created not only between the two artists, but across history, geographic borders, and generations, between apparently-disconnected communities that have suffered catastrophic losses whose severity would seem to decimate the spirits of those involved. Through the emblematic emaciation of an artistic body, two nefarious (yet clearly disparate) evils are brought into contact: one political, national, military, and ideological, the other medical, viral, and indiscriminate (although, as Bronson points out, disproportionately attacking a particular population). Zontal’s somatic approach to representing trauma, expressing suffering through his body rather than linguistically, creates inter-generational connections through space and time, between historic communities and individuals. Zontal’s wilful display of his vulnerable body involves a somatic language that, by demonstrating a patrilineage of suffering, bridges the incommensurate experiences of distinct communities that have suffered indelible, personal traumas. By linking himself to a nexus of community relationships existing before and beyond his individual predicament, Zontal demonstrates a generosity of spirit that extends empathy rather than victim status. The connections made manifest by Zontal catapult the work outside the confines of the private, the interpersonal, and the art-historical, and into the collective realm of the public, political monument. Therefore, an embracing, open-ended statement is created, along with opportunities for dialogue across generations and communities.

Potted paper-whites – flowers appearing during the winter months to hint at the coming of spring and notions of rebirth – peek from the window frame. The paper-whites, the most delicate and ephemeral of spring flowers, will most certainly outlive Zontal. They poignantly allude to the season that will be denied to him. This probably-unintended floral detail offers, for me at least, the punctum in Roland Barthes’s sense: the detail that jumps forward, piercing the studied quietude of the photograph, to shatter my analytic tendencies and grip my emotions. (This is not to say that studying and discovering this artwork has not brought tears to my eyes on every single occasion.) The flowers embody the chiasmic temporality and inscription of death inherent to all portrait photographs, as put forward by Barthes in Camera Lucida (1981), the famous analysis of photography initiated by his experience mourning his beloved mother’s death. For Barthes, photography’s special characteristic, its noeme, is, “[t]hat-has-been,” in other words, the referent in the film’s emulsion that offers the viewer the absolute certainty that the object was, indeed, once there before the lens.[5] The object one sees and the medium that represents it are contingent, existing in a causal relationship. Further, there is a traumatic awareness of mortality when viewing photographs of those who have died after their likeness has been captured on film: “this will be and this has been.”[6]

For Barthes, the portrait or figurative genre of photography (is there any other in Camera Lucida?) involves this “temporal hallucination,” which looks to the past while simultaneously prefigures the future.[7] The past is not merely pointed to, but wedges itself into the present, as if woven into a fabric endlessly folding back upon itself. Memorial portraits, for Barthes, incarnate this looping temporality because they represent someone both living and dead; they indicate the “anterior future of which death is the stake.”[8] “That-has-been” suggests a specific moment in time that has passed, a fleeting-but-now-enduring moment for those surviving subjects who achingly contemplate images of the dead, searching for, but never arriving at, “a just image” of their beloved.[9] Because the title of the artwork, Jorge, February 3, 1994, commemorates the day of Zontal’s death (shortly after the photographs were made), the temporality in the work is similarly convoluted and haunting. A memorial photograph like Jorge, February 3, 1994 (which allows one to see the dead while he was still alive) depicts precisely the impossibility whereby, “[h]e is dead and he is going to die . . .”[10] The artistic work Bronson does after Zontal’s death, to tint the original black and white photographs with sepia tones, suggests the creation of an unflinching, ponderous memorial. The warm sepia creates a sense of temporal distance; not only does it soften the harsh, photo-journalistic quality of the black and white, but also lends the work a nostalgic, antique feeling akin to heirloom photographs. The sepia tones also make the historical connection to the Holocaust more visually evident. The “nowness” of the moments captured, which unfold in the rhythm of the panels, is memorialized as a major historic event. The sepia tones transform Jorge, February 3, 1994 from an urgently contemporary moment to one that shifts to the past.

These temporal relationships are anything but simple because, in recognizing the death-in-life that is conveyed by portrait photographs (as Barthes would have it), one is also catapulted into the inevitable future of one’s own, certain death. There are other general links Barthes makes between photography and death in Camera Lucida, which are: structural (in its referential exactitude and temporal finality); emotional (in its affective connection with memory and desires that cannot be fulfilled); metaphysical (in its impossible duality of presence and absence); and ontological (in its stillness and silence). There is no arguing with Barthes that photography mirrors death. Although the issues raised by the Zontal-Bronson collaboration, as unflinching in their intensity as ambitious in their scope, point to some ethical and political dimensions clearly different from the specific parameters of Barthes’s book, the point I’d like to make with the Bronson-Zontal collaboration is that photography can also elude death, that it can be a life-in-death. How is this possible?

Collaboration

Jorge, February 3, 1994 is neither still nor silent. It not only moves, but also speaks.

