“Haute Culture: General Idea – A Retrospective, 1969-1994”

“General Idea is basically this: a framing device within which we inhabit the role of the artist as we see the living legend.” Among Toronto’s art community, General Idea’s work is so well known that this and other of the group’s declarative mock manifesto statements have virtually been memorized. Consequently, “Haute Culture,” the first major retrospective for General Idea, in acknowledging General Idea’s importance by way of a homecoming risks presenting a local audience with covered territory.

Exhibited earlier this year at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, “Haute Culture” was curated by Paris-based independent curator Frédéric Bonnet for the Art Gallery of Ontario. In Toronto it is curated by David Moos, former curator of modern and contemporary art, and Georgiana Uhlyarik, assistant curator of Canadian art. Despite its following an exhibition in France—where General Idea (GI) has received enough recognition and exposure that Bronson was awarded the Order of France in 2011—the AGO’s version maintains solid autonomy. The gallery holds a substantial GI collection, and of the 336 works exhibited over two floors of the gallery, 107 hail from the AGO. Moreover, significant GI pieces have either been performed or exhibited at the AGO, notably The 1971 Miss General Idea Pageant, a performance piece whose multiple manifestations arguably launched GI’s career.

Fortunately, the exhibition, comprehensive even by retrospective standards, surprises both the informed and neophytes with rarely or never seen work. Alongside GI’s best known pieces—for instance, Colour Bar Lounge from the 1984 Miss General Idea Pavilion, 1979, and other documentation, fragments and artifacts from that fictional structure—is work that has not been exhibited for over 25 years, including two installations, “P is for Poodle,” 1982-83, “XXX” (bleu) 1984, and “Playing the Triangle,” 1979. Even the GI-versed will find obscure pieces, such as a 50-plus suite of darkly cartoonish drawings, “Jorge Zontal Drawings Series,” 1984-1992, notable for revealing a skilful draftsmanship not often associated with the group. Many of the rarities are early pieces dating back as far as 1967, or pre-GI. Mostly small multiples, sketches, mail art and general ephemera, they actually include an early General Idea Business Card, 1971, with palm tree graphics humorously recalling those of a tiki bar.

This formative work is not GI’s strongest, but it stands historically noteworthy for foreshadowing concepts GI later solidified. Consider that, while the cliché hippie graphics of Jorge Zontal’s George Saia’s Belly Food, 1969, may not be memorable, these “food” bottles—“stock” from the Belly Store, a faux retail outlet GI ran from a storefront studio on Toronto’s Gerrard Street—initiated a strategy continuing throughout GI’s career: a William Burroughs inspired “viral” infestation of mainstream consumer culture.

Forming such timelines requires concerted effort, however, since the exhibition is not arranged chronologically. Instead, it is divided into five of GI’s central themes: “the artist, glamour and the creative process;” “mass culture;” “architects/archaeologists;” “sex and reality;” and “AIDS.” These categories overlap in certain pieces, one being “The 1971 Miss General Idea Pageant,” which fits into both glamour and mass culture.

Most visibly represented in placement and scale is the AIDS work, especially the AIDS Wallpaper, 1990, an overt poaching of Robert Indiana’s iconic typographic design for his “love” sculpture, which reads “AIDS” instead of “LOVE.” GI’s AIDS Wallpaper and “Imagevirus” posters, 1991, documentations of the group’s publicly installed AIDS work, make for a wryly funny installation choice because the “Imagevirus” posters, installed on both floors, appear to spread virally through the exhibition itself, as if to highlight the double meaning their practice took on because of the AIDS epidemic. Stressing GI’s AIDS icon, which also took the form of stamps, posters and a sculpture, is curatorially astute: as the group’s most publicly recognizable series—even gracing the cover of Ontario Dentist magazine—it marks the apogee of their “viral” interventions into pop culture. Most clearly highlighting the AIDS projects’ visibility is GI’s two-metre-high AIDS, 1989, sculpture at the AGO’s front left façade. Still, installed on a busy sidewalk, the piece does make one question why “AIDS” and “sex and reality” are separate categories.

Viewing these works from the ’80s and early ’90s highlights just how much the political frame surrounding AIDS has shifted—for example, GI’s portrayal of themselves as baby seals (Fin de Siècle, 1991), and therefore as victims, reflects the radical politics of another era. Besides zeitgeist, prescience has been crucial throughout their oeuvre, as implied by the 1984 future they aimed for in their pavilion. Indeed, GI’s many forays into logo busting, from FILE to AIDS, predated that phrase’s coining by two decades. Again, a chronological exhibition, an admittedly unpopular option in postmodern curatorial practice, could have better illustrated GI’s precognition.

Despite such organizational flaws, “Haute Culture” triumphs for comprehensiveness and for small gestures such as “viral wallpaper” that succinctly explicate GI’s practice. Another particularly effective gesture is Felix Partz’s The End of the (Western) World (ca. 1993-94)—a subtle coda for the exhibition. This small drawing (28 x 21.5 cm) depicts three cowboys—or GI—riding on horseback into the sunset. An ironical pairing of an apocalypse (a reference to the end of GI and, consequently, to AIDS) with the stereotypical cinematic happy ending, it aptly symbolizes the collective’s typical blurring of fact and media fictions. Perhaps their Hollywood Western heroes’ disappearance over the horizon also represents the trio’s having achieved the goals of one of their fictional manifestos: to become living legends.

Today, Toronto’s post-conceptual artists take mixing theoretical rigour with media and sex as a given, but GI received much local criticism for pioneering the practice. Indeed, this retrospective reminds us how, for Toronto artists of following generations, GI’s three members were iconoclasts who galvanized a progressive contemporary art scene out of nothing. ❚

“Haute Culture: General Idea—A Retrospective,” 1969–1994 is being exhibited at the Art Gallery of Ontario from July 30, 2011, to January 1, 2012.

Earl Miller is an independent art writer and curator residing in Toronto.