Content provided in partnership with
The enduring ephemera of general idea: an ambitious 30-year survey assembles prints, posters, photo works, banners and other objects that document General Idea's legacy of irreverent wit and fierce activism
Art in America, March, 2005 by Peter Gallo
Somewhere near the end of modernism, a couple of years after John Latham chewed up Clement Greenberg's Art & Culture and fermented a mash of spit and criticism, and shortly before Valerie Solanas shot Andy Warhol, and Marcel Broodthaers participated in the occupation of the Palais de Beaux-Arts in Brussels, three young Canadians barely out of art school formed the Toronto-based collaborative General Idea. "Huddled against the Canadian winter of 1968," as their "auto-legend" has it, George Saia, Ronald Gabe and Michael Tims dispensed with their birth names and became, respectively, Jorge Zontal, Felix Partz and AA Bronson. "Being a trio," they wrote in a manifesto, "frees us from the tyranny of the individual genius." (1)
- Most Popular Articles in Arts
- Art since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism
- Free-standing cardboard sculpture
- What makes a successful business person? Business people who are tops in ...
- Take advantage of local advertising: TV, newspaper or magazines? If your ...
- Tino Sehgal at the ICA
- More »
A year later, drawing a trajectory that connected Rrose Selavy to the drag queens of 1969's Stonewall riots in New York, the three began working under another signature rubric, "Miss General Idea." A 1971 altered photograph, which they called their "artist's conception," figures her as a transvestite, rubber-outfitted version of Hugo Ball at Cabaret Voltaire. Miss General Idea functioned as the group's muse, and General Idea hosted a series of Miss General Idea beauty pageants that set out in countercultural fashion "to (capture) glamour without falling into it." (2) Contestants for the 1971 pageant were selected from the group's artist friends, and the winner that year, Vancouver artist Michael Morris, was crowned "queen" and is remembered in the annals of General Idea activity as Marcel Idea.
There followed over the course of a 25-year collaboration what seems like a tireless outpouring of museum installations, boutiques, films, performances, photographic works, manifestos and publications such as FILE magazine, which re-figured the logo and format of Life magazine. Filching anything that flowed through the contemporary art and culture media stream, File was part of the group's overall effort to dispense with the avant-garde/popular culture divide and to co-opt promotion for the sole, Dada-like purpose of generating more promotion. It anticipated many queercore and punk zines of the later '70s and '80s (of which, thanks to local figures like Bruce LaBruce, Toronto was a fountainhead) as well as more recent mass-media interventions, such as the widely distributed, anti-globalist Vancouver-based publication Adbusters.
During the 1980s, General Idea turned the larger part of its effort to the AIDS disaster, adapting the "viral logic" of the simulacrum, a concept they took from writer William S. Burroughs, to the production of multiples. The collaborative was enormously successful at getting the word out. Their meaningfully transgressive reinscription of Robert Indiana's ubiquitous "LOVE" logo as "AIDS" (1987), mass-produced and distributed on posters, billboards, tchotchkes, electronic images, lottery tickets and stamps (it even made the cover of the Journal of the American Medical Association) became--with Gran Fury and Donald Moffett's brilliant Silence=Death campaign and 1989's landmark exhibition "Witnessing: Against Our Disappearance," curated by Nan Goldin--among the most effective works of cultural activism aimed at breaking through the denial, inaction and ineptitude in which the official response to the public health crisis was mired.
With nearly 200 objects, "General Idea: Editions, 1967-1995" is the first show since "General Idea's Fin de Siecle" (which originated at the Wurttembergischer Kunstverein in Stuttgart and toured internationally in 1992-93) to gather so substantial a number of the trio's works. Barbara Fischer, director of the Blackwood Gallery at the University of Toronto at Mississauga, took on what must have been the daunting task of assembling nearly three decades of the collaborative's multiples--daunting in that it was never, in the strict sense, General Idea's purpose to supply museums or collectors with archivable fine-art objects. Their prints, banners and photographic material, often queered versions of work from the modernist canon, were the implements of participatory, usually ephemeral gestures and events.
General Idea's early work echoes Broodthaers's critique of the museum industry during the late '60s and early '70s. Broodthaers turned a critical eye on the ways museums create and administrate cultural values. He devised elaborate exhibitions, such as "Museum of Modern Art--Department of Eagles" (1968-72), which mocked the installation format and with great humor exposed the ways in which museums use art to build institutional stature. In the same critical spirit, General Idea's first efforts focused on the production and dissemination of art's discursive set-up material, mostly the paperwork that surrounds and supports both the creation and reception of art, including press releases, clippings, notices and reviews, exhibition announcements and invitations, self-published postcards and broadside handouts, mail-art projects, catalogues, art posters and entry kits for the Miss General Idea pageants. Most of this early material consists of offset prints appropriated from '30s and '40s fashion ads, with the urban, Deco, slightly shady but elegant (like Toronto itself) look of noir film.
