Sexuality and signification: episodes of General Idea's subcultural politics

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i

SEXUALITY AND SIGNIFICATION: EPISODES OF GENERAL IDEA’S
SUBCULTURAL POLITICS

by

VIRGINIA SOLOMON

________________________________________________________________________

A DISSERTATION Presented to the

FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL

UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA

in Partial Fulfillment

of the Requirements for the Degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

(ART HISTORY)

December 2013

Copyright 2013 Virginia Solomon

ii

Acknowledgements

This dissertation proceeds from the premise that knowledge production is a
collaborative activity, and I certainly would not have been able to complete it without the
help of a community of wonderful individuals too numerous to thank individually. To the
multitudes that have supported me in my work, consciously or unwittingly, I offer my
upmost gratitude. Research and writing and feel like a solitary process. But I am lucky to
be surrounded by people who know and appreciate the fact that while the labor of reading
and writing is individual, thinking and living are not, and oh, all of the thinking and
living we have been able to do!
I have been fortunate to have had wonderful mentors throughout the
conceptualization and materialization of this project. Richard, thank you for giving me
the freedom to explore the content and conclusions of this dissertation while keeping me
on track with its rigor of analysis and connection to history. Jack, thank you for teaching
me how to be a scholar—how to write and to engage with objects and texts with openness
and generosity, but also to know when to step away from it all. Thanks also to the myriad
faculty members I was able to work with at USC who have contributed to this project
along the way—Nancy Troy, Megan Luke, Thomas Crow, and Vanessa Schwartz, in its
beginning stages, and Kate Flint and Suzanne Hudson, whose assistance was vital in
seeing it to its conclusion.
In addition to the individual support that I have received, generous institutional
funding has enabled me to complete my work thus far on General Idea. Grants from the
College of Letters, Arts, and Sciences; the art history department; and the Visual Studies
Graduate Program supported both early research trips and also my writing. A Helena

iii

Rubenstein Fellowship allowed me to attend the Whitney Museum of American Art
Independent Study Program, where I refined many of the ideas explored here in tandem
with a cohort of artists and theorists who modeled much of what I find so vital and
inspiring about artistic practice in the first place. Thank you to Jennifer Gonzalez, Ron
Clark, and José Muñoz for your gracious feedback and encouragement, and thank you to
my cohort for your constant support and challenge. The ISP enabled me to interact with
artists and critics whose practices very much inspired my interpretation of General Idea
and its presentation of subcultural politics. Thanks to Gregg Bordowitz and Sharon Hayes
in particular for sharing thoughts on a wide range of topics both large and small. Most of
all, thank you to AA Bronson, who went well above and beyond the call of politeness in
his willingness to share his time and his memories, many of them painful, with me.
Thanks for your time, and also for making such wonderful, thought provoking, and
ramifying work.
A generous fellowship from the National Gallery of Canada funded my archival
research in Ottawa, Toronto, and Halifax. Thank you to everyone at the National Gallery
for listening to me complain about being cold every day, and for not wondering out loud
why someone who is a professional scholar would make the mistake of moving from Los
Angeles to Ottawa in the dead of winter. Special thanks in particular to Michael
Williams, Philip Dombowsky, Julie Levac, Peter Trepanier, and Cami Prud’Homme at
NGC, and to Cyndie Campbell in particular for all of your help with the GI Collection,
and also good spots for skiing and playing with dogs around the city. As well as tips on
how to stay warm. While not officially on staff at the National Gallery, Fern Bayer
certainly was my guide to the General Idea Collection, and to all things General Idea and

iv

Canadian art from the 1970s and 1980s. Fern, could I know even half of what you’ve
forgotten, this would be a better product. Thank you for all of your work throughout the
years to make sure that General Idea’s practice stays accessible and understandable.
While not directly pertaining to my dissertation, the curatorial work that I have
been able to do has helped me clarify the thematic and theoretical underpinnings of my
take on GI. Thank you to Amy Sadao and Nelson Santos for the opportunity to curate
Tainted Love with one of my best friends, and one of the smartest guys I know. Thank
you also to Leonard Lauder for funding the Whitney-Lauder Curatorial Fellowship,
during which I was able to work with such amazing people in Philadelphia, and with
amazing artists who explore subcultural politics in other formats.
So much of the real work of conceptualizing this kind of a project comes through
casual conversations with friends that spark ideas that later catch fire into something
more. This project stems largely from too many conversations with too many people to
thank individually, but it never would have materialized without astute insight from Avi
Alpert, Steven Lam, Jeannine Tang, Joe Madura, Soyoung Yoon, Jason Goldman,
Stefanie Snyder, Aleca La Blanc, Rachel Middleman, Karin Higa, and Leta Ming. To my
writing group: Emily Leibert, Claire de Dobay Rifelj, and Kay Wells, anything that
makes sense in the elocution of this document is thanks to you. Most of all, to the folks
from USC who let me count them as family—Catherine Clark, Sarah Hollenberg, Brian
Jacobson, and Kristine Tanton—thank you for the laughing, the distraction, and the
perspective. I can only hope I provided you a portion of the sanity you offered me.
Just as fitness gains are made during periods of rest, this dissertation came about
because of the quality of the time I spent away from it. To the members of the USC and

v

Metromint Cycling teams, thank you for making that time fun, and hard! Fight On and
Fear the Dots. Meg Burrit (and Gryphon) and Becca Shapiro, thank you for not needing
to know anything more than “that thing you’re writing is about art and sex or something,
right?” Maureen Carroll and Colleen Macklin, you lived through this project’s beginning,
and its end, and miraculously didn’t kill me in the process. You have the graciousness
and the patience of saints. And, last but certainly most importantly, thank you to my
family. Mom, Dad, thank you for supporting me through all of this madness. Thank you
for trying to understand it, but not needing to, and for being proud and excited about it
every step of the way, even when my confidence would falter. I love you both.

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Abstract

Over the course of its twenty-five year career, Canadian artist group General Idea
(1969-1994) systematically theorized an alternative form of politics present within the
subcultures in which it participated. This subcultural politics had both different forms and
different aims than traditional politics. Rather than such activities as demonstrations or
boycotts, General Idea’s subcultural politics manifested in the more everyday stuff of
getting dressed, going to concerts, and participating in nightlife, seeking to produce
alternative forms of culture in the present rather than advocate for changes in forms of
government or public policy in the future.
The group emphasized subcultural practices that were political precisely because
of the ways they demonstrated culture as a motivated phenomenon that constantly seeks
to naturalize itself and its values, hierarchies, and assumptions to support some forms of
life while subjugating others. It pointed to actions that used the forms and processes of
dominant culture as a signifying practice, but articulated them to different ends. As such,
for example, a beauty pageant undermined not just femininity, but identity and
subjectivity as fixed and given in general. As its career progressed, its work became less
connected to specific subcultures, but it nevertheless continued to manifest this form of
engagement, thereby demonstrating a general theory of subcultural politics that is
applicable across the field of culture.
Because General Idea’s subcultures, be they the Canadada mail art network or the
underground downtown scene in Toronto, were predominantly queer subcultures, it
presented its subcultural politics as a form of sexuality itself. The group articulated its
subcultural politics through the language and images of gay life, for example, or of fetish

vii

sex. These were political not simply because they crossed cultural norms, but because
they highlighted norms in general as constructed phenomena.
The group did more than simply point out the forms of politics circulating within
subcultures, however. Through its engagement with other historical and contemporary art
practices, General Idea also highlighted certain parallels between the forms of critical
cultural engagement within subcultures and that present within a particular lineage of
artistic practice, including self-evident examples like Dada and Pop but also less obvious
examples like International Modernism or the work of Joseph Beuys. The group
presented a form of queer art history by creating a queer avant-garde based not on the
sexual identity of the artist, but on the practices’ demonstration of the very subcultural
politics it strove to highlight in its own work. By manifesting subcultural politics within
its projects, and constantly pointing to subcultural politics in other practices, General Idea
emphasized the political potential of both artistic and social spaces excluded from both
liberal democracy and also narratives of oppositional activity since the Second World
War. These spaces are often the only source of refuge for subjects excluded from and
therefore frequently indifferent to institutional modes of social justice, and still remain
vibrant, though under-valued, arenas in our contemporary moment.

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Table of Contents

Acknowledgements............................................................................................................. ii

Abstract...............................................................................................................................vi

Preface................................................................................................................................ix

Introduction .........................................................................................................................1

Chapter One - Sexuality and the Politics of Social Life....................................................36

Chapter Two - Borderline Culture: Sexuality as Subcultural Politics.............................101

Chapter Three - Cocktails, Tchotchkes, and Poodles:
Subcultures as Signifying Practice...................................................................................159

Chapter Four - Literal Metaphors: AIDS, Infection, and Abstraction..............................210

Coda - Queer Subcultures and the Political Present........................................................260

Images..............................................................................................................................263

Works Cited.....................................................................................................................413

ix

Preface

Like others among the twenty or so people in the audience for Sharon Hayes’
Everything Else Has Failed! Don’t You Think it’s Time for Love? (2007), I spent each
lunch break during the week of September 17th, 2007, crying at the intersection of West
51
st
Street and Sixth Avenue in midtown Manhattan. (1) The performance consisted of
Hayes walking out of the UBS building shortly after noon carrying a small speaker and a
microphone on a stand, and reciting a love letter from an anonymous speaker to an absent
“you.”
1
The letters gradually establish a loose narrative in which the speaker has been
separated from her lover by circumstances related to the war in Iraq.
2
The two had been
able to maintain something of a relationship via letters, but the speaker has stopped
receiving replies from the lover and, as such, has resorted to speaking the letters in public
in the hopes that this gesture would inspire a response.
3

I find myself continually returning to this piece, and the emotional impact of the
performance undoubtedly has contributed to my investment. Surely my tears flowed
because of this longing, this gesture of love rendered unrequiteable by ostensibly
unassailable, intertwined institutions that keep the lovers apart—the military-industrial

1
The performance occurred as part of the show 25 Years Later: Welcome to Art in
General, installed at the UBS art gallery on the occasion of the non-profit arts
organization Art in General’s 25
th
anniversary. Rather than a retrospective of the
organization’s work, the show was conceived of as a series of creatively staged
encounters between art and the public.
For more on the exhibition, see: http://www.artingeneral.org/exhibitions/425
2
Although the details of the fictitious story are ambiguous, over the course of the
performances it becomes clear that for a time the lovers lived together in New York, until
the absent lover’s family demanded that she leave the country, having something to do
with the war in Iraq. Hayes’ speaker offered to accompany the absent lover, but the offer
was refused. Thus began the epistolary exchange that provides the context for the
performance.
3
Documentation of the entire piece, including audio, is available at the artist’s website:
www.shaze.info

x

complex, states and citizenship, and homophobia. But my regular return also stems from
the ways in which it touches on many of the concerns of this dissertation. It helps me
ground the subcultural politics that General Idea theorized through its work, as its initial
performance coincided not only with my first forays into this current project, but also
with my own participation in a vibrant queer art scene in New York that includes such
artists as Hayes. My experience of being involved in a social scene that was heavily
invested in considering alternative forms of politics through art helped me see the same in
General Idea’s practice.
Elements of subcultural participation infuse Everything Else Has Failed..., setting
a clear scene for Hayes’ exploration of the politics of subcultural practice. From the
outset of the piece, her use of affect demonstrated the space of the performance as a
subcultural space, one populated by and legible to those who participate in the subculture
(in this case, a socially inflected queer avant-garde art scene in NYC) and illegible if not
invisible to the mainstream. I was not the only member of the audience to tear up at the
performances. Hayes’ skill at delivery—her ability to use her voice to convey the
yearning and the loss contained within the letters—certainly contributed to this intensely
emotional response from her audience. The passion and conviction with which she
infused her voice, and the response this elicited from the audience, stood in stark contrast
to the be-suited bankers scurrying about during their lunch hour talking on their cell
phones. She tried to make eye contact as unsuspecting people walked in front of her, in
the space between her speaking body and the audience gathered to listen to that day’s
oratory. (2) Occasionally someone would stop, but more often than not, if they even
noticed her, they would quickly look away and hurry along out of eye- and earshot. This

xi

clear disjunction between the audience and the general public—between those who
understood and were interested in the performance, and those who didn’t and weren’t—
productively reproduced the structure of subcultures. It illustrated the gulf between those
who gather together to use the values and hierarchies of dominant culture against the
mainstream and those who live comfortably within those structures; those who “get it”
and those who don’t.
4

More than reproduce a subcultural setting by positioning the audience against the
mainstream of the bankers walking by unaware or indifferent to the performance, Hayes
marshaled subcultural life through her use of love.
5
Everything Else Has Failed... points

4
The model of subcultures that I use throughout this essay draws from the work done at
the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, particularly as enumerated by
both Stuart Hall and Dick Hebidge. Both scholars looked at the everyday activity that
constituted participation in a variety of subcultures, from soccer hooligans to punks, and
discussed how that activity constituted an active political engagement with creating space
for alternative structures and values. Two aspects of their discussion of subcultures are
particularly pertinent to this discussion. The first is the fact that everyday social activity
can constitute active political engagement, and the second is the prominence of
détournement within subcultures, wherein subjects take a process or object from
dominant culture and use it for a different purpose. Both of these scholars render
everyday activity political, and political because of the work that it does in the present
moment, rather than to affect change in the future. The artists discussed here likewise
empower everyday life with political agency. I will discuss this in further detail in the
introduction that follows this preface.
Resistance Through Rituals: Youth Subcultures in Post-War Britain. Eds. Stuart Hall and
Tony Jefferson. NYC: Routledge, 2000.
Dick Hebdige. Subculture: The Meaning of Style. NYC: Routledge, 1979.
5
This reading of love as a political force owes much to Chela Sandoval’s Methodology of
the Oppressed. Sandoval presents love as a form both of social action and of identity
construction. Love functions as a marker of differential consciousness that is itself
inherently political because it simultaneously rejects dominant models of subjectivity and
oppositionality. This method of considering alternative processes of identification as
themselves inherently political greatly informs my reading of General Idea’s subcultural
politics.
Chela Sandoval. Methodology of the Oppressed. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 2000.
For more on the role that subcultures play within this work, see:

xii

towards specific instances in which subcultures mobilized love to political effect. The
most prominent reference is to the American hippie counterculture of the late 1960s,
which looked to love as a way to construct an alternative social order while
simultaneously protesting the war in Vietnam with such slogans as “Make Love not
War.” For hippies, dropping out of society and forming alternative economic and kinship
structures with different standards and ethics—all through the language of love—were
intensely political acts. In fact, Hayes has pinpointed the origins of this performance’s
title in an archival image from Berkeley in the late 1960s, which depicts a man sitting in
the middle of a protest holding up a sign that reads: “Everything Else has Failed! Don’t
You Think It’s Time for Love?”
6
The sentiment conveyed by the sign, and by Hayes
some forty years later, is that love encompasses an alternative form of political activity in
the face of a government, which, then as now, is either unable or unwilling to address
instances of grave social and economic injustice. It is precisely the alternative form of
politics that General Idea developed through its work, its subcultural politics, that
concerns this dissertation.
The use of love in this context began to help me clarify the subcultural politics I
saw within General Idea’s work, where subcultures had a more precise and pointed

Virginia Solomon. “Politics of Queer Sociality: Music as Material Metaphor,” Farewell
to Post-Colonialism: The Third Guangzhou Triennial. Eds. Gao Shiming, Sarat Maharaj,
and Chang Tsong-zung. Guangzhou: Guangdong Museum of Art, 2008, p 314-317.
6
Julie Carson. “Now, then and love: Questions of Agency in Contemporary Practice.
Interview with Andrea Geyer, Ken Gonzales-Day, Sharon Hayes, Adrià Julià, Juan
Maidagan, Emily Roydson (LTTR), Stephanie Taylor, Bruce Yonemoto and Dolores
Zinny,” Exile of the Imaginary: Politics, Aesthetics, Love. Vienna: Generali Foundation,
2007, p 163.
An excerpt of this interview also appears as an artist project in the catalog for the
exhibition, Tainted Love, that I co-curated with Steven Lam in the summer of 2009.
Emily Roysdon. “Love,” Tainted Love. NYC: Visual AIDS, 2009, p 6.

xiii

intervention than simply a given condition as an always-already oppositional space. At
the foundation of my realization lay the fact that love, within Everything Else Has
Failed..., materialized as more than forbidden affection between same-gendered bodies.
This specifically negated the facile interpretation of resistance within which any action
always carries the same political impact in all settings, and where expressions of
homosexuality are always oppositional. It is precisely these formulations of
oppositionality and identity that this dissertation, through General Idea’s practice, aims to
work against. What Hayes’ performance helped me see in General Idea’s work was a
systematic formulation of subcultural politics as a methodolgy. The group utilized
subcultures as a means to highlight a particular form of critical engagement with
dominant culture—a form of engagement that it observed in various practices that
constituted participation in the subcultures of which it was a part—rather than to promote
any specific set of practices as automatically resistant in all contexts, simply the fact of
having tattoos or listening to particular genre of music, for example. Subcultural politics
entail rearticulating dominant culture to alternative ends, highlighting culture as a
signifying practice and using the fact to create spaces structured by different values,
hierarchies, and priorities.
Hayes’s use of love in Everything Else Has Failed... manifests the subcultural
politics theorized within General Idea’s work. Describing why she was drawn to the
protest photograph from which the performance draws its title, Hayes notes that it pointed
to the social act of love—outside of a romantic context in its declaration to an
indeterminate ‘you’—as itself political. The image, and its text, spoke to “this
imbrication of politics, aesthetics, and love,” which she then deploys to highlight how a

xiv

specifically queer form of social life manifests an alternative method of political
engagement.
7
She sees the love that the protester references as an act of subcultural
politics. But she herself performs another aspect of subcultural politics through her
appropriation and re-deployment of his gesture, because of what love means within her
specific subcultural context.
Hayes does not explicitly define the love that she references and performs within
Everything Else Has Failed... When discussing the project, however, she often refers to
the work of another artist, Emily Roysdon, who explicates love as a politicized aspect of
everyday queer life. Roysdon, whose work engages photography, choreography, and
curatorial practice, specifies love as “a strategy, medium, site, and scene.”
8
She clarifies,
“I must be explicit—Queer Love. Queer love exemplifies itself by its lack of singular
object relations and an insistence on unstable and mutable boundaries.”
9
And her notion
of love is inextricable from queer subcultural life: “The theater of queer love employs
politics, poetics, and aesthetics in equal measure.”
10
This love, for Roysdon, denies the
very structures of dominant culture in part because of its refusal to differentiate among
art, politics, and the social realm. This idea of love, not the romantic affect shared
between two autonomous subjects, constitutes love for Hayes.
For both Roysdon and Hayes, love is a lived critical engagement with and
disarticulation of dominant culture. Hayes models this through her composition of the
letters, drawn from historical love letters, speeches, protest songs, and slogans—from
Bob Dylan lyrics to ACT UP slogans to lines from the resignation speech of New Jersey

7
Ibid, p 163.
8
Ibid, p 160.
9
Ibid.
10
Ibid.

xv

governor Jim McGreevey, delivered in 2004 after being caught in a homosexual
extramarital affair. Re-speaking has long been a part of Hayes’ work. But Everything
Else Has Failed... presents this form of appropriation and rearticulation—of occupying
utterances from other times and contexts and using them to one’s own purposes—as itself
part and parcel of Roysdon’s understanding of love. This love is consummately political
and intimately constitutive of queer life, encompassing a range of practices from sex to
signification: the poles that define Everything Else Has Failed.... These same poles
delineate General Idea’s work, perhaps nowhere more clearly than in its iconic AIDS
project—an image that, fittingly, takes as its source material another variation on the
theme: Robert Indiana’s LOVE (1965). (3)
Putting General Idea in conversation with Sharon Hayes demonstrates the
continued urgency of the earlier group’s presentation of subcultural politics as not just an
alternative avenue to achieve social change, but as an entirely different conception of
politics altogether. The two moments share disillusionment with traditional structures of
politics. General Idea rejected efficacy and instrumentality as terms useful for a
discussion of politics, which finds an echo in similar sentiments expressed within the
language of Occupy Wall Street. Those terms manifest forms of judgment generated
within dominant culture, to apply to traditional forms of politics that prop up the
mainstream social order, however they might contribute to changing specific regimes of
government. That both moments, General Idea’s and our contemporary context, turned to
culture as a political space outside of that framework indicates the continued need for
alternative avenues to work for social justice, and suggests the continued relevance for
the project of which General Idea was a part. Subcultural politics work in the present,

xvi

making space for alternative social orders and modes of subjectivization now rather than
trying to affect change in the future.
While the street is not dead, and public policy certainly matters, not all subjects
have access to the street and public policy seems increasingly unable to adequately
address the matrix of factors that impact inequality in our contemporary moment. The
fact that the US cannot adequately regulate its own banks points to the futility of
regulating flows of global capital rooted in alienation and exploitation. Once again, like
the Berkeley youth and, as this dissertation will argue, like General Idea, we face a failure
of traditional politics demonstrated by the rise of movements that seek to operate outside
of its sphere—not just Occupy, but also the Tea Party, both of whom want to radically
alter the shape, scope, and function of government, however they may disagree on their
desired outcome. As such, Hayes, and many of the other artists who constitute her cohort,
offer a politics of the present, highlighting how queer subcultures create alternative social
and economic orders now, however ephemeral they may be, while also working towards
more traditionally recognizable forms of social justice.
11

Ultimately, what General Idea observed, and what seemed to motivate the
urgency I experienced in contemporary practices as I began this dissertation, was a
reformulation of what constitutes politics in light of the social practices of specific
subcultures. Both the historic and the contemporary practices with which I was engaged
at the time saw an almost complete overlap between an artistic milieu and a social scene,

11
Many of the artists who regularly work with LTTR and Ridykeulous also work with a
number of queer of color social outreach organizations, including the Silvia Rivera Law
Project, Queers for Economic Justice, and FIERCE, a member-led organization devoted
to developing leadership and community improvement for queer youth of color. Each of
these organizations include art as part of their outreach, and artists donate work to benefit
auctions.

xvii

and each of those social scenes directly took up sexuality as a rubric although none was a
sexual subculture, per se. This reformulation of politics then demanded a reevaluation of
the stakes of the social field, as a site for more than mere frivolity or escape or any of the
other terms with which social life, and subcultures in particular, have been dismissed
since the civil rights movements of the 1960s and early 1970s.
By presenting artistic practices as another form of cultural labor, General Idea
highlighted the power of this work to act and to do. It pointed out social practices as
agents with the power to analyze and explicate culture at large. By celebrating drag
practices that, rather than pass, aim to highlight gender as a construct reified through
dominant culture, as it did in The 1971 Miss General Idea Pageant to be discussed in
chapter one, the group pointed to the politics not of cross dressing, but of demonstrating
how culture naturalizes itself. This potential is not limited to subcultures, subcultural
practices, and subcultural objects, but General Idea demonstrated that it is within these
sites that this potential is self-consciously explored and productively exploited. By
formalizing social life within its work, the group modeled the generative nature of
culture, of the present, and of the ephemeral. It is a model that carries as much pertinence
now as it did forty years ago, for communities disenfranchised by official institutions of
culture and of government who need a way to make sense of bodies and lives that are
inconceivable within mainstream structures.

1

Introduction

We had abandoned our hippie backgrounds of heterosexual idealism, abandoned
any shred of belief that we could change the world by activism, by demonstration,
by any of the methods we had tried in the 1960s – they had all failed [...] We
abandoned bona fide cultural terrorism, then, and replaced it with viral methods.
1

AA Bronson, member of General Idea

AA Bronson, the surviving member of General Idea (the other two, Felix Partz
and Jorge Zontal having both died of AIDS related causes in 1994), offered the above
description of the group’s insistently multi-media practice, which included happening-
like performances, videos, installations, and even a quarterly magazine. General Idea is
rarely discussed in relation to politics, and, although openly gay, not often considered in
relation to issues of sexuality. In the description cited above, however, Bronson presents
politics and sexuality as key aspects of the group’s work, in fact using those terms as the
descriptors of its artistic strategies. General Idea highlighted how many of the methods of
its contemporary avant-garde artists shared common critical engagement with those of
subcultures, in fact using its artistic practice to highlight the political operation of
subcultures and to position art as another part of larger cultural practices, both dominant
and oppositional. Through the rubric of sexuality, the group demonstrated how culture
consists of systems and structures—both official and unofficial, visible and invisible—
that create meaning and impart value upon objects, bodies, and ideas. As such, culture is
a motivated process. General Idea presented subcultural politics as practices that
highlighted this significatory operation of culture, not only critiquing how culture

1
AA Bronson. “Myth as Parasite/Image as Virus: General Idea’s Bookshelf 1967-1975,”
The Search for the Spirit: General Idea 1968-1975. Eds. Fern Bayer and Christina
Ritchie. Toronto: Art Gallery of Ontario, 1997, p 17-18.

2

privileges some forms of life while subordinating others but also using it to create
alternative hierarchies, meanings, and social orders. This dissertation traces how General
Idea deployed subcultural politics throughout its career, arguing that its practice offers an
example of a different way to discuss the relationship between culture and politics by
rendering visible how power operates within the social field, in banal and ephemeral
moments directed at the present as much as activity more self-consciously addressing
governmentality and change in the future—in getting dressed and dancing and cruising as
much as campaigning and demonstrating and voting.
General Idea was familiar with and participated in many of the significant art
movements of the later decades of the twentieth century, in fact presciently
foreshadowing many developments within the arts that would grow to be of primary
concern to mainstream discourses of contemporary art in subsequent years—the museum
as site of spectacle, the exploding art market, the relationship between art and politics,
and so forth. While its influence on both contemporary and later artists is under theorized
in our histories of postwar art, however, this dissertation focuses more on the relationship
between subcultural practice and artistic practice for General Idea—how its subcultures
deployed art as an element of subcultural participation, and how General Idea
appropriated the critical strategies of its subcultures into its art. It melded artistic
strategies with subcultural strategies in a manner that highlighted the political potential of
each site. As I will discuss in more detail in the my first chapter, the group came together
within a setting of almost complete overlap between an artistic avant-garde and a
particular kind of queer subculture in Canada in the late 1960s and early 1970s, in the
form of the performance and mail art network called Canadada. This experience would

3

influence its approach to the production of art as an inexorable part of subcultural
practice throughout its career.
At the outset, General Idea and its contemporaries within Canadada used art as a
part of literal subcultures, creating characters and settings that they then materialized
within their everyday dealings with other people and even institutions. Mr. Peanut, an
alias for the Vancouver-based artist Vincent Trasov, even garnered 4% of the vote in his
run for the mayor of Vancouver in 1974. (4) The group also used its performances as
subcultural events, including drinking and cruising alongside scripted elements, both of
which were recorded for video. As time passed, General Idea became less connected to
specific, literal subcultures, corresponding with shifts in ideas about the capacity for
subcultures to function as spaces of dissent: from seeing them as oppositional spaces to
seeing them as spaces to, on the contrary, contain rebellion. This conceptual shift held
less sway for the group, though, as the denigration of subcultures presumed ideas about
politics, and of contestation, that were themselves suspect to the group. General Idea
became less involved with specific subcultures—the Toronto scene centered around
Queen Street West of punk rock, underground fashion and publishing, alternative
education, radical theater, and queer nightlife to be discussed in more detail in chapter
one; and the Downtown scene in New York City of artists, no wave filmmakers, punk
and new wave musicians, and queer performance to be discussed in more detail in
chapter two—but continued to incorporate subcultural strategies that highlight culture as
a motivated process and demonstrate that meaning is neither given nor natural. The group
distilled developments in artistic practice and intermingled them with related methods
from everyday subcultural practice, and this dissertation focuses the significance of its

4

application of one sphere to the other, and vice versa. The specific episodes that I discuss
from General Idea’s career speak to this significance, and underscore how the group’s use
of art to theorize subcultural politics highlights alternative ways to conceptualize the
political in the first place.
As the quote that begins this introduction demonstrates, General Idea viewed its
practice as foundationally political, though it strove to redefine precisely what that meant,
and what its scope would entail. Rather than deploy conventional political methods,
Bronson recalls, the group turned to viral ones. Many histories of the group since the
production of its famous AIDS logo have astutely recognized its viral methods, but
anachronistically read the fact of the human immunodeficiency virus as a virus back onto
its earlier practices of appropriation, parodic inhabitation, and strategic rearticulation.
Likewise, the model of the computer virus looms large over any discussion of virality.
Reading these models back onto General Idea’s practice in the 1970s, however,
contributes to the unfortunate trend to read the group’s work independent from its
specific subcultural context, where a contemporary meaning of the virus held sway. This
model, as will be discussed in more detail in chapter one, stemmed from the Beat author
William S. Burroughs, who Bronson cites specifically later in the same passage.
Burroughs presented a notion of the virus as a model for a queer form of politics that
sought to occupy the systems and processes of dominant culture and, by causing them to
resignify, to demonstrate how culture makes meaning and distributes power. This is the
basis of General Idea’s theorization of subcultural politics, the method that it would apply
to different objects throughout its practice.

5

There are a number of more conventional modes of cultural studies and of art
history that this dissertation brushes up against, but consciously deviates from. This is not
a biography or an exhaustive study on the work of General Idea, though I do engage with
the group’s use of biography and marshal the facts of its various artistic and social
networks in my argument for the significance of its incorporation of subcultural methods
into its artistic practice. This is also not a periodization of General Idea. It does follow a
loose chronology, but time was as much a medium for the group as paint or performance.
Its play with temporality is a part of the critical engagement with dominant culture that it
drew from its subcultural participation, and as such plays a part in the subcultural politics
that I see in its work. Also, while sex is important to General Idea’s art, and even plays a
structural role in its theorization of subcultural politics, the subcultures to which the
group referred and from which it appropriated with its work were not sexual subcultures.
Bronson, Partz, and Zontal certainly participated in sexual subcultures as individuals; for
example Zontal was rounded up in the 1981 police crackdown on gay bathhouses in
Toronto, an action notorious enough to have warranted international coverage. As
presented within the group’s art, however, sexuality was more concerned with different
modes of identification and subjectivity than sex or sexual identity, per se. It was more
likely to include radical forms of drag that were interested in demonstrating identity as a
performance; or to present the styles and tools fetish sex as a way to demonstrate how the
structures of sex contribute to the systems of meaning making across dominant culture. It
is within these kinds of observations and demonstrations, I argue, that General Idea’s
politics lay, less so than in its advocacy against anti-gay policing, for example. As such, I
am not making an argument for the group as an activist, in any kind of traditional

6

understanding of agitating for specific changes in public policy. Redefining what
constitutes politics away from a traditional understanding of ‘activism’ was an outcome
of its theorization of subcultural politics but, as the quote which begins this introduction
demonstrates, the entire understanding of politics that frames the term ‘activist’ was
suspect to the group in the first place.
While art critics and curators have presented different interpretations of General
Idea works, and the significance the group’s career as a whole, their considerations have
paid scant attention to the role that the group’s social circle played in its practice and
none to how it participated in those circles through its work. As a general rule, scholars
read General Idea with theoretical and interpretive models developed to describe the
critical potential of culture, and cultural production (Marxism, structuralism,
deconstruction). These theoretical models underlie traditional accounts of either identity
politics or New Left style critique, the forms that most often appear in considerations of
art and politics since the Vietnam War. These forms also provide the foundation for
discussions about art and politics in which the group appears, which often focus on its
status as a collective, as a producer that operated outside of traditional gallery systems
and institutions for the display of art, and as an example of an artistic response to the
AIDS crisis.
2
Rather than address the work as a mode of cultural politics, however, and a
mode of politics connected to a specific set of subcultures and social scenes, these

2
For examples of these approaches, see:
Kirsten Olds. Networked Collectivities: North American Artists’ Groups, 1968–1978.
Unpublished Dissertation: University of Michigan, 2009.
Gwen Allen. Artists’ Magazines: An Alternative Space for Art. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 2011.
Deborah Barkun. Art, AIDS, and Collective Identity: Configuring General Idea’s
Collaborative Body, 1969-2000. Unpublished dissertation: Bryn Mawr, 2005.

7

discussions typically remain within the field of art and within the specific content or
mode of address of the work in question. The group remains an example of institutional
critique, or of dematerialized practices, or of artists’ attempts to activate art outside of the
museum and gallery system, or of any other critical practices that take art and its
institutions as their object.
Even critics and curators who have long been interlocutors with General Idea, and
have engaged elsewhere with the social setting out of which the group emerged, repeat
this trend. The best example of this surprising disjunction appears in the writing of
curator and critic Philip Monk, who has been writing about General Idea since the late
1970s. His astute arguments about the group’s engagement with structures, and
structuralism, nevertheless neglect to place the work in an intensely social artistic scene
in downtown Toronto—a scene he has considered extensively under different cover.
While his work has greatly shaped my reading of facets of General Idea’s practice, its
conspicuously absent consideration of what are clearly socially informed elements of its
practice drove me to pay more attention to the cultural and political consequence of the
group’s work as a whole.
3
My work builds upon the interpretation of General Ideas
practice and methods presented by these studies and exhibitions, but applies their
observations about General Idea’s critical operation to make a larger argument about the
politics of subcultures.

3
Philip Monk. Glamour is Theft: A User’s Guide to General Idea, 1969-1978. Toronto:
Art Gallery of York University, 2013.
Philip Monk. “Picturing the Toronto Art Community: The Queen Street Years,” C:
International Contemporary Art, No 59, Fall 1998.
Also available: http://www.yorku.ca/agyu/curate/site_design/essays/PicturingToronto.pdf

8

By discussing the subcultural politics of General Idea’s work, the claims about
subcultural politics writ large that its practice makes, and the role that sexuality plays
within its presentation of subcultural politics, I offer an alternative way to consider the
history of art, politics, and culture—and, most importantly, their intersection—since the
late 1960s. General Idea highlighted the impact that art can have as a political space for
specific subcultures, forming as it did within a context where artistic and queer
subcultures overlapped almost completely. While the aim of this dissertation is not to
make a claim that all art, or indeed all subcultures, enact the kind of politics I describe
within General Idea’s work, it is to demonstrate that potential within their overlap,
particularly for subaltern subjects. It is also to highlight the importance of looking not
only to economic, political, and cultural contexts to situate certain practices, but also to
the social—not as a general field but as a specific set of affective networks and
exchanges, both formal and, typically more impactfully, informal, that frame how many
people experience their everyday lives. The possibilities for art’s impact broaden when
we allow it to function as a social phenomenon, and this in turn allows for a broader
understanding of what constitutes political activity.

Biography as Practice

Subjectivization and identification were two cultural processes that General Idea
inhabited from the outset of its career, with Bronson, Partz, and Zontal deploying both
within their individual practices before coming together to form a group. General Idea
presented biography, and, as connected to biography, history, as a part of its practice,

9

putting a spin on biography as an outmoded method of art history—gone with the
practice of reading artistic output as an expression of the artist’s psyche and soul
autonomous from its economic, political, and social context. It created a biography
through its work, and so self-consciously incorporated its social context into various
projects that biography is impossible to separate from its art. Thus the group has a “real”
biography, in the sense that it had a set number of members, who were born on specific
dates, but also a “fake” biography, that it created to give an identity to itself as a group,
performing identification and subjectivization as significatory cultural practices that deny
the categories and valuations laid onto identity and subjectivity as ostensibly essential
phenomena.
4

This group biography is additionally fake because, at times, it lies, presenting as
truth details that never occurred, for example by creating documentation around the Miss
General Ideas from 1968 and 1969 although the first pageant did not occur until 1970.
The group’s choice, in 1970 to back-date itself to 1968, with all of the political turmoil of
that year across the globe, provides an early clue to the role that politics would play in its
work. To the extent that playing with identity and subjectivity were an object of General
Idea’s work, biography was a tool for its practice. Its use of biography was part and
parcel of its general play with history, and with documentation, as it appropriated found
objects and used them to create histories for these events that never occurred and people
who never existed. History, and its physical manifestations via the archive, were tools for

4
This aspect of General Idea’s work is most systematically considered in Deborah
Barkun’s unpublished 2005 dissertation. She discusses how General Idea created an
identity for itself, as a collective, and goes on to consider what happens to the singular
group identity when the individuals who constitute the group begin to deteriorate, as two
of the group’s three members contracted HIV in the late 1980s.

