Retrospective of Toronto’s General Idea at the National Gallery of Canada shows art collective retains power after 30 years

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Somehow, I had forgotten about the seal pups and the ice floe until I entered a room at the National Gallery of Canada this month to be confronted by blinding whiteness. This installation by the trio of Canadian artists known as General Idea is as startling to behold today as it was in 1990, and in the midst of a large retrospective exhibition, I was transported back to the awe of that first viewing.

Entitled Fin de Siècle, the artwork creates an overpowering visual effect simply by stacking large polystyrene foam boards in an uneven pile and shining harsh fluorescent light on them to create a jagged ice field. Three cute white critters are stranded in this harsh landscape: life-size reproductions of defenceless harp seal pups as adorable as stuffed toys.

When the work was first unveiled by General Idea, it was both startling and mysterious: The three artists known as Jorge Zontal, Felix Partz and AA Bronson had tried on various avatars in their 20 years together and had recently taken to portraying themselves as pampered poodles in their work. What was the meaning of the seal pups? Was this an ecological message? Polystyrene, the material of so many coffee cups, isn’t biodegradable, although a small sign in the gallery politely reassures today’s viewer that the boards will be recycled.

A primer on Toronto’s General Idea, Canada’s most radical art collective

In retrospect, Fin de Siècle is more transparent. In the late 1980s, General Idea had begun a series about the AIDS crisis and, unbeknownst to their public, by 1990 both Zontal and Partz had learned they were HIV-positive. Today, in a world more aware of LGBTQ issues, the work is interpreted as a statement on fickle public sympathies: People were rushing to the barricades in defence of baby seals but were shunning those with AIDS. In GI’s self-mocking iconography, the glamorous artists were no longer pets but prey. Four years later, Zontal and Partz died within a few months of each other and General Idea was no more.

What is remarkable, given these circumstances, is that the work is not merely visually arresting and thematically challenging; it’s also exuberant and funny. In the current era filled with artistic sermons, it’s important to recall that as GI strove to raise public awareness of AIDS, it kept its sense of humour to the end. This show is a definitive survey of the trio’s art-making from the joyous counter-culture of the 1970s through to those final dark days, but in the midst of a new epidemic it is the art about AIDS that really stands out – and endures.

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The retrospective, painstakingly assembled by gallery curator Adam Welch, begins with a quick survey of GI’s greatest hits and perhaps, 28 years after its demise, the group does need an introduction to those who weren’t there at the time. In Toronto, in the early 1970s, a gaggle of Gerrard Street roommates began making experimental films and using the storefront window of their house to mount satirical displays. The group quickly coalesced around its three most active members, who adopted eccentric pseudonyms and created preening personalities to match.

The three artists, dubbed General Idea when a gallery mistook the title of a work for the group’s name, rose rapidly in the art world as masters of satirical social critique and ironic cultural play. Those in the know might trace a particular strand to Partz’s skill as a painter, Zontal’s work in film or Bronson’s experience with co-ops and communes, but the trio always insisted that every work was simply GI. Here was compelling evidence that co-operation was a legitimate approach to the visual arts, and a devastating retort to the cult of the lone (male) genius.

Next in the exhibit, Welch immerses the viewer in the early years, dominated by the mock beauty pageant dedicated to Miss General Idea. The concept included performances in 1970 and ‘71, and much preparation for the darkly aspirational (and purely fictional) 1984 pageant, including plans for the largely non-existent 1984 Miss General Idea Pavillion: General Idea used the concept to prod both the glamour industry and the art world. Not everyone was in on the joke. Artist Janis Campbell of New Brunswick returned the contestant kit (which included a modest brown dress in which to pose) with a stiff letter denouncing the project’s sexism. Or maybe Campbell was simply playing her role. With GI you never knew.

In truth this work now feels distant: It’s hard to get excited about performances one never saw or to follow all the small-scale documentation of a much-prolonged trope. In 1979, by the time GI unveiled the Colour Bar Lounge, the cocktail bar for the pavilion, the thematic ambitions were becoming torturously obvious. A related show made for Dutch TV, but never shown because programmers felt it was too conventional to qualify as video art, features a dutifully McLuhanesque debate about television only enlivened by the three artists’ stilted delivery.

The move to the poodle paintings, supposedly excavated from the ruins of the pavilion, mocked the expressionist painting movement of the 1980s, which often featured images of snarling hounds. It was a welcome new direction, but revealed that GI, usually so prescient about cultural developments, was falling out of fashion.

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The painful irony is that AIDS reinvigorated GI’s career even as HIV infected Partz and Zontal. Looking for more contact with international dealers, Bronson and Zontal had moved to New York in 1986; there, they witnessed the devastation AIDS was wreaking on the artistic community. In a breathtaking move, pure GI magpie cheek yet also both political and poignant, they replaced the stacked letters of Robert Indiana’s L-O-V-E graphic with A-I-D-S. As GI repeated it on everything from scarves to posters – once again both engaging in and critiquing commerce – the new logo rapidly made its point: AIDS had to be hauled out of the closet.

Finally, the obvious implication of GI’s fornicating poodles or self-portrait as babies tucked up in bed was acknowledged by critics who would begin to call the trio “gay.”

And yet as the artists made AIDS awareness a crusade, their work always retained its double edges, its ambiguity and its humour. Outside the exhibition hall, the gallery has recreated 1992′s Pharma©opia, a trio of yellow and red helium-filled blimps in the shape of medicine capsules. Drugs the size of bombs, they are simultaneously cheerful and ominous, warning of the looming epidemic while the copyright symbol comments on pharmaceutical profiteering.

That work followed One Day of AZT and One Year of AZT, pieces which turned the capsules into modernist sculptures. They were based on Partz’s own HIV medication regime as GI began to let slip the masks that separated the artists from the audience.

Across the hall from this retrospective Welch has installed some other AIDS art including one of Bronson’s first solo works, a giant photograph of an emaciated Partz – a shrunken body in a loudly patterned shirt, taken in his bed shortly after he died. Bright colours can no longer clothe hard truths and the viewer must witness the actuality of death. GI had left the building, taking irony with it.

General Idea continues at the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa until Nov. 20

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