Good grief.

Five years after AIDS claimed his two collaborators, artist AA Bronson comes back with a major exhibit that confronts his losses--and ours

In the Prozac Nation that we have become, sadness is practically taboo, Psychiatrists stand ready to prescribe sedatives and antidepressants even to bereaved widows at funerals, for whom out-of-control weeping and wailing might be not only appropriate but healing. In such a context, Canadian artist AA Bronson's exhibition "Negative Thoughts," which opens at Chicago's Museum of Contemporary Art on January 27 and runs through April 22, is about as shocking as art can get these days.

Bronson was a member of General Idea, three gay men whose 25-year collaboration produced an internationally acclaimed body of work that was witty, conceptual, and flagrantly gay. They often represented themselves visually as a trio of fornicating poodles and conceptually as a goddesslike character named Miss General Idea. In later years their work centered on AIDS, depicting pills (the Chicago show includes "Pla[C]ebo," which consists of 2,500 helium-filled, pill-shape balloons) or transforming Robert Indiana's famous LOVE logo to read AIDS. General Idea ended when the other members--Jorge Zontal and Felix Partz--died of the disease in 1994.

In his first major solo exhibition, Bronson steers straight into his experience of devastating loss. The show includes a 7- by 14-foot billboardlike photo of Felix taken a few hours after his death, a series of six-foot portraits of Jorge--blind and skeletal--in his final week, and a nude self-portrait of Bronson lying in a coffin. Also central to the show is a 112-page book featuring the extraordinarily personal and moving essay "Negative Thoughts," in which Bronson (who is HIV-negative) declares, "When I was younger, I considered myself 100% optimistic. But now, at the age of 53, I find myself cynical, judgmental, and depressed."

Although the work is dark and deeply upsetting, it represents a major breakthrough for the artist, who was unable to create for five years after his partners' deaths. "I'd been blocked for so long that I realized I had to head straight into the grief and mourning," he says, "I had to be prepared that nobody would be willing to look at it, that people would say, `We've heard too much about AIDS and dying, we want to move on,'" Having shown some pieces in Los Angeles and Vienna, Bronson said, "I know they work when I feel they are cathartic not just for me but for other people. There are an awful lot of wet eyes when people see these pictures,"

Perhaps the most disorienting experience for Bronson has been learning to function as an individual. He likens it to being a stroke victim relearning how to use his limbs. But after a period of paralysis, he's beginning to glimpse the liberation his new life holds. For one thing, after shuttling between Toronto and New York for many years, he has settled in Manhattan with his lover, architect Mark Krayenhoff (they live in the West Village apartment building that Monica Lewinsky moved into).

And new artistic horizons beckon. "One thing about being three people is that it's hard to deal with anything personal. General Idea's work was on some level very abstract," says Bronson. "My own work has gone the opposite direction--it's very, very personal and not ironic. Once the group identity ceased to exist, it's possible to be myself."