10

culture, and sites to be occupied for subcultural politics that form an interrelated but
distinct legacy of opposition from that present within identity politics.
General Idea, which would eventually solidify as AA Bronson, Felix Partz, and
Jorge Zontal, began in 1969, work both in the home that the core members shared in
Toronto and also in theaters and artist-run spaces across Canada.
5
The first time that the
group showed under the name of General Idea occurred in 1970, at an exhibition called
Concept 70 at the Nightingale Gallery, which would become the vital artist-run center, A
Space, the next year. The simultaneously military and corporate nature of the group’s
name—echoing such companies as General Motors and General Electric—demonstrates
both that the matter of authorship was not central to its project, but also that the
production of identity was a central part of its practice. During the early seventies, the
group’s membership was intentionally nebulous. The “Artist Directory” that General
Idea published as part of its participation in the Mail Art network and included in its
FILE Megazine from its first publication in 1972 through 1974, demonstrates this

5
Assumed names for Michael Tims, Ron Gabe, and Jorge Saia respectively. The word
play of their assumed names references Marcel Duchamp’s Rrose Selavy, a character that
the artist created in collaboration with the photographer Man Ray, who took photographs
of Duchamp as Selavy. In French, Rrose Selavy sounds like the phrase “eros, c’est la
vie,” which translates as “love, that’s life.” The members of the group echo this, with
Jorge Zontal sounding like horizontal (evidently in reference to his penchant for napping)
and Felix Partz regularly riffing off of his last name and the military connotations of
General Idea’s name by raunchily referring to himself as Private Partz. Any project on
General Idea is indebted to Fern Bayer, who cataloged the group’s archive and organized
the vast array of factual information concerning the characters and timeline of General
Idea’s production. Her work in the archive lead to an exhibition, The Search for the
Spirit: General Idea 1968 – 1975, guest curated by Bayer and organized by Christina
Ritchie, at the Art Gallery of Ontario, which ran from October 8 1997 – January 11,
1998.

11

imprecision.
6
(5) It listed not only Bronson, Partz, and Zontal as members, but also other
regular participants in General Idea projects, as many as 12 distinct individuals. In later
years the identity of the group would solidify around Bronson, Partz, and Zontal. The
group began to assert itself as a trio that was simultaneously a singular unit in 1975,
producing self-portraits that represented either the artists or objects in triplicate, insisting
that, “three heads are better than one.”
7
(6) This acknowledgement of the tripartite nature
of the singular group was just the beginning of General Idea’s deconstruction of identity
and subjectivity, and of its incorporation of identification and subjectivization—the
foundation of an individual’s incorporation into the social field—into its investigation of
the alternative politics present within everyday subcultural life.
Each member of General Idea was seeped in both the countercultural ethos and
also the artistic avant-garde of the 1960s, which eventually led them to Toronto.
8
Each
also received formal studio training, though the media that they studied in school did not
automatically dictate their role in the group’s insistently multi-media practice. AA

6
FILE Megazine was a general circulation quarterly periodical that General Idea
published from 1972 until 1989. The publication was a space both to report on Canada’s
conceptual and performance art scene and also to realize art projects by General Idea and
others. Print runs vary from 1,500 to 3,500 copies.
7
Beginning with its Showcards Series, which started in 1975, General Idea aggressively
re-branded itself as a trio, using triples within works for which it made sense, and
creating a number of self-portraits. Not all of these self-portraits represented the group,
but, in representing something in threes, poodles, for example, or icons from the material
compiled around the Miss General Idea Pageant, the group insisted upon its tripartite
constitution.
Philip Monk discusses this specifically in the context of people projecting solidity
and consistency onto General Idea, and aspects of its practice, that are in fact not fixed or
constant. This disregard to the group’s cultivated mutability overlooks the ways in which
the processes of making-meaning were objects for General Idea’s art.
Philip Monk. “Crisis (and Coping) in the Work of General Idea,” Institutions by Artists:
Vol. 2. Vancouver: Filip Magazine, 2012.
8
Records concerning the biography of General Idea, and its three primary members,
reside in the General Idea Archive at the National Gallery of Canada.

12

Bronson (Michael Tims, b. 1946) was born in Vancouver, and as the child of a member
of the Canadian Air Force, he moved often before enrolling in architecture school at the
University of Manitoba. While in Winnepeg, Bronson became involved in both
underground publishing and alternative education. Felix Partz (Ron Gabe, 1945-1994),
was born in Winnepeg and also attended the University of Manitoba, but studied painting
before turning to a more conceptually inflected practice. Jorge Zontal (Slobodan Saia-
Levy, 1944-1994), originally from Parma, Italy, was the most widely traveled of the
group, having been born to Yugoslavian Jewish parents who had fled World War Two.
While his father was caught and sent to Auschwitz, his mother was able to escape with
him to Switzerland. After the family was reunited at the end of the war, it emigrated to
Israel and then Venezuela. Like Bronson, Zontal enrolled to study architecture, but at
Dalhousie University in Halifax. His interest quickly gravitated towards film and
performance, however. To a greater extent than Bronson, Zontal was involved with the
influential Intermedia Society in Vancouver, where he enrolled in workshops with
Deborah Hay, the American choreographer and member of the Judson Dance Theater, in
1968. The influence of insistently interdisciplinary and collaborative artist-run
Intermedia, and of its colleagues in Vancouver, would shape the early years of the
group’s practice significantly.
Bronson and Partz were casually connected while in Manitoba, with Partz dating
a good friend of Bronson’s, Mimi Page.
9
Mimi moved to Toronto in 1969 to participate
in Rochdale College, an experiment in communal living and radical education. Bronson
and Partz reconnected at Rochdale that year and began collaborating with Zontal through

9
Page would become Miss General Idea 1968 when, in 1970, General Idea created
printed materials providing a back-story to that year’s competition.

13

the experimental Theatre Passe Muraille, for which Bronson did design work and Zontal
planned to do some filming.
10
The trio’s first collaboration occurred in conjunction with
the theater in 1969, consisting of installations and performances both in the theater and as
part of a vibrant street theater scene in Toronto. At the same time, the three men were
connected to underground publishing, fashion, and music, each of which would greatly
influence General Idea’s work. After a brief stay in Rochdale, Bronson, Partz, and Zontal
moved into a house together that had a large window facing Gerrard Street. They used
this window to make installations that demonstrated the concerns shaping both the
countercultures from which each artist emerged and the conceptual and performance art
practiced by their contemporaries, highlighting the critiques of culture shared by their
social and artistic context.
11
These early installations, many of which were stores selling
found objects that were perpetually closed until—as a sign would read—a proprietor
returned in a few minutes, display thematic concerns that would occupy the group until
the AIDS-related deaths of Partz and Zontal in 1994, including the relationship between
art and popular culture; art as an integral part of every day social life; and the political
valence of everyday, ephemeral inhabitations of systems and structures of dominant
culture. (7)

10
The archives for the Theatre Passe Muraille, which still operates in Toronto, reside in
Guelph, Ontario, in the theater archives at the University of Guelph.
11
While the nuances, subtleties, and complexities of post-war leftist political culture are
numerous and varied, with no one singular truth unifying the range of thinkers associated
with the moment, certain continuities can be drawn among their thinking. Basing their
thought on a Marxist critique of the effects of capitalism, post-war theorists tried to come
to terms with how capitalism perpetuates itself not only through economic but also
cultural practices. Both the practices and the values of capitalist production and
consumption are perpetuated, reinforced, and naturalized through culture. Post-war leftist
thinkers can be connected in a project to think their way through and out of this
phenomenon.

14

General Idea’s early work consisted of installations, street and theater-based
performance art, videos, and participation in mail art. Throughout the early years,
irrespective of media, its work was intensely collaborative and utterly unconcerned with
the creation of saleable objects. This reflects certain realities of the group’s art-making
context. Canada had neither an established domestic art market nor any connection to
avenues of international art exchange such as existed in New York and Los Angeles.
Despite this fact, Canada turned to the arts as a means of establishing a pan-Canadian
cultural identity in the face of anxiety over the rising cultural hegemony of its southern
neighbor.
12
To enable this artistic production, Canada founded the Canada Council,
which enabled conceptual and performance art practices as well as collaborations across
the country.
13
The Council heavily funded both artist-run spaces and travel grants for
artists, contributing to the context in which conceptual, performance, and ephemeral
practices took precedence over the production of autonomous, marketable objects.
14
This
funding allowed General Idea, and the artists in its network, to engage in collaborative,
long-running practices that unfolded across different artists’ work, and over the course of
years. As such, it also allowed the group to carry out the sustained investigation of

12
For a more detailed discussion of the Canadian art market and Canadian relationships
to American culture, see:
David Burnett and Marilyn Schiff. Contemporary Canadian Art. Edmonton: Hurtig
Publishers Ltd, 1983.
13
Founded on March 28, 1957, with the passage of the Canada Council Act, "the objects
of the Council are to foster and promote the study and enjoyment of, and the production
of works in, the arts, humanities and social sciences." Despite its institution in 1957, the
effect on alternative art spaces was not felt until the late 1960s, in part due to the creation
of Local Initiative Project Grants, artists in residencies, and short-term grants in the 1967-
1968 granting cycle.
For more on the Canada Council, see the organization’s website:
http://www.canadacouncil.ca/
14
Burnett and Schiff. Contemporary Canadian Art. p 182.

15

subcultural politics, and of the role that art plays within subcultural politics, that is the
focus of this dissertation.

Sexuality: The Politics of Subcultures

As this introduction’s epigraph makes clear, General Idea’s practice was shaped
by a fundamental disillusionment not just with traditional forms of electoral politics, but
also with the leftist and civil rights tactics of the 1960s— what Bronson terms
“demonstration and activism.” More than their tactics, the group also rejected their claims
to self-seriousness and aspirations to change the entire world at all. Instead of marches or
love-ins, General Idea systematically investigated, and demonstrated, an alternative form
of politics articulated within the everyday stuff of subcultural participation—listening to
music, making and reading zines, patronizing certain bars and clubs, or even getting
dressed in the morning. Bronson pits the Summer of Love and the Situationist
International, on the one hand, against a slew of subcultures—McLuhan’s global village,
drug culture, underground publishing, and alternative education—on the other, explaining
that the group ultimately turned to the “queer outsider methods of William Burroughs” as
its model for subcultural politics. In the face of the failure of traditional forms of politics,
and also the rejection of sexuality as an effective strategy of alterity by mainstream
opposition movements, as will be discussed in more detail in chapter one, General Idea
returned to the model with which it was familiar, and that already constituted its
subcultural participation.

16

General Idea demonstrated a refusal to engage with institutionalized forms of
politics, because institutionalized forms already shape what is possible within their scope
and thus limit the alternatives that can be imagined. This sees a contemporary expression
in our contemporary politics. We live in a moment that is deeply disillusioned with
traditional institutions and avenues of government and politics, as movements from the
left and the right coalesce around dissatisfaction with the outcomes of our current
legislative system. Interviews with both Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street participants
illustrate this condition. The Tea Party attempts to change politics through traditional
political processes—by electing Tea Party candidates, engaging with representatives, and
even changing voting processes to ensure the likelihood that people who agree with them
can vote and those who don’t, can’t. Occupy’s refusal to participate in traditional forms
of politics, in fact to enumerate a political stance at all (at least as would be recognizable
by anyone associating politics with governmentality), has more in common with the
understanding of politics presented by General Idea. Occupy received frequent criticism
for its lack of explicit goals, of changes it wanted to see in the world and a plan for how
to get there. Part of what Occupy did, though, was to refute this insistence that politics
had to be about long-term goals, permanent change, or defined tactics. Traditional forms
of politics had proved themselves unable, even unwilling, to address problems that
affected large segments of the population, and what Occupy tried to do, consciously or
not, was to find an alternative way to address those problems—an alternative form of
politics. General Idea’s subcultural politics offers some insight into a longer history for
Occupy’s gesture.

17

Incorporated the defining elements of subcultures into its work, General Idea
appropriated activities as banal as sending and receiving fan letters or as complicated as
detourning dominant cultural systems of identification and subjectivization to make local
celebrities replete with their own forms of glamour, riffing off of the Hollywood or art
world star systems. Rather than try to affect social justice via governmental means,
General Idea highlighted how subcultures performatively enact spaces of social justice,
however ephemeral they may be. Unfortunately this social justice is often limited and,
even within subcultures, power is distributed inequitably. This imperfection does not
negate the fact that subcultures present a real alternative to traditional forms of politics,
which frequently offer some sort of recourse for subjects excluded from dominant
political methods by way of race, class, gender, citizenship status, or any of the other
ways that the neoliberal state regulates who is and who is not entitled access to
personhood.
From their earliest formulation, subcultures have been sites for the imagination
and implementation of alternative forms of politics, aimed at making space in the present
rather than changing conditions in the future, and of acting in and on the social field
rather than through formal institutions, governmental or private. General Idea drew on
this understanding of subcultures as political phenomena, based on a conception of
culture in general as a political site. Subcultures, General Idea insisted, are political
precisely because they highlight the political operation of culture at large—the ways that
culture imparts values and hierarchies that privilege some and subjugate others, while
making those inequalities seem natural and given. As I will discuss in more detail in
chapter one, General Idea and the correspondence network of which it was a part

18

displayed a form of politics that also was evident in Canadian Gay Liberation. Each used
the mechanisms of meaning production and valuation present within dominant culture in
a manner that exposed culture as a signifying practice. General Idea frequently
demonstrated its influence by French theorist Roland Barthes, through direct citation and
also through the group’s extended engagement with myth, drawing on his discussion of
how particular ways of understanding the world become common sense through their
repetition within popular culture.
15

General Idea’s practice drew extensively from dominant culture. It appropriated
heavily from popular culture, including movies and magazines, in addition to mimicking
the systems through which dominant culture established and regulated norms. This
relationship to dominant culture, operating against it from within rather than try to
overthrow it or establish some kind of outside, is an important part of how subcultures
work. As they were described by Stuart Hall and others at the the University of
Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS), which was founded in
1964, subcultures are part of dominant culture, and they operate within and against
mainstream social norms rather than in an autonomous sphere where they are totally free
to determine their own systems and structures.
16
Just as norms shift from one dominant
culture to another, so too do subcultures differ, manifesting different forms and, as such,
different specific political strategies. Part of what subcultures demonstrate is that it is not
possible to have one set of political actions, or even political beliefs, apply across all

15
Roland Barthes. Mythologies. Trans. Annette Lavers. NYC: Hill and Wang, 1972.
Roland Barthes. Image-Music-Text. Trans. Stephen Heath. NY: Hill and Wang 1978.
16
John Clark, Stuart Hall, Tony Jefferson, and Brian Roberts. “Theory I: Subcultures,
Cultures and Class,” Resistance Through Rituals: Youth Subcultures in Post-War Britain.
Eds. Stuart Hall and Tony Jefferson. NYC: Routledge, 2000, p 9-74.

19

situations—anti-normative activity differs for different people in different times and
places. General Idea embraced this hybridity, as will be discussed in more detail in
relation to the video Test Tube (1979) in chapter three.
While the group drew from the visual archive of dominant culture, the heart of its
interest in subcultures lay in its inhabitation of the institutions of mainstream society.
This included literal institutions, like television, but also less evident ones, perhaps most
importantly the act of signification itself—the way that cultural processes assign and
reinforce meaning and value. Toronto-based critic and frequent General Idea interlocutor
Philip Monk described the group’s work as structural and semiologic, and, as such,
“verbal processes are precisely those of the making of General Idea’s art.”
17
CCCS
scholars discussed this under the rubric of stylization, which addressed not specific goods
or objects, but rather the process by which goods and objects are used within the
subculture. Stylization within subcultures is a semiotic practice, which highlights
meaning as a performative, constructed phenomenon. Dick Hebdige, the scholar at CCCS
who most extensively engaged with stylization, explained two particular strategies
through which subcultural participants enacted subcultural politics—strategies that
formed a base for General Idea’s practice. These practices, détournement and bricolage,
describe taking objects and practices from dominant culture and deploying them to
different ends not to re-define the object or practice, but precisely to show how culture is

17
As mentioned in fn 2, Monk wrote extensively about General Idea through the late 70s
and early 80s, and continues to engage regularly with the group’s work, and the legacy of
its practice for the art scene in Toronto. He reads its work as strictly structural, alongside
not only Roland Barthes but also Claude Levi-Strauss. While many of the interpretations
that he offers about General Idea and semiotics resonate with my reading, he divorces the
group entirely from its social and political context, and does not address the ways in
which the group took up structuralism itself as a system in inhabit and re-articulate.
Philip Monk. Glamour is Theft, p 16.

20

a signifying process that reinforces and naturalizes norms, values, and forms of life.
18

General Idea used these subcultural strategies as the media of its practice, and they form
the basis of its subcultural politics.
Hebdige discusses examples of bricolage and détournement that are regular parts
of the daily routines of subcultural participants—getting dressed, socializing with friends,
reading particular books or magazines, attending music shows, or engaging in specific
leisure activities. This interest in the everyday, in the mundane and the banal (though its
effects were often the opposite to denizens of the mainstream) as political sites, shares an
observation made by French scholar Michel De Certeau that it is through the quotidian
activities of people’s daily habits that subjects internalize the norms and values of
dominant culture.
19
Within the history of art, however, and in particular the history of art
that General Idea reference within its work, the everyday carried particular interest. The
group’s correspondence network in the first few years of its existence was called
Canadada, and it awarded the title of Miss General Idea 1971-1983 to Marcel Dot, who
referenced Marcel Duchamp both through his name and the exaggerated drag of his
winning photograph, which echoes Man Ray’s photographs of Rrose Selavy. (8)
Early avant-garde practices looked to everyday life and the social field as sites
replete with political potential, and attempted to collapse art into everyday life as a way
to enact political interventions because the division of art and the everyday is itself a
construct with political consequences. Although his dismissal of the post-war avant-garde
is routinely met with suspicion, Peter Bürger’s description of how historic avant-garde

18
Dick Hebdige. Subculture: the Meaning of Style. NYC: Routledge, 1979.
19
Michel De Certeau. The Practice of Everyday Life. Trans. Steven Rendall. Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1984.

21

practices sought to integrate art and life to provide a realm of genuine experience outside
of commodified mass culture still holds currency as an account of the political aspirations
of the historic avant-garde—it appropriated the forms and channels of mass culture to
undermine it, enacting its own subcultural politics. This reading of the political operation
of the historical avant-garde also shares subcultural interventions into what constitutes in
the first place, empowering as political activity that traditional understandings of politics
dismiss as frivolous or inadequately revolutionary. While he disagrees with Bürger’s
interpretation of the political efficacy of the post-war neo-avant-garde, art historian and
critic Benjamin Buchloh reaffirms Bürger’s presentation of a subcultural form of politics
within the historic avant-garde. It sought to create a form of politics, and of resistance,
that rejected the determination of dominant culture that politics are either completely
critical or completely resistant.
20
Bronson recalled how General Idea’s politics were
shaped not only by the failure of activism and of demonstration, but also by an unease
with limiting politics to only that which would change the world. While important,
changing the world was less important to the group than creating space for alternatives in
the present.
More than simply critique dominant culture, General Idea highlighted how
subcultures, including Gay Liberation, used cultural mechanisms of signification to
produce alternative social orders.
21
This is the politics of subcultures that motivated

20
Benjamin Buchloh. “Introduction,” Neo Avant-Garde and the Culture Industry: Essays
on European and American Art from 1955 to 1975. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press,
2001, p xvii-xxxiii.
21
While the group did not cite him literally, as it did with Barthes, the brand of Marxism
that it evinced drew heavily on the French philosopher Louis Althusser’s observations
about culture and politics, both in relation to the politics of dominant culture, but also
how culture offers spaces for resistance. While culture normalizes dominant forms of

22

General Idea, one oriented towards the social field rather than affecting changes in public
policy. The difference between these two forms of politics maps onto observations made
by political philosophers Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau. They offer two terms that
mark this difference: politics and the political. Politics refers to actions by or geared
towards government, while the political refers to how subjects constitute themselves
through relations to others, relations that often occur within the field of culture.
22
I
privilege the term political because of how it marks an engagement with culture, rather
than governments. It also is distinct from the etymology of the word activism, with its
associations of direct action and protest—which Bronson dismissed as heterosexual
idealism. Art critic and curator Lucy Lippard, who has devoted her practice to different
modes of thinking and enacting politics through art, has made a similar distinction
between political and activist art, wherein political art causes people to think differently
through images, while activist artists work primarily in “a social and/or political context,”
trying to enact specific changes.
23
General Idea enumerated a form of politics that
operated within the social field, causing power to flow differently, for however short it
might be, by rearticulating culture to open up a space within it for different ways of
being.

being, its strategies of signification can be applied to different purposes—a condition that
subcultures have used to great effect for their participants, any impact it might have on
larger culture notwithstanding.
Louis Althusser. “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes toward an
Investigation),” Lenin and Philosophy, and Other Essays. Trans. Ben Brewster. NYC:
New Left Books, 1971, p 127-188.
22
Mouffe, Chantal and Ernesto Laclau. Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a
Radical Democratic Politics, NYC: Verso, 1985.
23
Lucy R Lippard. “Too Political? Forget It,” Art Matters: How the Culture Wars
Changed America. Eds Brian Wallis, Marianne Weems, and Philip Yenawine. NYC:
NYU Press, 1999, p 49.

23

The idea of engagement with the social field has structured a range of art practices
over the last twenty years, presented with names like Relational Aesthetics or Social
Practice art. These practices typically manifest their relationship to culture in one of two
ways: either by addressing culture directly by serving some sort of social function—
starting a school, for example, like the Bruce High Quality Foundation’s Bruce High
Quality Foundation University (2009-Present), or aiding social movements, like Tania
Bruguera’s Immigrant Movement International (2010-2015); or viewing the artwork as a
setting for social relations, like with Rikrit Tiravanija’s cooking projects or Liam
Gillick’s architectural structures that exist as frameworks for interaction more than
specific and discrete objects themselves. The popularity of these practices, and the
investment that various art communities have in determining how they can provide
alternatives to our contemporary global neo-liberal world order, is clear in the popularity
of the Creative Time summits, which have been held annually in Manhattan since 2009,
with remarkable attendance numbers given the relatively limited scope of the discussion.
While these practices share with General Idea an interest in creating alternatives, and
while General Idea in fact appears in various books trying to theorize socially oriented
art, the group’s practice differs in a number of respects, many of which stem from its
engagement with subcultures and its insistence upon subcultural politics. Its work offers a
history for these contemporary practices, but it also offers contemporary art historians
and critics a different precedent and vocabulary to consider the various ways art can
engage with the social field, and the political significance of that engagement.
24

24
For more on Relational Aesthetics, Social Practice Art, and the Creative Time
Summits, see:
Nato Thompson. “Creative Time Summit Overview,” creativetime.org. Web, 6/2013.

24

As the quote that begins this introduction demonstrates, General Idea framed its
interpretation of subcultural politics within the notion of sexuality, as a foil to
“heterosexual idealism.” It set itself, and its Burroughs-inspired viral queer outsider
methods, apart from the heterosexual idealism of the counter culture and the New Left
based on their methods and also their aims. While using language, gestures, and imagery
that denote sex and desire, General Idea presented sexuality as more than that—as an
embodied critique of how dominant culture normalizes and regulates morals, values, and
hierarchies. General Idea employed sexuality as a way to engage critically with culture.
For the group, it denoted the process through which subcultural participants created
alternatives, within which they could have some form of agency to establish their own
terms of identification and subjectivization and to briefly exist without being subject to
the immediate policing of dominant culture; however ephemeral it may be. Stylization,
for Hebdige, was about the process of using objects rather than the objects themselves,
turning the noun of style into the verb of stylization. Likewise, for General Idea sexuality,
identification, and subjectivization took phenomena presumed to be fixed, natural, given,
and also, often, linked—sex, identity, subjectivity—and demonstrated how they
accumulated their significance through the process of culture. Subcultures do not present
different processes for producing meaning and value; they render visible how all of
culture is a process of signification and reification. The group took the means through
which dominant culture ascribes value and used those means to give value to the

Nicolas Bourriaud. Relational Aesthetics. Paris: Les Presses du Réel, 1998 (English
2002).
Nato Thompson. Living as Form: Socially Engaged Art 1991-2011. Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, 2012.
Claire Bishop. Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship. NYC:
Verso, 2012.

25

valueless, be it kitsch objects or queer subjects. Sexuality was subcultural politics, for
General Idea, and the group deployed it across levels of culture—from the basement bar
to art history itself—to highlight how art can be part of the political expression of
everyday subcultural life. The group highlighted how art objects themselves do and
make, and possess agency as a vessel of history and a purveyor of knowledge in addition
to the object’s traditional role as a mirror of culture or individual expression.
Sexuality was an essential aspect of General Idea’s subcultural politics, both in
terms of its embrace of the gestures, motifs, and objects of non-normative sex, but also as
a broader concept that encapsulated the whole process of identification and
subjectivization. The group paid particular attention to ways in which subcultural
practices demonstrate the performative nature of identity. The group literally took up
identity as an artwork, not only in the individual artists’ identities but also as the artists
created a singular identity for General Idea. Its performances, videos, installations, FILE
editorials, and ephemera show how repetition produces meaning, for words or objects as
much as for bodies. Despite the fact that homosexuality was legalized in 1968 in Canada,
it nevertheless remained a homophobic culture and one of the objectives for Gay
Liberation was to re-articulate a culture that deemed some bodies normal and some
bodies deviant and disgusting, to render that kind of valuation irrelevant.
25
As such, it
took the means through which dominant culture rejected homosexuality and used it to
affirm it, not as normal, but for its deviance. The group applied sexuality to any instance

25
Gay activists also agitated to change laws and public policies that allowed
discrimination, including sodomy laws, and anti-discrimination codes that did not include
sexual orientation in hiring and housing. The Body Politic covered this activism as much
as it participated in subcultural forms of politics.

26

of this critique, whether related to sex and desire or not, because of how it related to
signifying practices written on and through bodies.
The group’s focus on the body, and on forms of cultural critique enacted through
the body, resonates with French philosopher Michel Foucault’s concept of biopower.
Foucault describes biopower as a method through which the modern, capitalist nation-
state controls populations by disciplining bodies via productive, and not just repressive,
processes.
26
This carries the consequence that norms and discourse create the possibilities
and limits for bodies, in addition to explicit forms of regulation that allow and prohibit
behavior. General Idea demonstrated how subcultures provide the possibility, however
briefly, for power to flow in the opposite direction. Subcultures provide a space to
rearticulate norms and discourse, and for the bodies of the participants to enact that
rearticulation. As Judith Butler reminds us, subjects never have complete freedom to self-
determine their identities. In Bodies that Matter, she argues that the subversive potential
of performativity is precisely that it disarticulates cultural norms that ostensibly find their
root in the presumed materiality of bodies, but in fact are what gives those bodies their
legibility.
27
As such, its political intervention lies not in subjects’ ultimate autonomy to
create whatever identity they want, but rather in highlighting how norms shape the
possibilities for identity. Over the course of its twenty-five year practice General Idea
increasingly abstracted this intervention, removing not only reference to specific
subcultures but also the body altogether while still enacting the underlying critical
process. In so doing, it demonstrated how sexuality functions as a general form of

26
Michel Foucault. The History of Sexuality Volume 1: An Introduction. Trans. Robert
Hurley. NYC: Pantheon Books, 1978.
27
Judith Butler. Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex.” NYC: Routledge,
1993.

27

subcultural politics operative in different contexts and for different purposes and not just
limited to gay rights.
Precedents for discussing sexuality as a form of cultural politics larger than
deviant sexual activity exits within the field of queer and performance studies. Of
particular influence for this project are works by Jack Halberstam, José Esteban Muñoz,
and Roderick Ferguson. Each of these scholars, through different sorts of examples, has
convincingly argued for sexuality as a demonstration of culture-as-performance, through
but not limited to deviant sex acts or deviations from gender norms. Each also argues
how these demonstrations occur precisely through a re-articulation of dominant culture
that negates the values and norms it is meant to inscribe and naturalize, what Muñoz has
called “disidentification.”
28
More than just reject normative forms of being, however,
Muñoz presents disidentification as a rejection of identity as it exists within
heteropatriarchial bourgeois culture altogether. Ferguson likewise argues for the
understanding of identity as a given, stable, natural essence as a heteropatriarchal
construct, and specifically discusses how women of color, and black lesbians in
particular, construct an alternative form of coalitional politics around this
disidentification.
29
Halberstam applies similar observations about the political potential of
queer bodies, of how they manifest an embodied critique that highlights culture as a
signifying practice, to artistic practices that utilize a subcultural methodology without
representing queer bodies, offering a framework for my reading of General Idea’s

28
José Esteban Muñoz. Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of
Politics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999.
29
Roderick A. Ferguson. Aberrations in Black: Towards a Queer of Color Critique.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004.

28

demonstration of subcultural politics within works that manifest no clearly evident
relationship to specific subcultures, or even specific subcultural practices.
30

This branch of queer studies draws upon subcultural theory to insist upon the
political importance of practices that bear no relationship to official institutions of
government, or of politics. Culture is political because it provides a means through which
to create alternative systems and structures, but also norms. General Idea presented art as
another form of culture, as another subcultural space that carried the potential for
subcultural politics. Curator Helen Molesworth describes this in a show, Shared Women,
from 2007. Echoing Bronson’s disillusionment with traditional forms of politics, she
describes how “the artists of Shared Women seek to make their own [world]. Given that
the public sphere under the current political regime is so bankrupt, why, much of this
work asks, would we even want "equality" within it? Better to create a counter-public
sphere, one interwoven with the existing world (pop-culture and high-art references
abound in Shared Women), but nonetheless a self-generated framework.”
31
She describes
how the artists in the show construct this counter-public sphere on the basis of queer
social life. Though not included in Molesworth’s exhibition, which focused on the scene
discussed in the preface to this dissertation, General Idea is in lineage with these feminist,
queer artists who build their work out of the ways in which their overlapping artistic and
social circles appropriate and rearticulate the systems and images of dominant culture
within their everyday lives. It was these contemporary practices helped me come to this
interpretation of the General Idea’s work.

30
Judith Halberstam. In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural
Lives. NY: NYU Press, 2005.
31
Helen Molesworth. “Worlds Apart: Helen Molesworth on Generations of Feminism,”
Artforum. V XLV, N 9, May 2007, p 102.

29

At the same time as I was formulating the arguments of this dissertation, I was
able to witness firsthand the practices represented in Shared Women. There was an
immediate feedback loop between the work I was experiencing in person, and at times
participated in as an audience member, and the archival work I was researching, which I
expand upon in this dissertation’s conclusion. The extent to which my understanding of
General Idea’s work shifted in its interaction with the contemporary practices erased
temporal distinctions between the two moments, with the contemporary work inflecting
the earlier as much as General Idea influenced the later. The group enacted a similar kind
of circumstance with the interactions it staged within its own practice, rendering art
history itself as a site for subcultural politics. General Idea presented art history as a
signifying practice, legitimizing itself, and its methodology, by pointing towards
precedents for its work in earlier practices. As I will discuss in chapter four, the group
legitimized not only its form of politics, but also the role that art played within this
politics, by enacting a form of queer art history through its practice—by referencing and
reenacting earlier moments from art history, starting with Casper David Friedrich and
including more contemporary figures as Marcel Duchamp and Joseph Beuys. General
Idea produced a queer avant-garde, not by creating a canon of work by gay artists, but by
putting those figures and practices through a queer process, by appropriating and
rearticulating them, by taking them up in such a way as to make them performative
objects, by showing how they demonstrate a potential for a queer operation. In so doing,
the group demonstrated how even the systems of knowledge production are susceptible to
subcultural politics, and highlighted the role that art could play within that process of

30

defining and giving value to subalterity, through the systems of culture but in accordance
to different logics and ethics.

Subcultures, Sexuality, Politics, Art

This dissertation considers a number of examples to present an argument about
how General Idea’s work highlights the political operation of subcultural life, as a politics
of the present that uses dominant culture against itself, rather than a politics of the future
that looks to permanently change society. I also highlight how the group presented this
subcultural politics with the language, imagery, and gestures of sexuality, highlighting
the ways that dominant culture deploys sexuality as a juridical force not only to
undermine specific norms of gender and of sex, but also to undermine the way that
gender and sex function as tools that dominant culture uses to propagate itself more
generally. These case studies unfold chronologically, not in an effort to present a
coherent history of the group’s practice, or because chronological time was important to
the group—in fact it was not, as linear time was another construct of dominant culture to
be appropriated and rearticulated. The increasing distance from literal, on the ground
subcultures that manifests in the group’s work as time progresses, however, due in part to
the continually evolving nature of subcultures and in part to the group’s rising status
within the art world, contributes to its ability to build from specific examples of
subcultural politics to a more general theory of the same. It defines how politics operates
within subcultures, and later deploys those strategies outside of a self-consciously
subcultural context.

31

Chapter One, “Sexuality and the Politics of Social Life,” focuses on two major
performance works, The 1971 Miss General Idea Pageant, and The Hollywood Decca
Dance (1974). (9) Both pieces stemmed from General Idea’s mail and performance art
network, a subset of Fluxus that participants referred to as Canadada. Canadada was as
much a social network as it was an artistic one, and provides a basis for my argument
about General Idea’s integration of art and subcultural life, and its commitment to
subcultural politics. These two performances establish the almost complete overlap
between General Idea’s artistic avant-garde cohort and its queer subcultures, and they
demonstrate how General Idea and its cohort used their artistic practices as extensions of
their subcultural lives, setting the stage for the group’s engagement with subcultures and
subcultural processes throughout its career. By considering these projects together with a
close reading of The Body Politic, a Toronto based gay newspaper that would quickly
grow into a major voice for Canadian Gay Liberation, I contextualize General Idea and
its cohort’s understanding of politics within liberationist social movements. This is in
contrast to the explicit criticism that the group, and these movements, received from
leftists committed to class as the only real axis for lasting social change. These critics
dismissed cultural interventions as frivolous and ineffective, terms often used to describe
homosexuality within both dominant and leftist culture.
My second chapter, “Borderline Culture: Sexuality as Subcultural Politics,” takes
up two concepts through which General Idea theorized its political intervention as it
moved away from the intensely collaborative work discussed in chapter one, and thus
materialized a practice that less literally served as a space for the construction and
realization of its subcultures. Instead of contributing to already existing subcultures, these

32

concepts became the ground upon which General Idea built an audience for itself out of
already existing subcultures in Toronto, creating an audience for its brand of avant-garde
art from already existing audiences for other underground media—publishing, fashion,
punk rock, etc. At the same time, through these concepts, it elaborated the connection
between subcultures and sexuality, presenting sexuality as a form of subcultural politics.
The first of these concepts is “the borderline case,” which was considered extensively in
an article in the group’s FILE Megazine in 1972. (10) General Idea used “borderline
case” to stand in for its critical cultural intervention: occupying the border between
ostensibly oppositional elements to highlight the dialectical nature of contemporary life.
More than simply critique this phenomenon, however, General Idea demonstrated that
this process is precisely the building block of subcultural life. The second key concept is
that of “glamour,” most thoroughly presented in an editorial in FILE in 1975—commonly
called “the glamour manifesto”—and a performance, Going Thru the Motions (1975),
that was pendant to the editorial. (11) General Idea presented glamour as a borderline
case, as a means through which gender norms become naturalized, and deployed it as an
exemplar of its subcultural politics, to the extent that subcultures deploy the systems of
culture but highlight them as agents rather than natural processes. This critical operation
was the basis for the subculture it built through its own work.
In Chapter Three, “Cocktails, Tchotchkes, and Poodles: Subcultures as Signifying
Practice,” I turn to two videos, Test Tube (1979) and Shut the Fuck Up (1985), in which
General Idea explicitly theorized how its work intervened into traditional ideas about
what constitutes politics, precisely because of its strategy of parodically occupying the
systems and structures of dominant culture. (12) Using the language of research and

33

development, cocktails, and television, Test Tube presents an argument for a politics of
contingency, hybridity, and flexibility, as opposed to the firm dogmatic stances of
capitalism, or fascism, or communism. Shut the Fuck Up emphasizes art as a political
site, demonstrating both how culture shapes art but also how art can intervene in culture.
These videos demonstrate how politics itself is a borderline case with good objects and
methods and bad objects and methods. Given its disillusionment with traditional forms of
both dominant and oppositional politics, which the group observed shared a notion of
what constitutes politics in the first place, General Idea not surprisingly reveled in taking
the bad position. As the group gained more international acclaim and became less
physically rooted, spending more time in Europe and New York City and less in Toronto,
it moved away from literally representing subcultures in these videos, demonstrating how
art can manifest subcultural methods and thus enact subcultural politics without depicting
specific subcultures. These videos specifically consider, and present, how subcultural
politics can operate outside of literal subcultural spaces.
The final chapter, “Literal Metaphors: AIDS, Infection, and Abstraction,” focuses
on General Idea’s AIDS logo, first realized as a painting in 1987 and thereafter in a vast
array of permutations, from a monumental sculpture to a cover of the Journal of the
American Medical Association. (13) The group appropriated Robert Indiana’s famous
LOVE design, but reconfigured it to read “AIDS” in the same format, font, and color
scheme. As a painting without any representation of specific subcultural practices or
objects, the work is a culmination of the group’s abstraction of subcultural life to
highlight the politics inherent to that life. But at the same time it is painfully concrete,
presenting the name of a virus that was ravaging General Idea’s artistic and social

34

networks via a project that mimicked the process of virality and contagion—its strategy
throughout its career that took on new valence in the context of AIDS. The group
intended a specific sort of political intervention with AIDS, but through the different
permutations of the work it roped art history itself into its argument about subcultures and
politics. Through AIDS, General Idea also presented a queer art history, building on its
own art historicity since its first projects in 1969. Its queer art history was based on a set
of queer practices, not necessarily the practices of self-identified queers. But it also was a
form of art history that is itself queer because of its insistence upon conjecture,
imagination, and speculation over evidence and proof. By embarking upon this art
historical intervention in the context of its AIDS interventions, the group imbued art
history, as a method of knowledge production and legitimization, with a political
operation available to but also paralleling the processes of subcultures.
Throughout its career, General Idea occupied the systems and structures of
dominant culture—from the concrete: the beauty pageant or the lifestlye magazine; to the
abstract: naturalizing meaning through repetition—to make its art, highlighting that
parodic process as the process of subcultural participation. It presented a different form of
politics, with different sites of materialization. Because its art objects and practices were
also subcultural objects and processes, General Idea insisted upon these sites as
themselves agents of political intervention, as progenitors of knowledge and of
legitimacy and of history that operated outside of dominant insistence on evidence,
teleology, official sanction, or even permanence. All of these observations fell within the
rubric of sexuality for the group precisely because of the ultimate significance and
consequence that they held for bodies. I present its observations about art, culture, and

35

politics, contextualizing it within a moment that, much like our own, experienced intense
disillusionment with governmental politics and revolutionary overthrow. This dissertation
is a historical account that also highlights aspects present within contemporary practice
that are overlooked by too tight a policing of what constitutes the political.

