In honor of the General Idea exhibition, taking place from September 22, 2023, to January 14, 2024, in Berlin, the atrium of the Gropius Bau has become a metaphor for ‘failed hope. Two thousand white faux ice floes, created from recyclable (as assured by the exhibition organizers) styrofoam sheets, are piled around three baby seals. In the context of the “Fin de Siecle” installation, these cuddly faux fur animals serve as satirical alter egos for their creators – Canadian artists AA Bronson, Felix Partz, and Jorge Zontal. 

Living and working together as part of the late 1960s Toronto counterculture, these artists formalized their collaboration in 1969 as a single entity known as General Idea. This collective was renowned for its satirical approach to deconstructing the media and the art world and came to an end in 1994 with the untimely deaths of Partz and Zontal due to AIDS.

 

 

At the time when the trio first exhibited the installation “Fin de Siecle,” addressing the impending disaster, isolation, and fragility, French film star Brigitte Bardot launched a campaign against seal hunting that generated an enormous response in the media and society. This campaign was far more effective, as it was perceived as cuter than the artistic protest of a group of middle-aged individuals against the indifference of politics and society toward the mysterious, wicked, conspiracy theory-ridden, and largely fatal immunodeficiency disease AIDS. A photographic version of  “Fin de Siecle” was created in 1994, further solidifying the identification of the General Idea members with the three endangered seals.

 

 

The exhibition at Gropius Bau offers the most comprehensive retrospective of the trio’s work to date, showcasing pieces from the late 1960s to the early 1990s. It was developed in close collaboration with the sole surviving member of General Idea, AA Bronson, and is presented as a continuous narrative. The exhibition encompasses over 200 works, including paintings, sculptures, advertising objects and logos, publications, videos, and even a grotesque beauty competition.

 

 

Similar to their Pop Art contemporaries, General Idea fully embraced mass media. They designed provocative merchandise sold at their portable shop, and created videos mirroring TV talk shows, daytime soap operas, and evening news, Their well-known FILE magazine boldly parodied LIFE Magazine. They even covered a tram with their AIDS logo. 

General Idea consistently encouraged public interaction with their work, both in museums and on the streets. Their strategies of infiltrating established formats, blurring the lines between authorship, originality, and copies, and using art to reach a broad audience remain central to the contemporary practices of many artists, particularly in the digital and social media age.

 

 

General Idea infused their work with a strong dose of black humor, often pushing it to the point of cliché. The group’s identity as a threesome was, in their words, a conscious rejection of the ‘tyranny of the artist as an individual genius.’ Together they created an alternative world as a total work of art. The one, where the poodle served as their alter-ego, given its contradictory role as a symbol of glamour and a common pet, blending elements of high, low, and counter-culture. This is evident in their self-deprecating “Pink Poodle” paintings and collages that explore the theme of excessive gay sex.

 

 

Throughout the exhibition, some walls were covered with the group’s AIDS wallpaper, where the three artists and early activists of the 1980s LGBTQ+ movement converted Robert Indiana’s iconic red-blue-green sculpture “LOVE” into “AIDS.” This transformation serves as a logo against repression, ignorance, and the indifference of American politics toward the disease at the time. The use of the AIDS logo was a consciousness-raising endeavor, intended to “infect” people with an idea, a concept Bronson has described as ‘image cancer.’ This “screaming” wall decoration, with the cynical title “Imagevirus,” exudes a powerful and oppressive presence. In front of it lie massive helium-filled medication capsules and placebos, alluding to accelerated HIV research driven by protests and the omnipotence of the pharmaceutical industry.

 

 

The medical and pharmacological realities of coping with the disease often found expression in General Idea’s work. The pill became a recurring element in their visual vocabulary, represented as helium-filled balloons, sculptural objects of various dimensions, and as a backdrop in one of the group’s self-portraits. 

The group became highly politicized towards the end of their time together, in the lead-up to Partz’ and Zontal’s eventual deaths from AIDS in 1994, focusing all their energy on art as a form of activism against a disease that was rapidly killing many of their peers. 

 

 

The works of General Idea belong to the Participatory and Relational Arts movement, with Relational Aesthetics emphasizing the artist’s communication of their mission to the public. The essence of Participatory and Relational Arts lies in the active engagement of viewers, emphasizing collaboration over the artist’s sole authorship. Such artworks can take diverse forms and manifest as events, situations, or performances, fostering social bonds and collective meanings. By broadening exposure, these works serve as examples of temporary democracies. 

Relational works intertwine the experience and participants in the present moment, shaping the overall tone and meaning. This art form, often provocative, enables unrelated individuals to share a collective experience, creating a temporary space for human connectivity within a social context, evoking political consciousness, and inspiring change.

In many ways, the members of General Idea can be considered the pioneers of ‘creative activism.’ Their practice of inserting their artwork directly into the public sphere laid the groundwork for conceptually driven activist engagement by a new generation of artists, challenging both the art world and society at large.