To remind the reader of some pertinent dialogue, Bronson’s text conveys the following exchange: “Jorge was blind when I took these photos. I had to act as his mirror in order that he could look ‘normal.’ ‘Should my eyes be like this?’ he asked. ‘A little more open,’ I replied, ‘No, not quite that much.’”[11] With the animation of the photographic act provided by the text supplement, the work is charged with life. Bronson’s text describes an exchange of viewpoints – an appeal and a response – that also occurs in the artwork itself, seen in the three, separate panels, which are to be read from left to right. The triptych format captures the different directions Zontal’s eyes and body take after his request for assistance, and show how he follows Bronson’s suggestions. On the left, he faces the window but his eyes look up and over his left shoulder, his pupils rolling back unnaturally to expose the whites of his eyes. In the middle panel, his look is directed straight ahead and appears stern and unnatural, focusing on the wall rather than out the window. In the right panel, Bronson has moved closer to Zontal, whose upper body now fills the frame in the classic, three-quarter-turn portrait position (which suggests dignity). Due to the tilt of his head, Zontal’s stance now appears contemplative and aware of the camera’s gaze. The ‘success’ shown by Zontal in the right panel can be appreciated in relation to the ‘mistakes’ that precede it on the left. Because the work consists of all three panels, and Zontal’s difficulties finding the right look are not edited out, the collaborative process is made clear. Rather than taking part in the objectifying male gaze, or in the ideological silencing of a non-critical, ethnographic approach, one witnesses a paradigm of shared vision. Zontal situates his experience of blindness as an opportunity to collaborate with Bronson and, in doing so, demonstrates that one is always (inter)dependent upon the look of the other for the performance of identity. Bronson acts as Zontal’s mirror but also his eyes, seeing him and seeing for him, helping Zontal position himself to better self-represent.

Further, Bronson’s indication of his own participation can be detected by the camera flash reflected off a mirror in the background in the left and right panels. Bronson seems to use an ‘amateurish’ snapshot aesthetic in a way that is reminiscent of Nan Goldin’s, so that ‘unprofessional’ technical mistakes are retained to achieve a quasi-documentary, or at least (auto)biographical authenticity. The glaring flash in the background – the visual residue of Bronson’s involvement – is another means of showing two distinct perspectives, thereby resisting the stasis and one-directionality of the traditional portrait structure. Rather than erasing his trace, Bronson projects his presence into the scene in a dynamic, phenomenological way, as if to cohabitate with Zontal in the visual field.[12] If Zontal’s body is centrally implicated in the work, so too is Bronson’s by the flash in the mirror, as if leaving a palpable trace of his love for Zontal right in the image, as if the act of photography itself were an embrace of the eyes to surround the subject. This photographic practice can be read as an event of fraternization in which Bronson’s presence in the making of the photograph, on personal and ethical grounds, is not elided.

Agency

Zontal’s emaciation, his partial nakedness, and his blindness are signs of vulnerability that, due to their large-scale photographic display, would appear to foster an easy mastery of him within the gaze. The collaboration in the work is significant because it demonstrates a renunciation of visual mastery by the photographer (Bronson), despite the many levels of ‘exposure’ the work seems to produce. The potential for visual mastery is overcome because of the way Bronson sees Zontal but also sees for him, assisting him in structuring his own look. Therefore, the delicate status of representational perspective, in other words, who represents whom, is brought forward in a manner distinct from other contemporary artists (Nan Goldin, for example) who have also photographed vulnerable subjects coping with AIDS-related illness, but who have maintained sole authorship of the work. By emphasizing the waning of Zontal’s visual ability, the artwork demonstrates how both parties – Zontal and Bronson – contribute to the artwork’s structure, and therefore the boundaries surrounding the work’s authorship are blurred. Is Jorge, February 3, 1994 a portrait or self-portrait? The written text and the work itself both describe the transactional nature of the photographic act. This situates Jorge, February 3, 1994 within the self-critical documentary practices espoused by Abigail Solomon-Godeau (among others), whose mandate is for the clarity of all parties’ involvement in the production of the image, especially the photographer’s.[13] Bronson’s text, in fact, offers one of the initial steps towards an ethical paradigm for autobiographical, lens-based practices whereby the photographer makes evident his investments and the degree to which the material has been manipulated.[14] The dialogue recounted by Bronson and the structural details of the work make evident his and Zontal’s perspectives, thereby demonstrating a concern for avoiding the representational violence to which a blind, terminally-ill man may be vulnerable.

The shared vision of Jorge, February 3, 1994 raises the question as to whether blindness and terminal illness suggest alienation and solitude or an opportunity for dialogic connections. Zontal assumes a position of agency (rather than abjection or passivity) within this photographer-sitter contract. The significance of their collaboration deepens when considered in relation to Barthes’s description of the opposition between sitter and photographer in traditional portrait photography, which causes a type of “death” for the sitter. The traditional portrait structure described by Barthes in Camera Lucida involves two perspectives, but only one (the photographer’s) which is apparent in the final portrait. Barthes notes that the incongruity between the image the sitter intends and the image the photographer will ultimately capture involves a loss of the sitter’s agency. Photographic portraiture involves an objectifying transformation that annihilates the sitter’s true sense of self: “I am neither subject nor object but a subject who feels he is becoming an object: I then experience a micro-version of death.”[15] Barthes’s point is that this one-sided or domineering quality to portraiture, structuring and enforcing an image upon the sitter, deadens or freezes the subject into a mere likeness. The subject’s intended image is stifled by the imposed view of the photographer. It is precisely this dichotomy, and the shifting intentions between photographer and subject, that Bronson and Zontal stitch together in a collaboration involving desire, questions, suggestions, and reactions. Bronson is the facilitator for Zontal, who gives himself to be seen, in triplicate, again and again.

