After its worldwide premiere in Paris, Haute Culture: General Idea, comes to the AGO this summer, returning the works of Canadian art collaborators Felix Partz, Jorge Zontal, and AA Bronson to their hometown. From 1964 to 1994 these three artists made up the artistic collective General Idea. Haute Culture offers a dense, two-floor, over-three-hundred piece retrospective on the group’s 30-year career. Immense in scope, the show can be savoured over multiple visits, and with a diverse range of paintings, photographs, films, and installations, there is undoubtedly something for everyone’s taste.
The work has some of the kitsch commonly found in contemporary art: faded photographs, funky drawings, a sense of nostalgia, and an overdose of humour. The top floors of the gallery are turned into a warehouse of parodies. In the piece “Nazi Milk,” a decade ahead of the “Got Milk?” ad, the collective writes the line “Wear a Moustache” in a clever juxtaposition of authoritarianism and the new emerging world of commercial dominance.
General Idea’s work is referential, creating amalgamations of other artists’ ideas — flipping and transforming old meanings into new ones. Most pieces let concept take precedence over the work itself. Some of the group’s later creations take a personal twist, as two of the members were battling AIDS. Whole rooms are devoted to copious, all-consuming pills. In the less haunting sections, the exhibit is cluttered with allusions to Duchamp, Orwell, and the ever-growing consumer society of the sixties.
The exhibit blends fiction and reality through different media. A glass case that in other exhibits might contain an artist’s diary or sketchbooks contains the dress of the group’s fictitious muse, Miss General Idea. Beside this a high-def television repeatedly plays the official Miss General Idea beauty pageant. On the floor below, furthering the fusion of fact and fiction, are “hieroglyphics” found on General Idea’s imaginary archaeological dig.
General Idea once claimed, “We are famous glamorous artists.” They made this statement when they were living together in a ramshackled house on Gerrard Street, still unknown to the world. Though at times General Idea seems bland, they can be quite poignant, even inspirational; they make being an artist seem easy and, most of all, lots of fun.
