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General Idea

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Going Thru The Motions, 1975

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About The Work

General Idea was both prolific and multi-disciplinary (way before it became de rigueur) creating works in a wide range of media including photography, sculpture, painting, mail art, video, installations, multiples and performance.

This early and iconic screenprint was created in tandem with a 1975 performance at the Art Gallery of Ontario, in Toronto. “Going Thru the Motions” was staged as a ‘rehearsal’ for the General Idea beauty pageant. This conceptual parody, which was a 20 year running concept that was realized in various mediums or iterations. Classified as a “rehearsal,” a pageant queen roamed the isles of the AGO, directed by a mysterious offstage presence, commanding “action” and “cut.” An unknowing gallery audience acted as a studio audience during the performance’s cinematic proceedings. “Going Thru the Motions,” was a performance, a pseudo film, and an exhibition poster...a truly multimedia work.

General Idea works from the early 1970's are exceptionally rare. Several elements in "Going Thru the Motions" appear in future works in their oeuvre notably the "wavy hand" (aka "Hand of the Spirit") and the woman's leg in lace up stiletto. It appeared again in 1975 on the cover of the Glamour issue of “File Magazine,” GI's parody version of Life Magazine. General Idea wrote in 1975 "Glamour replaces Marxism as the single revolutionary statement of the twentieth century"

Courtesy of Caviar20

About General Idea

General Idea was an artist’s collective made up of Felix Partz, Jorge Zontal, and AA Bronson, relentlessly striving to critique popular and media culture by way of humor, parody, and irony. The collective inhabited the media they so hoped to subvert: they organized beauty pageants as performance art starting in 1970 and broadcasted mock television talk shows to integrate the fringes of the community into mass media. They published FILE magazine from 1972 to 1989, an appropriation of LIFE used to explore brands and “interrogate the production and consumption of art as commodity.” Their loyalty to printed material and selling their own work became clear when they started Art Metropole in 1974, a non-profit space dedicated to contemporary art in multiple form including books, posters, prints, video, audio, and electronic media. In the late 1980s, General Idea’s focus shifted to the AIDS crisis, which garnered nearly 75 public art projects from the group. Unfortunately Partz and Zontal both passed away from the virus in 1994. The collective’s archive resides in the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa.

Retrospectives of General Idea have been held at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo, Seville, Spain, Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Munich Kunstverein, Germany, Kunstwerke, Berlin, and Kunsthalle, Zurich. General Idea exhibited at dOCUMENTA 10, Kassel, and the Venice Biennale in 1980, among other international biennales. They were awarded the Bell Canada Award in Video Art in 2001, and the Skowhegan Medal in Multi Media in 2006, to name a few.