Haute Culture: General Idea
- Art
- / Temporary Exhibitions
- Created on Tuesday, 22 February 2011 23:00
- Published on Tuesday, 22 February 2011 23:00
- Written by Heidi Ellison
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Detail of "XXX (Bleu)" (1984). Courtesy of the estate of General Idea. |
Conceptual art requires a great deal of patience. I always wonder why I should stand around in a museum looking at murky photos of some performance ...
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Detail of "XXX (Bleu)" (1984). Courtesy of the estate of General Idea. |
Conceptual art requires a great deal of patience. I always wonder why I should stand around in a museum looking at murky photos of some performance that happened years ago (you had to be there!) or reading long texts about a work that is meaningless without an explanation when I could just as well be reading about it on paper or a computer screen in the comfort of my own home. After all, this is art made to inspire thinking, not looking.
There are many rewards to be had, however, in the new exhibition called “Haute Culture: General Idea” at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, a retrospective of the work of an artists’ collective called General Idea (the name was meant to contradict the idea of the artist as genius). The three protagonists – Felix Partz, Jorge Zontal and AA Bronson – lived and worked together in what seems to have been – judging from their output – a funhouse frenzy of creativity, producing a wildly varied body of work: paintings, photos, magazines, installations, sculptures, videos and more.
Never heard of General Idea? Neither had I, perhaps because it was based in Toronto (sorry, Canada) or perhaps because Partz and Zontal haven’t been heard from since 1994, when they died of AIDS.
Even if you have never heard of them, however, you certainly will have seen their clever transformation of the four letters of Robert Indiana’s famous “LOVE” image (first created as a Christmas card for the Museum of Modern Art in 1964, it was never copyrighted and went viral after being used as a U.S. postage stamp) into “AIDS” in a very nice ironic twist that is typical of the witty, iconoclastic art of these three
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"AIDS" (1987). Courtesy of the estate of General Idea/BFAS Blondeau Fine Art Services, Geneva. Photo: Zindman/Fremont |
philosophical, punning cutups who seemed unable to get too serious even when Partz and Zontal were ill and turned their disease into a subject for their art.
One of their favorite games was sending up the mass media. Bronson once described their magazine File – a rip-off of Life magazine’s format and logo (the latter had to be changed after Life sued) – as a “parasitic art project.” They actually published 26 issues of File between 1972 and 1989. The Warhol-deadpan mock talk show called “Test Tube” uses the TV test pattern as a background and inspired their “Colour Bar Lounge,” which includes such lines as “The ‘Golden Shower’ is definitely the general public’s choice. One sip and it’s Goodbye Abstract Depressionism!”
Parodies of advertising include their version of those atrocious milk-mustache commercials with a “Nazi Milk” ad, in which the mustache is – you guessed it – shaped like Hitler’s. They also created objects like the fabulous jockey-short shopping bags on show here, made from the real thing.
General Idea mocked not only mass culture, but also Art with a capital A. The trio re-created Yves Klein’s famous “Anthropometries,” for instance, by making their own version, “XXX (Bleu),” in which they replaced with their fetish poodle the naked women that Klein dipped in his signature blue paint before making them roll around on canvas (the poodle represents the Artist in General Idea’s symbology). In a copy of a Mondrian painting called “Infe©ted Mondrian,” a patch of yellow is insidiously replaced by green, a color the artist never used.
One of their credos was “form follows fiction.” They created a fictional character called Miss General Idea, a sort of transsexual dominatrix, to be their muse and even held a beauty pageant for her. In one installation, they become archaeologists unearthing the ruins of their fictional Miss General Idea Pavilion and even produce a funny mock documentary about its lost civilization, complete with eerie music and a portentous voiceover analyzing life there and the deeper meaning of recurring motifs like “pissing poodles and spilled cocktails.”
This gives you a brief idea of the wit and wisdom of General Idea, but it is difficult to sum up their disparate work. Rather than sitting around and reading about it at home, I do recommend that you go to the museum and see it.
Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris: 11, avenue du Président Wilson, 75116 Paris. Métro: Alma-Marceau or Iéna. Tel.: 01 53 67 40 00. Open Tuesday-Sunday, 10 a.m.-6 p.m. (Thursday until 10 p.m.). Closed on public holidays. Admission: €7. Through May 29. www.mam.paris.fr
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