36

Chapter One – Sexuality and the Politics of Social Life
Intro
Two searchlights rotated outside of the entrance to the Art Gallery of Ontario’s
Walker Court on the evening of October 1, 1971, as the audience arrived for the 1971
Miss General Idea Pageant.
1
In total, 339 individuals purchased the $2.50 Beauty
Without Cruelty ticket both to attend and, as it turns out, to participate directly in the
event. There was more to the semi-scripted performance than just the action on the stage.
The performance was filmed, as the group originally intended to broadcast it on
television, and as such the audience was more than a passive participant. The cameras
rolled from the first limo that pulled up to the red carpet through the crowd’s exit,
including the intermission with its free Japanese wafers, coffee served in silver pots, and
75-cent sangria. The extravagant staging of everyday social activity was both a frame
and a central part of the Pageant, exemplifying an often-overlooked aspect of General
Idea’s practice.
2
As this chapter argues, the group intended its artistic practice to

1
Information about the 1971 Miss General Idea Pageant, unless stated otherwise, is from
the General Idea Archive at the National Gallery of Canada. For a more detailed
presentation of the Pageant, along with the rest of General Idea’s work from its inception
until 1975, see:
The Search for the Spirit: General Idea 1968-1975. Eds. Fern Bayer and Christina
Ritchie. Toronto: AGO, 1997.
2
Most literature on the group separates it from its social context, discussing the work in
relation to its engagement with the art world but not any specific cultural milieu. It is my
argument in this dissertation, however, that it is precisely this cultural milieu that shapes
the form, content, and politics, of General Idea. Additionally, the group is mostly
discussed in relation to politics when it engaged in fund or consciousness raising for
various anti-gay crackdowns throughout Toronto in the late 1970s and early 1980s,
including raids in The Body Politic and the bathhouses in Toronto. Much of the discourse
about art and politics in contemporary art grows out of this reluctance to discuss as
political any art that is not involved in some kind of direct politics. One of the larger aims
of this dissertation is to intervene in this circumstance, and demonstrate how artists saw

37

function as a social practice, highlighting the political consequence of everyday
subcultural life—of drinking and cruising, of reading ‘zines and going to shows, but also
of fabricating identities and entire alternative social orders.
3

This chapter introduces the politics of General Idea’s work, drawn from and
staged within the various subcultures in which the group participated. The group
appropriated the form of its subcultural social life quite literally in the first few years of
its career. This aspect of its practice is particularly evident in the collaborative mail and
performance projects it created under the auspices of Canadada—a subset of the Fluxus
correspondence art network that saw its peak of popularity in the late 1960s and early
1970s. Two performances in particular exemplify General Idea’s use of the social
substance of its subcultures to offer a reconfiguration of what constitutes politics. These
two performances, The 1971 Miss General Idea Pageant and The Hollywood Decca
Dance (1974), demonstrate how the group was able to meld art and social life to proffer

their work as participating in a kind of politics embedded in the fabric of cultural
practice.
3
A whole range of literature from outside of art history specifically addresses the
question of the politics of subcultural social life. The research of such scholars as Stuart
Hall and Dick Hebdige has influenced my interpretation of General Idea, but, more
formatively, work from within queer studies, including seminal texts by Jack Halberstam,
José Esteban Muñoz, and Roderick Ferguson provide me with a model for interpreting
subcultural production as a site of intersection between art and politics.
Resistance Through Rituals: Youth Subcultures in Post-War Britain. Eds. Stuart Hall and
Tony Jefferson. NY: Routledge, 2000.
Dick Hebdige. Subculture: The Meaning of Style. NYC: Routledge, 1979.
Roderick A. Ferguson. Aberrations in Black: Towards a Queer of Color Critique.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004.
Judith Halberstam. In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives.
NY: NYU Press, 2005.
José Estaban Muñoz. Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. NYC:
NYU Press, 2009.

38

an alternative form of political engagement.
4
Both performances were simultaneously
subcultural social events and art projects, and demonstrate how participants within
Canadada used art as a way to materialize their subculture.
The 1971 Miss General Idea Pageant was a public ceremony that occurred at the
AGO, but it was not a typical beauty pageant. While it possessed contestants, with
judges and winners and losers, the competition was based on a series of photographs that
the participants submitted, per instructions included in a submissions packet that General
Idea sent to sixteen participants in its mail art network.
5
(14) As such, with this
performance the group staged an elaborate send-up of the art world as a site of popular
culture, and in fact a form of a popularity contest. Instructional material included in the
kit directed each individual to send in eight pictures of either themself or a stand-in in

4
Peter Bürger’s 1973 book, Theory of the Avant-Garde, still functions as a touchstone for
discussions about the politics of art, and the possibility for and significance of collapsing
art and life. His denial of art as a productive part of leftist politics since the Second World
War, however, contrasts with the work of contemporary scholars who address work that
specifically engages with everyday social life as the material of its practice. Such social
practice work, deftly supported by such organizations as Creative Time and written about
extensively by Claire Bishop, provides an alternative model of art, of politics, and of their
confluence in the social field. Although they differ in their presentation of the specific
political operation of the post-war avant-garde, Benjamin Buchloh and Hal Foster also
elaborate the political potential of these later practices in a manner that has influenced my
reading of General Idea.
Peter Bürger. Theory of the Avant-Garde. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1984.
www.creativetime.org
Claire Bishop. Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship. NYC:
Verso, 2012.
Benjamin Buchloh. “Introduction,” Neo Avant-Garde and the Culture Industry: Essays
on European and American Art from 1955 to 1975. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001, p
xvii-xxxiii.
Hal Foster. “Who’s Afraid of the Neo-Avant-Garde?” The Return of the Real: The
Avante-Garde at the End of the Century. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996, p 1-33.
5
Packets were sent to Doug Barry, Marcel Dot, Janis Campbell, Tina Miller, Michaele
Berman, Margaret Coleman, Marnie Wright, Mr Peanut, Gum Vasey, Dr Venus, Bob
Fones, Ann Elliott, Vicky Barkoff, Vincent Trasov, and Tess Tickle.

39

the gown, and to return those photographs, along with the entire contents of the kit, to
General Idea. It would receive thirteen replies.
General Idea did not specify within the submission packet what the judging
criteria were for the pageant, other than the example set by an included edition—The
Artists’ Conception for Miss General Idea 1971. (15) That notwithstanding, the
submissions that the group received, from which it selected photographs to blow up and
display at the A Space artist run center in Toronto from September 24-30, 1971, all
shared a tongue-in-cheek, playfully critical presentation of an array of stereotypes of
femininity. (16) Judges appointed by General Idea chose a winner from these
submissions.
The images that lined the wall of A Space were moved to the AGO’s Walker
Court during the day on October 1
st
. By the time the audience began arriving on the red
carpet for the 7:45pm door, the courtyard had been transformed into an exaggerated
approximation of an award show. A stage, a screen for projections, wrought iron
candlesticks, and sculpture stands for trophies and prizes filled the space. To add to the
festive mood, at 7:50 a block of dry ice landed in the top tier of the courtyard fountain,
billowing smoke throughout the crowd. The judges, contestants, and notable guests
arrived in a scripted and choreographed manner, with cameras catching the action for a
planned television broadcast that never materialized because, when the group revisited
their footage for editing, it found nothing on the film but sound. (17) All entered the
AGO to a taped welcome from Miss Honey, Miss General Idea 1970. General Idea also
provided ballots for the audience to choose their own winner—Miss Generality.

40

The Pageant proceeded like a traditional beauty contest, with formal
introductions, introductions of and speeches by previous queens and notable guests, and
performances by Pascal, the chanteuse of Toronto. Bronson MCed the event,
accompanying many of his monologues with slides that showed the history of the
pageant. Much of this history was made up, as this was actually the first time the group
organized an actual contest. After the three finalists were announced, the ceremony
broke for an intermission, which included a cash bar. The ceremony was on hold, but the
performance continued and the cameras kept rolling as the audience interacted with each
other and with scripted vignettes in the lobby. Once the pageant resumed, and after more
from Bronson and Pascal, the evening ended with the announcement of Marcel Dot as
Miss General Idea 1971-1983. The judges explained that they selected his photograph
because it best captured glamour without falling into it. (18)
The 1971 performance was certainly collaborative, and deeply embedded in
General Idea’s networks, as members of Canadada provided the substance of the
competition and denizens of General Idea’s social circles provided the self-consciously
scripted, performative audience for the pageant. Its presentation of the art world itself as
a site of competition, with winners and losers, both implicated General Idea within but
also set it slightly outside of this system, as artists who felt excluded from the galleries,
auctions, and magazines that structured such contemporary art centers as New York or
Paris.
6
Additionally, the pageant set the stage for General Idea’s practice of inhabiting

6
That General Idea would present itself as an outsider within the context of an event held
in and supported by one of the major art institutions in Canada, let alone Toronto, is
indeed paradoxical, but was part of the group’s self-conception and presentation. This
paradox will be discussed in more detail below, but in brief speaks to the place of

41

cultural forms and using them to create alternative forms of social organization. This
includes the beauty pageant, but also the archive and the concept of history, as in the
creation of non-existent pageants from 1968 and 1969, solely through their
documentation. As such, this performance also demonstrates the links among art,
everyday subcultural social life, and sexuality that will be foundational for my argument
about General Idea’s reconfiguration of politics.
The second performance I discuss in this chapter, The Hollywood Decca Dance,
was also an award show—this time for General Idea’s correspondence network,
Canadada. Rather than take up the beauty pageant, however, it materialized in the form
of a prime-time event, like the Emmys or the Oscars. The event occurred on February 2,
1974, at an old Elk’s Lodge in downtown Los Angeles. Like the Pageant, the Decca
Dance was conceptualized as a performance to be aired on television, though this time
the footage survived and appears on a number of different tapes. Also like the Pageant, it
occupied a found format to present ways of imagining different social orders. The Decca
Dance was simultaneously a genuine celebration of Canadada, a Canadada art work, and
an explication of the practices that constituted Canadada. By presenting these aspects in
tandem, the performance highlighted the political operation of the practices it referenced,
practices as invested in constructing alternative social orders as alternative methods and
forms of artistic production and distribution. Canadada was an art movement, of a sort,
but it also was its own subcutlure. The Decca Dance celebrated this dual nature.
Close to a thousand people paid the relatively steep price of $25 to attend the
Decca Dance. They entered the ornately decorated theater to see a sparse stage, set up

performance art and ephemeral practices in a moment that, in Toronto, still was
dominated by the production of material objects.

42

with a podium and a large screen. The event opened with Ray Davies, a one-man band
complete with drums, banjo, and harmonica, playing “Oh, Canada,” followed by the US
national anthem. (19) It proceeded with a complicated intermixing of celebration and
narration. Individuals received awards in categories ranging from best animal
impersonation to best large scale installation, while the award presenters and hosts
explicated the disparate yet intertwined practices, characters, gestures, and motifs that
constituted and collaboratively constructed the Canadada world. This narration unfolded
via direct exegesis and also through the award presentations, each of which were
accompanied by slides. And, of course, there were musical interludes, some of which
included complex choreography. Many contemporary reviewers responded to these
practices as frivolous and nonsensical, but through the Decca Dance the involved artists
were able to convey the purpose behind the silliness, as well as make sense of practices
that unfolded piecemeal over the course of years but nevertheless drew from and
contributed to the collective world they had all helped to create.
7

The 1971 Pageant laid out General Idea’s strategy of appropriating not just
images but entire systems for its work. In the process, it presented observations about the
structure of the art world, and also of certain overlaps between art and everyday life, by
mis-using the markers of normative sexuality—Marcel Dot was declared Miss General
Idea, for example, and each of the contestants self-consciously played with tropes of
femininity within their submissions. But the Decca Dance took a broader view of

7
Archival documentation for the practices that made up Canadada resides predominantly
at the National Gallery of Canada, in Ottawa, and at the Morris and Helen Belkin Art
Gallery in Vancouver. For an overview of the movement and scene, see:
Louis Jacob. Golden Streams: Artists’ Collaboration and Exchange in the 1970s.
Mississauga, ON: Blackwood Gallery, 2002.

43

sexuality, clarifying what it meant within General Idea’s subcultures. Both performances
certainly contained a literal presentation of subversive sexuality, but to General Idea and
its social and artistic circles, sexuality was more than simply who desired what and
whom. This sexuality was a structure and system of identification rather than any
specific bedroom practices, a way of identifying rather than a fixed and essential
identity. The group inhabited this structure just as it inhabited the beauty pageant or the
award show or the art-star system, and the Decca Dance highlighted how the
engagement with art present in the 1971 pageant was also an engagement with social life
and popular culture more generally, and it demonstrated how scripting structures
everyday life as much as it does theater.
Gay Liberation in Canada, as exemplified by the newspaper The Body Politic
(1971-1987), which started as a local rag in Toronto but would quickly grow to be the
voice of Canadian Gay Liberation, shared General Idea and company’s theorization of
sexuality and its political consequence. Rather than be defined as an identity based on
sexual object choice and preferred bedroom practices, sexuality was a way of being in
relation to others, which highlighted subjectivity and identification as collaborative and
iterative.
8
As such, social life was itself inherently and essentially political because it
was a site for the contraction of alternative ways to understand and exist in the world—

8
At the time of General Idea’s inception, many of the seminal texts that come to mind
addressing sexuality and subjectivity had not yet been written, or had not been translated
into English. The group did encounter writing that outlined the relationship between
cultural systems and meaning, but its practice was contemporary with the formulation of
such philosophers as Foucault who many now look to to describe the matrix of social
phenomena that I present in General Idea’s work. It is worthwhile to point out the
contemporaneity of these developments, both because it locates them within the same
zeitgeist but also because it highlights each as a form of practice attempting to make
sense of emergent cultural expressions. Art practices generate theories as readily as
philosophical practices do.

44

not just to critique mainstream society, but to create alternatives to it. This in turn called
for a re-definition of what constituted politics, one based on immediate experience and
possibility rather than long-term legislative change. Politics in this context was about
creating space for different social configurations in the present, rather than any kind of
electoral engagement that would change laws and public policy in the future. This
chapter describes how General Idea used art as a space to experiment with alternative
social orders structured around this understanding of sexuality, thereby establishing the
politics that underlay the group’s work throughout its career.

Along the “five thousand miles long and one hundred miles deep” Line
9

All art is, of course, shaped by the possibilities and preclusions of its context.
General Idea and its cohort self-consciously engaged with these frames as part of their
practices, however, emphasizing the conditions of production that enabled their artistic
practices to meld seamlessly with their social practices, and their artistic production to
simultaneously function as the production of subcultures. To a certain extent, this art can
be viewed as art about being a Canadian artist, with all of its advantages and pitfalls, and
as such its context warrants extensive consideration. Canada’s relationship—politically,
culturally, and economically—to the United States; its own population distribution; state
funding that encouraged artist-run centers, collaboration, and publications; and the

9
AA Bronson. “The Humiliation of the Bureaucrat: Artist-Run Centres as Museums by
Artists,” Museums by Artists. Eds. AA Bronson and Peggy Gale. Toronto: Art Metropole,
1983, p 29-37.
For the purpose of this dissertation, I cite the version of the essay published in Museums
by Artists because it is the more complete version. The essay in the catalog is truncated.

45

prominence of ephemeral and other non-object-based practices all contributed to this
specific context. While the government provided arts funding for nationalist purposes,
General Idea and its contemporaries used the funding to critique the very thing the
funding was intended to enhance. From the outset, then, the group used the systems and
structures of mainstream culture against the dominant social order, enacting its
subcultural politics through the very materialization of its practice.
In his catalog essay for a seminal exhibition he curated titled From Sea to
Shining Sea (1987), Bronson discusses a number of salient characteristics that explain
the shape of Canadian art in the 1970s, including the contemporary Canadian art world,
and this world’s position in relation to what was happening in the U.S., particularly in
New York. In this essay, which presents the premise of the exhibition, Bronson
discusses the relative dearth of spaces for the display and discussion of art in Canada
during the late 1960s and early 1970s.
10
In the opening to a 1983 essay concerning artist-
run spaces reprinted in From Sea to Shining Sea, Bronson describes the impetus for
artists to start their own spaces:
... knowing the impossibility of an art scene without real museums (the Art
Gallery of Ontario was not a real museum for us), without real art magazines
(and artscanada was not a real magazine for us), without real artists (no,
Harold Town was not a real artist for us, and we forgot that we ourselves
were real artists, because we had not seen ourselves in the media – real
artists, like Frank Stella, appeared in Artforum magazine)...
11

10
Bronson has been taken to task for this opinion, and its wholesale disregard for what
was a productive painting community in a number of cities throughout Canada. While
these critics acknowledge that institutions didn’t exist for the ephemeral practices of
General Idea and its cohort, they object to the claim that there were no institutions at all.
For an example of these criticisms, see:
Geoffrey James. “An Official Guide to the Periphery,” Maclean’s, 8/3/1987, p 45-46.
11
Bronson. “The Humiliation of the Bureaucrat,” p 29-30.

46

He frequently comments, in fact, that part of the group’s goal with its practice
throughout the 70s was to fabricate an art scene. Although Bronson, not surprisingly,
overstates the lack of arts institutions in Canada, there certainly was not an established
network of spaces to show the kind of art that General Idea and its cohort made, art that
was time-based and ephemeral, oftentimes insular and deliberately obtuse, and
completely uninterested in being valuable. From Sea to Shining Sea documents the artist
run spaces that developed in response to this lack.
The title, ‘from sea to shining sea,’ however, also clearly references Canada’s,
and Canadian art’s, relationship to the U.S., taking a line from the chorus of the famous
song “America the Beautiful.” Bronson lists the factors that informed the group’s
particular art-making context, and shaped its view of the art world that it then parodied
in the Pageant:
The Canadian configuration is of course a line: five thousand miles long and
one hundred miles deep, the pattern of inhabited Canada nestling innocently
against the belly of the American border, nurtured by the aggressive foreplay
of American magazines, American radio, American television, all portraying
for us reality as something our American husband does at work, a great
turmoil of masculine sweaty activity on the other side of the border, while
we, the great white princess protected by our snow-white blanket of
inactivity and our good manners, wait to be stimulated by these muscular
reports of the real world...
12

He notes the role that media played in his experience of Canadian art, describing how
artists experienced the art world through the media, and therefore one didn’t feel like an
artist until one saw oneself reflected back on video or the pages of a magazine (in part
explaining why General Idea conceptualized the 1970 and 1971 pageants as
performances for video). Magazines circulated information about art and artists just as

12
Ibid, p 30.

47

they did about movies and stars. Given this confluence, why not award a photograph an
art equivalent of an Oscar? What really was the practical difference to a space on the
wall at MoMA?
Specific conditions in Canadian social, economic, and political affairs also
contributed to General Idea’s art-making context, and specifically influenced the shape
of the Miss General Idea Pageant. Canada occupied a precarious position within
international affairs in this moment. It did not share the position on the world stage that
the US occupied, and as such suffered severe anxiety over losing national identity to its
southern neighbor, particularly because of the preponderance of American media in
Canada. At the same time as it was trying to maintain cultural sovereignty, Canada was
also struggling to create a universal national identity, to construct a pan-Canadian
identity that included disparate urban communities as well as dispersed rural
populations.
The Canadian government responded to these two challenges, constructing a pan-
Canadian identity and maintaining cultural sovereignty in the face of US hegemony,
with, among other things, the creation of the Canada Council.
13
The Canada Council,
and provincial councils created in its model, were also a response to the lack of
international art markets and systems of exchange, both economic and theoretical, in
Canada. As Bronson told Paul O’Neill in an interview, “an aspect of being in Toronto in

13
Founded on March 28, 1957 with the passage of the Canada Council Act, "the objects
of the Council are to foster and promote the study and enjoyment of, and the production
of works in, the arts, humanities and social sciences"
For more on the Canada Council, see its website, at:
http://www.canadacouncil.ca/

48

the late 60s and early 70s was that there was no real art world.”
14
The Canada Council
responded to this circumstance by creating alternative modes of supporting the arts and
generating an artistic community through travel grants and support to artist-run spaces
and art schools beginning in the early 1970s.
15

In addition to Canada Council funding that supported travel and sites so that
artists could interact face-to-face, the Canadian Department of Manpower and
Immigration launched the Local Initiatives Program (LIP) in 1971 to reduce
unemployment through job creation projects for non-profits. A number of artist-run
centers took advantage of this. Artists used this funding, in part, to create their own
institutions of exchange to supplement those created by the Canada Council. They
expanded the scope of their work to include information processing, including General
Idea’s own magazine, FILE, founded with an LIP grant. In an interview in the edition
published to accompany their The Armoury of the 1984 Miss General Idea Pavilion
show in 1986, the artists remark, “a large part of the original impetus for working with
mass media formats was that there was no existing art audience in Canada when we
started, so we had to assemble our own audiences wherever we could find them.”
16

Artists took funding allotted for state-building purposes and used it to their own ends.

14
Paul O’Neill. “Interview with AA Bronson,” North Drive Press #3. 2006. Web, 2006,
p 3.
15
For a more complete discussion of developments within Canada concerning public
funding for the arts, see:
David Burnett and Marilyn Schiff. Contemporary Canadian Art. Edmonton: Hurtig
Publishers Ltd, 1983.
Additionally, the catalog for the exhibition From Sea to Shining Sea details a history of
artist run spaces in the 1960s and 1970s.
16
General Idea. “General Idea on the Armoury.” The Armoury of the 1984 Miss General
Idea Pavillion. NY: The Buffalo Fine Arts Academy, 1986, p 19.

49

These different facets of Canada Council funding (particularly artist travel grants)
and Local Initiative Project funding enabled artists to produce and converse with each
other despite the distances among them. It also shaped the kind of work that they made,
allowing artists to engage in the kinds of ephemeral and performance-based practices
that were a hallmark of Canadian Conceptualism at this time, without a need to create
marketable objects to make a living.
17
The funding structures enabled the critical
engagement with artistic production that interested artists around the globe, as much art
of this period commented upon the significance of economics and commodification upon
the art object and an artistic practice. Many of the artists who participated in these
movements spent a surprising amount of time in Canada interacting with Canadian
artists, be they the conceptualists who were brought to the Nova Scotia College of Art
and Design (NSCAD) as part of the lithography workshop or the project series classes
that were designed around these visitors, or folks who participated in the Fluxus Eternal
Network, who found a second home at Intermedia, which later became the Western
Front artist run space in Vancouver.
18

Artists producing in areas with more developed art markets, to which they were
tied for their livelihood, worked within art institutions to uncover how those conditions
shaped artworks and an audience’s experience of art. Canadian artists faced no such
limitation, and because of these spatial considerations, artists in General Idea’s art scene

17
For an overview of Canadian Conceptualism, see:
Traffic: Conceptual Art in Canada, 1965-1980. Eds. Grant Arnold and Karen Henry.
Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 2012.
18
For more information on both of these institutions, see:
Garry Neill Kennedy. The Last Art College: Nova Scotia College of Art and Design,
1968-1878. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012.
Glenn Lewis, Eric Metcalfe, Michael Morris, Vincent Trasov, and Kate Craig. Art and
Correspondence from the Western Front. Vancouver: The Western Front, 1979.

50

were able to almost seamlessly blend their art practices into their social lives. The
Pageant and Decca Dance held up a mirror to the art world, but it also reflected the
countercultural social and avant-garde artistic circles in which the artists of General Idea
spent their everyday lives.
These circles were not limited to General Idea’s immediate surroundings in the
countercultural maelstrom of downtown Toronto, thanks to the innovative national
funding structures already discussed. The group also collaborated extensively with a
larger and more formalized network of mail artists, termed the Eternal Network.
19
Mail
art as a movement was unified in its interest in circumventing many of the pillars of the
traditional art system, including its emphasis on individual authorship, commodifiable
objects, preciousness, and skill. Art critic Jerry G. Bowles wrote, in a 1972 article for Art
in America, that “its real aim is to provide a system through which artists can
communicate with each other, to learn of joint interests, and to promote the development
of ideas.”
20
This ethos perfectly dovetailed with the interests and concerns of General
Idea and its cohort.
The Eternal Network first appeared in a poster circulated by Robert Filliou and
his collaborator, George Brecht, in April of 1968. (20) Art was many things to Brecht
and Filliou, the least interesting of which were things put into a museum or a gallery.
And the Eternal Network was more than an art project. Filliou insisted that it was an
expanded field of not just art but also private parties, weddings, divorces, funerals,

19
For a more detailed discussion of the Eternal Network, and Canadian contributions
thereto, see:
Robert Filliou: From Political to Poetical Economy. Eds Hank Bull, Sharla Sava, and
Scott Watson. Vancouver: Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, 1995.
20
Jerry G. Bowles. “Issues and Commentary: Out of the Gallery, into the Mailbox,” Art
in America. V 60, N 2, March-April 1972, p 23.

51

factory works, bars, civil rights or Vietnam protests, and so forth.
21
He enforced this
expanded view of interesting practice by holding unjuried exhibitions that were based on
material submitted through the mail. Nothing was returned to submitters, but each
received documentation of the show. Other participants in the Eternal Network grew this
strategy of viewing art less as a produced object and more as a space for
experimentations in living artfully, and as a space for socio-political criticism. Artists in
Canada were able to discuss these ideas with Filliou directly, as he visited a number of
important art centers across Canada in 1973, from the Nova Scotia College of Art and
Design to the Western Front artist space in Vancouver.
This privileging of art as a site of experimentation with artful living, which
General Idea would celebrate in those terms in early issues of FILE, enabled the political
operation of these practices—politics as living contrary to the dictates of mainstream
society, rather than direct action or electoral engagement.
22
As art critic Robert Fulford
would explain it in an article on correspondence art for the Toronto Sun in 1973,
“Correspondence art abolishes the distinction between artist and public. For
correspondence art there is no public. Everybody who gets involved in it becomes part of
the art-act, becomes linked into the network of information systems.”
23
This concept of a
network overlapped with the values of artists who were seeped in the counterculture and

21
Stephen Perkins. “Utopian Networks and Correspondence Identities,” Alternative
Traditions in the Contemporary Arts: Subjugated Knowledges and the Balance of Power.
Ed. Estera Milman. Iowa City: The University of Iowa Museum of Art, 1999.
This catalog is drawn from 4 shows that celebrated the U of I Alternative Traditions in
the Contemporary Arts project. Shows ran from spring 1998 through spring 1999.
22
For a more detailed discussion of this phenomenon in FILE, see fn 73.
23
Robert Fulford. “Correspondence Art: Collages in Time, Distance, and the Mind,” The
Toronto Star. 3/17/1973, p 49.

52

the power of mass media—both as a space for the dissemination of mass culture, but
also as a possible format for subversive manipulation of mass culture.
24

The appeal of media particularly resonated with Canadian artists in the Eternal
Network, because of the place that networks and media held within mainstream
Canadian culture. In an address to the Liberal Policy Convention of 1970, Prime
Minister Pierre Trudeau called for investment in technological advancement and the
integration of technology into Canadian culture.
25
There was a communications fervor
that led to the launch of Anik I in 1973, making Canada the first nation with a
geostationary satellite as part of a domestic communications system.
26
Media, networks,
communications technologies—each was an important site for the dissemination of
dominant culture worldwide, but particularly self-consciously within Canada. As such,
they were ideal sites of intervention for Canadian artists. Artists did not contain their
efforts within electronic media, though, as publications were a vital part of Canadada.
Rather than simply send individual objects through the post, these artists used mail as a
way to construct elaborate personae that they flushed out through performances in their
daily lives and contribute to the collaborative project of Canadada itself, via postal
projects and in their daily lives, both of which reached a larger audience through
journals, magazines, and fanzines.

24
Sharla Sava. As If the Oceans were Lemonade: The Performative Vision of Robert
Filiou and the Western Front. Unpublished M.A. Thesis: UBC, 1996.
25
Pierre Trudeau. “Technology, the Individual and the Party,” Living in the Seventies. Ed
Allen M. Linden. Toronto: P. Martin Associates, 1970, p 1-7.
26
While a full consideration of Marshal McLuhan is outside the scope of this
dissertation, the influence that he, and the zeitgeist of communications technologies that
influenced his thinking, had upon General Idea from the outset is undeniable.

53

Already established systems and structures in general were a vital part of these
practices: literally, in terms of using the postal system or taking images from popular
culture that they then incorporated into their own work; or more structurally, inhabiting
the systems of dominant culture and re-deploying them to produce different meanings
for images, objects, and bodies. Through its mobilization of sexuality, General Idea
demonstrated the overlap between many of the concerns of its artistic contemporaries vis
a vis the relationship between structures and meaning and Gay Liberation’s political
engagement with the same. The interest in networking, the use of performance and
media technologies to construct personae and even entire worlds, all of this came within
the purview of what constituted sexuality within Canadian Gay Liberation.
In the opening lines of her essay “Gender “Trouple”,” from the catalog to General
Idea’s first retrospective, curated by Frederick Bonnet in 2011, Elisabeth Lebovici
writes:
Too obvious? Not general enough? Or maybe both? The theme of sex at
work, that is in the body of work of General Idea, presents us indeed with
such a dilemma: you can feel it everywhere without being able to pin it down
anywhere.
27

She goes on to discuss the lack of explicit sex in the group’s work, and answers the
inevitable next question—then why talk about sex?—by discussing the fact of the group
as a trio, a triple-couple, a trouple. Playing off the title of Judith Butler’s groundbreaking
work, Gender Trouble, Lebovici discusses the ways in which the group’s work
undermines heteropatriarchal norms and systems of representation. Sexuality is precisely

27
Elisabeth Lebovici. “Gender “Trouple”,” General Idea: Haute Culture, A
Retrospective, 1969-1994. Zurich: JRP|Ringier Books, 2011, p 84-101.

54

this rupture, for her, within General Idea’s work—a semiotic intervention rather than a
form of identity.
Bronson recounts that the members of General Idea did not try to be political
artists, and they had no interest in trying to be gay artists, although he is amused by the
fact that the press never referred to the gay content of the group’s work, including
paintings representing three neon poodles in a menage a trois.
28
(21) He recounts feeling
like the group was dismissed as inadequately political and engaged by Gay Liberation,
and specifically the Gay Liberation newspaper, The Body Politic, that was based in
Toronto.
29
And yet, the kind of sexuality present within General Idea’s work, and within
the Gay Liberation championed by The Body Politic, share striking similarities. Each
demonstrates an investment in a radical overhaul of the entire social field, and
particularly the way we conceptualize identity not as given and natural, but rather as
collective, relational, mutable, and iterative. This is in contrast to securing physical and
cultural space for the expression of same-sex desire.
30
In Ant Farm’s Art’s Stars in

28
Interview with author, 3/10/08.
29
Funnily enough, while Bronson recalls being rejected by the BP, members of the BP
collective active in the 1970s recall feeling like outsiders to the “cool scene” happening
around General Idea. The first issue of FILE was advertized in BP, which also reviewed a
few GI shows, and the group became more involved with the paper as it encountered
censorship and police crack downs in the late 70s and early 80s. But other than
advertizing the first issue, there was little coverage of the group in BP. While discerning
the truth of the matter is nigh on impossible, it is relevant that General Idea perceived this
attitude, which seems to be correlated by its absence in a periodical that did discuss gay
art in Toronto, including some of General Idea’s peers and spaces where the group also
showed work.
The opinion of members of The Body Politic Collective stems from a conversation with
Brian Waite and Ed Jackson, two early members of the group, on August 26, 2011.
30
While sharing an understanding of the structural role sexuality performs, General Idea
and the Body Politic collective also shared a reference to understanding the politics of
sexuality, not in terms of rights but rather in terms of radically rearticulating subjectivity
and the social order. In his book Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into

55

Hollywood video produced out of The Decca Dance, the Vancouver-based Eric Metcalfe
describes the practices within Canadada as a denial of essential identity and an
assumption of a more performative mode of being.
31
He calls this “a new way of getting
off” and refers to Metcalfe as his “straight name,” as opposed to his persona within
Canadada, Dr. Brute.
32
Sex and sexuality infused Canadada, but as a lived critique of
dominant culture, including normative ideas about identity, rather than as an identity
itself.
The Body Politic began publication in 1971 in conjunction with a simultaneous
protest held in both Ottawa and Vancouver in August of 1971, and quickly grew to be
the gay liberation publication of note throughout Canada. These protests, referred to as
“We Demand” on the basis of a manifesto written to be read aloud at each, aimed to
institute a number of reforms that were not a part of the 1969 omnibus bill that legalized
homosexuality across Canada. (22) The newspaper was published by a collective, and
editorial duties shifted across members with each issue. Many collective members also
participated in radical socialist political groups, particularly the Young Socialists, but
left these groups in disillusionment over their rejection of the radical political potential

Freud (1955), which was oft cited by both groups, Herbert Marcuse discusses the
fundamental relationship between psychological categorizations and politics, arguing
against Freud’s early assertion that civilization functions on the basis of the repression of
drives—especially the libido—and the channeling of that energy into socially useful
purposes. He offers a justification for this radical notion of sexuality, and the
rearticulation of subjectivity that it incorporates, as inherently political, which was of
foundational importance for GI and BP.
Herbet Marcuse. Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud. London:
ARK Paperbacks Edition, 1987.
31
Ant Farm. Art’s Stars in Hollywood (1974). Black and white video, 53:00 minutes
32
Both in his real life as Eric Metcalfe and his Canadada one as Dr. Brute, Metcalfe was
involved in heterosexual relationships, reinforcing this fact of sexuality as something
more than desire.

56

of sexuality and sexual liberation.
33
While some articles within the paper certainly do
address traditionally political topics—politicians running for office, bills under
consideration in provincial and national parliaments, etc—it also published art and
creative writing, as well as more theoretical musings on the nature of sex, identity, and
politics.
The very first issue contains an article by someone named Jude – Radical Pervert.
He titled his article “Destruction of ‘sexual duality’,” and it prefigures many more
discussions within BP about the object of gay liberation not being about gay rights, but
rather about reconfiguring society through the enactment of a form of sexuality that
fundamentally exploded any notion of identity as it existed within mainstream society.
34

He writes of his interest in undermining “genital-based identities” and claims
mainstream objection to homosexuality resides not in “oral or anal aspect of sexual
behaviour [...] it’s the breaking of the world’s most important rule .... recognition of two
distinct sexes and their appropriate performance.” As such, he describes how the politics
of gay liberation lie in a radical reconstruction of everyday life, a refusal to participate in
the very stuff of sexuality within dominant culture, saying later: “The destruction of
duality will emerge with the refusal to be part of the sexism perpetuated by the straight
games of cruising, courtship, marriage, family, religion, fashion, entertainment, etc.”
Jude highlights how sexuality in this context isn’t about sex, identity isn’t about essential
biology, and politics isn’t just about the demands that were read on the steps of
Parliament on August 28
th
, 1971.

33
Gary Kinsman and Patrizia Gentile. The Canadian War on Queers: National Security
as Sexual Regulation. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2009.
34
Jude – Radical Pervert. “Destruction of ‘sexual duality’,” The Body Politic. V 1, N 1,
November-December 1971, p 3.

