News

In its long history as a cultural centre, Toronto, for the most part, has failed to successfully export its best visual artists. Something about Lake Ontario just seems to kill our cultural pollen as it flies.

There has been, however, one notable exception – or three, depending on how you calculate it – the artist collective General Idea: Felix Partz (né Ron Gabe), AA Bronson (Michael Tims) and Jorge Zontal (Slobodan Saia-Levy). Co-joining in a Gerrard Street studio in the east end of Toronto in 1968, the three artists donned their noms de plumes and set out to make history, writing it themselves if no one else was interested, and ingeniously mimicking the machinations of celebrity. Ironically, fame was their primary theme, and they worked it all the way to the Hamburg Kunstverein and New York's Museum of Modern Art before their final dissolution in 1994. (Both Partz and Zontal died of AIDS-related illness in that year.)

On Nov. 5, Bronson, the sole survivor of GI, was named an Officer of the Order of Canada, a long-overdue acknowledgment for his role in this brilliant artistic experiment, which we can glimpse in its early mutations in an exhibition this fall at the Art Gallery of York University. Organized by AGYU director Philip Monk, the exhibition restages two of their seminal exhibitions from the seventies, taking us back to the notorious Yonge Street lair of Italian-born art-dealer Carmen Lamanna (who provided the crucial seed bed for so much advanced Toronto art of the day), and allowing us to experience the enigma of GI afresh.

Ingeniously, the trio created the concept of The 1984 Miss General Idea Pageant, staging “audience rehearsals” at various locations – including the Art Gallery of Ontario in 1971, a show complete with cued standing ovations – and appointing a succession of pageant winners, among them the Vancouver artist Michael Morris in the persona of Marcel Idea, a heavenward gazing starlet in a ruffled cape.

This was haute camp in the Duchampian mode, with media parody elevated to an art form. “We wanted to be famous and glamorous and rich. That is to say we wanted to be artists,” they wrote in their frontispiece to the glamour issue of FILE Megazine, the subversive LIFE magazine look-alike that they created in 1972. (Almost immediately, the publication became a national and international organ of the avant-garde.) “We knew that if we were famous and glamorous we could say we were artists and we would be.”

Further bodies of work entailed elaborating plans for an imaginary 1984 Miss General Idea Pavilion, faux archeological remains from its ruins, poodle erotica, faux heraldry, self-portraits as vampires, babies, doctors (with their stethoscopes poised) and, finally, a brilliant body of work in response to the AIDS epidemic. Their Robert Indiana-influenced AIDS logo, which they created in 1987, was disseminated virally through public space around the world, and their colossal sculptures of AZT capsules became the epoch-defining monuments of the crisis, bodying forth the epidemic with a sound-bite glibness that the media adored.

At AGYU, the first gallery presents a near complete restaging of their 1975 Lamanna show Going Thru the Notions, and it begins with a sculptural overture: a section of hoarding covered with a jigsaw-puzzle pattern from which selected sections have been excised, allowing for a tantalizing partial view of the gallery beyond – a puzzle within a puzzle. Another work, titled Luxon Louvre Mock-Up , consists of a small section of venetian blind made from mirrored slats. Like a skilled celebrity, the object reveals as much as it conceals. The venetian blind became a key motif in the GI look, at times fashioned into costumes for use in their videos and performances. (Two of these pyramidal “massing studies” are shown in this show, suspended from the ceiling.)

The second gallery presents GI at a slightly later stage of gestation, with the exhibition Reconstructing Futures (1977). Here, the archival graininess of the earlier show gives way to a full blown pastiche of Hollywood glamour. Triumphal silvery amphorae frame the entrance to a celebrity lounge, decorated with a grey carpet in the shape of a painter's palette, a pair of black leather chairs, a set of marble dumbbells (for maintaining the body beautiful), and a curvaceous screen, which creates the effect of an oversized field of Benday dots. Behind it is a giant paparazzi shot of the three artists, apparently fleeing a fire. On the walls, decor takes the form of floor-to-ceiling, grainy black-and-white aerial photos of scorched farmer's fields, smouldering in a ziggurat pattern. Could this be the ashen remains of the pavilion in ruins?

The work feels as mysterious today as it did then. But which parts of the GI oeuvre are fiction and which are fact? Who, in the collective, was responsible for what? To ask for clarity would be entirely against the spirit of the enterprise. Assimilating a wide range of influences – Warholian Pop (in particular, Warhol's understanding of the mechanisms of fame), Marcel Broodthaers's phantom Museum of Modern Art: Department of Eagles, the Dadaism of Zurich's Cabaret Voltaire (with its eccentric costumes and sexual ambiguity), Fluxus silliness, and the subversive strategies of mail art – they blended a potent cultural cocktail. Forty years later, it still packs a punch.

The 1984 Miss General Idea Pavilion continues at the Art Gallery of York University in Toronto until Dec. 6.