It’s the biggest show at the Art Gallery of Ontario since its doors reopened almost three years ago in Toronto to strut its Frank Gehry-designed renovation and expansion.
We’re talking floors four and five in the gallery’s titanium-clad rear end, 1,800 square metres in total, all dedicated to – no, not Leonardo or Monet or Cleopatra but a trio of Canadians who once had the gall to proclaim: “We never felt we had to produce great art to be great artists.”
We’re talking about the now-defunct General Idea collective, which between 1969 and 1994 manipulated, subverted and ironized seemingly everything in art and society, using every idiom and means possible – photography, sculpture and video, vegetables, acrylic paint and underwear, drawing, performance art, costume, architecture, magazines, posters, poodles – to create a dazzling, dizzying alternate universe, what one member would call “an imperfect simulacrum of a perfect world.”
Opening today, Haute Culture features more than 300 thematically arranged works, including such G.I. greatest hits as the One Day of AZT/One Year of AZT installations, the Triple X blue paintings and all 29 issues of FILE magazine, which Jorge Zontal, Felix Partz and AA Bronson conceived and executed, first in Toronto, then in New York. Of course, those aren’t their “real” names – Zontal was born Slobododan Saia-Levy in 1944 in Italy, Partz was born Ronald Gabe in Winnipeg in 1945 and Bronson was born Michael Tims in 1946 in Vancouver. But, as the Boys might have observed, what is reality anyway but a construct of fiction and fact, desire and belief, action and reaction?
Of course (too), Haute Culture could only have been conceived and curated by a Frenchman – the critic Frédéric Bonnet, with an assist from the AGO’s now-former director of modern and contemporary art, David Moos. It was Bonnet who installed the original, albeit smaller, edition of Haute Culture in February this year at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. One says “of course” because Europe “got” General Idea before North America, certainly well before the United States did. As well, G.I. was fed on the mother’s milk of theory provided by French artists and writers such as Duchamp, Lévi-Strauss, Barthes, Cahun, Klein and Baudrillard.
Perhaps a paragraph back I should have said “weren’t their real names.” Because only Bronson – he of the bushy grey beard, the big glasses with the plastic frames, the black cane and the business card that reads “Healer” – survives. Zontal died of AIDS-related causes in Toronto in February, 1994, ditto Partz a few months later, both nursed to their respective ends by Bronson, a self-described “midwife to the dying … who was good at it.”
Visiting Toronto recently from his home in New York, where, among other things, he’s been studying for a master in divinity at Union Theological Seminary (“I wanted to see how Christianity fits into the bigger picture”), Bronson, now 65, confessed that his “brain has been working more” on a Berlin-bound exhibition of his own pre- and post-General Idea solo creations than on the G.I. retrospective.
“I try to focus more on the present than the past,” he said in his high, cracking voice, “as much as the past keeps trying to draw me back.”
Not that Bronson finds General Idea a millstone. By his own admission, he was the most archivally inclined of the trio (“I tended to keep everything”) – a propensity he traces, in part, to his admiration for the way Andy Warhol would ceaselessly fill banker’s boxes with stuff, and also to his youth as the son of a Canadian Air Force pilot.