57

Frequent specific references to feminism within the newspaper also convey
similar points about sexuality, identification, and politics. Even in the first issue, we see
members of The Body Politic collective repeatedly refer to the fight against sexism, over
and most of the time in opposition to what to the goals of today’s gay politics: access to
marriage, the military, etc.
35
For example, also in the first issue, Georgia Strait writes an
article titled “The Gay Ghetto.”
36
This essay provides just one of a number of examples
of articles that position the gay world, gay ghetto, gay club life, as opposite to liberation
and as part of the structure of sexism, part of the mechanisms with which capitalism
enforces its oppression through normative understandings of sex and identity. Time and
again articles call for gay liberation to move past a strict focus on sex as the object and
end goal of gay liberation politics. They position that focus on sex itself as a part of
dominant heteropatriarchal culture, within which sex is a part of a specific structure of
biologically-based essential identity through which all people, not just gay people, are
subjugated. The editorial for the 4
th
issue of the paper, May-June 1972, states this clearly
and succinctly: “Gay liberation is a socio-political force working for a society free of
unnecessary repression and oppressive political structures.”
37
Not oppressive laws, but
oppressive structures. Although plenty of rights-based work occurred within the

35
For a specific discussion that distinguishes between a gay rights agenda and a
liberation-based project based on the importance of everyday cultural and social practice,
see:
José Estaban Muñoz. Cruising Utopia.
36
Georgia Strait. “The Gay Ghetto,” The Body Politic. V 1, N 1, November-December
1971, p 17.
37
The Body Politic Collective. “Editorial Page,” The Body Politic. V 1, N 4 May-June
1972, p 2.

58

movement, and within the pages of the paper, the ultimate goal was to overturn entirely
the systems of rights, law, and the state as it existed at the time.
38

It was precisely in its attempts to present an alternative model of sexuality and
subjectivity, to define other means of thinking and performing identity, and to have sex
function differently than it did within reproductive mainstream culture, that earned the
newspaper a sharp crackdown from Toronto police. In 1977, collective member Gerald
Hannon published what would be his second article about intimate relationships between
adults and children. In both of his articles on the subject, the first in issue number 5 from
late 1972 and the second that resulted in the censorship in 1977, he argues that the idea
of the purity of childhood and of children as not sexual beings is a vestige of the
heteropatriarchal family that serves as the foundation for capitalism. By undermining
that, one undermines the social systems of global capital. In response to this article, the
Toronto police raided BP headquarters, seized equipment and subscription information,
and began a process that would develop into a lengthy, costly, and ultimately fruitless
legal battle that probably did more to galvanize the newspaper’s readership than if
authorities had done nothing. Artists from aross Canada, including General Idea, rallied
to help raise money for the paper’s legal costs, and it continued to publish as The Body
Politic through the 1980s.

38
These goals were shared among any number of liberation movements in the 1960s and
1970s around the globe, and as such Canadian Gay Liberation shared theories, strategies,
and a vocabulary with multiple branches of an international wave of libratory activity. In
particular, the early manifestations of Gay Liberation in the United States shared this
radical orientation. American Gay Rights organizations, however, shifted to a rights- and
identity-based form of advocacy and self-presentation in short order, as Richard Meyer
discusses in an article addressing this shift.
Richard Meyer. “Gay Power Circa 1970: Visual Strategies for Sexual Revolution,” GLQ:
A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies. V 12, N 3, 2006, p. 441-464.

59

Various aspects of General Idea’s national, cultural, economic, and social context
influenced its practice, and it incorporated those aspects self-consciously into work that
was intended to function both as art and as an experiment in life-as-politics. As such,
rather than simply offering context, these elements become building blocks for and
formal strategies within the group’s work, and vital parts of its political intervention. As
the two case studies that follow in this chapter demonstrate, each of these facets allowed
General Idea to create work that made incisive comments into the state of art-making
and the art world, while simultaneously modeling the political intervention present
within the everyday activity of subcultural participation.

“Capturing Glamour Without Falling into It”
39

While the framework for the 1971 Miss General Idea Pageant was a General
Idea creation, the actual ceremony was a collection of original General Idea scripts,
repurposed General Idea projects, contributions from frequent General Idea
collaborators, appropriated elements from other art works and dominant culture, found
objects, and aspects left to chance and improvisation over the course of the evening.
These various means of production, not to mention the elements themselves, reproduced
the processes of subcultural formation, and the Pageant functioned as much as a
subcultural space and event as it did an artwork. As the group’s first large-scale,

39
Marcel Dot was awarded the Title of Miss General Idea 1971-1983 because his
submission, the judges declared, captured glamour without falling into it. Dorothy
Cameron announced this as an interpretation by the three judges—it does not appear as a
judging criterion in any of the planning materials for the 1971 Pageant performance that
are available in the General Idea Archive at the National Gallery of Canada.

60

cohesive solo project, the Pageant highlighted the group’s interest in artistic practice as a
social practice, and in the political function of subcultural participation. It appropriated
the political intervention of subcultures and presented this intervention as an expanded
idea of sexuality. Sexuality as subcultural politics would occupy General Idea
throughout its career, and these concepts received their first extensive consideration in
the 1971 Miss General Idea Pageant.
The 1971 Pageant began when the group mailed its submissions kit to the pre-
selected participants. The kit itself presented many of the modes of fabrication that
defined the Pageant as a whole. It was surprisingly slick, given the group’s resources at
the time, arriving in a box embossed with one of General Idea’s several logos (a found
image of the sun rising behind a palm tree) and including various pieces of ephemera
and instructional material printed on the group’s letterhead.
40
(23)
True to this practice of inhabiting the means through which official institutions
legitimized themselves, the submission packet included documentation—by turns real,
appropriated, and fabricated—about the history of the Miss General Idea Pageant,
including a modified copy of an article from the women’s section of the Toronto-based
newspaper, The Globe and Mail, about the original project where the Miss General Idea
Gown first appeared. (24) Pertaining more directly to the Pageant itself, however, were a
series of photographs and documents that fabricated a history for the event. These
included a typed letter from Granada Gazelle, Miss General Idea 1969, and an

40
This branding was a common strategy in correspondence art, creating mock
corporations or other institutions through one’s practice. Other examples include Ray
Johnson’s New York Correspondence School, Lowell Darling’s Dudley Fines School of
Finds Arts, and Glenn Lewis’ New York Corres Sponge Dance School of Vancouver, to
name only a few.

61

autographed photo from Miss Honey, the outgoing Miss General Idea.
41
(25) It also
contained a program for the 1970 pageant, which GI made specifically for the kit. This
range of ephemera demonstrates General Idea’s playful relationship with reality, and
with the material of history. There was no Miss General Idea Pageant in 1968 or 1969,
but the group declared them in part to support their fabrication of the group’s birth date
as 1968, and in part because, Bronson recalls, Mimi and Granada were jealous and
wanted to be beauty queens too. Inhabiting the format of contests, using the stuff of
documentation and of history to create its own version of events, General Idea set the
stage for what would be a career-long practice of using the stuff—the material and the
structures—of dominant culture as a way to offer both a critical engagement with and an
alternative to that culture.
The box also contained The Miss General Idea Gown, a found, liver-colored
taffeta dress with blue embroidery that was left over from the earlier project featured in
the Globe and Mail article in the submissions kit.
42
(26) The number of submission
kits—sixteen—was determined by the fact that sixteen of these particularly ugly dresses
remained lying around the house since the previous project came down. Instructional
material included in the kit directed each individual to send in eight pictures of either

41
Miss Honey was Honey Novick, a friend of the group and at times a participant of
General Idea. Mimi Paige, Felix’s girlfriend at the time and also Miss General Idea 1968,
was not in the submission kit though she did attend the pageant.
42
This project, Betty’s (1970), was an installation in the storefront-like window of the
house on Yonge Street in which the group lived at the time. The thrift store next door had
thrown away the dresses and the group displayed them in the window with a sign that
perpetually read “back in five minutes.” The piece was featured in an article in the
fashion section of Toronto’s Globe and Mail newspaper, and the group sent a copy of the
article as a part of the submissions packet.
Carter, Joyce. Authentic Unreality,” The Women’s Globe and Mail (special inset into The
Globe and Mail). Janury 22, 1970.

62

themself or a stand-in in the gown, and to return those photographs, along with the entire
contents of the kit, to General Idea. Of the thirteen replies, only one was a rejection –
Janis Campbell of Sackville, New Brunswick, refused to participate in what she called a
“sexist exploitation” and a “male chauvenist pig idea.” True to the group’s cheeky
nature, her rejection was displayed as her submission to the pageant. The three judges—
Dorothy Cameron, an art adviser; David Silcox, a former visual arts officer of the
Canada Council and current dean of fine arts at York University; and Daniel Freedman,
a friend of the group and an award-winning actor—were tasked with finding a winner
with no more direction than the participants received for their submissions. (27)
The mail art network in which the pageant materialized was heavily invested in
creating different personae that artists then inhabited in their everyday lives, conflating
art and life by complicating presumptions about real life and identity as given, natural,
and free from scripting and conscious pre-determination. General Idea formalized this
within the structure of the pageant itself. In a letter written to Dennis Young, at the time
contemporary curator at the AGO, in the spring of 1971, the group described each
individual aspect of the performance, from the arrival of the limos to the emotions of the
audience as it left the performance. The letter described these aspects in the present
tense, in the form of a script rather than any kind of prognostication. By scripting
behaviors that would otherwise be considered routine and automatic, the group
reinforced the scripted nature of what would otherwise be considered natural and
reactive phenomena.
At the same time, it incorporated its social world into its practice by emphasizing
individuals’ reactions to the event, giving similar attention to audience response as to the

63

words and actions of performers. When the letter narrates, “a clapping of hands, a
turning of heads: Miss Granada Gazelle arrives in her sparkling white convertible with
escort Daniel Freedman, General Idea member and pageant judge,” it scripts a reaction
without actually directing it—the crowd did not receive any instruction about how to
respond to the arrival of the 1969 Miss General Idea. Likewise, the letter says
“spectators drift among the panels of documentation, examining the entries of various
contestants, watching their reflections bounce off the layers of plexiglass and
photographic paper.” This undoubtedly occurred, but because that’s what art audiences
do in a museum when there are objects on display, not because General Idea told them
to. This incorporation of everyday life within the fabric of the performance was an
important piece of the group’s intervention, as much because it demonstrated the
scripted nature of “free” behavior as it incorporated “real” aspects into a staged event.
The performance began with an introduction from Dennis Young. Pascal, a
notable chanteuse and transwoman in Toronto, performed the group’s unofficial theme
song, “We Got Ideas.” (28) Young then introduced Bronson as the MC of the event, who
then in turn introduced the contestants, judges, and notable guests, as well as the three
previous Pageant Queens. Notable guests included artists and arts officials but also
prominent figures in General Idea’s countercultural social circle. Each Queen presented
remarks and introduced the next Queen. This culminated when Miss Honey, the 1970
winner, gave a brief speech in front of a screen displaying images from the 1970
pageant. Occurring as one of a five-part General Idea performance called What
Happened, at an underground theater festival, the 1970 pageant—which was less a
contest and more of a staged performance—saw Miss Honey send lines from the

64

Gertrude Stein play titled What Happened over telex to Simon Fraser University while
the other contestants danced behind her in bear suits. (29) Already, the absurd humor
and interest in networking provided an occasion for playful experimentation.
First staged as part of the 1970 Festival of Underground Theatre, What Happened
was related to the work that General Idea did with the Theatre Passe Muraille—an
underground theater in Toronto that was one of the first sites for alternative theater in
Ontario.
43
The group’s involvement with the theater provided another example of its
general disregard for the divides among levels of culture, and art and design, unless it
were mocking them, as General Idea designed the poster for the theatre’s staging of Jean
Genet’s play The Maids (1947) in 1969. (30) The play’s plot details two housemaids
who construct elaborate sadomasochistic rituals when their mistress, Madame, is away.
The focus of their role-playing is the murder of Madame and they take turns portraying
both sides of the power divide. Their deliberate pace and devotion to detail guarantees
that they always fail to actualize their fantasies by ceremoniously "killing" Madame. All
characters in the Passe Muraille production were played by men, building upon the non-
normative sexuality present both within the play’s sadomasochism, and also its frank
depiction of women and non-normative sexuality in a time when representations of
women and any sort of sexuality were still relatively taboo. Production notes from the
TPM archives direct actors to adopt “bad acting clichés,” emphasizing the act of
performance, and the play opens with a scene of the maids role-playing: each one

43
Archives from Theatre Passe Muraille currently reside in the Theatre Archives at the
University of Guelph, in Guelph, Ontario. The theater was founded in 1968 by Jim
Garrard, and although it has weathered multiple obscenity charges over its productions, it
is still in operation today. It originally opened as a part of Rochdale College, which is
how it immediately came to the attention of the members of what would soon become
General Idea.

65

chastising the other for getting her rubber gloves dirty in an attempt to seduce the
milkman.
44
From the onset the play embraced both camp and fetishism within its
envelope of s&m while also disrupting the naturalism of acting to highlight everyday life
as a process of role-playing. The Miss General Idea Pageant grew out of this world,
which the group made sure to emphasize within the form and the content of the
performance.
Bronson followed this presentation of the previous pageant with a description of
the entries, rules, and expectations for the pageant, accompanied by slides throughout.
This historicization and factual presentation within performances occurred frequently
throughout General Idea’s work. These presentations are explanations, of a sort, but they
are also their own artistic utterance and as such function as both object and exposition.
The group took the format of history, of truth telling, and used it to mix fact and fiction
to create the mythology around, and of, its practice. The first half of the pageant
culminated in the announcement of the three finalists, Margaret Coleman, Tina Miller,
and Marcel Dot. Each contestant said a few words before the pageant broke for an
intermission with refreshments and a cash bar.
Just like the entrance, however, the intermission was not a break from the
performance. The cameras kept running while the audience enjoyed snacks and libations.
They also partook of hash-laced brownies that Margaret Coleman distributed while
everyone continued to cast ballots for Miss Generality. This quasi-scripted, quasi-
improvised, quasi-party series of interactions clearly was intended to be a part of the
performance – the intermission is a vital part of pageantry.

44
A notated script for The Maids is available at the archives for the Theatre Passe
Muraille, in Guelph.

66

The Pageant recommenced with another performance by Pascal before Peggy
Gale announced Coleman as the audience’s choice for Miss Generality, no doubt heavily
influenced by the gift of hash. Miss Honey then gave her farewell speech. Finally, the
moment arrived to announce the judges’ choice for Miss General Idea, and Bronson and
the judges played up the suspense that precedes any award announcement by excessively
commenting on the entries, the splendor of the pageant, and so forth. (31) Dorothy
Cameron, in the “may I have the envelope please?” moment, handed the piece of paper
with the winner’s name to Bronson, falling off the stage as she announced that Miss
General Idea 1971 would be Marcel Dot. Dot changed his name to Marcel Idea on the
spot. Flower petals fell from the ceiling as he said a few breathless words and surveyed
his prizes—a bouquet of flowers, a pearl necklace donated by Jorge Zontal’s pearl-
distributor uncle, a print of the Artists’ Conception on brown latex, and the Miss General
Idea trophy, which was a found ceramic object from the 1950s of a mermaid sitting on
top of a fish.
The Miss General Idea Pageant presented a microcosm and also a send-up of the
contemporary art world. Notable contemporary artists, critics, curators, and
administrators attended the event, but the group also offered an astute set of observations
about the structure of contemporary art more generally, highlighting the ways in which
that ostensibly rarified field in fact tightly overlapped with any number of systems of
popular culture. General Idea presented the art world itself as a beauty pageant, “in
which talent competitions, winners and losers, prizes and celebrity all take part.”
45
After
all, the pageant was not live, but rather based on a judgment of artworks that were on

45
Bronson, “Myth as Parasite,” p 19.

67

display before the award ceremony, and that judgment was presented in the format of a
pageant. Through this juxtaposition, General Idea indicated sites of structural overlap
between popular and high culture.
This view of art was in stark contrast to a position, a hallmark of Greenbergian
modernism, that valued artistic activity precisely because it was distinct from everyday
life. At the same time, it diverged from the general conception of art within the then-
dominant discourses of conceptualism, which, vary as they did, nevertheless shared a
distaste for the kind of art that availed itself to markets that bestowed prizes and
celebrity. Of course, though both modernism and conceptualism ostensibly eschewed the
kind of glitz that General Idea presented through the Pageant, part of what the
performance did was to present the dialectical relationship between a kind of critical
position that many of these modernist or conceptual works represented (be it of popular
culture, art institutions, or both) and the necessary relationship to capital and notoriety
that in fact enabled the work to exist. Art critic Jerry Bowles sums up the unspoken
position that General Idea’s pageant highlighted in an article from 1972, explaining, “the
art business is show business and everybody wants to be a star.”
46

General Idea frequently presented the ‘culture/nature interface’ as one of the
central motivating forces of its practice.
47
This interface became shorthand for a whole

46
Bowles, “Out of the Gallery.”
47
One of the group’s on-going projects was called Borderline Case, which it referred to
constantly in its other writings and projects. It solicited from the Eternal Network images
that represented a borderline case, though it left the interpretation of what that meant to
the person sending the images. It then organized the images into 10 categories, as the
concept was originally introduced in the IFEL: Special Paris Issue FILE. Once the group
began displaying showcards under the auspices of borderline cases, however, the work
settled into five categories and five fell by the wayside. Additionally, beginning with the
Luxon, V.B. project of 1973, General Idea began discussing the divide between nature

68

process that looked at ostensibly natural and given phenomena (sex, gender, culture,
meaning more generally) and demonstrated that they are in fact made through various
systems, from the official (laws) to the unofficial (media). This engagement with culture
motivated both the artistic and the subcultural scenes of which General Idea was a part,
and throughout the Pageant the group referenced historical precedents for artistic
practices that similarly overlapped with subcultural practices. As discussed in the
introduction, the members of General Idea were steeped in both contemporary political
art circles, subscribing to Situationist International newsletters, for example, but also in
the history of the historic avant-garde. General repeatedly recounted its interest in Dada
and Surrealism in interviews, but also directly incorporated aspects of those movements
into its work.
Marcel Dot’s winning photo is a prime example of this hearkening back to Dada,
which offered artists a historical example of political artistic and social practice, of
displaying the absurdity of the morals and values of contemporary life as a way to
demonstrate the constructed nature of a contemporary social order that rewards certain

and culture itself as a borderline case, explaining in that project’s pendant pamphlet: “[i]n
this show, which concerns the prototype for LUXON V.B., we address ourselves to that
exact and exacting space marked by Glamour: the interface between content and context,
nature and culture, inside and out [...] The Spirit of Miss General Idea 1984 manipulates
the necessary vacuum for content and context to air their differences.” This statement
clearly is playing with physics, as a vacuum is specifically a space without air, but not
surprisingly the installation included pictures of Ashram Rrak, a friend of the group,
vacuuming the slats of the mirrored venetian blind installation. The Borderline Case will
receive extensive consideration in chapter two of this dissertation.
General Idea. “Editorial,” IFEL: Special Paris Issue FILE. V 2, N 3, September 1973, p
11.
General Idea. “Borderline Cases,” IFEL: Special Paris Issue FILE. V 2, N 3, September
1973, p 12-31.
General Idea. Luxon V.B.: The 1984 Miss General Idea Pavillion (1973), self-published,
p 4-7.

69

forms of life while subjugating others.
48
General Idea was part of a correspondence art
scene that used the postal system not as a way to distribute individual artworks, but
rather as a way to construct performance characters that artists then presented as real
people functioning in everyday life—in the grocery store and the post office. Michael
Morris’ assumed name, Marcel Dot, evokes renowned Dada artist Marcel Duchamp, and
the image with which he won the 1971 Miss General Idea Pageant cites Man Ray’s
famous photograph of Duchamp’s alter ego Rrose Selavy. (32) In this photo, Duchamp
appears in drag, covering his neck, chin and much of the side of his face with a stole,
similar to the torso of The Miss General Idea Gown in Marcel Dot’s photograph.
Duchamp’s hands also suggest The Hand of the Spirit, another icon of Miss General
Idea, his thumbs hooked under the stole, his open palms gathering the fur under his chin,
and his open fingers cocked to parodically mimic genteel manners. (33) Duchamp picks
up cues of gender, race, and class and presents them in such a way as to draw attention
to them as performance, rather than attempt to convince a viewer that he is a woman.
Likewise, Dot’s deployment of femininity in his photograph is not drag, per se, at
least not any kind of drag that is interested in passing. He is interested in demonstrating

48
While the photograph of Duchamp that Dot references is not technically a Dada work,
having been taken after the movement’s decline throughout Europe and the United States,
artists within Canadada frequently played fast and loose with the actual facts of history.
The frequent use of the word ‘dada’ within their work, however, and in particular their
fondness for collage, puts Dot’s appropriation within this larger interest in the historical
movement. There were many different parts of Dada, occurring in different cities with
different approaches, methods, and intents. But the prevalence of collage within
Canadada created an affinity with Berlin Dada, in particular, which saw its politics as
residing in its denaturalization of bourgeois mores. For an in-depth discussion of Berlin
Dada, see:
Brigid Doherty. “Berlin,” Dada: Zurich, Berlin, Hannover, Cologne, New York, Paris.
Ed. Leah Dickerman. Washington, DC: D.A.P./National Gallery of Art, Washington,
2005, p 84-153.

70

femininity as a trope, but through his over-the-top-performance—his awkward pose, the
absurd look on his face, the fact that the entire torso of the dress hangs loose around his
neck and a found object in the shape of a caricatured hand protrudes next to his face—he
highlights that trope as having no inherent relationship to biology. As the judges
described it in awarding him his title, his photo captured glamour without falling into it.
He demonstrated the artifice of glamour without being glamorous. Duchamp’s
appearances as Rrose Selavy in Man Ray’s photographs were likewise presented as
performances within the field of everyday life, thereby bringing everyday life into the
field of performance as well.
49
Dot references this in his choice of name, and in his pose
for his photograph, which the judges then reinforce through their choice of the winner
for the 1971 Miss General Idea Pageant.
General Idea used the material of popular culture within a performance that
demonstrated the overlaps between art and everyday life, both in terms of their operation

49
Amelia Jones discusses the performativity of Dada, specifically drawing upon Rrose
Selavey as an example of a politicized performance of the self, within the context of a
world that saw the self as natural, whole, and pre-given. She also argues that Duchamp as
Rrose Selavey eroticized everyday life, highlighting the invested and thereby political
nature of meaning and value production. The erotic politicization of dramatic self-
performances in particular exploded the bourgeois moralism, utopian formalism, and
romantic sentimentalism that dominated the European art world in the first decades of the
twentieth century.
Jones, Amelia. “”Women” in Dada: Elsa, Rrose, and Charlie,” Women in Dada: Essays
on Sex, Gender, and Identity. Ed. Naomi Sawelson-Gorse. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
2001, p 142-172.
Rosalind Krauss’ discussion of Duchamp’s work with Man Ray points to another facet of
the project that resonates with its use within General Idea’s practice. She argues that his
gender presentation is less about drag and more about drawing a parallel between how
gender points to a crisis of identification and how photography as a medium points to a
crisis of the role of the index. While for Krauss gender clarifies the semiotic operation of
photography, for General Idea the opposite was true—the ability of the camera to
fabricate ostensible truth highlighted the iterative nature of subjectivity.
Krauss, Rosalind. “Notes on the Index: Part 1,” The Originality of the Avant-Garde and
Other Modernist Myths. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985, p 196-209.

71

(the fact of winners and losers) and also their structure (how values become naturalized).
The central role that questions of gender and sexuality played in the performance,
however, begs certain questions about what larger point the group might have in that
regard. Partly, certainly, there were aspects of the prominence of sexual deviancy within
General Idea’s artistic and social subcultures, and the general place of sexual deviancy
as a part of oppositional culture in the 1960s and 1970s. But the material of the 1971
Pageant implies that there is more to it than that. The juxtaposition of the group’s
structural interrogation of art and popular culture presented through the material of
sexual deviancy suggests a structural and systemic operation for sexuality as well. The
second case study in this chapter, The Hollywood Decca Dance, clarifies the role that
sexuality played within General Idea’s practice as a form of subcultural politics, and
proffers a political significance for sexuality, for the group’s work, and for subcultural
life that it would maintain throughout its career.

“Art is the Lie that Reveals the Truth”
50

Marcel Dot and Pascal, as well as the explicitly and self-consciously performative
self-presentations of the other participants in the 1971 Miss General Idea Pageant,
present a kind of literal sexuality that was a hallmark of both countercultural radical life
and avant-garde art in this moment. With the passage of the 1969 C-150 omnibus bill,
homosexuality was legalized in Canada insofar as gay sex was decriminalized, along

50
John Jack Baylin exclaimed this line during the Hollywood Decca Dance, before
welcoming Willoughby Sharp to the stage to present the award for “Best Bulge.”
Ant Farm. Art’s Stars in Hollywood.

72

with abortions and contraception, marking a turning point for Canadian sexual
liberties.
51
The depiction of non-normative sexuality, while certainly still not free from
violent retaliation from a still homophobic public, nevertheless characterized General
Idea’s social and artistic world. At this time Bronson and Zontal were openly gay, as
were many of their collaborators. The group’s work and also its context was infused with
open and frank depictions of sexuality, and its work and the work of its cohort grew out
of a primal stew of sexual libertinism.
Certainly there is something to be said for the fact that alternative sexualities
were simply part and parcel of the counterculture in the late 60s and early 70s. AA
Bronson himself, in an interview in March 2008, recalled:
all the straight guys, in order to be seen as of the moment had to have had
sex with a guy at least once, you know, they had to do it or just everyone
would look down on them. So it was a funny moment right then in the 70's.
The whole thing about sexual freedom was a big topic. And the sort of lack of
definition around sex was more important than identity really. It was very
free-form. I think there was this idea that sex could move in any direction at
any time, you know.”
52

The members of General Idea actively participated in a number of counter-cultural
institutions, including Rochdale College, an experiment with free alternative education
in Toronto, which was in fact what brought Bronson, Partz, and Zontal together in the
first place. The influence of the counter-culture of the 1960s cannot be overstated, in the
sense that it developed and implemented the idea of a politics of everyday social life as a
productive site of intervention. But as even the quote above shows, and as we see

51
Pierre Trudeau introduced the bill in 1967 while still serving as the Minister of Justice.
It was in reference to this bill that he uttered his famous statement, "there's no place for
the state in the bedrooms of the nation," adding that, "what's done in private between
adults doesn't concern the Criminal Code." The clip first aired on CBC as Trudeau's
Omnibus Bill: Challenging Canadian Taboos. [TV clip]. Canada: CBC. 1967-12-21.
52
Interview with author, 3/10/08.

73

reflected in the pages of the Body Politic, sexual liberation was about more than freedom
to have sex, and sexuality was about more than physical intimacy.
General Idea used sexuality as a framework to demonstrate certain confluences
between art and popular culture, in fact participating in a scene, Canadada, that used the
institutional privileges of artistic practice to make a subculture. The presence of literal
forms of non-normative sexuality is certainly clear: Pascal was a locally famous
transwoman, and Marcel Dot won the pageant with a photograph that features him in
drag. But sexuality functioned on a more structural level within the Pageant, and within
General Idea’s artistic and social groups more generally, as well. For these artists,
sexuality was a performative enactment and critique of how various formal and informal
institutions within each field produce meaning and determine value. This other use of
sexuality, and how it functioned as a form of subcultural politics, is clearly on display in
another large-scale performance, collaboratively staged by a number of members of
Canadada. This peformance is The Hollywood Decca Dance, which occurred on
February 2, 1974, at an old Elk’s Lodge in downtown Los Angeles. The Decca Dance
explains the alternative form of sexuality upon which General Idea would draw
throughout its career, and presents it as the basis of the subculture that it and other
Canadada artists were able to create through the field of art.
Like the Pageant, the Decca Dance was conceptualized as a performance for
video. The official documentation of the performance, a tape called Art Stars in
Hollywood, portrays not only the ceremony but also the rehearsals and multiple takes

74

that led to the final product.
53
Similarly to the pageant, the activity that framed and
enabled the performance was as much a part of the work as the event itself. The Decca
Dance was planned as a celebration of the Eternal Network in all of its myriad formats
and materializations. It was both a reunion and a first in-person meeting for artists who
had worked together on a widely conceived collaboration for years, but had oftentimes
never been in the same city, let alone room, as each other. But it also was an opportunity
to explain practices that overlapped in many ways, and that combined to create the
micro-world of Canadada, but whose nuances and complexities were oftentimes
unfamiliar to even participants of the network, let alone audiences. So the Decca Dance
was both a celebration and an explanation that proved to be the high point for the Eternal
Network’s activity in North America. It also, as an art project that was also a key part of
a developing subculture, highlighted the political nature of subcultural participation and
demonstrated the place that sexuality held within that politics.
Canadada was a moniker for an art movement, but it was also itself a
collaborative artwork, comprised of a mix of mail and performance practices that were
simultaneously individual and also intensely collaborative.
54
The artists in this subset of
the Eternal Network did not so much make mail art as use the postal system to create the
personae, motifs, and myths that were the heart of their simultaneously social and artistic
practices. In a 1973 article discussing FILE, whose masthead names it “a transcanadada

53
Ant Farm also produced a pendant video, Art’s Stars Interviews, which consists of a
series of interviews with all of the Canadian artists involved with the event.
54
This name indicates both the prominence of Canadian artists within the group and also
the influence of Dada, an early 20
th
century art movement that embraced collage and
nonsense as ways to use art to critique mainstream bourgeois society. Artists of other
nationalities participated, but the bulk of the work, both artistically and organizationally,
was done by Canadians.

75

art organ,” Walter Klepac noted the growing tendency for these artists to adopt “art
forms that reflect the life styles and the communities in which they live and work.”
55

Artists maintained personal practices, creating characters in and through which they
lived their everyday albeit eccentric lives, but these characters drew from and
contributed to a larger world, a meta-project of sorts, of places, names, motifs, and
gestures, that was collaborative in the sense that many individuals contributed to it,
though it was anything but coherent, cohesive, or even planned. Drawing on earlier post-
war gestures presented within Fluxus and Happenings, they lived their daily lives,
conducted business, and entered into relationships as their personae—giving them life
outside of the field of art.
56
For example, in 1972 Vancouver-based artist Vincent Trasov
debuted Mr. Peanut. (34) Mr. Peanut ran for mayor of Vancouver in 1974, earning four
percent of the vote. He also appeared in correspondence pieces across Canadada, from
the cover of the first issue of FILE reporting on the visit of the New York Corres

55
Walter Klepac. “Getting it all Apart – FILE Magazine: Special Double Issue,” Books
in Canada 7-9/1973.
56
Happenings and Fluxus, two movements in particular that directly influenced
Canadada. Developed in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Happenings were a practice
coined by an artist named Allan Kaprow, and they consisted of unscripted occurrences
staged within particular parameters, with the intent of breaking people out of their
routines of everyday life in an attempt to bring about a different form of consciousness.
Fluxus took an opposite approach to a similar aim, incorporating the everyday into
artistic practice to demonstrate the absurdity of the limitations placed upon everyday
objects and gestures. We can think of George Maciunas’ Flux Kits here, or Yoko Ono’s
pieces where she would mail people index cards with a simple direction on them,
oftentimes something as basic as introspection. Both of these precedents intersected at
The Western Front, a communal artist space that is still in operation in downtown
Vancouver. Many of the artists who would come to be a part of Canadada came through
the Front, and as such its activities familiarized many later artists with these earlier
strategies.
For more on Happenings, see:
Judith F. Rodenbeck. Radical Prototypes: Allan Kaprow and the Invention of
Happenings. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011.

76

Sponge-Dance School of Vancouver to Toronto to a well-publicized affair with Granada
Gazelle at his rural retreat Babyland. (35) By entering into these everyday unscripted
activities as their characters, artists across Canadada demonstrated the artistry of social
practice and the social nature of artistic practice.
Canadada projects were never intended to operate individually. In an article from
the March 17, 1973 issue of the Toronto Star, reporter Robert Fulford makes precisely
this point, that mail art and the Eternal Network are about experience and accumulation
rather than the individual objects.
57
In fact, this dispersion was precisely the point, which
General Idea note in an interview with Fulford later that year. The group insists that mail
art “builds up a type of mythology that can never be grasped all at the same time because
its all in different places in time. So it creates a mythology based on clues, on gossip, on
little bits of information that don’t say so much as they hide or imply certain
undercurrents.”
58
This kind of dispersion and complication stemmed from participants
embracing the network as a full time lifestyle, molding every aspect of their lives into a
creative experiment with alternative cultural configurations and using their art practices
and public arts funding to create subcultures.
59
Critical response to these practices often
overlooks this operation, however. An anonymous critic, presumably Dennis Wheeler, at

57
Fulford. “Correspondence art: Collages in time, distance, and the mind”
58
Transcript, GI on This is Robert Fulford, 1/21/1973. National Gallery of Canada.
59
This form of working proved particularly popular in Toronto, Vancouver, San
Francisco, and Los Angeles. Artists engaged in these kinds of practices often were drawn
to them because of the lack of a market either where they lived or for the kind of work
that they made. Economic factors also enabled these artists to continue to make this kind
of work. Not only is the production of ephemera a gesture against, for example, large
scale paintings on canvas or industrially produced metal cubes, it is also significantly less
expensive. Also, beginning in the late 1960s the Canadian government, through the
Canada Council, was incredibly supportive of these kinds of practices, in the form of
artist travel grants and local initiative programs funding, which artists used to produce
publications, performances, and videos but also to create artist-run centers.

77

the time the west coast representative for the National Gallery of Canada, described
FILE, and the projects it presents, as decadent, a “zoo of exotic phenomena.”
60
Clearly,
then, even these publications were insufficient to clarify the projects and how they
functioned as both critical artistic and social practice.
Providing clarity to these practices was one of the primary goals for the Decca
Dance (1974), although, as with General Idea, the performance’s explications were
themselves artworks in addition to clarifications and contextualizations. After the
playing of the Canadian and US national anthems that opened the ceremony, AA
Bronson and co-emcee EE Claire (the Vancouver-based artist Glenn Lewis) walked on
stage wearing tuxedos. (36) Additionally, Bronson wore exaggerated Hand of the Spirit
gloves, fabricated based on the found object Dot used in his submission to the pageant
three years earlier. They stopped at the back of the stage and, standing with their backs
to the audience, recited Whispered Art History. As a part of the celebration of the Eternal
Network, the Decca Dance was also a party for the one million and eleventh birthday of
art, a riff on a performance that Robert Filliou staged in Aachen, Germany, in 1963. (37)
Whispered Art History was part of this first celebration, a description of art’s birth on its
one millionth anniversary. The Hand of the Spirit Gloves and Whispered Art History are
two of countless examples of aspects of Canadada that seem ridiculous but have a
specific meaning within that proscribed circle, though being ridiculous was an important
part of that meaning. Each of these aspects was part of a sustained engagement with how
various phenomena from everyday life come to garner their significance, how the

60
Anonymous. "FILE: The Great Canadian Art Tragedy." The Grape, Vancouver, May
24-30, 1972.

78

structures of meaning-making within popular culture naturalize purposes for images,
objects, and gestures.
The first set of presenters, John Jack Baylin and Granada Gazelle, who also
hosted the awards portion of the evening, reaffirmed this underlying interest in melding
art and mass culture in the interest of investigating larger questions of signification,
including the relative value assigned to different levels of cultural practice. In her
welcome, Granada gushes:
I want to tell you sincerely and from the depths of my heart, how truly
wonderful it is to be here in Hollywood tonight. For those of us who have
licked a thousand stamps, have waited patiently in Xerox lines, have collated
pages of offset, have stood for hours over light tables trying to line up the
Letraset, and most of all, have fought for precedence in the world of ideas
and gossip ... This is our night of nights! [...] Here in Hollywood the
Dadacademy salutes you the network!

