General Idea
[1] As pioneers of early conceptual and media-based art, their collaboration became a model for artist-initiated activities and continues to be a prominent influence on subsequent generations of artists.
[7] Their major installation, One Year of AZT/One Day of AZT, was featured as a project at the Museum of Modern Art and now resides in the collection of the National Gallery of Canada.
[10] AA Bronson (aka Michael Tims, b June 16, 1946, Vancouver, British Columbia) attended the University of Manitoba in the School of Architecture.
[11]: 15 Jorge Zontal (aka Slobodan Saia-Levy b January 28, 1944, Parma Italy; d 1994, Toronto Canada) arrived in Caracas, Venezuela as a post-WWII refugee.
[11]: 26 Page, Partz, Bronson and Zontal all subsequently became involved in the scene in and surrounding Passe Muraille, which forged their initial collaboration.
[13] The central themes that would preoccupy General Idea throughout their career – self-mythologization, spectacle, appropriation, parody, media deconstruction, an ironic interest in commerce and the semiotics of advertising language – were clearly present in the early days of the group.
They shared an interest in the forms and methods of popular culture and mass media,[11]: 9 and were influenced by the writing of Marshall McLuhan, William Burroughs, and by the Situationist International.
Participation in these projects was facilitated via contact with Ray Johnson and his New York Correspondence School and the foundation of Image Bank by Michael Morris, Gary Lee-Nova and Vincent Trasov – all General Idea collaborators/participants – in Vancouver.
[11]: 66 The pageant was conceived of and executed as if it was a live-broadcast televised spectacle, and appropriated all of its conventions, including glamorous pre-show red carpet arrival.
[11]: 74 The Pageant format, and the implied timeline set by the deadline of 1984, provided them with a kind of thematic universe in which all their media experiments could be collected.
[11]: 78 The name and design of the magazine were meticulous spoofs of Life, and the collective hoped to use the visual familiarity as "a kind of virus within the communication systems.
"[16] FILE ran for 26 issues, and was instrumental in the formation of a network of Canadian Artist-run centres, serving as a vehicle for artist's projects and the "wisecracks, wordplay, and cryptic layers of fact and fiction"[17] of General Idea's self-mythologizing sensibilities.
[11]: 98 This was all under the rubric of the Search for the Spirit of Miss General Idea – in the group's conceptual framework, an analogy for artistic inspiration and research.
The evening featured a parade of the VB Gowns (a series of ziggurat-shaped 'gowns' made of manipulated Venetian blind slats) and a performance by Rough Trade.
[11]: 111 It featured architectural blueprints, the Pavillion Hoarding (installed outside the storefront window of the gallery), as well as their Showcards Series (1975–79), an articulation of themes and beliefs central to the overarching Miss General Idea project.
The group announced, via a huge performance (done as part of a residency in Kingston, Ontario), the destruction of the 1984 Miss General Idea Pavillion in 1977.
It also served as a symbol not only of self-identification, but also as a vessel through which the group could continue their strategy of media appropriation, which in turn allowed them to respond to the artistic exigencies of operating within the larger international gallery world.
[20]: 21 The poodle images were vehicles for a series of stylistic appropriations, for instance, the orgiastic Neo-Geo Mondo Cane Kama Sutra paintings.
Pilot (1977) was commissioned by TVOntario, Test Tube (1979) was created during a residency at the De Appel Gallery and produced for Dutch television.
Test Tube (a faux-soap opera, complete with commercials) and Shut the Fuck Up are deconstructions of and confrontations with the media distortion of the persona of the artist.
[19]: 197 The group had been, throughout their career thus far, making multiples and editions, each of which was a further elaboration of, or in some way tied to an existing General Idea work.
[19]: 160 The eventual move to New York City was precipitated by an increase anti-LGBT policing in Toronto at the time (Zontal was caught in one of the routine bathhouse raids performed by police), by a backlash in Toronto against non-material art practices, as well as the group's perceived disproportionate ubiquity and clout in the city's small art scene.
[7]: 75 It is an appropriation of Robert Indiana's by-then ubiquitous LOVE logo (substituting, in the same visual arrangement and color composition, the letters L-O-V-E with A-I-D-S).
[7]: 108 The IMAGEVIRUS campaign continued to proliferate: as a public art project, it was displayed on the Times Square Spectacolor Board, it adorned the sides of trams in Amsterdam, and was installed in the advertising windows in New York City Subway cars.
It addresses the imminence of disaster, isolation and precarity/fragility (a photographic version of the installation was created in 1994, furthering the identification of the members of General Idea with the three endangered seals).
Before that Editions was exhibited at the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, the Munich Kunstverein, Kunstwerke (Berlin), and the Kunsthalle Zürich, Switzerland.
They had their first Latin American museum show/retrospective, General Idea: Tiempo Partido at Museo Jumex, Mexico City and MALBA, Buenos Aires, in 2016-2017.
They continue to have solo exhibitions at Esther Schipper Gallery (Berlin), Mai 36 Galerie (Zürich), Maureen Paley (London) and Mitchell-Innes and Nash.
It ran at the Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam) from April to mid-July 2023, and is set to run at the Martin Gropius Bau (Berlin) from late September 2023 to January 2024 as one the most comprehensive retrospectives of the collective's work.
The estate of General Idea is represented by the Esther Schipper Gallery, Berlin, Maureen Paley, London, Galerie MAI 36, Zurich and Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New York.
