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

In contrast, General Idea launched illuminating critiques of the culture and pharmaceutical industries while not losing sight of the healing and medicinal powers of irony. Even as it was engulfed in the AIDS disaster and was losing two of its own (Zontal and Partz both died in 1994), the collaborative continued to pull off provocatively gay Duchampian pranks. Most of the multiples produced during General Idea's final years made humorous, even sarcastic, allusions to both modern art and HIV. The installation Magi[c] Bullet (1992), for example, featured 1,500 helium-filled, capsule-shaped Mylar balloons, which make reference to both Andy Warhol's silvery pillows of 1966 and the anti-HIV drug AZT. Playing Doctor (1992), a serf-published photographic edition, depicts the three artists in white physician's coats posed with stethoscopes and an assortment of signature red, green and blue placebos floating above their heads.

Since the deaths of his partners, Bronson has produced some powerful works dealing with mortality, survival, grief and renewal. Felix, June 5, 1994 (1994/99) features a photograph taken by Bronson of Partz in the hours that immediately followed his death. Bronson prepared Partz's body as though for a wake, dressing it in a Klimtian array of wildly patterned textiles and arranging some of Partz's favorite things around it: a tape recorder, cigarettes, a TV remote control. Six prints of this high-key, lacquer-on-vinyl, photo-transfer billboard image were featured in the exhibition "Dream City" in Munich in 1999. The image also was included in the Montreal Biennial in 2000 and in the 2002 Whitney Biennial.

Bronson continues to produce a wide range of projects, including sculpture, installation, video, performance and Internet works. He likens his post-General Idea experience to that of a stroke victim. "Without Felix and Jorge (and consequently without General Idea)," he wrote in a recent e-mail exchange with this writer, "I found myself without an identity, and my work since then has focused on reconstructing an identity."

His 2003 show at Galerie Frederic Giroux in Paris, titled "AA Bronson*Healer," featured a trade booth at which one could purchase a two-hour "healing session" with the artist. In the General Idea spirit of marvelous bluff--in this instance, a bluff that surely did not compromise the sessions' personal, therapeutic and overall cultural value--Bronson issued printed certificates to authenticate and document each consumer's purchase. Each certificate, in time, will become the unique and valuable reminder of a truly fabulous encounter.

(1.) General Idea, "'How our mascots love to humiliate us ...'. Revelations from the doghouse," in General Idea: 1968-1984, Basel, Kunsthalle, 1984, p. 25.

(2.) Ibid., p. 28.

(3.) Ibid., p. 36.

(4.) Marcel Duchamp, Salt Seller: The Writings of Marcel Duchamp, ed. Michel Sanouillet and Elmer Peterson, New York, Oxford University Press, 1973, p. 180.

(5.) Andy Warhol, "Artist's Comment," Art in America, No. 1, 1962, p. 42.