This reference to the Dadacademy, referencing both Dada and the Academy of Motion
Picture Arts and Sciences (the organization that stages the Oscars), collapses art into life
but also raises life into art. Baylin later confirmed this gesture. Explaining the transition
within the Eternal Network from the production of mail art to a prevalence of more and
less formal ‘zine production, he states later in the event: “The Mail scene has been
rapidly expanding into the Zine scene. As the Network grows the demand for news off
the subliminal is always there. ART’S DEAD BUT GOSSIP’S STILL ALIVE!” This
was the material of the art produced within Canadada, and by General Idea: gossip,
ideas, and exchange—the media for a social scene, as well as an art practice.
The categories recognized by the Dadacademy at the Decca Dance reflect both
the silliness and sense of absurd humor, but also the rigor, with which individuals and
collectives approached their practices. Categories ranged from Best Animal

79

Impersonation and Best Bulge to Best Large Scale Project and Best Glossy ‘Zine.
Throughout the evening, the presentation of awards alternated with a slide show,
narrated by Dot, which relayed the history and highlights of the practices that the Decca
Dance celebrated. The slide show poetically but exhaustively narrated the development
of the myriad characters, terms, places, and images that populated the work of the artists
in attendance. Slides also accompanied the awards presentations, displaying each piece,
be it object or person, that was under consideration in each category. Within all of this
scripting, there was still space for artists who weren’t involved in the planning process to
participate, such as when, after being awarded Miss Congeniality by Mr. Peanut, Anna
Banana stormed on stage and proceeded to smash her trophy to pieces while screaming
that clearly they didn’t know her at all if they thought she would want or deserve that
award. This interplay between script and improvisation, as well as a consummate
commitment to collaboration, structured Canadada and enabled it to simultaneously
function as an art project and a subculture.
As any award show would, however, the more serious affairs were regularly
punctuated by entertainment, with songs by Pascal, and music and dance numbers by
various groups within the Network who worked within those media. These songs and
dances were as self-referential as the rest of the network’s work, and further reinforced
the extent to which the artistic content of Canadada was also the foundation of its
subcultural operation. One particularly ridiculous example was that of John Dowd
leading the Shark Fin Dancers through a number. Dowd was an artist and, with his Tom
of Finland-esque figure, also frequent object of sexual objectification within John Jack
Baylin’s John Dowd Fan Club. At the Decca Dance, he led the Shark Fin Dancers, a

80

troupe that worked with Glenn Lewis, through a piece called “Gold Diggers of 84.” (38)
The title of this piece references an interview of the same name that Willoughby Sharp
conducted with General Idea and published in Avalanche the previous year.
61
In turn,
Sharp references a General Idea project from 1972.
62
(39) While potentially alienating,
these layers upon layers of references also contributed to the construction of Canadada
as a coherent place with its own frames of reference and systems of meaning, achieved
by occupying and rearticulating significatory structures from dominant culture, one of
the most fundamental of which is repetition.
The Decca Dance contained elements that were tightly scripted and rehearsed,
indicating a commitment to precision and clarity that supports the organizers’ attempts
to explicate the practices that constituted Canadada, to describe how it functioned as an
artwork but also to make sense of how it functioned as a subculture. These efforts were
systematically documented in both print and video.
63
By all accounts the idea for the
Decca Dance grew out of conversations between Michael Morris and Lowell Darling in

61
Willoughby Sharp. “The Gold-Diggers of ’84: An Interview with General Idea,
Toronto,” Avalanche. N 7, Winter/Spring 1973, p 14-21.
62
Gold-diggers of ’84 (1972) was a project in which General Idea sent two items to
ninety institutions around the world. The first was a card announcing the group’s
presence in that institution’s collection, and the second listed the collections that held
General Idea work. Not surprisingly, the second card listed the ninety institutions to
which cards were sent.
63
In addition to the Ant Farm tapes, the event was documented by Kerry Calona, which
led to the release of two videos by the former group and one by the latter cameraman.
Additionally, two publications, one each by Glenn Lewis and General Idea, circulated
transcripts, responses, and documentary photographs from the event.
While other accounts of the event almost certainly exist in other underground and
alternative publications, the primary evidence of the event includes the two Ant Farm
Tapes, Art’s Stars in Hollywood and Art’s Stars Interviews, Calona’s Decca Dance,
Mondo Artie Episode 1681 by Glenn Lewis, and an insert in the Annual Artist’s
Directory FILE, titled Hollywood Edition Art’s Birthday.
General Idea. Annual Artist’s Directory FILE. V 2, N 5, February 1974.

81

1973. By the time planning got rolling in earnest, the principal planners included Lowell
Darling from Los Angeles; Michael Morris, Vincent Trasov, Glenn Lewis, and John
Jack Baylin from Canada’s west coast; AA Bronson, Felix Partz, and Jorge Zontal from
Toronto; and Willoughby Sharp from New York. Letters among the organizers
specifically emphasize the importance of the slide show as an explication of the work of
“artists who have been working closely together on the subliminal.”
64
Artists drew on
other artists’ work without necessarily explaining all of the facets of the original
reference, such that audiences or artists who had missed a work might be confused by
subsequent pieces. The Decca Dance sought to fill in these holes.
The planners took the term ‘subliminal’ from William Burroughs’ 1964 novel
Nova Express, and used it to indicate the underlying material, both visual and verbal,
that structured their contemporary social order. This concept was useful for them
because so many Canadada artists appropriated their imagery from popular culture and
mass media. The artists “on The Subliminal,” however, used this material to create other
mythologies, their own interconnected world of, among other things, shark fins and
hands of the spirit. As these mythologies unfolded gradually and piecemeal across
numerous works and practices since the late 1960s, the Decca Dance was perhaps the
first place to provide a coherent summary of the myriad strands of its oftentimes-
confounding narrative. A press release from Morris frames the performance as a way

64
The press release is undated, and I was unable to locate any evidence that it was
released widely, but a copy of it resides in the Decca Dance materials in the General Idea
Archive at the National Gallery of Canada.

82

into the long-term narrative practices. The Decca Dance was a party and a celebration,
but it was also an acknowledgement by artists of the difficulty of their practice.
65

Part of the difficulty of the practices being celebrated by the Decca Dance was
precisely the fact that they were so intertwined, and yet made by so many people over
time, productively echoing how subcultures develop. As Dot described in Ant Farm’s
Art Stars video, “We all had the same picture but a different piece of the same picture.”
The work was collaborative but not systematic or planned in advance to have any kind of
trajectory. Artists simply took up strands from other works that applied to their current
interest, and left it to the audience to understand the reference. To a certain extent this
worked, because true to their desire to collapse art and life, the work formed a subculture
wherein the stylization, the funny icons and slang lingo, percolated not only through
magazines and performances but also parties, or even the weekly Shark Fin swim
sessions at a local pool in downtown Vancouver, where folks would meet and just swim
around, sometimes free form and sometimes choreographed, for fun while wearing
bathing caps with shark fins attached to them.
The Decca Dance presented Canadada as a subculture, but it specifically
highlighted the political operation of that subculture through its engagement with
sexuality. Artists collaboratively produced a distinct world with names, icons,
characters, and situations that were incessantly witty, playful, and ridiculous. Frequently
this humor came in the form of word play and double entendre that contributed to the

65
The artists organizing the event performed all of the steps that any mainstream award
show would go through in terms of publication and documentation, faithfully enacting all
of the different parts of their appropriated object. Their reach, however, was much more
limited, as the tapes of the event were never widely broadcast, the performance was
predominantly advertised within the alternative art press only. The majority of attendees
were participants in some facet or another of the Eternal Network.

83

pervasive sexuality of the work, if it did not include literal representations of various
signposts of non-normative sexuality. For example, after the performance of Whispered
Art History, Marcel Dot entered and welcomed the crowd, introducing Bronson and
Claire as the evening’s MCs. His introduction exemplifies the way that sexuality
functioned within the network, as cheeky deployment of taboo material. He welcomes:
Friends we are here from Canadada to celebrate the one million and eleventh
anniversary of the Birth of Art. We plan to have a marvelous time tonight.
Don’t worry about art, there will be plenty, there will be art coming out of
your ears, nose and Private Parts. Art was life and in the next decade we hope
it will be the same again.
66

Private Partz was a performance character for Felix Partz, though clearly the reference
here is to genetalia, incorporating sex into an arena in which it typically doesn’t appear.
By recognizing the fact that the interaction with an art object is a sexualized one, that it
involves private parts as much as it does eyes and ears, Dot removes art from a rarified
pedestal so art can be life, or be shown to always be life as much as it may be discussed
otherwise. But he also opens the event with an acknowledgement of the role that
sexuality plays within Canadada, hinting towards the part that it played within the larger
cultural and political intervention at work.
The Decca Dance drew from artistic practices that materialized within and
through various formal and informal institutions of mainstream culture, forming a world
with ideologies and common senses that were alternative to but nevertheless created
through hegemonic systems. As such, the practices celebrated within the Decca Dance
demonstrated that the meanings and values based on those systems were arbitrary and

66
Unless otherwise noted, quotes from the Decca Dance come from the transcript for the
event housed in the General Idea Archive at the National Gallery of Canada. Whenever
possible, the transcript has been corroborated by footage of the event from Ant Farm and
Kerry Calona.

84

reconfigurable. These mail artists created a coherent world with its own mythology, its
own narratives, and its own set of characters, and the Decca Dance provided a key to
this world. It was a collaborative, iterative performance that clarified the collaborative,
iterative nature of the projects of which it was a part. Through this it demonstrated the
collaborative, iterative quality of culture and social life—of being, meaning, and value.
This was sexuality within Canadada, and within Canadian Gay Liberation, and which
General Idea would enact throughout its career as subcultural politics: an embodied form
of cultural critique that demonstrated the mechanisms through which phenomena gain
meaning and value, and creating alternatives through those mechanisms.
That sexuality permeated Canadada in a manner distinct from literal sex, and sex
as an identity, seems to have been the real fuel for the virulent fire of Wheeler’s critique
of FILE mentioned earlier, as he concluded his article by lamenting:
Shitting on their own homosexuality, they have done an inestimable
disservice by re-repressing what remains for many a serious and actual
struggle within this society. They have paraded their homosexuality as
though that in itself gave the mag some bizarre status within the enigma of
the alternate society. Instead the problems of homosexuality as an actual
way of life recede into the pageantry of camp parody.
67

Rather than function as an identity, sexuality was the means through which to undermine
identity, as it denaturalized identity by revealing it as a process. Artists throughout
Canadada created their own personae, but they did not stop with creating their own
characters; they also occasionally would occupy others’. For example, the Dadacademy
awarded Irene Dogmatic Best Animal Impersonation at the Decca Dance, but the slide
that appeared while Dot announced the award was of Clara Coldbear playing Irene
Dogmatic, an animal persona playing another animal persona of an entirely different

67
Anonymous, “Great Canadian Art Tragedy”

85

artist. The presentation of the Best Animal Impersonation Award demonstrated the kind
of critical engagement that was valued within Canadada, and thus its politics. How Dot
presented the award highlighted each of the individual projects’ deconstruction of how
images, objects, and gestures come to have meaning within the social field. He
specifically pinpointed their interest in identification as a space that is not given or
biologically determined but rather constructed communally within a field of actors,
agents, and systems. Each artist celebrated by the Decca Dance took up the structures of
mainstream culture, both high and popular, thereby constructing their alternative
Canadada identities through already existing systems.
The confluence of non-normative sexual desires and practices with an
understanding of sexuality as a foundational semiotic structure within western culture,
influenced by Burroughs, came full circle in the issue of FILE published in conjunction
with the Decca Dance—the special Annual Artist Directory Issue released in February
of 1974. (40) This confluence also indicates the role that art, as General Idea saw it, had
to play within this sort of a political project. As John Jack Baylin exclaimed, before
introducing the Best Bulge category at the Decca Dance, “Art is the lie that reveals the
truth!!”
68
As mentioned earlier, FILE was created, in part, as a piece of General Idea’s
mail art activity. As such, every issue included a list of addresses for people who wanted
to participate in mail art, a list of images that people wanted to receive, and a list of
images that people possessed. This particular issue not only published the annual artist
directory, a more comprehensive list than the ones that had appeared in each previous
issue of FILE, but also included what the group termed (in an editorial published in four

68
Art’s Stars in Hollywood

86

languages) “an eleven-year calendar issue, devoted to the inauguration of the Decca
Dance.”
69
This eleven-year calendar spanned, of course, until 1984.
In a series of cartoons printed to look like individual cards towards the back of the
issue, each wishing Art a happy birthday and advertizing a birthday sponge dance in
Hollywood, General Idea exemplified the relationship between practices of non-
normative sexuality and alternative forms of subjectivity. (41) Each of these cards
depicts a figure holding a birthday cake. Each figure but one, as well, has the same
face—the caricatured bunny used by mail artist Ray Johnson (who General Idea refer to
as Sugar Dada) in many of his pieces. Each figure has different clothes, different hair,
and each has a name indicating which character within the network the card depicts. The
first two cards provide a gay setting for these pieces, as the first literally reads “your
gay” and the second “bum bank.” These were both plays on characters within the
network, Jorge of General Idea and Bum Bank as one of the invented associations that
John Jack Baylin founded. But they also point towards the other, structural function of
sexuality within this milieu.
Given the prevalence within the network of circular in-jokes, and, as such, the
incredible burden placed on audiences to keep up with practices to get all of the allusions
that would be part of any single object, the fact that these figures are given name tags
seems peculiar. Each figure, however, carries multiple characteristics that belong to
different characters within the network – characteristics whose performative nature this
kind of swapping reinforces, akin to Clara Coldbear appearing in the image displayed
when Irene Dogmatic won the award for best animal impersonation at the Decca Dance.

69
Annual Artist’s Directory FILE, p 5.

87

In these cards, the ‘your gay’ figure has Jorge’s characteristic hair and beard, but wears a
leopard print coat like Dr. Brute wears when performing with his Brute Band. Likewise,
the ‘flakey’ card carries the name of one of Glenn Lewis’ characters, but it wears the suit
of Mr. Peanut. So identity here circulates as easily, literally, as borrowed clothes,
exemplifying identification as consummately collaborative. In accepting his Sphinx
D’Or award, the highest honor from the Dadacademy, Count Fanzini exclaimed, “We
are entering a New Era of social art and the music of the new spheres is yet to come ... I
am not here, you are not here, already it is tomorrow. Happy birthday Gertrude Stein.”
The Decca Dance announced Canadada as a space for experimentation with how to
create alternative new social orders, and therein lay its demonstration of subcultural
politics.
General Idea, and the artists with which it worked early in its career, used
sexuality to undermine more than the methods and structures of identity. Sexuality was a
politicized methodology of creating alternative meanings through the significatory
processes of dominant culture. One of the primary methods of Canadada was to take
phenomena from dominant culture—images but also systems and structures—and re-
purpose them to create a parallel world with alternative social orders. General Idea and its
cohort were more interested in creating space for themselves to determine their own
values and hierarchies, their own systems of meaning and significance. In an article about
many of the more prominent Canadada artists published, appropriately enough, in Rolling
Stone in April of 1972, Thomas Albright reports “Their raw materials are ideas, jokes,
and words and images scavenged from the diarrhea of verbal and visual ‘information’

88

that spews forth endlessly from the mass media.”
70
This interpretation clearly projects
Canadada’s critical relationship to contemporary popular culture, while also
acknowledging these practices’ observations about the role that mass media as systems
play in shaping contemporary reality.
He states later in the same article:
Some are concerned primarily with exploring and expanding the nature of
the communications process itself, via miniaturized micro-systems that
parallel the workings of the artist-gallery-critic-collector establishment and
form non-commercial alternatives to it: by probing the psychology of
perception and epistemology, or how we come to know about things; or by
more mystically conceived activities that transform information into energy
and energy into a fluid matrix or web that cements together the isolated
“spaces” occupied by private individuals throughout the planet [...] Whether
the emphasis is Dada or Zen, anti-art or a logical extension of art,
correspondence art is, in an oblique, apparently impersonal way, working to
restore the function of art as a form of social or personal, even intimate,
communication. In the process, it is attacking or subverting many of the
roots by which “art” has traditionally been defined.
71

This description is worth quoting in full because it demonstrates the length to which
these artists went in taking up the systems of dominant culture, using them to their own
ends within a practice that was understood and in fact appreciated precisely because it
attempted to meld art and life, not simply to make art life but, as General Idea would say
in FILE, to make life art as well.
72

For example, the second issue of FILE features the first of many discussions of
“practising non-artists,” (PNAs) which refers to characters that exhibited the kind of

70
Thomas Albright. “New Art School: Correspondence,” Rolling Stone. 4/13/1972.
Reprinted in Space Co. Spring/Summer 72, p 3.
71
Albright. “New Art School: Correspondence,” p 3.
72
General Idea. “Art: Practising Non-Artists,” Manipulating the Self FILE. V 1, N 2 & 3,
May-June 1972, p 10.

89

absurdity and stylization that characterized Canadada, but did so unintentionally. By way
of introduction to a taxonomy of different types of PNAs, General Idea writes:
What is a PNA? Why do we get off on them? In a sense the PNA is the key to
whole Art Question, the substance behind the life-style issue that takes art out of
the galleries and into the streets. The PNA is nobody’s marksman. Although
proven highly susceptible to the attention of the press, the PNA of the most
developed variety carries his immunity within the method of his daily activity,
and carries on with a totality that is at once impossible and commendable.

The individuals that they then discuss range from the deliberately theatrical to the likely
mentally disturbed. While some of the group’s attention to the manifestations of mental
illness cause some discomfort and offense, this article and its interest in the “practising
non-artist” demonstrates some of the group’s thinking about intersections between art
and life, and demonstrates the context in which they were able to mobilize art as a means
through which to create subcultures.
By taking up material from mainstream culture, Canadada artists followed in a
tradition of critical art practices beginning with the one that they name in their moniker.
Dada provided them with an early precedent for appropriation. It also provided them
with a method, not only for finding material, but also producing it. The world of
Canadada is marked by superficially nonsensical language, both words and phrases (like
Dada itself) that are constantly repeated throughout performances, essays, mailings, or
what have you. ‘Collage or perish’ appears constantly throughout this work of the early
seventies, and even in the script for the Decca Dance. This mandate, to collage or perish,
inflects their process with a kind of urgency not strictly associated with artistic practice,
but certainly of consequence for subcultural social production. Therein lies a hint as to
the politics of this work. It does not manifest the specificity of some of the more famous
slogans of protest history—no “act up, fight back, fight AIDS,” no “out of the closets

90

and into the streets.” Rather than seek to overthrow anything, the call to “collage or
perish” directs participants to take up aspects of the world around them and work with
them to create their alternative alongside and around, rather than replace, dominant
culture. This is the politics of the work, which is inexorably tied to Canadada’s
understanding of sexuality.
There is no apparent or explicit connection to a traditional understanding of
sexuality within the “collage or perish” process. It does, however, embody the critical
engagement with culture that sexuality signified within Canadada. It also explains
artists’ formal choices that are quite precise despite their apparent haphazardness,
thereby clarifying how Canadada operated as a subculture and the scope and aims of its
inherent subcultural politics. Another phrase that continually appears in the Decca
Dance, and in the pages of FILE, as mentioned earlier, is ‘the subliminal,’ or ‘surfacing
on the subliminal,’ which was connected to the concept of “collage or perish” via
Burroughs. Defined literally, subliminal means that which is below the level of
conscious thought. So we think of subliminal messaging as that which goes directly to
the level of desire, for example, bypassing altogether any coherent decision-making
process. General Idea and its Canadada cohort turned their attention to precisely this
modus operandi of popular media and popular culture—naturalizing forms of meaning
and being that in fact carry no pre-given significance.
The connection between sexuality and structures of signification is clear in the
group’s engagement with William Burroughs, and specifically the final novel of his
Nova Trilogy, the book Nova Express (1964), from which they draw the phrase
‘surfacing on the subliminal.’ Another Canadada catch-phrase was “cut-up or shut up,”

91

citing the process that Burroughs used to write the Nova Trilogy—a process discovered
with Bryon Gysin when, the story goes, the men were cutting images to use in a collage
on top of a stack of newspapers, and upon rearranging the cut up pieces of newspaper
that they unwittingly created, realized that re-ordering the stuff of popular media offered
insight into what that media actually did to influence consciousness, not just tell a story
or relay the news.
73
In an article for the Toronto Star in 1973, Robert Fulford expressed
a similar interpretation, that these Canadada practices were trying to wrap their heads
around images in contemporary life, to look seriously and closely at the images that
make up spectacular culture in a way that affords them some specificity.
74
The cut up
allowed access to the subliminal for both.
75

Within the context of Burroughs’ practice, however, the subliminal carried a
specific structural function in relation to signification and identification that spoke
directly to both the subcultural and the artistic experience of General Idea, and clarified
the role that sexuality played as the foundation of the group’s subcultural politics. The
frequent reappearance of a particular line from Nova Express in the pages of FILE points
to this relationship. Burroughs writes, “and he breaks out all of the ugliest pictures in the
image bank and puts it out on the subliminal so one crisis piles up after the other right on

73
Burroughs and Brion Gysin, who discovered and publicized this strategy, refer to it as
the Third Mind. They discuss how they came to it, and its consequences, in their artist
book of that title.
William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin. The Third Mind (1965).
For the most recent interpretation of the cut-up method, as it pertains to Gysin in
particular, see:
Laura Hoptman. Brion Gysin: Dream Machine. NYC: New Museum, 2010.
74
Fulford. “Correspondence art: Collages in time, distance, and the mind.”
75
The cut-up technique was used as early as the work of the Dadaists, most notably in
poems by Tristan Tzara. The cut-up resonated with the prominence of collage particularly
within Berlin Dada.

92

schedule.”
76
Here we see why this idea of the subliminal held significance for General
Idea. The term works both sides of the fence, as a critique of how popular culture
operates, but also as the mechanic with which these artists injected their intervention.
This double operation was important for Burroughs as well, manifest within both the
plot of his novels and also their form.
77
The ability both to critique dominant culture by
means of exposing its underlying structures, and also to use that exposure to create
alternatives, constitutes a part of what sexuality meant within his work—which General
Idea enthusiastically cited as the root of its intervention, and of its politics.
By specifically referencing this matrix of concepts through their discussions of
the subliminal, General Idea and its cohort signaled that their use of the forms of
dominant culture to articulate different meanings and impart different values was a

76
While it is outside of the scope of this specific discussion, the image bank would also
become an important concept within Canadada. Vincent Trasov and Michael Morris
formed an organization in 1969 called Image Bank, which served as a hub for the
exchange of images among mail artists. General Idea published image requests in FILE,
in conjunction with Image Bank, through the Annual Artists Directory issue discussed
above.
William S. Buroughs. Nova Express. NY: Grove Press, 1992, p 12.
77
In his 2001 book, Queer Burroughs, Jamie Russell addresses precisely this point,
arguing that the narrative and the form of the Nova Trilogy use sexuality as a means
through which to enumerate a different model of identification. He explains how this also
presents a different form of politics, which was antithetical to the rights-based politics of
the gay rights movement that began with the Mattachine Society in the 1950s. Burroughs,
he argues, uses sexuality to present a mode of iterative identification that is in contrast to
mainstream gay identity, let alone models of inherent and given subjectivity within
dominant culture. Russell presents the cut-up method as a part of this undermining of
essential identity, because traditional narrative is precisely part of the structure that
transmits norms throughout culture. By enforcing a different form of sense-making upon
his reader, Burroughs asks them to undergo a sort of de-conditioning process. His use of
material from mainstream journalism and scientific tracts interspersed with his own
writing is part of this process,. As Burroughs himself says, in The Ticket that Exploded,
“In the beginning there was the word and the word was bullshit.”
Jamie Russell. Queer Burroughs. NYC: Palgrave, 2001.
William Burroughs. The Ticket that Exploded. Paris: Olympia Press, 1962, p 198.

93

fundamental part of sexuality. As such they connected sexuality to the intervention
enacted by their subcultures and thus positioned sexuality as subcultural politics.
78

Thomas Albright quotes Michael Morris in Rolling Stone, describing an image bank as
“a convenient heading for how we put things together [...] An image bank reality exists
somewhere out there on the subliminal and all we do is plug into it.”
79
The Decca Dance
specifically hones in on Hollywood as a site for the promulgation of bourgeois values
and hierarchies. As Sharla Sava points out in a 1996 thesis, however, these artists’
choices were conscious and directed, fueled by more than whimsy and absurdity.
80
She
describes their work as “a shock wave of homoerotically charged collage and cut-and-
paste kitsch,” more tied to the Beat poets who also took much from Burroughs rather
than any sort of New Left program.
81

Conclusion

Through the work in the beginning of its career, which was insistently and
incessantly collaborative, General Idea presented a politicized collapse of art and
everyday social life. The combination of alternative sexuality and an engagement with
cultural structures rather than specific policies and institutions General Idea embraced
received no small amount of criticism from organized leftists. Many members of

78
The group never specifically refers to the technique of détournement by name, but the
members did freely admit the influence of Guy Debord and the Situationists upon
General Idea’s practice. Bronson even subscribed to a Situationist newspaper beginning
in the mid 1960s.
79
Albright. “New Art School: Correspondence,” p 4.
80
Sava. As If the Oceans were Lemonade.
81
Ibid, p 63.

94

Canada’s gay liberation movement began their activist careers in Marxist, Socialist, and
New Left organizations but left because of the homophobia and disdain for sexual
liberation they experienced within those groups. This attitude is also evident in responses
to General Idea and its collaborators, predominantly from artists who worked within
Conceptual Art traditions more closely aligned with the New Left.
82
The vehemence of
this response demonstrated the extent to which subcultural politics challenged traditional
ideas about political engagement, how to enact social change, and even how to judge
effectiveness in relation to political interventions.
This came across most clearly in an event held at the Nova Scotia College of Art
and Design (NSCAD) in 1972, as the Halifax leg of the Vancouver/Halifax Exchange
(VHX), from March 6 to March 11, 1972. NSCAD, for a number of reasons, among
them the Projects class begun by David Askevold and the school’s Lithography
workshop, was a vibrant space of exchange because of the many artists from New York
and Europe who participated in these different projects. At the time of the VHX, both
Lawrence Weiner and James Lee Byars were in residency. While General Idea did not
participate in this event, as none of its members were from Vancouver, many of its
collaborators did, and the practices that were derided during this event were very much
part of General Idea’s scene.

82
While a political intellectual history is outside of the scope of this dissertation, within
North America the term New Left came to define a new form and address of organization
beginning with the student movements of the 1960s. The ‘new’ refers to a shift within
these movements away from the old left and its focus on unions and class determinism.

95

Between March 6
th
and March 11
th
, 1972, eleven artists from Vancouver visited
Halifax for the first half of the Halifax/Vancouver Exchange.
83
(42) While in Halifax,
they staged various kinds of performances, poetry readings, film screenings, and a panel
discussion.
84
The exchange was the brainchild of Roy Kiyooka, who had moved to
Halifax from Vancouver in 1971 to become the head of the painting department.
Supported by a seven-thousand dollar grant from the Canada Council, Kiyooka—along
with Bruce Parsons and Allan Mackay in Halifax and Marguerite Pinney, Doris
Shadbolt, and Glenn Lewis in Vancouver—facilitated a series of events that
demonstrated the quality and rigor of “experimental work in the several art-forms, and
their mixes,” across Canada.
85
The exchange also highlighted important differences
between work made in Halifax, which often interrogated the structures and limits of art
and its institutions; and Vancouver (and by extension General Idea, who intensely
collaborated with many of the participating Vancouver artists), where many actively
used art as a space to experiment with alternative forms of social life. These differences
reflected debates about art’s form and purpose that raged internationally in the late 1960s
and 1970s, and the responses to these different practices over the course of the exchange

83
These artists were Cheryl Druick, Don Druick, Gathie Falk, Carole Fisher, Gerry
Gilbert, Gary Lee-Nova, Glenn Lewis, Michael Morris, Dallas Selman, Dave Rimmer,
and Vincent Trasov. (43) Artists from Halifax were originally scheduled to visit
Vancouver first, in February, but because of a rail strike their visit was rescheduled and
eventually occurred from March 26
th
to the 30
th
.
84
Venues included the student unions at St. Mary’s, Mt. St. Vincent, and Dalhousie
Universities, as well as the Mezzanine and Anna Leonowens Galleries at NSCAD. The
schedule of events that constituted the Halifax/Vancouver Exchange, in addition to other
primary material that inform my reconstruction of events, are available in archives at
NSCAD. Many thanks to Aimée Brown, Sarah Hollenberg, Wes Johnston, Garry Neil
Kennedy, and Jayne Wark for allowing me to draw upon their work in and familiarity
with these archives.
Typed Schedule, Anna Leonowens Gallery File 037297 – Halifax Vancouver Exchange.
85
News Release, Anna Leonowens Gallery File 037297 – Halifax Vancouver Exchange.

96

highlight the scale of General Idea’s intervention, shared with its collaborators in
Vancouver. These artists not only challenged mainstream ideas about what constituted
politics, they also challenged the scope and aims of international oppositional
movements as well. That the negative response to these political interventions drew upon
the presence of sexuality within the work highlighted the structural intervention that
sexuality contained within its revolutionary moment.
Pieces by Cheryl and Don Druick, Gathie Falk, Carole Fisher, Gerry Gilbert,
Gary Lee-Nova, Glenn Lewis, Dallas Selman, and Dave Rimmer, which engaged with
many of the Conceptual concerns being addressed at NSCAD without pushing the
formal boundaries of what constitutes artistic production, were well received by the
Halifax artists and critics who attended the exchange.
86
The same cannot be said for the
Canadada works that were less directly in conversation with the kind Conceptualism
practiced at NSCAD. Lewis’ Better Body Works was one of the Canadada projects that
occurred at Halifax.
87
(44) For this piece, Lewis displayed postcards that he had
distributed ahead of time and requested be mailed to him at NSCAD under the name of
one of his many alter-ego projects, The New York Corres Sponge-Dance School of
Vancouver.
88
The image on the front of the postcard depicts a superhero action figure

86
Recollections from Ian Murray and Michael Morris and Vincent Trasov confirm this
reception of the more traditionally conceptual objects and performances.
Both conversations occurred through July of 2010.
87
Better Body Works occurred at NSCAD on the afternoon of March 9
th
.
88
The New York Corres Sponge-Dance School of Vancouver references many different
artist projects. The first is the New York Correspondence School, a project by the artist
Ray Johnson, who was one of the progenitors of mail art. Artists in the Eternal Network
frequently referred to him as Sugardada. The Sponge in the title also refers to a project by
Robert Filliou, who in 1963 declared that art was invented one million years prior when a
man threw a sponge into a river. Lewis’ own practice often involved choreography,

97

emerging from an extremely tan anus clad in a garter belt and shown from the lower
back to mid-thigh, lying on what appears to be an outdoor lounge chair. “Better body
works” appears across the left buttock, and “Flakey,” one of Lewis’ personae, is stamped
on the left side of the garter belt while “this is not to be sneezed at” is written in small
gothic font in the middle and “”Greetings from Terminal City” appears on the right.
89

The verso also bears the stamp “Greetings from Terminal City,” along with a note that
reads “Send better body works to a meeting of the New York Corres Sponge-Dance
School of Vancouver at the Nova Scotia College of Art,” along with the school’s address
and the dates of the exchange.
The artists from NSCAD did not respond well to this playful and joke-y
intermedial work, a sentiment that emerged in a panel discussion that occurred the
afternoon of the 7
th
. (45) The event was an extension of Lewis’ Little Hot Stove League
project, which met as a weekly discussion group in Vancouver. The panel consisted of
artists Lawrence Weiner, James Lee Byars, and David Askevold, alongside Kiyooka,
Morris, Lee-Nova, Don Druick, Gilbert, and Trasov appearing for the first time as his
performance persona Mr. Peanut.
90
AGO curator Dennis Young moderated the
conversation. The Vancouver artists, Trasov and Morris recall, felt as if their work and

influenced by a series of workshops held by Deborah Hay, Yvonne Rainer, and Steve
Paxton at Intermedia in Vancouver in 1968.
89
Glenn Lewis is an accomplished and enthusiastic chef, and many of his alter egos’
names—Flakey Rose Hips, playing off of the spice rose hips, and EE Clair, certainly
referencing the modernist poet ee cummings but also the cream-filled, chocolate-covered
donut the éclair—reflect this interest. Fittingly, after the end of the Halifax/Vancouver
exchange he, along with a number of other artists from Vancouver, went to New York
where they did a cooking project at Gordon Matta-Clark’s restaurant, FOOD, and also
met Ray Johnson and other correspondence and Fluxus artists who would be influential
in the further development of each of their practices.
90
Mr. Peanut appeared often throughout the next few years, including in a campaign for
mayor of Vancouver and on the cover of the first issue of FILE, both in 1974.

98

their concerns were given inadequate consideration and dismissed as silly and
inconsequential.
91
Ian Murray, a student at NSCAD and participant in the exchange,
describes the tensions as “a Fluxus versus Minimalist thing, hippie versus hip thing ...
They [Vancouver artists] were more theatrical, poetical, experimental filmy, and
cartoony. They also mixed styles and disciplines whereas the dialogue at NSCAD was
much more specifically out of visual arts.”
92
He gives as an example a debate about the
relative merit of Ray Johnson’s mail art versus On Kawara’s date paintings. (46)
Debates about the Vancouver practices played out in terms of their artistic merit,
but their dismissal demonstrates precisely the terms with which homosexuality was
derided within popular culture and rejected within the more organized institutions of
oppositional politics: silly, decadent, frivolous. These were all code words for a kind of
gay sensibility within a mainstream society that used homosexuality and all of its
markers as one of its constitutive others. Discussing responses to the work in an
exhibition catalog for an exhibition marking the acquisition of Michael Morris and
Vincent Trasov’s archives, Scott Watson writes that they were “too rude and queer for
the establishment and too lacking in puritan rigor for a considerable number of the left
artistic intelligentsia.”
93
He explains, “identity became social, something one wore,
something one collages. Suddenly the inner depths weren’t so deep after all and

91
Vincent Trasov and Michael Morris, email letter to author, July 2, 2010.
92
Ian Murray, email letter to author, June 25, 2010.
93
Scott Watson. “Hand of the Spirit: Documents of the Seventies from the Morris/Trasov
Archive,” Hand of the Spirit: Documents of the Seventies form the Morris/Trasov
Archive. Vancouver: UBC Fine Arts Gallery, 1992, p 23.

99

appearance and surface, with all their variety and differentiation, seemed to be a
typography for new kinds of being and behaving.”
94

General Idea received a similar response in the article “FILE: The Great
Canadian Art Tragedy,” published in The Grape discussed earlier.
95
Wheeler critiques
the form of General Idea’s politics, lamenting that it didn’t find solidarity with other
oppressed groups and instead developed a competitive parallel to the gallery system that
excluded them. He calls these groups represented in FILE oppressive of people who
work under different interests, and claims that they have flipped process and idea art
back on themselves and made them into profitable production devoid of critical
operation. These groups, he critiques, reify spectacular commodity culture and make
their bed with liberalism, doing a disservice to gay rights because of their camp parody
of homosexuality and trading in content for mere lifestyle. He lambastes the group for
parading their gayness as a joke rather than appreciating that it is a sight of real and
meaningful struggle. A letter to GI from Trasov not only names Wheeler, but also
laments his interpretation of their collaborative work, saying, “Dennis knows us better
than that.”
96
Wheeler knew better than to judge them for disregarding the dire straits of
homosexual oppression, Trasov stated, but the arts administrator did seem to realize full
well the extent to which homosexuality, as an identity, played no part in the artists’
engagement with sexuality within their work.
Just as literal sex was rarely in the foreground of General Idea’s work, the
subtext of much of the group’s negative reception, particularly in relation to politics, was

94
Ibid, p 24.
95
Anonymous. “The Great Canadian Art Tragedy”
96
Undated letter from Vincent Trasov to General Idea, Art Metropole Collection,
National Gallery of Canada.

100

inflected but not explicitly colored by sexuality. Already during the first few years of its
career, when it was closely intertwined with an entire network of practitioners, General
Idea’s work demonstrated the shape and the stakes of its political intervention. With a
wit and sense of absurdity that resonated both with its contemporary subculture and a
legacy of a historic avant-garde, it established a method of combining art and social life
to incessantly proffer alternative ways of understanding, and politicizing, all aspects of
everyday life. Its early performances used art to create a subculture, which highlighted
the way that sexuality functioned as subcultural politics. My next chapter addresses the
subsequent phase of the Miss General Idea Pageant, the rehearsals of audience response
in anticipation of the coming pageant in 1984, and considers how it used these
performances and pendant issues of FILE to construct an art scene and a social scene
that elaborated sexuality as a part of the political potential of subcultures.

101

Chapter Two – Borderline Culture: Sexuality as Subcultural Politics

Intro

Once again, in the fall of 1975, General Idea staged a Miss General Idea Pageant
at the Art Gallery of Ontario. (47) Rather than being an awards ceremony, however, this
event was a performance, a rehearsal of audience reaction in anticipation of the next
competition, scheduled to occur in 1984. Just like the previous event, people flooded into
the museum, buzzing with the energy of one of the social events of the season. Unlike in
1971, however, the audience knew that it was as much a part of the performance, Going
Thru the Motions, as the individuals onstage—they were in on the joke and up on the
story, and they knew that they had a role to play.
Already, within its premise, this event carried a number of contradictions. The
group presented a re-enactment of the 1971 pageant as the 1984 event, playing with time
and with facts as if they were simply another artistic medium along with paint and
marble. The purpose was not to re-enact the previous event, but literally to present the
previous event as the future event. The stated purpose of the performance was to rehearse
audience reaction in anticipation of the 1984 pageant, but, in periodic interludes among
the re-performance, AA Bronson guided the audience through such activities as “the
standing ovation” and “the whiplash sequence,” presenting each less as scripted actions
and more like automatic responses that he nevertheless predicted would occur in 1984.
As such, he treated the audience as yet another object to be manipulated by the artist,
presenting what are ostensibly the most personal, ingrained, and natural of responses—
gasping, falling asleep, laughing—as something as scripted as dialog in a performance.
The audience was not just the participant; it was the object.

