Glad Rag. - periodical review

ArtForum, April, 2002 by Diedrich Diederichsen

FILE emphasized masquerade, role playing, and the mimetic rearticulation of mass- and pop-cultural themes. Those who believe that the serious influence of the Velvet Underground was felt only belatedly, in the wake of punk, should consider that General Idea (with their friend Dan Freedman) imitated the cover of VU's eponymous third LP shortly after its release. The inhabitation and adaptation of often unattainable roles was a preoccupation of FILE long before the members of the trio integrated their own faces as masks into changing "logos" (such as a threesome of poodles or beaming babies tucked under the covers) during the '80s.

The masquerade pursued by General Idea in the pages of FILE involved mostly fictive and expanded scripts, often with an obviously queer character. But like contemporaries and friends such as John Waters and the San Francisco anarcho-queer cabaret troupe the Cockettes, the concern was with the collagelike creation of gender mutants--based on found material, of course--rather than with the mere approximation of existing glamour roles. In the second issue of FILE the work of the group the Unseen Force was commented on as being like that of "Gilbert & George seen through the eyes of the Kuchar Brothers"--a dandyist understanding of roles filtered through a trash sensibility schooled by pop music and subcultures.

For some time FILE stuck with this practical approach, avoiding explicitly theoretical texts. This was in part a by-product of the layout: After all, the pieces were not supposed to be too long. Yet three years into the magazine's history, a 1975 issue offered a manifesto of sorts for both General Idea and FILE. The "Glamour" issue programmatically states: "We wanted to be artists and we knew that if we were famous and glamorous we could say we were artists and we would be.... We knew Glamour was not an object, not an action, not an idea. We knew Glamour never emerged from the 'nature' of things. There are no glamorous people, no glamorous events. We knew Glamour was artificial. We knew that in order to be glamorous we had to become plagiarists, intellectual parasites."

This notable manifesto not only mixes classic avant-garde ideas from Lautreamont to the Lettrists but enlists them to a different end: The way leads not via theft back to truth but instead to "secondarity"; the inauthentic is precisely the goal. Rather than rejection through parody or appropriation, a new condition, one no longer dependent on a putative nature and on the norms and legal systems derived from it, is the horizon of the strategy. Whereas Lautreamont believed that the act of transgression in plagiarism led again to a truth, General Idea's Glamour aimed at the inauthentic as a goal in itself: the inauthentic understood as a critique of the "authenticism" of normality.

Whatever one might think today of this position artistically, politically, or culturally, it had become dominant in art and subcultural milieus five to ten years after its formulation. What FILE had prepared during its first three years and finalized in the Glamour issue was the implicit theory of the New Wave: the culture of David Byrne and Blondie, Industrial Music and No-Wave-Super-8-Kino that not only formulated the postmodern as a description (unlike all its famous theorists) but lived it as an artistic-cultural thesis. This led to a position that attempted--perversely but interestingly--to snatch ideas for artistic practice from the theories of Baudrillard and Lyotard. Even the farewell to the simulacra was later to take place in the pages of FILE, in the form of a 1987 roundtable (whose participants included Judith Barry and Peter Halley) on the occasion of a Group Material exhibition with the beautiful title "Resistance (Anti-Baudrillard)."