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rfmcdonaldWeekend before last, when my friend Mark was in town we caught the ongoing exhibition of Toronto-based art collective General Idea, Haute Culture: General Idea. I'd first encountered General Idea back in 2003, back in my first visit to Kingston when I saw the group's touring exhibition
General Idea Editions 1968-1995 at Queen's University's Agnes Etherington Art Centre. Later, I saw their famous sculpture AIDS on display in 2006 in front of the Royal Ontario Museum.
Haute Culture is a huge exhibit, covering two entire floors of the Art Gallery of Ontario, containing vast quantities of their work in multiple media, with everything from the stuffed poodles they used to paint blue Xs in Geneva to oversized replicas of AZT pills to preserved plans for their Miss General idea pavilion. What stood out particularly for me was their 1984 video "Shut The Fuck Up", which spliced together footage of everything from Adam West's Batman (a clip of the Joker winning first prize for his "Death of a Mauve Bat" painting, an empty canvas) to shots of Yves Klein's nude models painting canvases blue to the three actors of General Idea condemning the media for its cynical thoughtless superpower of chewing up and assimilating everything new and producing only the thinnest and least transformative visions.
I was very impressed by the exhibition's size and completeness; I wish that I had the background in art to be able to evaluate it as thoroughly as I'd like. They were quite good with mashups, it's true, and the title of the article MacLean's Sara Angel "How General Idea predicted the future" is accurate.
How does anyone manage to engage with an issue culture--not just a mass media industry, as General Idea proposed in "Shut The Fuck Up", but the output of single individuals like (say) me, and consumers like (say) me and (say further) you--when things can't be made to click, not reliably and maybe not at all? I need to know.
General Idea Editions 1968-1995 at Queen's University's Agnes Etherington Art Centre. Later, I saw their famous sculpture AIDS on display in 2006 in front of the Royal Ontario Museum.
Haute Culture is a huge exhibit, covering two entire floors of the Art Gallery of Ontario, containing vast quantities of their work in multiple media, with everything from the stuffed poodles they used to paint blue Xs in Geneva to oversized replicas of AZT pills to preserved plans for their Miss General idea pavilion. What stood out particularly for me was their 1984 video "Shut The Fuck Up", which spliced together footage of everything from Adam West's Batman (a clip of the Joker winning first prize for his "Death of a Mauve Bat" painting, an empty canvas) to shots of Yves Klein's nude models painting canvases blue to the three actors of General Idea condemning the media for its cynical thoughtless superpower of chewing up and assimilating everything new and producing only the thinnest and least transformative visions.
I was very impressed by the exhibition's size and completeness; I wish that I had the background in art to be able to evaluate it as thoroughly as I'd like. They were quite good with mashups, it's true, and the title of the article MacLean's Sara Angel "How General Idea predicted the future" is accurate.
The group chose the name “General Idea” to describe their practice, which was media omnivorous and favoured intellect over technical virtuosity. GI demonstrated this to the world in 1971, when they staged the Miss General Idea Beauty Pageant at the Art Gallery of Ontario, where contestants were both men and women. With this piece of performance art, Bronson, Partz, and Zontal imitated popular culture to plug themselves into one of the most important dialogues of the day: the questioning of gender stereotypes.
“It was the era of McLuhan,” says Bronson, explaining how GI used every available form of mass communication—including TV, mail, balloons, and contests—to create art they could spread “like a media virus.” Soon, the group was more conscious of how its work was “presented through media than through exhibitions.”
Another McLuhan-inspired tactic was Bronson, Partz, and Zontal’s refusal to apply an individual signature to any of their works. Like their spiritual godfather, GI believed the future of art lay in collaboration, appropriation, and subversion. GI’s approach wasn’t for everyone. As with McLuhan, the group was often described as jokesters making impenetrable puns.
All this changed when AIDS hit the world and Partz and Zontal found out they had it (both died in 1994 of causes related to the disease). As Haute Culture masterfully documents, General Idea’s output from 1987 onward became exclusively focused on bringing attention to AIDS. Until the mid ’80s it was known as “gay cancer,” Bonnet explains. “GI was the first to market the disease.”
Bronson, Partz, and Zontal did this by appropriating the world-recognized design of American artist Robert Indiana’s 1964 love logo, substituting the word “love” with “AIDS” and reproducing this image on stamps, wallpaper, screen savers, posters, T-shirts, and as a sculpture. “They hijacked Indiana’s icon,” says Bonnet. It was a move that placed GI in the forefront of the world’s cultural zeitgeist. At the height of AIDS, Bronson, Partz, and Zontal’s message that art could be infectious was eerily apt.
Yet GI’s influence was far from over. Like McLuhan, the collective’s prescience becomes increasingly apparent with the passage of time. According to Bonnet, today the Miss General Idea Pageant appears a lot like reality TV, GI’s focus on self-documentation foreshadows Facebook, and the group’s belief in the end of the individual signature has come to pass on websites like Wikipedia. Offering a final comment on GI’s role in art history, Bonnet adds, “Now it’s so common for an artist to have a diverse practice—to make clothes, to make sculpture, to make film. But then it wasn’t and General Idea was doing all these things. They did everything.”
How does anyone manage to engage with an issue culture--not just a mass media industry, as General Idea proposed in "Shut The Fuck Up", but the output of single individuals like (say) me, and consumers like (say) me and (say further) you--when things can't be made to click, not reliably and maybe not at all? I need to know.