102

General Idea embraced ambiguity throughout its career, in fact judging a work’s
success on the basis of the number of meanings it was able to generate.
1
This was not
unique to General Idea in this moment that was just beginning to embrace the death of the
author. The group incorporated ambiguity within its practice as an integral part of the
operation of its work, though, as a significant piece of its critical engagement with
dominant culture.
2
In fact, it strove to find the contradictions inherent within dominant
culture, and to place those contradictory elements together to demonstrate how dominant
culture is fundamentally structured by contradiction. This chapter will demonstrate how
this method of exposing contradiction provided the foundation for the group’s Miss
General Idea Pageant project throughout the 1970s. It will also explain and how General
Idea used two key concepts—the Borderline Case and glamour—to build alternative
social structures that embraced ambiguity, rather than logic.
General Idea took up the Borderline Case as form, content, and methodology
within its work, and this chapter demonstrates how it equated the Borderline Case with
subcultural politics.
3
As it did with many loaded, technical terms, General Idea used

1
In a 2008 interview, Bronson described the group’s interest in multiple meanings,
saying, “on a more formal level the topic of ambiguity was something we discussed
endlessly and read about; it was a topic of particular interest to us.”
Interview with author, 3/10/2008.
2
In his canonical 1967 essay “Death of the Author,” Roland Barthes argued against the
role of an author’s intentions and biography as the sole producer of meaning for a certain
text, insisting that meaning stems instead from the interaction of a reader with a text. This
opened objects to multiple meanings, a phenomenon that many advanced artists
enthusiastically embraced in the 1970s.
Roland Barthes. “Death of the Author,” Aspen n 5+6, 1967, item 3.
3
Although first enumerated by psychologist Pierre Janet, and later elaborated by Anna
Freud, Freud’s most complete discussion of borderline personality disorder, in particular
as it relates to the idea of splitting, can be found in an essay, “Splitting of the Ego in the
Process of Defense,” written in 1938 and published posthumously in 1940:

103

borderline case and a related term, splitting, to gesture towards a field of discourse, and
for its affective resonance, rather than for their specific meaning. Nevertheless, the
specifics of the terms are useful to describe how the group deployed them to clarify the
political function of subcultural participation—fashion choices, where individuals hang
out, concert attendance, nightlife, etc. One characteristic of borderline personality
disorder (BPD) that pertains to General Idea’s form of cultural engagement is the
tendency for individuals with BPD to swing between poles of idealization and
demonization, of thinking in black and white modes of judgment that preclude shades of
gray, and thus preclude seeing the very contradictions that the group presented as the
foundations of dominant culture. General Idea presented mainstream society as a
borderline case, and explained that diagnosis in the first project to be discussed in this
chapter: an article from FILE called “Borderline Cases” published in the fall of 1973,
which contextualized and theorized a series of works also called Borderline Cases.
4
The
work presents images that show doubling, splitting, mirroring, and mimicry, framed by

Sigmund Freud. “Splitting of the Ego in the Process of Defense,” The Complete
Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Standard Edition. Ed. and Trans. James
Strachey. NYC: W. W. Norton and Company, 1975, V 23, p 271-278.
A long and rich body of literature exists that has applied psychoanalytic methods to
questions of subaltern resistance to dominant culture, and that have productively
marshaled different forms of neurosis and psychosis as positions of resistance for
subaltern subjects. There is certainly a place for that kind of analysis in relation to
General Idea’s use of the borderline and splitting as concepts, and that kind of analysis
could make a very strong case in support of General Idea’s presentation of the politics of
subcultural practice. Unfortunately, that kind of psychoanalytic reading is outside of the
scope and the methodology of this dissertation, as the evidence presented within the
objects General Idea produced indicates that it meant to refer to borderline personality
disorder and splitting in a more popular, and less clinical, fashion. The same is true of its
engagement with the concept of the fetish, discussed in chapter three.
4
Most of the borderline cases presented within the FILE article were never produced into
individual objects.

104

texts that, through double entendre, describe both the images and also various ways that
dominant culture, as a signifying practice, masks its constitutive contradictions.
As described in the previous chapter, General Idea viewed sexuality as more than
an identity based on desire and sexual object choice. It presented sexuality as a set of
practices that undermined the very idea of such systems and structures of classification
and valuation as identity. For the group, sexuality was a set of practices that highlighted
how cultural phenomena like identity get naturalized and reified through cultural
processes, but use those processes to make not just alternative identities, but alternative
forms of identification that render identity meaningless and impossible as a fixed
category. As such, sexuality was a manifestation of General Idea’s use of the borderline
case as a concept, and as a method. By addressing phenomena and categorizations other
than identity, however, the group enabled sexuality, as a mode of being that was also a
process of cultural engagement, to speak towards the semiotic function of culture more
generally. In the editorial to the special Glamour Issue FILE, published in the fall of
1975, General Idea clarifies the connection between sexuality and this more general form
of engagement with culture as a signifying practice. The editorial, which came to be
known as the “Glamour Manifesto,” argues for the political significance of this form of
critical cultural engagement, which was a constitutive part of subcultural participation,
and clarifies how fell under the umbrella of sexuality for the group.
General Idea published the special Glamour Issue FILE in conjunction with
Going Thru the Motions, in fact using the same image as the cover of the issue and on the
poster for the performance (and the pendant exhibition at the group’s Carmen Lamanna
Gallery, Going Thru the Notions). (48) The “Glamour Manifesto” explained how

105

sexuality offered a way to clarity a general theory of the cultural intervention of
subcultural participation, and also explained the political significance of sexuality, and
Going Thru the Motions connected these abstract theorizations back to specific
subcultures. The Hollywood Decca Dance (1974), discussed in the previous chapter,
explicates how artists created Canadada as a subculture that had material manifestations
but also functioned, in large part, as a dematerialized space, a kind of networked
placeless space created via mail projects. General Idea’s Miss General Idea Pageant
project proffered a different relationship between art and subcultures, one more literal
and grounded and based on the role that General Idea played within the subcultures that
constituted Toronto’s Queen Street West scene in the 1970s. The group was integral in
terms of both creating an audience for non-plastic art and connecting a social world of
queer nightlife, punk rock and new wave music, underground publishing, and avant-garde
fashion. In fact, it constructed an art audience out of these other subcultures, and displays
that fact in Going Thru the Motions. Over the course of the performance, General Idea
reiterates how sexuality functioned as a modality of subcultural politics inherent to the
activity of participating in subcultures, reinforcing art as an integrated part of cultural
practice and culture as a site replete with political significance.

106

The Borderline Case and the Dialectics of Modern Life

General Idea used subcultural strategies of appropriation, resignification, and
détournement throughout its projects in the 1970s.
5
In so doing, it highlighted how
culture is a signifying process both by emphasizing the contradictions that are concealed
within mass culture, and repurposing the modes through which culture produces meaning
and naturalizes dominant ideologies to create alternative systems, values, and social
orders. In its discussion of the Borderline Case, the group theorizes its strategy,
describing its interpretation of mass culture and demonstrating how its intervention
turned dominant structures against themselves. The group’s Borderline Cases project
unfolded between 1972 and 1973, and offers different examples of borders—biological,
geographical, conceptual—as a way to present the dialectical nature of social life, despite
mass culture’s attempts to deny its inherent contradictions.
6
Through the range of
examples that it considers, General Idea demonstrates the extent to which the
methodology of its artistic practice, which was drawn from the examples of subcultural

5
As discussed in the introduction, such strategies were considered essential parts of
various different subcultural practices since the end of the Second World War through the
1970s. Dick Hebdige, the voice most commonly associated with this observation,
discusses that it is less the specific actions or subcultures that carry critical potential, but
the more general fact of causing dominant culture to resignify in the first place. For more
on this, see:
Dick Hebdige. Subculture: The Meaning of Style. NYC: Routledge, 1979.
6
Earlier projects, such as the Light On videos, clearly also investigate the divisions
between nature and culture. The Light On works saw General Idea photographing or
filming the reflection of light onto the land- or city-scape, manipulating mirrors in an
attempt to shine light on the space between nature and culture.
As always, for General Idea projects completed up through 1975, for more information
on Borderline Cases see:
The Search for the Spirit: General Idea 1968-1975. Eds. Fern Bayer and Christina
Ritchie. Toronto: AGO, 1997.

107

practices, could function as a general political strategy enacted within and on the field of
culture.
The stakes of the project first appear as if in an advertisement on the inside back
cover of the second issue of FILE.
7
(49) The ad carries the label “rejected from
artscanada, May, 1972,” signaling both the group’s disdain for the major publication,
and also its disregard for the kinds of traditional, plastic practices featured therein. The
Borderline Case receives exhaustive consideration in the subsequent issue of FILE,
however. In September of 1973, General Idea published its IFEL Special Paris Issue
FILE.
8
(50) The anagram of FILE to read IFEL provides a play on Eiffel, the architect for
the famed monument in Paris, France. General Idea amusingly referred, however, to
Paris, Ontario. Much of the humor of General Idea’s work stems from its word play,
filled with incessant punning and double entendre. This is consistent with its interest in
ambiguity and multiple meanings, and also demonstrates that language too is a site of
dominant culture to be occupied and redeployed for subcultural purposes. In fact, the
group approached culture as a linguistic phenomenon, as a signifying practice that
conferred meaning and value upon the range of objects within its purview. The editorial
called upon the reader to adopt a number of clichés related to Impressionism and
nineteenth century Paris, France—to affect the beret and the artist, to consider the voyeur
and the viewed in a clear reference to the flaneur.
9
The last call is to “affect the

7
General Idea. Manipulating the Self Issue FILE. V 1, N 2 & 3, May/June 1972, inside
back cover.
8
General Idea. IFEL: Special Paris Issue FILE. V 2, N 3, September 1973, p 11.
9
The flaneur was a key figure within the popular culture of modernism and modernity,
used as a theoretical linchpin by critics beginning with Charles Baudelaire and Walter
Benjamin. While the flaneur has been heavily theorized as both a symptom and a
progenitor of modernity, General Idea’s reference draws more upon the flaneur as a stock

108

borderline case.” The ironic, tongue-in-cheek send up of cultural clichés establishes the
critical modus operandi that the group would go on to demonstrate, in more subtle and
also more consequential sites, in the Borderline Cases to follow. To affect, not to be—to
demonstrate the significatory process that confers meaning and value on an object,
gesture, or position without accepting the normative outcome with all of its attending
connotations.
In concluding the editorial, General Idea emphasizes its focus on process as the
site of its cultural engagement, and as the space of its political intervention. The object is
not to make one specific alternative social order, but rather the process of creating
alternatives itself, based on a rejection of normative forms of logic and classification. The
editorial ends: “FOR YOUR CONVENIENCE, consider the borderline cases catalogued
in ten divisions on the following pages. Consider these deceptive. Levels of ambiguity
present classification problems not yet dealt with by structural methods.”
10
While poking
a needle in the side of the form of philosophy and cultural criticism then dominant in
advanced art, counter-cultures, and the organized political left, this introduction also sets
the stage for the group’s work as an exploration of a whole range of cultural institutions,
from gender to logic itself. It lays the foundation for a general theory of subcultural
politics that could be applied to myriad settings because its focus on process rather than
outcome.
The ten Borderline Cases in this issue of FILE build a complex playbook for
navigating the potentials and possibilities of cultural production of all sorts, shifting the

figure, and also as a dandy whose frivolity and simultaneous distance from and
implication in dominant culture matched its own.
10
General Idea. “Editorial,” IFEL: Special Paris Issue FILE. V 2, N 3, September 1973,
p 11.

109

site of politics from the object produced to the act of production itself.
11
The article
begins with a substantial introduction, which continues to lay out the stakes of the project
in the context of linguistic and systems theory. Its intro also explains the group’s
commitment to ambiguity, as the lack of singular meaning undermines how
characterization and classification circulated as given and natural within dominant
culture. It claims, “[a]mbiguity is not a symptom of a schizophrenic who travels back and
forth across the line but a quality of the border dweller who performs in the stolen
moments. In the suspended animation of the state of sweeping generalities and
macrovision is all sides of the story.”
12
Ambiguity was not rhetorical laziness, but rather a
refusal of normative forms of sense-making, which provide the foundation for normative
values and hierarchies. The play with the language of neurosis, of the schizophrenic
within the context of a larger reference to BPD via the title of the project, brings attention
back to the group’s insistence upon contradiction and dialectic as an inherent condition of
dominant culture, despite all of the mechanisms that attempt to hide that fact. When it
claims, “[i]n the suspended animation of the state of sweeping generalities and
macrovision is all sides of the story,” it focuses attention on this interpretation. Dominant
ideology freezes culture, reifying itself and its version of society. General Idea’s work, as
a manifestation of subcultural politics, points this out, highlighting aspects of social life
that are essential to but rendered invisible by dominant culture.

11
The ten borderline cases are: Now You See It, Imitation of Life (Mimicry), Self-
conscious, Graven Image (Mockery), Split, The Limit, Out of Your Element, Strange
Customs, Consummation, and Now You Don’t.
General Idea. “Borderline Cases,” IFEL Special Paris Issue, FILE. V. 2, N. 3, September
1973, p 12-31.
12
Ibid, p 12.

110

The Borderline Cases include a short text alongside a number of images culled
from General Idea’s archive, which it built by placing a call to its mail art network
requesting images that pertain to this theme.
13
Most of the images are from magazines
from the 1940s and 1950s, returning to the moment and the medium that generated the
group’s contemporary dominant culture.
14
Each Borderline Case carries a primary image
and a number of smaller images that offer variations on the theme presented in the larger
picture. Through the group’s hallmark witty play on common figures of speech and in-
group jargon, the attendant text expands on a particular aspect of the Borderline Case,
demonstrating how each example highlights particular contradictions within dominant
culture and provides an avenue for subcultural intervention.
The first section, “Now You See It,” presents General Idea’s interpretation of
dominant culture and introduces the group’s intervention. The primary picture features a
man carrying a woman on his shoulders, water-skiing on a square of wood. (51) From the
outset, sexuality plays a role in the Borderline Case, and the image portrays normative
sexuality on the point of a border, as water skiing allows someone to be on water in a
way that physics typically prohibits. The text across the image highlights the
precariousness of this position, reading, “[b]alance must be continuous.” This literal
balance offers a metaphor for a bigger balance, however, the “balance of nature and

13
The image credits for the issue make this clear, as it credits the images in the article to
“the General Idea collection of borderline imagery. These images were contributed by
various correspondents around the world.”
General Idea. IFEL Special Paris Issue, FILE. V. 2, N. 3, September 1973, p 3.
14
Notes from Project Fonds, The General Idea Collection, National Gallery of Canada.
For more on post-war Canadian cultural formation, see:
Pierre Berton. 1967: The Last Good Year. Toronto: Doubleday Canada, 1997.

111

culture.”
15
Mainstream society, General Idea presents, is a constant process of making
value-laden significances appear fixed and given. The group is trying to do something
else, however, by pointing out this iterative condition: “[s]mack in the middle is where its
exactly at. Our eyes are colliding head on making end meet. Now the two points we are
trying to make are riveted to the fulcrum. A far cry from the base of the triangle.”
16

General Idea embraces a different view of culture, one based on mutability and a
different form of sense making and legibility—the moving, fulcrum point of the triangle,
rather than the stable base. By presenting its interpretation of culture, and its
interpretation of the work done by the processes of culture, General Idea lays out how the
Borderline Case could play a role in subcultural politics, highlighting the inherently
contradictory nature of late capitalist culture by enacting those inconsistencies.
General Idea frequently addressed the ostensibly mutually exclusive positions of
nature and culture, in fact demonstrating that specific dichotomy as one of the structuring
mechanisms of dominant culture. Through its practice, though, it demonstrated both
nature and culture to be constructed phenomena, prefiguring a later observation by Judith
Butler concerning the ways in which culture constructs an idea of nature as a way to
legitimize itself. The example she uses is biological sex as a basis for discussions of
gender, when both gender and sex come to have their specific meaning through culture.
17

“Imitation of Life (Mimicry),” the second section, builds upon the presentation of nature
and culture as equally constructed that the group began in the first section. These images
show occurrences of doubling, as if in a mirror but in real physical space, using doubling

15
General Idea. “Borderline Cases,” p 13.
16
Ibid.
17
Judith Butler. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex.” NYC:
Routledge, 1993.

112

as a way to trouble any notion of origins, of the natural and the given, by presenting
everything as a copy. (52) Marching boy, kissing woman, interlaced bird—the case is not
that one figure in each pictured pair is nature and one is culture, but that each is both and
neither. The text reaffirms this condition from the outset, claiming, “when one body is
imitating one body lying down its life imitating life.”
18
The group embraces this status of
the copy as a position of power, and as the locus of subcultural politics. After asking if
two bodies meeting was the impetus for the invention of the mirror, the group asks, “was
this prop-osal to end our singleness? There’s safety in numbers and two can have a mind
of its own.”
19
This lays the groundwork for a new kind of collectivity, and a different
understanding of subjectivity and identification based not on a natural self but on
matrixes of relation and iteration.
The third section, “Self Conscious,” plays with consequences of this shattering of
the autonomous self that follows from an embrace of identification as a relational and on-
going process. The images juxtapose people looking into a mirror in similar but not
identical positions, alluding to the role that gesture, and performance, play in the
construction of the self. (53) The inclusion of both the figure and its reflection in the
mirror presents a fracturing of space that echoes Cubism, but while the historical
movement sought to present a more complete, more real view of its objects in space and
time, General Idea uses this device to the opposite effect. It undermines the concept of
completeness. The text treats the doubled image in the mirror as a distinct entity of the
same person: “[d]riving the wedge down deep through the centre and splitting the images
in halves. There is two of us to contend with now [...] Casting our image in the mirror

18
Ibid, p 14.
19
Ibid.

113

revealed a cast of two.”
20
In contrast to Lacan’s formulation of the mirror stage as the
moment the child begins to understand itself as an autonomous being located in a
specific, differentiated body, General Idea uses the mirror to undermine that very
concept.
21
The “Self Conscious” of the title refers to the embarrassment that occurs when
one is self conscious, wrapped up in other’s opinions and subject to the juridical powers
of cultural norms, and also a consciousness of the self as a product of culture.
General Idea explodes the idea of the self as a fixed, natural, and given
phenomenon; and demonstrates the possibilities that emerge once the relational nature of
subjectivity is embraced. In pointing to identification as an on-going process based on a
navigation of existing positions within dominant culture, the group not only undermines
subjugation on the basis of identity, but also undermines any system of classification
based on a presumed idea of nature and fixity. Identity becomes a microcosm for the fact
of culture as a signifying practice. The fourth section, “Graven Image (Mockery),”

20
Ibid, p 16.
Rosalind Kraus’ discussion of originality, the copy, and authenticity in the cast bronze
sculpture work of Auguste Rodin and the modernist use of the grid is useful here in that it
methodologically demonstrates General Idea’s use of doubling as a concept—
highlighting the repressed quality that nevertheless fuels a certain kind of practice, be it
modernism for Krauss or popular culture for General Idea. That the group would
frequently reference and recreate gestures, works, and figures from the height of
modernism affirms this connection, and in fact contributes to the intervention that the
group hoped to make in terms of leveling the ideologically charged distinctions among
levels of culture. This observation about copies without originals would occupy a
position of prominence throughout many different cultural practices within the canon of
post-modernism, from Judith Butler’s declaration of gender as a copy without an original
in Gender Trouble to Cindy Sherman’s demonstration of the same in her Untitled Film
Stills.
Rosalind Krauss. “The Originality of the Avant-Garde,” The Originality of the Avant-
Garde and Other Modernist Myths. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999, p 151-170.
21
Jacques Lacan. “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as Revealed in
Psychoanalytic Experience,” Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English. Trans. Bruce
Fink, Héloïse Fink, and Russell Grigg. NYC: W.W. Norton and Company, 1996, p 75-81.

114

highlights identification and subjectivization as processes, as opposed to the stable
categories of identity and subjectivity, by presenting images that demonstrate bodies
taking the shape of other bodies—people standing in front of images or objects,
mimicking their pose. (54) Which is the graven image, and which is the mockery, is
productively unclear, because in each image the body mimics the object; the original
mimics the copy. The text presents a form of self-determination within identification,
albeit on a collective and relational scale, as General Idea claims, “[w]e’re getting our
acts together to act out our fantasies in person on our persons.”
22
The juxtaposition of this
statement with these images acknowledges the ways that culture limits this agency, but
General Idea’s fantasy was not to create from scratch entirely different, affirming forms
of identity. It was to perform the cultural processes of identification and subjectivization
by disarticulating their gestures.
23
In so doing, the group undermines identity and
subjectivity as fixed and given concepts, thereby undermining a mainstream social order
based on significatory practices that reify fixity and essential being as their raison d’être.
The first four examples of borderline cases collectively demonstrate how General
Idea understood identity and subjectivity as borderline cases—as phenomena that are
sites for the reification of dominant culture, but that also contain the contradictions that
dominant culture tries to hide in the interest of naturalizing itself and its values and
hierarchies. With the fifth section, “Split,” General Idea begins to theorize how the

22
General Idea, “Borderline Cases,” p 20.
23
A number of contemporary philosophers have extensively theorized the limits to
individual agency within dominant culture. Two that have been particularly influential for
this project are Judith Butler and Gayatri Spivak.
Judith Butler. Bodies That Matter.
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. “Can the Subaltern Speak?,” Marxism and the
Interpretation of Culture. Eds. C. Nelson and L. Grossberg. Champaign, IL: University of
Illinois Press, 1988.

115

processes it observes in relation to identity can apply to other aspects of culture as a
signifying practice.
24
(55) The images and the text both reinforce the fact that a border, in
addition to being a site of division, is also a place of cohesion that shares elements of
each side. Splitting, as an aspect of BPD, describes an individual’s inability to bring
together positive and negative aspects of experience, and of the self, into one coherent
whole, with the consequence that people and things are either seen as all good or all bad,
with no ability to contain aspects of both.
25
As a defensive coping mechanism, splitting is
a symptom of the very contradictory states that it exists to deny. The split forms the
border that is the space of overlap between the two poles, and the text and images in
“Split” reinforce this fact.
The section also implicates the border and the split as sites of subcultural politics.
Emphasizing the productive potential of the divide as the space that oppositional
phenomena occupy, the text explains: “[i]t was only natural and we noticed at a certain
point that the waters parted and flowed in two directions at the same time. In the same
space we noticed time at midday when the shadows joined at the center.”
26
True to its
methodology, General Idea explains that the best way to respond to naturalized divisions
that culture imposes upon phenomena is to disidentify, to “cut up or perish and we joined
the ranks and called it collage.”
27
The process of naturalizing dominant ideology became

24
While each borderline case was supposed to become a repository for other images and
projects that shared its sensibility, “Split” was one of the only ones to ever be produced
by the group, as part of Borderline Case Five: Great Divide (1972). The other is the ninth
case.
General Idea. “Borderline Cases,” p 22.
25
Freud. “Splitting.”
26
General Idea. “Borderline Cases,” p 22.
27
Ibid.

116

the means to lay that condition bare, and to construct alternatives based on this
understanding of how culture functions.
After establishing the baseline for its methodology, General Idea begins to present
other kinds of borders and boundaries that demonstrate how culture functions as a
signifying practice, illustrating how the processes related to identification exemplify
general cultural processes. In the first of these larger examples, the group turns directly to
politics. The sixth section, “The Limit,” lays out some different ways that humanity has
tried to contain natural phenomena, using these means as metaphors for different political
and social systems and building to the axis of political opposition that loomed largest in
the western conscious in the 1970s. Beginning with coats to keep out the cold, clocks to
contain time, and dams to hold back water, the text moves on to address the control
mechanisms of each side of the Cold War: “[t]he asbestos curtain was a way of protecting
the audience from behind the scenes. The largest mass of concrete evidence is holding
back the waters while the red lights harness horsepower on the streets. Its called control
of masses like massed media containing the general public.”
28
General Idea equates the
political and economic control of the eastern bloc with the social control that creates and
polices bourgeois culture, echoing Warhol’s comment to Gene Swenson in his famous
interview of 1963:
I want everybody to think alike. [...] Russia is doing it under government. It's
happening here all by itself without being under a strict government; so if it's
working without trying, why can't it work without being Communist? Everybody
looks alike and acts alike, and we're getting more and more that way.
29

28
Ibid, p 24.
29
Warhol, Andy. “What is Pop Art?,” Interview with Gene Swenson. Art News 62.
November 1963, p 26.

117

These various forms that limit nature, movement, expression, each of them is a
Borderline Case in its own right, and each describes and simultaneously institutes a limit
upon subjects. Rather than lament this condition, though, General Idea celebrates it,
exclaiming, “Everyone is pushed to the limits [...] Now this is something we can really
get behind.”
30
The limit, the boundary, the borderline, this is a place of productivity for
the group, and, the Cold War metaphors imply, a place of political potential.
Rather than view limits, boundaries, and borders as constricting, General Idea
marshaled them, not only as sites from which to produce cultural criticism, but also sites
from which to produce alternative social structures.
31
These social structures enact the
dominant cultural processes that produce limits, boundaries, and hierarchies; but instead
of reifying those limits, these alternative structures revel in the contradictions contained
within and covered up by the dominant processes. They demonstrate how the naturalized
limits come to be, and use that acknowledgement as the basis for the alternatives they
produce. As such, the limit remained a productive part of General Idea’s vocabulary, but
it did not function as an impenetrable boundary. Limits were yet another found object for
the group, another Borderline Case. As an example, it offers the seventh section, “Out of
Your Element.” (56) The group explains: “We’ve drawn the line, got up against the wall
and now we’re going for broke. Like fish out of water we’re going to be floundering out
of our element.”
32
The group embraces being out of its element, because, when “the fish

30
General Idea, “Borderline Cases,” p 24.
31
This idea of the generative power of cultural restrictions echoes arguments about the
productive nature of artists’ response to censorship. For more on censorship as a creative
force, see:
Richard Meyer. Outlaw Representation: Censorship and Homosexuality in Twentieth-
Century Art. NYC: Oxford University Press, 2002.
32
General Idea. “Borderline Cases,” p 27.

118

gets a gill full of rarified air its underlining the dotted line.” The fish out of water exposes
the permeability of the limit, that the line is dotted and not solid. The limit is in fact the
proof of two things being mutually constitutive, as the group describes, “Where there’s
smoke there’s fire and one or the other is mutual [...] The shortest distance between two
sides is always a breakthrough and a breakthrough is a little bit of both.”
33
A border is a
cultural imposition meant to divide, but it is also the space of both sides at once, and
General Idea productively marshals both characteristics at once with its Borderline Cases,
which undergird its strategy of subcultural politics.
“Out of Your Element” ends with a reference to a specific and particularly fraught
but also particularly arbitrary border—the national border, represented by its policing
agent, customs: “[w]ith a foot in the door it is time to tell both sides of the story at
customs.”
34
Section eight, “Strange Customs,” takes up both meanings of the loaded
word, using customs as habits and also as a national checkpoint. As such, it
simultaneously references both formal and informal cultural structures. The images
highlight this, representing a doorway with an exceptionally worn step and a man
crossing through a hole in a fence at night, but also a masculine-appearing hand placing
an engagement ring on a feminine one. (57) The text also refers to both spheres, each
equally political for the group and thus equally implicated in the system under scrutiny by
the Borderline Case. The use of marriage metaphors to describe the encounter with the
juridical—“We declare ‘we do’ at customs”—reminds us of the levels of systems that
partake in culture as a signifying practice, and of the equivalency among these processes.

33
Ibid.
34
Ibid.

119

Identity, citizenship, the nation, each of these performs similar signifying work.
35
By
emphasizing the co-presence of the social with the juridical, the group justifies its idea of
politics, and also the political function of its own practice. “Our favorite spot for border
crossings is right between the lines,” the group quips.
36
General Idea continues to build
its case for its method of occupying dominant culture as a fundamental form of both
cultural criticism and social formation, describing its practice as “a stop action replay
edited out and collaged back in,” where cultural processes are stop action replays and the
group’s practice, as well as the subcultural practices from which it drew its strategies,
highlight this fact.
37

General Idea did not often clarify the stakes of its intervention, relying upon its
audience to share its beliefs in the problems with contemporary capitalist culture.
“Consummation,” the ninth Borderline Case, however, describes the violence of
dominant culture, and uses sexualized language to highlight how mainstream society
marshals sex and desire to prop up its ideology. Within this section, an image of a man
carrying a woman over a threshold appears next to an image of a woman being sawed in
half by an industrial saw, and an avalanche of snow cascading through an open window.
The performance not just of marriage, but of marriage as the foundation for a household,
within the context of the violence of the other two images, takes on an ominous air. (58)
The text provides some context, explaining, “The hard on avalanche is amounting to rape
in heat.”
38
In conjunction with the reference to marriage in the previous section, this

35
Ibid, p 28.
36
Ibid.
37
Ibid.
38
General Idea displays a somewhat troubling tendency to equivocate in its treatment of
women, which is a less laudable contradiction and ambiguity than we see in many other

120

implies that sex plays a structural role within dominant culture, functioning as a
Borderline Case extraordinaire for General Idea.
The way that sex appears within dominant culture, applied to phenomena not
necessarily related to either biology or intercourse, provided General Idea with an
example of how to use sexuality as a larger, more general investigation of the semiotic
operation of culture. The group presented sexuality as the vehicle of is cultural
intervention, as the practice that exposes culture as a motivated agent but also is the basis
for constructing alternatives based on contradiction and illogic. The section ends: “[t]he
ring has received the finger and banded together. Welcome to the region centrale with no
periphery and no division. This is no compromise. This is beyond words.”
39
Once again,
spacialized metaphors communicate how the occupation of culturally instituted divisions
intervene in the binaries that form the basis of how dominant culture makes sense of the
world. In this case, in addition to the address of space, the group expands its literal
discussion to speak to signification directly. “This is beyond words,” beyond the
structures of logic and sense-making present within dominant culture. This is the basis of
the group’s alternative: taking the structures and processes of dominant culture but using
them to expose the limits of that culture, based on the limits imposed by its systems of
logic—language.

circumstances in its work. This section presents the violence that is done to women by
dominant culture, but it continues to deny women agency by using the female body and
experience as a metaphor, as another empty shell that mimics sexism within culture at
large without parodying and ironizing it in the same way that the group does in other
instances.
General Idea. “Borderline Cases,” p 30.
39
Ibid.

121

The final section, “Now You Don’t,” offers a dénouement by completing the
phrase begun with the opening section, “Now You See It.” The images show frames and
internal machinery exposed by the removal of facades—a car chassis and engine, a house
footprint and bathroom hardware. (59) Each image shows the object’s structure and its
content—the very objects General Idea tried to expose through its strategies of cultural
engagement. Likewise, the text concludes the argument presented throughout the
previous Borderline Cases, that the Borderline Case is both the condition of dominant
culture and also General Idea’s method of cultural production. The group used the term
Borderline Case to stand in for how meaning and valuation are created through the
processes of dominant culture by setting mutually constitutive things in opposition. It
also stands in for the repetition of that process within subcultural practices to expose how
its flattening of contradiction and ambiguity is laden with power relations, what General
Idea explain as “[t]he same story as before but different. Same and similar but not equal
to what has already been layed down.”
40
The group rearticulated dominant cultural
processes to different ends, ends that both highlighted the invisible contradictions of
dominant culture but also embraced that contradiction and ambiguity as the basis of its
own cultural production. It describes, “[t]ime to reconstruct the plot with the invisible
writing on the walllessness. We are only for the time and space available to
undifferentiate the borderline.”
41
The purpose of the practices of subcultural social life,
and thus the locus of their politics, General Idea asserted, involves constructing
alternative cultures within dominant culture, where the alternatives acknowledge the
contradictions of contemporary life—the invisible writing—and the arbitrary nature of

40
General Idea. “Borderline Cases,” p 32.
41
Ibid.

122

divisions, classifications, and culturally reinforced hierarchies—wallessness,
undifferentiating the borderline.
Through its presentation of the Borderline Case, General Idea lays out its theories
about how culture works, and how a critically engaged practice can intervene in culture
by rearticulating its fundamental processes. It explains how the Borderline Case utilizes
the structures and mechanisms of culture not only to describe but also to enact culture, as
a critical but also a productive strategy. Although it was not a focus of this project,
sexuality appeared as a Borderline Case through a number of the examples the group
presented in the article. Sexuality as a Borderline Case would take on more importance in
relation to the Miss General Idea Pageant, specifically through the concept of glamour.
The group created a shorthand for the Borderline Case in an installation, and in particular
a performance within that installation, called Luxon V.B., at the group’s Carmen Lamanna
Gallery in 1972 and 1973. (60) The piece specifies the relationship among sexuality,
glamour, and the Borderline Case, and explicated glamour as a cipher for sexuality as a
Borderline Case.

This installation and performance condensed the entire critical nexus of the
Borderline Case into the shorthand catch-phrases and binaries of nature and culture, and
also content and context—phrases that would appear incessantly throughout subsequent
Pageant pieces. LUXON V.B. consisted of a number of mirrored Venetian blind slats
installed in the window of the Carmen Lamanna Gallery. It literally played with this
borderline concept, as the mirrored slates reflected the outside into the gallery, and the
inside back out. (61) In the pamphlet published to accompany the installation, the artists
write, “[i]n this show, which concerns the prototype for LUXON V.B., we address

123

ourselves to that exact and exacting space marked by Glamour: the interface between
content and context, nature and culture, inside and out.”
42
Reviewing the show in the
influential underground publication Proof Only, J.S. Bodolai referred to this as enacting a
collage of everyday life, with its pieces as the street, the gallery, passersby, and so forth.
43

In addition to the LUXON V.B. installation, the artists staged a performance on New
Year’s Day, Lux-On, where Ashram Rrak
44
vacuumed the slats of the installation,
comically enacting the installation as a Borderline Case by manipulating “the necessary
vacuum for content and context to air their differences.”
45
(62) Luxon V.B. presented the
Borderline Case not just as a theoretical framework, but as an embodied, literal practice
drawn from the interventions enacted by subcultural participation.

Sexuality and the Borderline

General Idea presented glamour as an archetypical Borderline Case,
simultaneously demonstrating the prevalence of sex and desire throughout dominant
culture but also redefining sexuality to signify the critical intervention contained within
the Borderline Case as an analytic strategy. The group defines its use of glamour in an
article in FILE that came to be known as The “Glamour Manifesto,” which appeared in
the “Glamour Issue” of FILE published in the fall of 1975. (63) Glamour was an aesthetic
and conceptual keystone for the group. This article outlines the group’s use of glamour

42
General Idea. Luxon V.B.: The 1984 Miss General Idea Pavillion. Self-published,
1973, p 4.
43
Bodolai, J.S. “Review, Luxon, V.B. at Carmen Lamanna Gallery.” Proof Only. V 1, N
3, 12/15/1973-/1/3/1974.
44
Marsha Karr, a friend of the group’s.
45
Luxon V.B., p 6-7.

