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发帖数: 1822 | 1 General Idea: Haute Culture at the AGO( Art Gallery Ontario )
July 2011 - January 2012
Murray Whyte
Allow me a moment to state the abundantly obvious: General Idea, the
three-man collective founded in 1969 by AA Bronson, Felix Partz and Jorge
Zontal, is the most significant, famous and influential art beast, single or
otherwise, to emerge from Toronto, if not Canada, in the last half of the
20th century.
For those who care to argue (seriously?), I have one suggestion: Go to
the Art Gallery of Ontario. Today the museum opens “General Idea: Haute
Culture,” a 25-year retrospective of the group's prodigious output. It
takes up two floors of the gallery's shiny, Frank Gehry-made tower. We can
at last stop waiting for the museum's content to match its celebrity
architectural skin.
“Haute Culture” is sprawling and comprehensive while also tightly
focused and smartly arranged. The exhibition is replete with discrete
experiences — several of the rooms here could easily be smart, pointed
exhibitions unto themselves — that fold into the greater whole. Great is
one way to describe it, in range, in quality and in sheer volume: At the AGO
, “Haute Culture” presents more than 300 works, spanning every media
imaginable, all of it orbiting General Idea's central trope of fictive
realities in their manipulated, uproariously funny context of a burgeoning
media machine.
The show is the product of several years' work by Parisian curator Fr
édéric Bonnet, who staged it earlier this year at Paris's Museum of Modern
Art. He made Toronto the second stop for “Haute Culture.”
To do so he collaborated with the AGO, which owns much of the work
here. We've had warm-ups in recent years, most recently at York University,
where former AGO curator Philip Monk re-created the 1984 Miss General Idea
Pavilion show in 2009. But this is GI's true homecoming, although only one
member, AA Bronson, has lived to see it. Partz and Zontal both died in 1994
of AIDS.
The legend of General Idea looms large over Toronto art history —a
fact its members no doubt enjoyed, given their strategic myth-building —
but for most of us, it's been little more than that. The last time a major
survey of General Idea graced its hometown was 1985, at the AGO, and they
had nearly a solid decade of art-making left as a group, including its
arguably most famous works, centred on the AIDS crisis.
“Haute Culture” brings it all home, so to speak, with dozens of
works not seen in decades, if ever, and if ever here. Bonnet has arranged
the show thematically, rather than by timeline. It's both an effective
format by which to absorb GI's oeuvre and one that snaps perfectly in line
with the group's strategy itself. Playing with timelines was integral to
General Idea's constructed realities, and the resulting confusions helped
embody their critique of a burgeoning, disorienting mass-media world.
Their AIDS logo, a later work appropriated from Robert Indiana's
shopworn “LOVE” sculpture from the '60s, became the General Idea brand. It
runs throughout the exhibition as a pervasive meme. In keeping with GI's
priorities of simultaneously paralleling and debasing advertising strategies
, the image elides time and space as it replicates and infects the show
itself — as the group intended, much like a virus.
Coming together in 1969, the group was engaged in conceptual
performance that had become de rigueur of the day. A 1969 work, “Mirror
Sequence,” had them infiltrate the AGO with mirrors, circling the baroque,
marble-floored Walker Court with mirrors as a cheeky debasement of
institutional power.)
In their Gerrard St. studio, they were building fake displays in the
vacant storefront. Playful as it was, it seeded an early interest in
consumer culture, advertising and the growing power a nascent mass media
complex wielded in creating consensus, and more than that, fame.
They targeted the vapid priorities of media culture with wildly
stylized parody, using the media's own tools to do it. FILE megazine, as
they called it, became their media voice. They described their intentions in
the 1975 “Glamour” issue thusly: “We wanted to be famous, glamorous, and
rich. That is to say we wanted to be artists, and we knew that if we were
famous and glamorous we could say we were artists and we would be.” And
then, tellingly: “We never felt we had to produce great art to be great
artists. We knew great art did not bring glamour and fame.”
Miss General Idea, the group's fictional muse, became its bridge
between conceptual performance and its prescient media critique, a link
between past and future, both real and imagined. In 1971, the group held the
second Miss General Idea Pageant at the AGO, a gloriously camp extravaganza
and a send-up of the emerging superficial priorities of glamour and style
in the wake of the '60s counter-culture.
The group sold the performance to the AGO with the pitch that it would
be good for their women's committee; that the museum swallowed it whole no
doubt added to their subversive glee at achieving it. But Miss General Idea
became much more for the group. In “Haute Culture,” the viewing of
everything their initial muse wrought is a highlight.
That idea of fictive realities? The group conceived for Miss General
Idea a Pavilion — really, a hall of culture to serve both as a future-world
antidote to the fustiness of museums, and a monument to their own cultural
significance — to be completed for the 1984 pageant. Alas, it was
incinerated — arson or accident, no one's sure — in 1977.
Exactly: The Pavilion never existed, but that didn't stop General Idea
from excavating its fictional ruins, uncovering artifacts that became
symbols of their own terribly significant oeuvre. In a room at the AGO, a
charred wall of tiles bearing poodle insignia — the artists' symbol for
themselves, in all its camp glamour and populist connotations of luxury —
is pieced together, as if by archaeologists. Blackened fragments — poodles
again — sit under glass in vitrines; faded wall-hangings of poodles in
suggestive poses ape the presentation of antiquities in just the sort of
museums General Idea sought to mock.
The idea is obvious enough: For who is it to assign significance,
value or cultural import? General Idea made their own answer, cleverly plied
wrote their own fictive history, using images to distort and parody reality,
always placing themselves at the centre.
They came to occupy that centre in a very real way, working in New
York in the mid-'80s and becoming the generational artistic voice for the
AIDS crisis. The revelation at this show is in seeing, for real, what I
already knew: “The current reality wasn't sufficient for us, or we didn't
feel like we belonged,” Bronson said in a recent interview with Uovo
magazine in Berlin. “So we had to create our own world.”
http://www.thestar.com/article/1032194--general-idea-haute-cult
http://www.ago.net/ago-celebrates-iconic-canadian-artist-group- |
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