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"Felix, June 5, 1994"
I made this photograph of Felix a few hours after his death. He is arranged to receive visitors,
and his favorite objects are gathered about him: his television remote control, his
tape-recorder, and his cigarettes. Felix suffered from extreme wasting, and at the time of his
death his eyes could not be closed; there was not enough flesh left on the bone.
Felix and Jorge and I lived and worked together from 1969 until 1994. This communal
life ended when Jorge died of AIDS on February 3, 1994. Felix followed shortly after, on June
5, 1994.
These bodies are our houses. We live in them as temporary tenants for a few years, for this
short lifetime. We inhabit physical structures which mimic our physical form: windows to see,
temperature controls, waste disposal systems. We gather these houses in towns and cities. By
day we live in these dream cities as if they were permanent, relatively unchanging, while at
night we inhabit the continuous flux of the dream world without questioning its fluidity.
But in fact both are dream worlds, both equally fluid: we might wake up at any time
from one and find ourselves in the other.
Felix and Jorge and I lived and worked together for twenty-seven years: during that
time we became one organism, one group mind, one nervous system; one set of habits,
mannerisms, and preferences. We presented ourselves as a 'group' called General Idea and we
pictured ourselves in doctored photographs as the ultimate artwork of our own design: we
transformed our borrowed bodies into props, significations manipulated to create an image, a
reality. We chose to inhabit the world of mass media and advertising. We made of ourselves
the artists we wanted to be.
Since Jorge and Felix died I have been struggling to find the limits of my own body as
an independent organism, as a being outside of General Idea. Over the last five years I have
found myself, much like a stroke victim, learning again the limits of my nervous system, how
to function without my extended body (no longer three heads, twelve limbs), how to create
possibilities from my reduced physicality.
I have had to place Jorge and Felix and General Idea at a distance. This has been
difficult, like escaping from my own skin.
Dear Felix, by the act of exhibiting this image in this exhibition I declare that we are
no longer of one mind, one body. I return you to General Idea's world of mass media, there to
function without me.
We need to remember that the diseased, the disabled and, yes, even the dead walk
among us. They are part of our community, our history, our continuity. They are our
coinhabitants in this dream city.
--AA Bronson
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