124

while also placing it within the context of other forms of and ideas about politics.
Conceptually, glamour stands in for the whole nature/culture, content/context interface
presented within the Borderline Case, and alludes to the role that sexuality played within
General Idea’s formulation of subcultural politics. The group plays with the dominant
cultural notion of glamour as a manifestation of internal radiance, promulgated to great
success by Hollywood and its media apparati. But the concept also carried a subcultural
specificity, given the place that it held within camp and gay subcultures more generally at
this moment. True to these subcultural manifestations, the group highlights how
dominant culture masks glamour as a complete artifice, as a phenomenon carefully
constructed by the Hollywood star system and media machine. This subcultural use adds
additional political valence to the Pageant project, within which glamour plays a central
role.
“Glamour” opens with a spread of the three artists seated behind a drafting desk
scattered with such recognizable motifs of the Pageant as The Hand of the Spirit and the
Buzz Saw Wheel for the General Idea Vehicule. (64) The text’s opening reads:
This is the story of General Idea and the story of what we wanted. We
wanted to be famous, glamourous, and rich. That is to say we wanted to be
artists and we knew that if we were famous and glamourous we could say we
were artists and we would be. We never felt we had to produce great art to
be great artists. We knew great art did not bring glamour and fame. We knew
we had to keep a foot in the door of art and we were conscious of the
importance of berets and paint brushes. We made public appearances in painters’
smocks. We knew that if we were famous and glamourous we could say we were
artists and we would be. We did and we are. We are famous, glamourous artists.
This is the story of Glamour and the part it has played in our art.
46

46
The fish-net stockinged, stiletto heeled leg on the cover of this issue of the magazine
references such Hollywood moments as Rita Hayworth putting on her stockings in Gilda
(1946), and Marlene Dietrich in Blue Angel (1930). The cover echoes the Hannah Höch
collage, Marlene (1930) in which Höch collages a pair of slender heeled legs protruding
from a column and writes the name Marlene to the right of the legs. (65)

125

This oft-quoted declaration equates General Idea’s practice with glamour, as its form and
its content. The group did glamour and was glamour, exemplifying its interest in
uncovering the processes behind cultural phenomena, and highlighting the ways in which
ostensibly natural and given aspects of social life are, at their core, performative
reifications of dominant ideology. The manifesto, over the course of its eight sections,
explains the group’s interest in glamour, using it as a model to make a case for the utility
of sexuality as an analytic and critical framework with a specific, culturally located social
politics.
47

The first section, “Stolen Lingo,” appears with an image of the Shark Fin Dancers
from the Hollywood Decca Dance in 1974. (66) The image appears within a round frame,
suggesting a lens or a spotlight and building upon the Hollywood associations in the
original performance and also within glamour as a concept in general.
48
This section

General Idea. Glamour Issue FILE. V 3, N 1, Autumn 1975.
47
The article’s eight sections are: Stolen Lingo, Objet D’Art, Poison, Gestures,
Manipulation of the Self, Image Lobotomy, The Battleground, and Artificiality. Each
section occupies a portion of a page or page spread, with the majority of the real estate
going to images that are recycled from previous performances or found images used in
past issues of the magazine.
48
Glamour, as a concept, developed in literature early in the 19
th
century. In a book on
the subject, Stephen Gundle and Clino T. Castelli outline the shift within the use of
Glamour from its literary antecedent in the work of Walter Scott to its popular culture
associations: “[a]lthough Scott popularized glamour as a term and established
associations with illusion, beauty, magic, and the supernatural, it was not until
Hollywood cinema made glamour its own in the 1930s that it became widely recognized
not only as a feature of fiction but also of commercial culture.”
48
Hollywood glamour
retained the connotations of illusion, of superficiality and artifice. Gundle and Castelli
also make the observation that glamour is inexorably tied to consumption: “[g]lamour,
therefore, is the manufactured aura of capitalist society, the dazzling illusion that
compensates for inauthenticity and reinforces consumerism as a way of life.”
48
As the
illusion that naturalizes consumption, glamour provided General Idea a site to inhabit, to
both perform meaning-making and also highlight its occurrence by embodying glamour
without falling into it.

126

offers an overview of the group’s strategy of appropriation and occupation, and also its
insistence upon meaning as a collective and iterative process manifest by glamour’s
complete artificiality. “We knew Glamour never emerged from the ‘nature’ of things,”
the article insists, “[t]here are no glamourous people, no glamourous events. We knew
Glamour was artificial.” This made glamour available as a tool perfectly demonstrative of
the Borderline Case, as an ostensibly natural and essential characteristic that in fact
manifests how culture functions as a signifying process. Being glamorous, for General
Idea, meant being “plagarists, intellectual parasites. We moved in on history and
occupied images, emptying them of meaning, reducing them to shells.
49
Not just specific
images or words were rife for appropriation within this framework—history itself was an
available format for the group, as was the manifesto. As critic Diedrich Diedrichson
notes, the manifesto “combines classical avant-gardist ideas from Lautreamont to the

More than Hollywood, though, the glamour that General Idea references is a post
Hollywood star-system Glamour. Theirs is the glamour of Warhol, the glamour of
Marilyn Monroe and Jackie O. General Idea’s use of camp within their project forms an
immediate connection to Warhol. As Susan Sontag describes in her famous essay on the
topic, the sensibility of camp, like glamour, is “unmistakably modern.” Frivolity and
artifice also connect camp and glamour. While not all that is glamorous is camp, all
camp, according to Sontag, is glamorous. General Idea’s glamour is camp through its
exaggeration. For example, it is Marcel Dot’s exaggerated performance of glamour that
enables him to embody it without falling into it. To the extent that camp “sees everything
in quotation marks,” and understands “Being-as-Playing-a-Role,” General Idea embrace
glamour’s camp as a strategy, as a way of enacting their denaturalization of meaning and
identity.
Stephen Gundle and Clino T. Castelli. The Glamour System. NYC: Palgrave Macmillan,
2006.
Susan Sontag. “Notes on Camp,” The Partisan Review, Fall 1964, p 515-530.
49
This interest in history’s potential as a process to be redeployed for subcultural
purposes appears throughout General Idea’s work. I discuss it in more detail, specifically
in reference to art history, in chapter four.
General Idea. “Glamour,” p 22.

127

Lettristes.”
50
The lineage that Diedrichson establishes in this comment shared a common
interest in how culture functions semiotically, and how subversive cultural practices can
have political impact by redeploying those processes to different ends, establishing
different forms of logic and of grammar. Histories of the Situationist International (SI),
with whom the members of General Idea corresponded, typically narrate the roots of the
movement’s strategies in the lineage referenced by Diedrichson.
51
With its manifesto, the
group deploys a gesture that had a long history within an intensely political strand of
artistic production. This methodological reference was not accidental, and lent gravity to
a process and an aesthetic that was frequently derided by both the mainstream and the left
in the arena of ‘serious’ politics. Glamour stood in as the exemplar of this larger strategy,
of occupying not just the objects but the processes of dominant culture and re-deploying
them to different ends that support subcultural logics and values, rather than the dominant
ideological formations.
The prevalence of the markers of literal sex and desire throughout the “Glamour
Manifesto,” and the use of sexualized language to discuss both the processes of mass

50
Diedrich Diedrichsen. “An Alternative to the Alternative Press,” General Idea:
Editions and Multiples, 1967-1995. Ed. Barbara Fischer. Mississagua: Blackwood
Gallery, 2003, p 282.
51
The Comte de Lautréamont was a Uraguayan-born French poet, born name Isidore-
Lucien Ducasse, who created his most influential work in the two years before his death
in 1970. The Lettristes were a group of predominantly French writers and artists who
began to come together and enumerate their ideas in the 1940s, and officially formed the
Lettrist International in 1952. This group also engaged with language, and was an
immediate predecessor to the SI, as Guy Debord was a Lettrist before forming the more
infamous group, known worldwide for its participation in the riots in Paris in May of
1968. AA Bronson personally communicated with members of the SI, and subscribed to
many of its publications. For more on the Situationist International, and its development
out of various strands of a linguistically motivated avant-garde since the end of the 19
th

century, see:
Tom McDonough. The Beautiful Language of My Century: Reinventing the Language of
Contestation in Postwar France, 1945-1968. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007.

128

culture and also General Idea’s use of subcultural strategies, highlights the privileged
place that sexuality held for the group. The second section, “Objet D’Art,” emphasizes
this fact, depicting an image of a stocking-ed leg wearing the Miss General Idea Shoe and
holding a Hand of the Spirit, which echoes the cover of the issue. (67) “Glamourous
objects,” it begins, “open themselves to meaning, answering need with vacancy, waiting
to be penetrated by the act of recognition.”
52
Sex abounds within the language and
imagery of this section, with talk of “whores” and “penetration,” but General Idea also
clarifies how sexuality functions as a process within its particular brand of cultural
analysis. It uses a discussion of the Miss General Idea Shoe to exemplify this: “[t]hey
[the shoes] raise the Participant into an unnatural (hence cultured) position in which
walking is rendered difficult, transformed from movement into a frozen gesture.”
53
The
shoe stands in for, specifically, gender norms, and how those norms are reified through
their performative presentation. It also stands in for other norms, as an example of a
process that can be applied across the spectrum of culture.
While exceptionally well read, General Idea did not typically enumerate the heavy
cultural theory and political philosophy that undergirded its interpretation of how power
flows through culture. It preferred to present its own theorizations of the politics of
cultural practice through its art. As it did with its use of borderline personality disorder,
discussed above, or the subliminal, discussed in the previous chapter, however, it did
reference general fields and concepts to loosely locate its project within other kinds and
histories of critical practices, be they plastic, literary, or theoretical. Within the “Objet
D’Art” section, it brings in another concept that locates its commitment to working

52
General Idea. “Glamour,” p 23.
53
Ibid.

129

through cultural practice within a larger field of critical engagement. The passage
declares that, at its core, an object is nothing but a shell, “a SILENCE which belongs to
the world of myth.”
54
By focusing on the object not as a thing but as a cipher of a
process, and naming that process “myth,” General Idea refers to a larger discourse about
the role that culture plays in perpetuating the dominant social, economic, and political
order, and as such the potential that culture holds to undermine mainstream ideologies.
When General Idea discusses myth, it refers specifically to Roland Barthes’s
influential text, Mythologies (1957), and his discussion of specific practices, objects, and
gestures as phenomena that reinforce dominant cultural norms.
55
Mythologies looks at
mass culture and investigates the ways in which it communicates ideology. As such, the
text provided the group with a way to talk about how the activities and objects of
everyday life are sites replete with power, with the potential to reinforce dominant
hierarchies but also to present alternative ones.
56
In Myhtologies, Barthes theorizes that
mass cultural sites as varied as a newspaper and a wrestling match normalize and
naturalize a certain way of understanding the world. He explains:
The starting point of these reflections was usually a feeling of impatience at
the sigh of the ‘naturalness’ with which newspapers, art and common sense
constantly dress up a reality which, even though it is the one we live in, in
undoubtedly determined by history. In short, in the account given of our

54
Ibid.
55
The prominent Toronto-based art critic and curator Philip Monk has extensively
discussed General Idea’s engagement with Barthes, going so far as to present an
interpretation of the group’s practice as an illustration of structuralism. I disagree with
Monk’s thesis, and think that the group took up structuralism as another found format, as
a part of its practice rather than its totality. I discuss this in greater detail in chapter three.
For Monk’s most recent consideration of General Idea, and its relationship to
structuralism, see:
Philip Monk. Glamour is Theft: A User’s Guide to General Idea, 1969-1978. Toronto:
Art Gallery of York University, 2013.
56
Roland Barthes. Mythologies. Trans. Anette Lavers. NY: The Noonday Press, 1957.

130

contemporary circumstances, I resented seeing Nature and History confused at
every turn, and I wanted to track down, in the decorative display of what-goes-
without-saying, the ideological abuse which, in my view, is hidden there.
57

Culture has a history, common sense has a history, and values have a history, and
Barthes’s aim was to highlight this fact. General Idea took this up as a baseline
presumption about culture as a motivated phenomenon, and as a directive about how it
could turn culture against itself.
Barthes was less interested in the specific meaning of particular events than in
how they performed culture, how they exemplified the process of meaning-making and
reified dominant ideology. This interest in the how and not the what of cultural objects
carries clear resonance for General Idea’s strategy of performing the processes of culture
to highlight that they are not benign or unloaded. Barthes makes this interest explicit,
describing: “[m]yth is not defined by the object of its message, but by the way in which it
utters this message.”
58
Myth describes not the specific meanings culture produces, but
rather the production of meaning as a phenomenon itself; it does, acts, and makes, not
just names or describes. General Idea presents glamour as myth, as a demonstration of
how culture produces and reinforces meaning and value. By using glamour as its example
of myth, the group was able to point out the prevalence of sex within dominant culture,
and demonstrate how the objects, language, and gestures of sex are used to reinforce
norms unrelated to literal sex or desire. The group makes this connection in its discussion
of the Miss General Idea Shoe in the “Objet D’Art” section of the “Glamour Manifesto.”
The shoe is a metaphor for incorporation into dominant modalities of signification, and
General Idea sexualizes that process through its description of the shoe, explaining

57
Barthes. Mythologies, p 11.
58
Barthes. Mythologies, p 109.

131

acculturation as “[t]he Participants’ calf muscles swell[ing] against the expected brush of
black silk hose,” which brings subjects to “the brink of a delicious terror, the terror of
sexuality itself.”
59
Glamour highlights the role of sex in dominant culture, and General
Idea harnesses this prevalence to render sexuality into a process, and into myth as it
functioned for Barthes as a process and a cipher for culture as a semiotic phenomenon.
With the third section of the manifesto, “Poison,” General Idea describes how
glamour functions as myth, but also how it can be used to disidentify not just gender
norms, but the signifying logic of dominant culture writ large. Glamour is a poison
precisely because of its status as myth, because it contains the contradictions dominant
culture strives to render invisible. The images within this section feature figures
mimicking the pose of the Artists’ Muse, originally circulated to demonstrate the “spirit
of Miss General Idea” in the submissions packet for the 1971 Pageant, with one leg
extended straight below her and the other bent back at a ninety-degree angle. (68)
Included among the mimicking figures is Michael Morris, as he exited the limo for his
entrance to the 1971 Miss General Idea Pageant. (69) The images focus on pose, gesture,
and repetition, and the text explains how these elements participate in the semiotics of
culture. It begins by presenting glamour as an ostensibly essential condition, erasing “the
complexity of the human image and human acts, leaving the simplicity of essences.”
60

And Miss General Idea, represented by the Artists’ Muse, is glamorous, “blissful
perfection, ignorant of dialectics.”
61
This is the work that glamour is supposed to do to
reinforce gender norms, and the process of meaning-making within culture more

59
General Idea. “Glamour,” p 23.
60
Ibid, p 25.
61
Ibid.

132

generally. Glamour is myth, though; it is a Borderline Case through which General Idea
enacted its cultural intervention, highlighting the work that culture does to reinforce
dominant ideology. It is of culture, but also “that other enemy to culture.”
62
The group
describes, “[t]he moment of maximum Glamour occurs when poison fuses nature into
culture, creating a momentary joint operation of the two: myth becomes reality, the
seductress becomes the mother, Miss General Idea gets a grant.”
63
General Idea takes up
glamour because it offers the group a sexualized site to performatively enact the
significatory processes that constitute culture.
The use of glamour allows General Idea to sexualize myth and thus sexualize the
semiotic operation of culture. It makes this point in the subsequent section of the
manifesto, “Gestures,” which reprints part of “Graven Image [Mockery]” from the
“Borderline Cases” article, focusing on the particularly homoerotically charged images of
scantily clad men in a circle in the desert mimicking the shape of a large cactus in the
background, collaged with a picture from a physique pictorial with a man in a similar
position. (70) The role of the physique pictorial within gay male culture in the post-war
period, as a space for the expression of gay desire in an otherwise homophobic culture,
reinforces the homoerotics of the larger image. The text defines gesture as a combination
of movement and desire, which accumulates meaning through repetition to become “the
raw matter for myth.”
64
The glamorous gesture can also be the site that exposes myth,
because it “is at once exotic and familiar, establishing its bearer as an object in disguise.
The very act of the gesture evokes a delicious terror, threatening the unmasking of sex

62
Ibid.
63
Ibid.
64
Ibid, p 27.

133

with ambiguous ease.”
65
Sex as a literal activity and an ostensibly essential aspect of
biology circulates throughout culture, but General Idea also point to sexuality as a cipher
of the semiotic operation of culture. Throughout its career the group would juggle
sexuality as a modality of critically engaged cultural practice with sex as biology,
bedroom practice, and identity.
The object of General Idea’s politics was culture itself. As such, the strategy of
occupying and redeploying cultural processes by way of appropriating and disidentifying
its objects was fundamental to the group’s intention to point out the way that culture is a
site for the distribution of power. The subsequent two sections of the manifesto make this
clear. The first, “Manipulation of the Self,” connects this to the body, by focusing on the
performative nature of identity. Quoting from a 1972 project of the same title, where the
group instructed its network to send images of themselves performing a specific action,
of wrapping their arm around their head to grasp their chin from the opposite side, the
text describes: “[h]eld, you are holding. You are subject and object, context and content,
viewed and voyeur.”
66
(71) How better to point out the contradictions covered over by
culture than to perform culture in a manner that demonstrates those contradictions. It
clarifies this further in the next section, “Image Lobotomy,” where it describes its how its
process “is the result of a brief but brilliant larceny: image is stolen and restored, but
what is restored?” Just as the important object of myth is not the object, but the process,
so too is the case for General Idea, where the link between what it appropriated and the
context in which it originally appeared matter for the ultimate impact of the gesture. It
claims, “the glamorous image is brilliant in its vacancy, glorious in its degradation. The

65
Ibid.
66
Ibid, p 29.

134

image retains signs of a former purity. The face of reality is still evident beneath the thin
skin of Glamour.”
67
This emphasis on process, the group’s performative demonstration of
culture coupled with its use of these processes as content, offers a way to see the
fundamentally political nature of culture outside of any engagement with the government
or public policy.
In a rare moment of concision, General Idea lays out the political stakes of its
subcultural politics, stating, “[g]lamour replaces Marxism as the single revolutionary
statement of the twentieth century.”
68
This claim appears in the section, “The
Battleground,” which describes how glamour functions as a tactic of cultural criticism.
Among images that are by turns militaristic and fetishistic, the group describes what
glamour offers to its practice:
Glamour, like myth, miniaturizes reality, making it visible in a single glance.
All major characteristics are retained. Any ‘real-life’ context may be simulated.
Glamour is the perfect simulation technique for ongoing battles, the perfect tool
for reshaping history: adding, subtracting, indeed MAKING history. Glamour
strikes in a single invisible blow.
69
(72)

The intervention that glamour offers is a way to make something using reality, but
without any kind of investment in authenticity. This holds true on a larger scale, in
relation to culture writ large, but General Idea conclude its manifesto by focusing back in
on the details of its own practice, and in fact on the way in which it constructed itself as a
work, ending with a statement about the suitability of art for precisely this sort of
subcultural politics. Within this final section, “Artificiality,” the group describes: “[t]he
image of the artist is the easiest to inhabit. Because of its historic richness, its ready but

67
Ibid.
68
Ibid, p 31.
69
Ibid.

135

empty mythology (berets, paint brushes, palettes, in a word FORM without content) the
shell which was art was simple to invade.”
70
The group describes art as a site filled with
gestures that revel in “imperative artificiality.”
71
In this sense, art, too, is of a piece with
myth, glamour, and sexuality.
Through the “Glamour Manifesto,” General Idea describes how glamour is a
Borderline Case, a phenomenon that appears within dominant culture to naturalize norms
but that can be deployed for oppositional purposes to highlight the contradictions that
naturalization covers over. It also highlights the ways that sex functions as a metaphor
within dominant culture, enabling the group to turn around and present sexuality as a
Borderline Case as well. General Idea contextualizes the political significance of its
cultural intervention because of its demonstration of the relationship between meaning
and power. It argues for its practice as not just a negative and critical one, pointing out
the fallacies of bourgeois ideology, but as a productive one that enables the building of
alternatives based on highlighting the performative nature of cultural givens—identities
that highlight identification as an ongoing process being only one example. General Idea
drew this strategy of demonstrating how norms are in fact the site of the most motivated
semiotic processes from subcultures, presenting precisely this observation as its
definition of subcultural politics. It literally and self-consciously highlighted this
condition within the performance that was pendant to the special glamour issue of FILE,
Going Thru the Motions.

70
Ibid, p 32.
71
Ibid.

136

Staging the Borderline

Between the Borderline Case works and the “Glamour Manifesto,” General Idea
lays out a theory of its strategy of cultural engagement. It explains how it viewed culture
as a semiotic practice, and aimed to demonstrate the significance of that for how power is
distributed across the social field. Although it drew this strategy from circles that were by
equal turns artistic and social, the group did not highlight that fact in the two projects
discussed above. That demonstration fell to its Pageant project, through the way that
aspects of that work drew upon other subcultures present in Toronto—sexual, fashion,
music, etc—to create an art audience that itself functioned as a subculture.
Between 1974 and 1978, General Idea advanced its Pageant project through a
number of performances that rehearsed audience reaction for the next competition,
scheduled to occur in 1984.
72
The ethos of the Borderline Case pervades the project,
which is made clear in the introduction to the largest scale of these audience rehearsals,
1975’s Going Thru the Motions, the pendant performance to the Glamour FILE. As
General Idea affiliate and frequent collaborator Granada Gazelle exclaims in the prologue
that opens the performance:
How different from that intimate little affair at the Art Gallery of Ontario in
1971! So much has changed in these thirteen years since Marcel Idea was
called to the crown, dada dada dada, capturing Glamour without falling into
it, dada dada dada […] Tonight, after thirteen years of Searching for the Spirit
and Searching for the Site, after thirteen years of Ambiguity without
Contradiction, after thirteen years of survival on the subliminal, at last in

72
The other performances rehearsing audience reaction for the 1984 pageant were as
follows:
1974 Blocking
1977 Hot Property
1978 Towards an Audience Vocabulary

137

1984 … FORM FOLLOWS FICTION … and the Spirit of Miss General Idea is
revealed in the possibility of climax.
73

The subliminal. Ambiguity without contradiction. Glamour. Each of these jargony catch
phrases presents a Borderline Case. Each was also the basis for an entire mythology, even
an entire world created around Miss General Idea. That this world materialized through
the same mechanisms that the group used to construct an art audience for itself highlights
the way that General Idea’s artistic strategies were also subcultural strategies.
The armature for the Pageant performances after 1971 was that they were
audience rehearsals, meant to prepare the audience for its role in the 1984 ceremony. Its
focus on building an ideal audience for the specific event of the 1984 Miss General Idea
Pageant emphasizes the way in with the Pageant project was part of this larger effort to
build a general audience for itself, and for dematerialized art in Canada. Audiences were
participants in General Idea Pageant performances, which literally re-presented the 1971
Miss General Idea Pageant as the 1984 Pageant. These events interspersed presentations
of the earlier work with breaks to rehearse the current audience in the spontaneous
reactions that the 1971 event elicited.
74
AA Bronson, who emceed each rehearsal, would
break the action in the re-performance to take the audience through its expected reaction,

73
Transcript, Going Thru the Motions, National Gallery of Canada archive, Ottawa.
74
The Pageant was a large budget affair that received institutional support and critical
acclaim. While media coverage of the group’s work in the early 1970s tended to lean
towards dismissing the work as silly in-group nonsense, by 1975 there was general
agreement that General Idea was not only a real artist group, but also that it was making
work of critical importance. There were some problems putting on the performance, as
letters from the director of the AGO and Peggy Gale, at the time the education officer,
indicate. A March letter from the director notified the group of the museum’s plan to
cancel the event, but Gale, who enthusiastically supported the proposal from the outset,
intervened and by April everything was back on track.
These letters reside in the Correspondence Files of the General Idea Collection at the Art
Gallery of Ontario.

138

and then would resume events as they transpired in 1971 so that the audience could
implement what it had just rehearsed. At times different characters would play the
significant figures from 1971, and at times the group simply substituted other
performances for the music or dance numbers, but the general format of the events
remained consistent over their run from 1974 to 1978. One of the last rehearsals, Towards
an Audience Vocabulary (1978), drove this point of the audience as an active participant
home by placing an audience on stage for a performance that then had its own audience,
an audience as performer for another audience.
75
(73)
General Idea’s interest in activating its audience was fueled by more than an
interest in breaking down the autonomy of the art object, or demonstrating the importance
of the reader to complete any cultural text, concerns that by this time were de rigueur for
advanced art.
76
It was a matter of necessity. Describing the Pageant in a piece from 1984,

75
Critics interpreted the work as being in lineage with artists adopting a camp sensibility
of glitz and glamour, of appropriation and inhabitation and rearticulation, of fabricating
the self as part if not the entirety of an art practice that held parallels to Dada, to
Baudilaire and Wilde, and of course to Warhol.
McDonald, Marci. “What did you do in the Seventies, Dada?” Maclean’s. May 1975,
Style section, p 10.
Dault, Gary Michael. “3 Trendy Young Men Market Themselves,” The Toronto Star.
11/3/1975, p D 8.
76
For example, in his “Notes on Sculpture,” Robert Morris discusses the importance of
the audience for the Minimalist object—how in fact one of the most important roles of
the object is to establish a relationship with the spectator, and to allow the spectator,
through an engagement with the object, to have an experience that involves the space of
and light in the gallery, as well as a relationship with other people in the room.
Performance art, beginning with Kaprow’s Happenings but continuing through
the eponymous genre, also specifically addressed the question of audience and its role in
creating the artwork. Such artists as Adrienne Piper and Vito Acconci come to mind in
this regard. But of particular significance, in terms of providing General Idea with a
precedent for incorporating the everyday into performance, and also of engaging with the
audience as a core part of the work, is The Judson Dance Group, and specifically the
work of Yvonne Rainer. Rainer and Deborah Hay both spent time at the Western Front,

139

the group describes, “We started work on the 1984 Miss General Idea Pageant and
Pavillion thirteen years in advance. We knew it might take us that long to locate our
audience. Our audience research and development programme went hand in hand with
the Progress of the Pageant and Pavillion.”
77
The Pageant was about making an audience
for the group. Later in the same piece, it writes, “[t]here was the rock ‘n’ roll audience,
the media people, designers, architects, the fashion scene, and of course the trendy
responsibles. This hybrid audience was a real audience developed out of the lack of an art
audience in Canada.”
78

General Idea created an audience for the Miss General Idea Pageants, but it also
created an art audience more generally by staging one out of the already established
practitioners of other modes of production within its subcultural scene. Bronson explains
this in more detail:
[W]ith the music and theatre, with the whole countercultural scene being so
strong, but no art, it created this kind of void that we could move into. We
could be the art scene. So those were the audiences we spoke to at the
beginning. We were talking to the theatre audience and the music audience
and the literary audience, not to an art audience. [...] So we
specialized in the beginning in building our own audience because there

the artist run space in Vancouver that housed many of General Idea’s friends, colleagues,
and collaborators.
For a more detailed analysis of the role of audience within Rainer’s work, and the
influence that her work had on the positioning of the audience as a concept, see:
Carrie Lambert-Beatty. Being Watched: Yvonne Rainer and the 1960s. Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, 2008.
For more on Happenings, see:
Judith F. Rodenbeck. Radical Prototypes: Allan Kaprow and the Invention of
Happenings. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011.
Robert Morris. “Notes on Sculpture, Part II,” Artforum. V 5, N 2, October 1966, p 20-23
77
General Idea. “’How Our Mascots Love to Humiliate Us...’ Revelations from the
Doghouse,” General Idea 1968-1984. Eds. General Idea and Jan Debbaut. Eindhoven:
Lecturis BV, 1984, p 37.
78
Ibid, p 38.

140

wasn’t an audience.
79

For General Idea, creating an audience was both something that occurred within its work
but also through its work, and was not just a by-product but in fact a self-conscious point
of the Pageant. The group presented the Miss General Idea Pageant as a Borderline
Case, as myth. It was as a work that was also a process, a subcultural object that also
instantiated subcultures.
General Idea staged the Pageant as just another form of subcultural practice,
weaving the images and gestures of various other subculture into its performances and
not just appropriating their audiences. Phenomena from fashion and fetish sex were fair
game for the group, and its equal treatment of these different forms of cultural practice
reinforced that the spectrum of cultural production as equivalently implicated in the
semiotics of culture. Publishing, alternative education, music, experimental theater—the
Miss General Idea Pageant demonstrated that each of these sites is a space of subcultural
politics, and each contributed to the subcultural politics of the Pageant.
Going Thru the Motions was, without a doubt, a social extravaganza. The Art
Gallery of Ontario expected 300 people to show up for the second rehearsal for the
audience in anticipation of the 1984 Miss General Idea Pageant. Despite the inclement
weather, nearly 700 people paid the $5 to participate in the performance. Doors opened at
8.30, and participants had an hour to mingle, take in the various installation elements of
the stage set-up, and take their seats before the event finally got rolling at 9.30.
80
A crew

79
Tess Edmonson. “General Idea: AA Bronson Talks Haute Culture,” CanadianArt.
7/28/2011. Web, 2/17/2012.
80
Details about General Idea works, be they installations, performances, or videos, have
been meticulously collected by the group’s archivist, Fern Bayer, and cataloged in The

141

of 40 worked the event, with multiple cameras and a sound crew conspicuously
documenting an event that General Idea conceptualized from the outset as a performance
for video.
81
Filming started as soon as the doors opened, and didn’t stop until the bar ran
out of alcohol after the closing of the formal parts of the event. By including the activity
outside of the performance in the video, the group emphasizes the importance of social
armature to the performance. While not strictly audience rehearsal, this certainly was an
important part of audience construction, both because it provided an incentive to people
to participate as an audience, and also because it activated the audience as a social entity
defined by its socializing together not just by its acts of witnessing. It also emphasizes the
extent to which the performance was a social event, as much as a concert at a bar or a
drag show at a bathhouse.
The performance unfolds in a number of sections, separated by intermissions that
feature music by the band Rough Trade, a favorite in Toronto’s underground rock
scene.
82
(74) Notes for the performance describe the type of action that the audience is to
rehearse in each section, but also detail any other edifying functions that each section was
meant to serve within overall preparations for the 1984 Pageant.
83
Each part of the

General Idea Collection at the National Gallery of Canada, in Ottawa. Information
presented here will be from files in that collection, unless otherwise noted.
81
The presence of cameras certainly was part of creating the air of a media spectacle
around the Pageant, and also emphasized that the role of the audience in the event was to
be that of participant-as-audience, or audience-as-participant. Notes on transcript drafts in
the General Idea Collection indicate the group’s plans to orchestrate this event as a
performance in the service of creating a video.
82
The sections unfolded as follows: “The Arrival of the Guests,” “The Opening Speech,”
“Rehearsal of the Audience,” “The Entrance of the Spirit,” “Rehearsal of the Audience,”
“Marcel’s Farewell,” “Band Rehearsal,” “Intermission,” “The Competition,” “Rehearsal
of the Audience,” “The Judges’ Decision,” and finally “Audience Exit.”
83
Multiple draft manuscripts for Going Thru the Motions are available within the
Manuscript Fonds of the General Idea Collection at the NGC.

142

evening, from the entrance to the after party, had a section within the performance’s
script, though not every section of the event was completely scripted.
The event starts with the audience entrance, and notes on archival manuscripts
specifically state that participants were to be informed that the performance was being
recorded for video, and that they were a part of the event—in fact they were the stars, as
the point was to rehearse their reactions for 1984. Formal, scripted audience rehearsal
sections preceded the sections of the pageant that had proved to be particularly full of
audience response in 1971, as General Idea presented the 1971 Pageant not simply as the
template for 1984, but in fact as the exact same event, only with an unknown winner.
This positioned the Pageant as a Borderline Case in relation to time as well, collapsing
past, present, and future into an unspecified now, and established the world of Miss
General Idea as one based on a different logic of temporality.
In each audience rehearsal, AA explains what was going to happen in the next
section, and then have the audience prepare how to react. The rehearsal scene would cut
to the next, in which would unfold what AA had just described. For example, the first
rehearsal was the Entrance of the Spirit, in which AA describes the Spirit’s entrance in
detail—what she’s going to do, where she needs to go, what she needs to do, and how he
wants the audience to react. Specifically, he lays out what he calls “the whiplash
sequence,” ie the whiplash motion of standing up an she approaches to push by to her
seat and then sitting down and watching her walk away. This elicited laughter from a
number of audience members, which General Idea included in the video, both
highlighting the inherent absurdity of rehearsing emotional response and further
complicating the borderline between scripting and spontaneity.

143

General Idea includes numerous instances of direction throughout the
performance, not only to the audience but also to the cameramen as the evening
progresses. The Entrance of the Spirit scene opens with AA checking cameras 2 and 3
and calling “action!” This conscious incorporation of the artifice of the event highlighted
it as a performance of a rehearsal, in addition to a document thereof. After AA calls
action, the camera cuts to the Spirit, entering late after the rest of the audience has already
taken their seats. As the Spirit, played by Suzette Couture, circumambulates the Walker
Court, she reads a text that described in the third person not only her movement through
the space, but also the feelings she is experiencing as she travels: “[s]he wished she knew
if this was really the final scene or just another take, as she fluffed her furs and did a short
‘compact routine’.” By describing herself—her movements, her feelings, her actual and
conceptual place in the performance—in the third person, in fact holding her hand up as
if reading from a script, the Spirit again emphasizes the play between life and theater.
(75) Finally she finds her seat in seat 992, the borderline seat halfway to seat 1984, and
the audience is forced to practice its whiplash sequence.
This play with scripting and spontaneity heightens in the section rehearsing
Marcel’s farewell speech. AA guides the audience through its response—predominantly
applause—though he directs the audience not to actually applaud, even though they will
want to. They are to pretend to applaud and the sound will be dubbed in later. The video
shows not many audience members playing along to what AA called “practicing the
sound of one hand clapping.” The video then cuts to Marcel’s farewell speech, which is
actually delivered by Victor Coleman, at the time of the important Coach House Press.
He aggressively chews gum throughout the scene, which starts with a halting and nervous

144

recitation of a memorized speech, and then a smooth though affectless rendition of a
different speech that he claims was handed to him on his way into the Pavillion. Upon
completion, he crumples the paper up and throws it to the ground, stepping off stage
while “sound unavailable” flashes on the screen over an audience resisting its instructed
impulse to actually clap its hands. AA’s mention of over-dubbing positions General Idea
as the ones who institute the traces of the audience’s response in a moment of ostensibly
high emotion—the passing of the Miss General Idea torch. This highlights the
manufacture of affect, presenting emotion as able to be manipulated. The group presents
reaction and feeling themselves as artifice, a point made even clearer by the fact that
neither the retiring queen nor the audience expresses much interest in displaying the
emotion of its assigned position.
Through its presentation of ostensibly automatic emotional responses as
manufactured, General Idea highlights the body itself as an object of culture. The group’s
presentation of affect as affectation reaches its climax in the final rehearsal of the
evening, the announcement of the winner. This, according to AA, would be the
audience’s starring role, and as such its rehearsal is particularly important. Their
response, he implies, gives the announcement its gravitas, rendering the audience not just
participants but in fact the arbiter and mark of significance for the pronouncement. In the
1971 pageant, he describes, Dorothy Cameron fell off the stage after announcing Marcel
Dot the winner. The audience responded by gasping, then laughing, and finally
applauding. AA discusses the group’s interest in this response, and then directs the
audience in how they will rehearse it—he will clap three times; on the first they will
gasp, on the second they will laugh, and on the third they will applaud. Upon the

145

announcement of the winner, once General Idea took the audience through the scene, the
audience leaps to its feet with thundering ovation, performing its role by applauding the
winner but also congratulating itself on its completion of this part of the performance,
applauding its applause in a literal collapse of viewer and actor. They then exited to the
reception, ushering in the second act of the performance.
Particularly within the video, General Idea emphasizes that Going Thru the
Motions was a subcultural event. The group highlights the wide-ranging scope of
participants in the audience, going so far as to point them out with labels throughout
various points of the video. Likewise, in place of Pascal, who performed musical
interludes in the 1971 version of the pageant, the 1975 version features the band Rough
Trade. General Idea would work with the band to design a number of its album covers
and images for its press material, as it did with the band The Dishes, who performed the
musical role in the 1977 rehearsal Hot Property. The Dishes released an album by the
same name that year, whose cover also was designed by General Idea. (76) Pageant
performances also were concerts for these punk and new wave bands.
In addition to doing design work for musicians, the group was a fixture within
many of the micro-scenes that made up underground Toronto, colloquially referred to as
“Queen Street West,” which continues to be a site for an art scene that doubles as a queer
subculture.
84
The range of art, music, fashion, and theater featured and advertised in the

84
For more on this matrix of social subcultures and artistic practice within Queen Street
West, particularly involving the party Hotnuts and the art practice of “artist, activist, and
nightlife whiz Will Munro,” as read through one particular screening of Charles Atlas’
film All Hail the New Puritan (1985-1986), see:
Jon Davies. “Hail!,” No More Potlucks N 26. March-April 2013. Web, 3/10/2013.

146

pages of FILE indicates something of the extent of General Idea’s scene in Toronto.
85

The rise of punk rock happened alongside an explosion in the production of ‘zines, home
produced periodicals that documented a local scene and presented its maker’s point of
view to be distributed through whatever channels were available, produced in whatever
number the producer could photocopy. FILE took on some of this ethos, but it combined
this do-it-yourself energy with a tradition of artist magazines that was well established by
the mid 1970s, including Interfunktionen (1968-1975), Willoughby Sharp’s Avalanche
(1970-1976), and Andy Warhol’s Interview, which began in 1969 and is still in
publication.
86
A 1998 exhibition at The Power Plant, an important contemporary art
center in Toronto, titled Picturing the Toronto Art Community: The Queen Street Years,
confirms the mélange that was the Queen Street West scene, and the central role that
General Idea played in it. Critic and curator Earl Miller described this scene: “[a] scene
around Queen Street West, an empty shell that had begun with glamour, was burgeoning,

85
While General Idea, and FILE in particular, were certainly influenced by and
discursively related to other artist magazines at the time, including Sharp’s Avalanche, it
was of a different kind with implications for its role as a keystone for various subcultures,
be they artistic, social, musical, or, as the case usually was, all of that and more. Diedrich
Diedrichsen discusses this fact in a 2003 article on FILE, “An Alternative to the
Alternative Press.” Calling it “new wave avant le lettre,” he explains, “GI’s adaption [of
LIFE with FILE] prefigures strategies that have become popular in contemporary youth
culture everywhere: the ironic play with the powerful logos of consumer culture, the
small semiotic subversions that borrow the public signs of the power of capital, and the
provisional ways these are used against it [...] FILE was interested in the infiltrations and
corrosive strategies that would only become popularized in the post-punk years –
strategies beyond confrontation.”
Diedrich Diedrichsen. “An Alternative to the Alternative Press,” p 279-280.
86
For a more detailed account of FILE, and its relationship to other artist publications,
see:
Gwen Allen. Artists’ Magazines: An Alternative Space for Art. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 2011.

