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

In retrospect, it is somewhat astonishing that even prior to the AIDS epidemic and Zontal's and Partz's HIV-positive status, the group commenced a critique of the corporatization of science and medicine in works that were send-ups of both the pharmaceutical and taste industries. In the late '70s, Colour Bar Lounge was conceived as a laboratory-cure-cocktail bar where experimental drinks were mixed and served in test tubes. With the lounge, General Idea set out to develop a new gay science "dedicated to the eradication of abstract depressionism and the encouragement of artful research." (3)

For the Colour Bar Lounge's debut at the 1979 Basel Art Fair, the Italian dealer Lucio Amelio published six lounge decor images, including the famous Nazi Milk (1979), which features an altered photograph of a uniformed blond boy, a glass of milk in his hand, the residue of milk above his lip an explicitly Hitlerian trace. The dairy industry's more recent "Got Milk?" ad campaign, which shows healthy, smiley models with milk mustaches who extol the presumed health benefits of the beverage, acquires a certain uncanniness in light of General Idea's earlier image.

By the early '90s, appropriation and travesty had become routine practices in art, but, with the consciousness of the AIDS crisis, General Idea developed an entirely new strategy for elaborating the critical meaning of older works of art: they altered them through "infection." The signature red, green and blue of the LOVE/AIDS logo were used to chromatically replace the primary colors of a classic Rietveld chair (Infe[c]ted Rietveld, 1994). The influence of Duchamp continued to pervade the collaborative's efforts. In 1921 Duchamp proposed that Dada works might "protect against ... life's multiple troubles, something like Little Pink Pills which cure everything." (4) General Idea altered Duchamp's own alterations of a found chromolithograph landscape, Pharmacie (1914), by inserting three hovering red, green and blue capsule forms (called "placebos" by the artists), and retitled it Infe[c]ted Phannacie.

For the current exhibition, Fischer has gathered samples of the artists' student projects, and these works make clear the consistency of General Idea's project virtually from the outset. In the early years of the Xerox machine, Ron Gabe (Partz) produced a small signed edition of three photocopied reproductions of Pop works, notable among them Warhol's 100 Soup Cans (1967). The "Xerox Series" procured a failing grade for Partz in the printmaking course, but to a remarkable degree, it anticipated later appropriations by Sherrie Levine, Richard Prince, Ronald Jones, Nayland Blake and others. More pointedly, Partz's choice foreshadowed the ways in which General Idea would draw on and move beyond the Warhol legacy.

As the artistic purveyor of so much disaster, Warhol maintained a mechanically overdetermined "disinterested interest" in his subjects. The disturbing beauty of the "Disaster" works was achieved by projecting the banalized images of horror that pepper the tabloids onto the austere, estheticized plane of late-modern monochrome painting. Warhol's project commenced in the early '60s as, in his own words, a "statement" on the "harsh, impersonal and brash materialistic objects on which America is built today." (5) Yet after the attempt on his life, Warhol himself seemed vulnerable to the violence that his art commented upon; the distance between the artist and his subject matter was more disassociative than esthetic or even ironic, a symptom perhaps of the trauma.