And, as if to confuse the notion of dying itself, as well as to disrupt the media trope (identified by Douglas Crimp and Simon Watney) of AIDS “victim[s]” being pathetically consigned to a deathbed, Zontal stands and claims a dignified pose.[16] Zontal can therefore no longer be categorized as the metaphorical “sitter” in the traditional portraiture dyad, which presumes an active photographer and a passive subject. Bronson’s and Zontal’s working method is a significant deviation from a type of portrait that Barthes calls “this death in which his gesture will embalm me.”[17] Zontal and Bronson foster a reciprocal, critical type of insight that renounces the mastery (interpersonal and ideological) that so commonly afflicts portrait photography. Although Zontal’s agency within this portrait appears initially to be reduced by his blindness and illness, what is put into play is a multi-perspectival approach. Such a sensitized relationship is urgent when the portrait subject is threatened with death in a literal way, and need not experience a metaphoric annihilation by the photographic act.

By the expansive scale of Jorge, February 3, 1994 and by showing Zontal three times, any visual mastery of Zontal becomes difficult (literally and figuratively) because the entire image cannot be apprehended in a single glance. If the viewer’s look is encouraged to penetrate the interior of Zontal’s and Bronson’s domestic world, Zontal’s three figures colonize the gallery and preside over it. Rather than emphasizing the dwindling of Zontal’s body, Jorge, February 3, 1994 enlarges it by the work’s heroic proportions. If the viewer’s look would dominate a figure who is blind and whose eyes can’t meet the look of the camera, Zontal’s three images dominate the room. Also, the aggrandizement of Zontal speaks to the continuing political importance of the visibility of AIDS and comprises a stance of resistance against the disappearance of its so-called victims, the toll of which, the work suggests, is personal as well as political. Further, the movement and rhythm conveyed by the sequence challenge the sense of sedimentation, eternity, and sameness to afflict a subject’s identity with a single, still photograph.[18] The formal qualities involved in the scale, triptych format, and its various details, offer assurances that the vulnerability that overwhelmingly codes Zontal’s body (visually, politically, and medically) are not transformed into a spectacle for easy consumption. The various tensions produced by the work lead to a dignification of Zontal’s impending death, which takes into account his remaining life.

Ambiguity

As if to acknowledge his death and to mourn it, the gallery placement of Jorge, February 3, 1994 would appear to enforce a separation between Bronson and Zontal, who is taken out of the intimacy of the domestic environment and placed at a distance in the public eye – where the work of General Idea, especially in its use of media codes, always functioned. From a sociological perspective, Jay Ruby explains the paradoxical relationship that mourners have towards images of dead loved ones: “Mourners are always confronted with two, seemingly contradictory needs: to keep the memory of the deceased alive and at the same time, accept the reality of death and loss.”[19] Ruby also makes the distinction between a post-mortem image, which is a representation of a dead individual (generally reclining on a bed, sofa or in a casket), and memorial images, which are representations made while the individual is still living, and used for posthumous admiration. The collaborative engagement in Jorge, February 3, 1994, where both artists honour Zontal’s demise by documenting it, may suggest the “preparation for separation” specific to the mourning experiences of the gay community, whereby friends and lovers acknowledge the threat of an AIDS-related death by undertaking “grief work” in advance of it.[20] These distinctions qualify Jorge, February 3, 1994 as a memorial image, whose borders are blurred, however, because the photograph was taken at a time when Zontal was resolutely still alive, although his death appeared immanent. By pointing to this dual pull, Jorge, February 3, 1994 may have ambivalent psychological functions for Bronson: between honouring the life they shared together (by the animation of this important, perhaps final, artistic exchange); and the memorial function Bronson asserts for the work (a posthumous recognition of the magnitude of the partnership and what it means to be irrevocably over).

Jorge, February 3, 1994 evokes a precarious, liminal state between living and dying, alterity and connection, intersubjectivity and solitude. Conflicting intimacies and exposures are involved in the work: possibilities for emotional proximity and, simultaneously, the affirmation of a physical distance to appreciate Zontal’s perilous embodiment, not only literally (so that his body can come into focus), but metaphorically (so that the ultimate distance of impending death can be respected and negotiated). Although Bronson and Zontal face each other at a subtle distance, they remain in touch emotionally by the caring exchange that binds them in the creation of the sequence, which is an enduring testimony to their interpersonal drama, a type of respectful recognition that never turns its back. In a remarkable paradox, the chiasmic temporality of photography is used to memorialize the dying process of a loved one through an emphatic assertion of life. Ultimately, perhaps, the collaboration teaches one less about photography’s radical potential than about the depths of love.