147

a scene with either a decidedly queer or sexually ambiguous sensibility.”
87
He refers to
the scene as “a growing nightlife-addicted entourage that surrounded GI,” including not
only the group, Carole Pope and Kevin Staples (the members of Rough Trade), and The
Dishes, but also other new wave groups that would form with art students from the
Ontario College of Art and Design (OCAD) like Martha and the Muffins, The Diodes,
and The Viletones.
88

This scene included more than just music, and General Idea frequently included
such figures as photographer David Buchanan, vintage clothing dealer and restaurateur as
well as early General Idea model Sandy Stagg, and impresario/musician/president of The
Dishes’ fanclub/FILE cover girl Anya Varda in its pieces, and in the pages of FILE,
which documented this scene as itself a kind of art project. Appropriately, critic and
curator Philip Monk opens his essay for the Power Plant show with a discussion of how
social scenes inflect art production, and how the Queen Street West scene was
particularly self-reflexive and celebratory of this fact.
89
He explains, “The social scene
influenced the making of work itself.”
90
In fact one of the early important clubs for punk
and new wave, Crash ‘n’ Burn, was in the basement of the Centre for Experimental Art
and Communication (CEAC), just off Queen Street West. Both Monk and Miller point to
the centrality of, if not queer sexuality, than ambiguous sexuality, to this scene, illustrated

87
Earl Miller, “File Under Anarchy: A Brief History of Punk Rock’s 30-Year
Relationship with Toronto’s Art Press,” C: International Contemporary Art. N 88,
Winter 2005, p 33.
88
Many of these bands would find international acclaim with the rise of New Wave, and
appear in the Punk Til you Puke Issue FILE.
General Idea. Punk Til You Puke Issue FILE. V 3, N 4, Fall 1977.
89
Philip Monk. “Picturing the Toronto Art Community: The Queen Street Years,” C:
International Contemporary Art. N 59, Fall 1998.
90
Ibid, p 4.

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by the proximity of the offices of The Body Politic to many of these bars, clubs, and art
spaces.
91
The fact that, as Earl Miller goes on to discuss, Toronto Queercore grows out of
this scene demonstrates the importance of sexuality to, and also the role that art played
within, this context.
92
This was the scene from which General Idea drew to create its
audience, and this was the scene with which it produced the Miss General Idea Pageant.
At the time, critics interpreted the pageant as an elaborate send up of the art
world—of the art market and of artist celebrity, which would prove to be a prescient
observation of developments that would crystallize in the booming art market of the
1980s. Arte Povera impresario Germano Celant describes the group’s project as, “the
explicit use of the myth-makings and the rites of investiture with which the art world
elects the general idea of the year (the fad).”
93
Other critics read the project as a metaphor
for and microcosm of culture at large. Writing in the magazine Toronto Life, Philip

91
For more on Queen Street West, see:
Rosemary Donegan, “What Ever Happened to Queen St. West?” Fuse. N 42, Fall 1986, p
10.
In particular, for the relationship between sexuality and Queen Street West, see:
Erin Silver. “What Ever Happened to Queen Street West?: Queer Artistic Imaginaries on
Toronto’s Queen Street West,” No More Potlucks. May/June, 2011. Web, 2/2012.
92
This interlacing of art, music, fashion, and ambiguous sexuality finds parallels with
what was happening in New York in this moment, colloquially referred to as the
downtown scene. As laid out in a 2005 exhibition celebrating the Downtown Collection
in the Fales Library at NYU, art in New York in the late 1970s and early 1980s was
equally amorphous (parallels to Warhol here are also telling). Musicians made art and
artists were in bands and everyone was at every show and party much like occurred in
Queen Street West in Toronto. In fact, General Idea floated between these two worlds, as,
beginning with the New York City Edition Issue, the group began to spend increasingly
more time in Manhattan, socializing and collaborating with many of the musicians,
artists, and curators who gave downtown art its shape. Later in 1976, notably, Going Thru
the Motions screened at MoMA.
The Downtown Book: The New York Art Scene 1974-1984. Ed. Marvin J. Taylor.
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005
93
Celant, Germano. “General Idea,” Domus: Architectura, Arredamneto, Arte, N 539,
10/1974, p 52, translated p 57.

149

Marchand describes how, by creating the world of Miss General Idea out of the images
and systems of popular culture and mass media, the group points to our own world as
constructed out of Glamour, image, and fetish.
94
By turning the performances into
subcultural events that also performed subcultural formation in a general sense, General
Idea presented social life as performance. As the audience exited the theater at the AGO,
the men were instructed to mouth the phrase “form follows fiction,” and the women
“ambiguity without contradiction.” Art historian Kirsten Olds describes the men’s line as
“a pointed statement about how entire worlds are built on fictional foundations,” and this
assertion, combined with the women’s celebration of a departure from bourgeois values
of rationality and clarity, sets the stage for the world-building potential of subcultural
social life modeled in the second act of Going Thru the Motions.
95

Through the Pageant, General Idea built a world for Miss General Idea, it built an
art audience, and it built subcultures. Rather than present any of these phenomena as
intentionally authored, though, it emphasizes how each comes to be relationally, through
performative enactment within the social field. Not only do the scripted elements of the
Pageant appropriate social gestures from General Idea’s subcultures. The entire second
act of the performance includes purely social activity for the audience-turned performers,
including such banal and ostensibly seedy activity as drinking, cruising, and clubbing.
The event included a cash bar, whose profits General Idea kept, and which did quite well
as it ran out shortly after the performance ended and had to be restocked before quickly

94
Philip Marchand. “The general idea behind General Idea: Think of them as
undiscovered pop stars who play the media instead of guitars,” Toronto Life. November
1975, p 30-37.
95
Kirsten Olds. Networked Collectivities: North American Artists’ Groups, 1968–1978.
Unpublished Dissertation: University of Michigan, 2009, p 185.

150

running out again. The stage was reconfigured to serve as two elevated dance platforms,
and Granada provided fashion commentary on the dancing audience.
While a whole range of social activity appeared within Going Thru the Motions—
a popular underground punk band, popular figures from within the underground social
scene, and sly allusions to the places and gestures that constitute various Queen Street
West subcultures—sex takes a pride of place even in moments that appear unrelated to
intercourse or desire, pointing to sexuality as a structural phenomenon and not simply an
activity or an identity. Many of the other subcultural phenomena referenced by General
Idea within the Pageant drew upon the markers of non-normative sex and sexuality, from
the name of Rough Trade itself to the incorporation of bondage attire into the fashion
designs by Sandy Stagg.
96
The incessant gender-bending throughout the scripted pageant
rehearsals, as well as the sly references to gay underground culture by General Idea and
Rough Trade (Carol Pope has been a known, out lesbian for the duration of her career),
created a subtext of sex that became more pronounced in the extra-performance moments
of the video. Whitney Worth, a roving reporter conducting interviews throughout the
social moments of the event, had the following scripted exchange with J.C. Allspectrum,
the bartender at the Colour Bar Lounge. (74) In response to a question about the most
popular drinks at the bar, Allspectrum, responds:
Yes, Whiteny, there’s something to please every palette at the Colour Bar. The
“Collage or Perish,” our ad-hocktail, is proving tres populaire, as well as the
standards like neo-citran-and-gin, and benalyn-and-creme d’Dada, and of course

96
The term ‘rough trade’ refers to a straight identified man who engages in aggressive
gay sex. Carried with the term are connotations of working class masculinity, and of
some sort of economic exchange. The term stems from prostitution, though also
circulates in less formal cruising contexts, and the erotics lie in sexualized dynamics
across gender, sexuality, and class boundaries.

151

several unusual requests. But the “Golden Shower” is definitely the general
public’s chose. One sip and it’s goodbye, abstract depressionism.

The cocktail choices at the bar include off handed references to artistic catch-phrases, like
referring to something as neo and, once again, the appearance of Dada. But it sets these
references within a social setting, and in particular within a sexualized setting.
The general public’s favorite choice, the Golden Shower, emphasizes this
sexuality, not only because a golden shower is a fetish sexual practice where one partner
urinates on another, but also because of Allspectrum’s description of it:
When you shake, shake like you’re possessed by the spirit. Do not rock or
swish or revolve or merely agitate. Throw your pelvis into high gear and
push the accelerator to the floor. Shake it don’t bruise it. Then pour it all into
a long-stemmed cocktail glass. Best yet is to serve it at body temperature and
jab a hand-of-the-spirit swizzle stick into the foam.

This emphasis on the social and sexual nature of the experience with the work of art
returns the body to art and highlights the interaction with the object as one involving
desire. One sip, and it’s bye bye abstract depressionism, presenting this view of art as a
social practice, distinct from Abstract Expressionism, which was celebrated as an escape
from contemporary society and as a representation of universal conditions of humanity
and of painting.
97

97
In his famous 1939 essay, “Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” the noted critic of post-war
modernism, Clement Greenberg, identified a separation from culture as a hallmark of
avant-garde art practice. Rather than engage with specific contemporary conditions,
Greenberg explained, post-war advanced art sought to communicate universal,
transcendental truths. While many convincing critiques of this interpretation exist, and
while this was not the paradigm of art within which General Idea operated, it nevertheless
remained the reigning interpretation of Abstract Expressionism at the time, and as such
served as a foil for General Idea’s practice.
Clement Greenberg. “Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” The Partisan Review. V 6, N 5, 1939, p
34-49.

152

Later in the same interview, the focus turns to a moment of artistic practice in
which sex and subjectivity featured front and center. Whitney turns the conversation to
Warhol, a subscriber to FILE, asking Allspectrum, “[w]as that Ultra Violet I saw coming
our of the lounge just now?” Allspectrum responds, “No, she was just in the foyer. It’s
impossible for Ultra to show up at the Colour Bar—she’s beyond our range.” (77) Ultra
Violet was a Warhol superstar, but it is also a color that is outside of the visible spectrum.
General Idea is making a few jokes with this line. First is the pun with the two meanings
of ultra violet—as the person but also the color—and second is a bit of a lighthearted,
self-depricating jab at the scale of the Pageant, and of the group’s practice. When
Allspectrum claims that ultra violent is outside of their range, she speaks to the
invisibility of the color, but also the fact that the Warhol superstar would likely not deign
to be seen at the Colour Bar Lounge. This play with representation and visuality, in the
context of Warhol’s practice, which made art of identification and subjectivity, opens
each site to function as the kind of embodied cultural critique that General Idea
celebrated within the Borderline Case. It also pointed to the role that it would marshal
sexuality itself to play as a Borderline Case.
A second interview, the last on the video, drives this point home even more
explicitly. Approaching an attractive audience member, “Rod,” Whitney mixes thinly
veiled come-ons with a double-spoken discussion of, on the one hand, fetish bondage
practices and, on the other, representation and ideology. (78) Referencing the Dr. Brute

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Colonnade, an area of the Pavillion for the 1984 Pageant,
98
Whitney opines in speech
that becomes increasingly excited:
I like the incredible pressure of image bondage, don’t you? The impossibility of
ever removing those spots from your eyes. I like the tension between the pavillion
as master and the artifacts as slaves to the vision, the audience as standard fixtures
subservient to the dominating theme, context whipping content into shapes,
culture binding nature with prewritten lines.

Whitney hits on Rod with a description of the critical process that constitutes the
Borderline Case, taking the language General Idea typically used in its discussion of the
method and replacing some of the words to reference sado-masochistim—bondage,
master and slave, whipping, binding. Once again, the juxtaposition of representation with
sex in a discussion of ideology emphasizes the political potential of subversive cultural
practice. By using examples more closely tied to the group’s subcultures, though, General
Idea is able to demonstrate the political potential latent in each moment of each
individual’s social life, as those moments are all implicated in the semiotics of culture.
Whitney makes this connection to this political potential explicit as he concludes
his monologue towards Rod:
And Dr. Brute, he’s lashed to the finials, those slender finials, the erectness of his
gesture, head jerked back, ass up-taut, foot arched in negative stiletto—all

98
General Idea never built the Pavillion for the 1984 Miss General Idea Pageant as a
physical structure. Instead, it materialized via representations of its different parts in the
pages of FILE, prints, and installations. Frequently, however, these representations were
appropriations from other sources, and the Dr. Brute Colonnade is no exception. Dr.
Brute was a performance persona of Eric Metcalf, who was also a founding member of
Western Front in Vancouver. Alongside Lady Brute (Kate Craig), Dr. Brute worked to
create Brutopia, characterized by leopard spots that the Brutes applied or appropriated
from found images. In the case of General Idea’s Dr. Brute Colonnade, General Idea took
a photograph that they received documenting a performance in which Dr. Brute bound his
hands above his head to a leopard spot covered column. It then used that photography to
create a line drawing that it then repeated successively to create the colonnade, modifying
details in different editions of the prints. Rodney Werden took the photograph, and the
performance occurred at A Space in Toronto in 1973.

154

straining under the downfall of ziggurats. Whose master plan is he laboring
under? Is he holding on or holding up?

The Dr. Brute Colonnade, which Whitney discusses here, was a part of the Pavillion that
materialized as a series of prints that General Idea made based on a photograph taken at a
Dr. Brute performance. The print shows a colonnade of repeated instances of Dr. Brute
handcuffed naked to a column in the pose that Whitney describes. Within the context of
Whitney’s discussion, Dr. Brute appears trapped within the confines of dominant culture.
General Idea’s appropriation of his image, and its repetition of it, presents Brute’s gesture
to be using the trappings of that confinement to create an alternative space, based on
alternative values written onto already existing objects. Fetish sex creates the architecture
for the performance of the Borderline Case.
Going Thru the Motions locates the structural intervention offered by the
Borderline Case, and by glamour as an exemplar of the Borderline Case, within
subcultural practice. By specifically drawing upon sexualized aspects of subcultural
participation, General Idea positions sexuality, too, as a signifying practice. In
implementing all of these processes through the Pageant, however, the group shows how
these forms of cultural criticism could also be the building blocks of alternative social
structures, forms, and orders, as the Pageant was also a method for building an art
audience that was itself a subculture. General Idea demonstrates that it is possible to build
cultures that are based on process and not on ontology, subjectivities that were about
identification not identity, and structures of meaning that embraced different ideas about
logic and legibility—Ambiguity without Contradiction.

155

Ambiguity without Contradiction

In 1972, General Idea began constructing the Pavillion for the 1984 Miss General
Idea Pageant, using a ziggurat shape appropriated from a series of paintings Felix Partz
made in the late 1960s. (79) The Pavillion appeared piecemeal, through various works
that represented or took place in various spaces within the structure. It was never
physically constructed in its entirety. The Pavillion also housed the formation of the
group’s audience, which the group staged as an expression of its subcultures, and as a
representation of culture as a signifying practice in general. As the cultural field in
Toronto began to shift, however, and as General Idea became less connected to
subcultures that were morphing to deal with different problems, the group’s work began
to shift as well, marking a dénouement of its practice as a self-conscious part of particular
subcultures. General Idea started destroying the fictional pavilion for the 1984 Miss
General Idea Pageant with the Hot Property audience rehearsal, in 1977. Hot Property
occurred at the Winnipeg Art Gallery on October 22, 1977, and rehearsed the audience’s
exit from the burning structure. A few months later, General Idea opened Reconstructing
Futures at Carmen Lamanna Gallery in Toronto, which ran from December 10, 1977,
through January 3, 1978. (80) The installation consisted of a number of elements,
including images of the burned out ‘foundation’ of the 1984 pavilion, which were also
documentation of a performance the group made while in residency in Kingston, ON the
month prior. (81) This performance, where the group laid out the familiar ziggurat shape
in a field and lit it on fire, and then filmed and photographed the flames from a
helicopter, also appears in the video Pilot (1977), which screened in the later

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installation.
99
The “Reconstructing Futures” panels display the group’s smoke self
portraits, images of the guys covered in soot, narrowly escaping through a door as flames
and smoke billow behind them, using fabricated documents to terminate a structure that
was only ever built through fabricated documents. (82)
General Idea built things—businesses, buildings, histories, identities— via
dominant cultural processes, but it did so in a manner that not only led to alternative ends,
but also demonstrated how whatever process it appropriated reinforced culture itself as a
signifying practice. Through the Pageant, built on a foundation of the Borderline Case
and replete with glamour, the group constructed a world for Miss General Idea, an
audience, and an art subculture. It also built a larger theory of political cultural
participation, drawn from specific subcultures but generalized through its work to a
theory of subcultural politics applicable to any situation and enactable through any aspect
of daily life. Just as Barthes enumerated myth as a process that highlights culture itself as
a semiotic phenomenon, so too did the processes General Idea deployed highlight culture
as a motivated, power-laden construct. The prevalence of sex within the group’s methods
pinpointed sexuality as a particularly important process, as the group’s focus in its
commitment to enumerating a theory of subcultural politics. Though its work would
become less connected to specific subcultures after the destruction of the Pavillion,
General Idea continued to produce work that highlighted culture as interested and
devoted to self-perpetuation.

99
Pilot was commissioned for television broadcast by the OECA-TV Ontario network, as
part of a larger series of commissioned artist videos. The episode, conceived by the group
as a pilot for a show about General Idea, introduces audiences to the group and to the
pageant project, enacting a kind of self -history and -mythologization that we see
throughout the group’s career.

157

Shifts in artistic trends, back towards plastic work; shifts in General Idea’s statue,
escalating as international art stars; and shifts in the cultural climate in Toronto all
contributed to the group’s increasing detachment from a literal and self-conscious
engagement with specific subcultures.
100
In the late 1970s Toronto experienced a number
of anti-gay developments that underlay the urgency for the politics that General Idea
highlighted through its work, and that influenced its shift to a more explicit engagement
with politics in the work I will discuss in the following chapter. The gay newspaper The
Body Politic was raided in December of 1977 for using the postal service for the
distribution of pornographic material, after the publication of Gerald Hannon’s second
article about intimate relations between adult men and young boys. Cops confiscated the
paper’s subscription lists, and that along with the mounting legal defense costs
galvanized the Toronto gay and art communities to support the paper. Official
crackdowns against the gay community in the city continued, culminating in extensive
raids on gay bathhouses in 1981, one of which snared Jorge Zontal.
101

These crackdowns, in combination with a backlash in the city’s art scene against
the power wielded by General Idea, informed the destruction of the Pavillion, perhaps
most explicitly with the site-specific exterior installation Toronto’s Fault: The First
Tremors (Ruins of the Silver Bar Lounge of the 1984 Miss General Idea Pavillion)

100
AA Bronson specifically discussed shifts within the social nature of Toronto’s
advanced art scene, and how the group felt alienated from it throughout the first half of
the 1980s.
For a more details, see:
Deborah Waddington. Interview with AA Bronson, unpublished, dated April, 1995.
Correspondence Files, General Idea Collection, National Gallery of Canada.
101
For an exhaustive history of the gay rights movement in Canada, and of government
regulation of sexuality there, see:
Gary Kinsman and Patrizia Gentile. The Canadian War on Queers: National Security as
Sexual Regulation. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2010.

158

(1981).
102
This installation consisted of silver spray paint found on rubble at downtown
Toronto’s Terminal Building. The rubble certainly indicated the aftermath of an
earthquake, which fits with the ‘fault’ of the title, with a faultline as another example of a
borderline. But the fault also indicated culpability—the ruin of the Pavillion was the fault
of an increasingly intolerant city that was cracking down, via multiple avenues and on
multiple fronts, on the possibility of enacting the kinds of politics and subcultures that
informed General Idea’s practice. Borrowing the title of another General Idea work, from
1980, The Honeymoon’s Over, and the possibilities for the kind of literal incorporation of
subcultural social life into performance based art practices became more limited as those
subcultures but also those art practices went out of fashion. General Idea turned towards
larger media—broadcast television and large museums—as its stature grew, moving
away from a literal engagement with frequently distant subcultures but maintaining the
shape and scope of the critical framework, the Borderline Case, that it explicated through
the Miss General Idea Pageant.

102
The project was funded by the artist run space A Space, on whose board AA Bronson
served.

159

Chapter Three – Cocktails, Tchotchkes, and Poodles: Subcultures as Signifying
Practice
Intro
“Bzzz Bzzz Bzzz,” the gossip column that General Idea began publishing in FILE
in 1976, documented the group’s increasing acceptance into established international
circles of advanced art, music, and fashion.
1
(83) Picturing the fabulous, the famous, and
the important in a dizzying array of hip and fashionable settings, the group drew upon
FILE’s dual function as a social and artistic organism to its full potential to demonstrate
that General Idea had indeed become a group of famous and glamorous artists. Each
issue’s “Bzzz Bzzz Bzzz” would present a collage of images from one ostensibly
glamorous and elaborate party, but in fact the images were from any number of events
that the group used to create a narrative around one fabulous fictitious fest. Initially, the
group used its own photos, as well as found images, to construct these scenes, but as
people began to catch on to what it was doing, others began to send General Idea photos
to be included in the gossip column. In a 2010 interview, Bronson literally referred to
“Bzzz Bzzz Bzzz” as its own party, reinforcing the real social function that FILE served
for the group and its various scenes in the late 1970s and early 1980—the art object itself
provided a social site, independent of any literal gathering in physical space. “Oh yeah,

1
“Bzzz Bzzz Bzzz” first appeared in the New York City Issue FILE, in the spring of
1976. It appeared regularly through the next decade, appearing in every issue until the
group stepped back from hands on editorship in 1986.
General Idea. “Bzzz Bzzz Bzzz,” New York City Issue FILE. V 3, N 2, Spring 1976, p 58-
61.

160

we faked it all,” replied Bronson to a question about the apparently modish circles
General Idea called its own during the late 1970s and early 1980s.
2

While General Idea used its work earlier in its career to knit together an
underground art and social scene, as represented by the Decca Dance discussed in
chapter one, and to actively produce subcultures, as it did with the audience rehearsals
discussed in chapter two, in the late 1970s it turned its interest in the subcultural to New
York’s Downtown Art scene, which included an insistently intermedial intermingling of
painting, photography, performance art, punk and new wave music and fashion, no wave
film, and the kind of theoretically informed cultural criticism evident in such journals as
October and Semiotext(e). This corresponded with the group’s gradual relocation to
Manhattan, in light of its career aspirations that required greater access to international
attention and markets, but also a backlash that had developed in Toronto against
dematerialized art practices, and against the ostensibly outsized role that the group was
playing within an art scene that had developed different interests, practices, and concerns.
The queer inflection of much of this work from NYC revolved around various modes of
non-normative sex and sexuality, made by openly identified homosexuals, openly
identified heterosexuals, and everyone in between. Its regular inclusion in FILE
continued to reinforce the role that sexuality as a critically engaged process would play
within General Idea’s work, and within its ongoing engagement with subcultural politics.
Fandom circulated within Canadada, with fan clubs proliferating throughout the Eternal
Network, but as the group’s reputation grew it began to aim its fannishness outside of its
immediate acquaintances towards the denizens of Manhattan’s downtown, thereby

2
Deborah Waddington interview with AA Bronson, April 1995. Correspondence Notes
files, General Idea Collection, National Gallery of Canada.

161

establishing a veneer of cool hipness, with a touch of geekery, that often accompany
popular imaginings of subcultural participation—from the independent record store clerk
to the gamer.
Subcultures circulated differently in General Idea’s work of the late 70s and early
80s that I discuss in this chapter, which no longer directly participated in specific
subcultures but more self-consciously addressed a general theory of subcultural politics.
The group increasingly discussed politics within its practice, presenting the shape, scope,
and intent of its intervention with escalating directness between 1979 and 1985. This
chapter presents three projects that highlight the group’s discussion of the politics of its
practice: the videotapes Test Tube (1979) and Shut the Fuck Up (1985), and the
installation The Boutique for the 1984 Miss General Idea Pageant Pavillion (1980).
Explicating these pieces with articles from FILE, articles that appeared within the
armature of the group’s self-fashioning as a paragon of avant-garde hipness, I argue that
General Idea persisted in insisting upon the political efficacy of subcultural social life
even as it became increasingly distanced from specific subcultures. By continuing to
draw upon the political operation of subcultural modes of critique outside of specific
subcultural scenes, General Idea suggested a theoretical distinction between subcultures
as specific, discrete things and the subcultural as a generalize-able operation or
intervention that nevertheless instantiates a politics within and on the social field.
3
This

3
This reading of subcultures draws heavily from such foundational works of cultural
studies as Dick Hebdige’s Subculture: The Meaning of Style. His work is particularly
important for its discussion of subcultural practices, including stylization, as signifying
practices. See the introduction to this dissertation for a more detailed discussion of these
formulations.
Dick Hebdige. Subculture: The Meaning of Style. NYC: Routledge, 1979.

162

enabled the group to continue to highlight the political efficacy of subcultural modes of
critique without materializing specific subcultures, as it did in its earlier career.
The forms of politics that General Idea drew from subcultures were
quintessentially opportunistic. They took whatever shape, form, or stance was necessary
to create a less oppressive social order, even if only temporarily, intervening in a notion
of social change that insisted upon whole scale revolution and permanent transformation.
The group presented this in Test Tube, which is a video created for television. The tape
uses the tropes of television to demonstrate how TV can be repurposed for different ends,
once again demonstrating the subcultural tactic of rearticulating dominant cultural
systems in a manner that demonstrates how those systems reinforce mainstream
ideologies and but also can be used to construct alternatives. The video presents politics
as flexible and navigatory, in fact offering this understanding of politics itself as an
intervention into traditional insistences upon clear dogmas and firm stances; an opinion
of which General Idea ran afoul, as discussed in chapter one and to be discussed in more
detail later in this chapter. Each section of the video stages a different form of politics,
from communism through capitalism to fascism, ultimately concluding that the ideal

Also, I conceptualize of this difference between subcultures and the subcultural as
paralleling that Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau draw between politics and the
political, where in politics constitutes the realm of governments and laws and the political
encompasses a much broader field of power relations that influence how subjects are able
to conduct the ins and outs of their everyday lives. Mouffe and Laclau use this distinction
to define a vision of democracy that doesn’t just account for, but depends upon difference
and contestation, rather than the model of consensus presented by liberalism as the ideal
form of politics. This framework productively echoes the example General Idea presents
because the group too sought to redefine how to conceptualize different ways of standing
up to and re-routing dominant flows of power, empowering everyday life to affect change
in a way that traditional definitions of politics don’t.
Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau. Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a
Radical Democratic Politics, NYC: Verso, 1985.

163

form, what the group terms “The Solution,” is the ability to choose among (and create a
hybrid of) all possible positions.
The Boutique for the 1984 Miss General Idea Pageant Pavillion demonstrates this
opportunistic politics in the form of a shop that sold General Idea editions and multiples
within the galleries of a museum or kunsthalle, pointing out the role that ostensibly non-
profit institutions play within the market for art objects, and within global flows of capital
more generally. The piece was only properly installed as a working store once. Such was
the potency of its observation that institutions did not want to be implicated in the
intertwining of art and capital that the work suggested. It garnered pointed criticism as an
exemplar of a problem many critics saw in General Idea’s method. Rather than
appropriate and occupy the systems of dominant culture as a means through which to
offer alternative social structures, these critics opined, the group simply replicated them
on a different scale. The group’s work, critics claimed, was bourgeois culture by another
name.
This reception differed remarkably from other, earlier and contemporary
examples of artist stores, like Claes Oldenburg’s Store (1961), or, more directly related to
General Idea, George Brecht and Robert Filliou’s La Cédille qui sourit (1965-1968). (84)
General Idea itself operated a number of stores out of its home in Toronto in the late
1960s, including Betty’s (1970), whose positive reviews made it into the submissions
packet for the 1971 Miss General Idea Pageant, as discussed in chapter one. Such stores
as these existed to circumvent the traditional art market and gallery system, but they did
not make as pointed an observation about the museum’s implication in art’s role as a
commodity as The Boutique. While I have no concrete evidence for this fact, I would

164

guess that differences in reception are due in no small part to differences in location for
these various commercial ventures.
General Idea responded to these critics with the final work considered in this
chapter, the video Shut the Fuck Up. Also commissioned for television, the work clearly
and succinctly let these critics know what the group thought of their interpretation. The
video is a collage various found and original scripted elements, cumulatively reaffirming
the political operation of art as a subcultural practice. It rejects the role of the artist in
popular culture and refines a general theory of subcultural politics that offers a particular
engagement with, and critique of, mainstream cultural forms. The works in this chapter
clarify the stakes of General Idea’s interest in subcultures and politics, demonstrating art
as a vital part of subcultural life and also theorizing what constitutes subcultural politics
on a larger, more general scale outside of the confines of literal, material subcultures.
General Idea directly addresses politics in its work during this period of its career,
and connected this politics to subcultures even though it was less directly involved in
shaping specific scenes. The group’s work shifted from representing subcultures to
enacting the modes of critique operative within those subcultures. Sexuality also
continues to inform its presentation of politics, in moments alternately rife with and
devoid of literal sex. The group continued to present sexuality as an embodied form of
cultural criticism, able to address any form of culture, not just those elements that directly
shape bodies and how bodies relate to each other. This chapter presents an equivalence
between General Idea’s understanding of politics and its understanding of sexuality, as
sexuality encapsulated the embodied form of cultural engagement present within the
practices of subcultural presentation, and thus functioned as a modality of subcultural

165

politics. Subcultural practices highlight how culture in general is a signifying process, but
use this observation to materialize alternative social orders, institutions, and ideologies.
General Idea took up this process, abstracted from any specific scene, in the projects
discussed in this chapter, explicating the significance of presenting sexuality as a cipher
of subcultural politics.

Trendy Responsibility

Questions about media, its role in national life, and its relationship to culture were
rampant in Canada after the close of the Second World War, and occupied a prominent
place in the practices of many of its artists as well. General Idea was no exception, as, for
example, it staged its pageants as televised events. Beginning with its video Pilot (1977),
however, the group’s ties to television became more concrete, as it began to work with
TV as not just a genre, but as a medium—not just as a series of communicative tropes,
but as a form of expression with its own specific formal and material problems and
possibilities. (85) Pilot was commissioned for broadcast on Ontario public TV, as part of
a series of artist commissions.
4
It took the form of a documentary, with General Idea
narrating the history of the group, and of the Miss General Idea Pageant. While
documentary is certainly a genre that has a place on television, though, the group shifted
to more banal forms for its next commission, 1979’s Test Tube, which honed in on the
staples of network daytime programming—the soap opera and the commercial. (86)

4
The series was called A Learning Opportunity, which was conceived and produced by
TV Ontario, operated by The Ontario Educational Communications Authority. Much like
PBS in the US, TVO carries an educational mandate, even within its dramatic
programming.

166

Test Tube was commissioned by De Appel Gallery in Amsterdam, and produced
specifically to be aired on Dutch television.
5
It tells the story of a painter, Marianne, a
new mother who struggles to decide where to go with her art, given her desire to be taken
seriously as an artist but also the presence of her child, who features prominently in the
early sections of the video. The spoken factors contributing to this struggle include the
apparently conflicting demands of commercial success, on the one hand, and critical
engagement, on the other, as she explains, “I have to figure out who I’m trying to please:
Ileana
6
? The public? The critics? History? Myself? Is this really what I want to do?” Test
Tube is, in fact, General Idea’s response to this same quandary.
The video unfolds over five parts, each of which is divided into 3 sections. The
first section takes place in the Colour Bar Lounge, where the three members of General
Idea discuss the different issues that structure each part as they pertain to art, politics, and
mass media. (87) The second section depicts Marianne’s story, and the third an ad for the
Colour Bar Lounge in the form of cocktails that are metaphors for different ideologies
that correspond to each problem that Marianne considered in the prior segment, and that
General Idea laid out in the first. (88) The group presents an artistic problem that
corresponds to a political ideology, and concludes with a cocktail that suggests how the
respective problem, and ideology, manifest in cultural practice. Throughout the 5 parts
General Idea intertwines different positions for art and artists, and for politics, ultimately
undermining the dominant insistence upon a rigid binary between critical engagement

5
The video aired on Dutch public television, and also appeared within the Colour Bar
Lounge installation, first shown at the Basel Art Fair in 1979, and as an independent
video.
6
This is her dealer, presumably Ileana Sonnabend, who was an influential gallerist of
post-war art. General Idea had a relationship with her during this time.

167

and complicity within an explanation of the importance of art’s popularity. By way of
conclusion, each section within the final part presents as “The Solution” a hybrid of
available formats; a navigatory, in-between, combined-best-of-all-options position
simultaneously referring to cocktails and artistic or political stances. That the group
created an equivalence among these three realms furthers its project of presenting art as
an important part of subcultural life that is always inherently political. It presents a
politics of navigation, a politics of opportunity and possibility that is embedded within
the tools and paradigms of its contemporary landscape, rather than whole-scale
revolution. Its work deploys subcultural forms that appropriate from, disidentify with,
and ultimately rearticulate dominant culture for subversive purposes.
In the opening scene, General Idea sets the stakes for both the first section of the
video and for the piece in its entirety. The group explains the work as being about art and
popularity, and General Idea’s experiments with how to make art popular. Increasing
art’s popularity, the group explains, would further its political agenda by gaining for it a
larger footprint within the cultural landscape, thereby increasing its audience. Setting a
baseline for dominant culture, Felix Partz describes, “You know, the mass media are like
a vast pharmaceutical complex, developing new cultural elixirs of an unprecedented
intoxication.”
7
He uses the language of product development to describe how culture
continually develops new means to impart dominant values and hierarchies. Presenting
art as a way to intervene in the situation, Jorge Zontal exclaims, “We think of the Colour
Bar as a sort of cultural laboratory where we can experiment with new cultural mixes and
serve them up to our friends. Here we isolate members of the art scene as our control

7
General Idea. Test Tube (1979). Color Video, 28:00 minutes.

168

group to test the effectiveness of our intoxicating cocktails.”
8
Rather than use media and
culture as ways to indoctrinate people to mainstream society, General Idea redeploys
them to subvert that process.
Later in that same scene, Felix expands upon art’s potentially resistant function,
explaining and demonstrating General Idea’s subcultural politics of parodic inhabitation
and disidentification:
But art remains a curious and elitest drink. Despite its unique flavour and
heady cultural properties, it has never been effectively exploited. Now
General Idea has taken the necessary risks to isolate this potent culture and
introduce the infectious mutations into the mainstream. These cocktails are
the medium in which a culture is grown and introduced to the host. And
everyone is a host at the Colour Bar Lounge.
9

Felix and Jorge discuss instrumentalizing art, creating art via the mechanisms of
dominant culture but as a way to undermine that dominant culture. Through the language
of scientific and product research General Idea offers the possibility of resistant
participation in aspects of dominant culture that typically produce desire for the products
and positions of the traditional social order. Rather than pursue the traditional modernist
gesture of separating itself from spectacular society, or the culture industry, General Idea
considers how to best make use of these already established channels of communication
to “introduce the infectious mutations.” From the outset, the group positions the video,
and, more broadly, its practice, as presenting an alternative form of politics. It doesn’t
only critique the structures of dominant culture, it appropriates and rearticulates the most
foundational aspects of that culture as the basis of its own social order.

8
Ibid.
9
Ibid.

169

While General Idea takes up the institutions of bourgeois capitalism within Test
Tube, it refuses a number of ideas that provide those phenomena with their power to
perpetuate the logic and common sense of the mainstream social order. In the 4
th
scene,
Jorge explains:
We don’t want to destroy television. We want to add to it. We want to stretch it
until it starts to lose shape, stretch that social fabric! Just imagine all those new
sensibilities taking up more and more room, all those chaotic situations on the
fringe of society flooding into the mainstream and doing it so quickly and so
effortlessly that it’s impossible to have an overview anymore.
10

This statement baldly expresses General Idea’s ideas about political intervention, and its
desire to transform how culture operates. Its method, for example, stretches the social
fabric until it loses its shape, necessitating an epistemological shift that negates the very
possibility of dominant culture and master narrative: “it’s impossible to have an overview
anymore.” Rather than prescribe a specific political strategy, however, or a utopian form
of social organization, the group presents a re-combination of positions already available
within dominant culture as a way to explode the restrictive forms of life within
contemporary society.
A politics of combining available positions across diametric oppositions clearly
appears within Test Tube. In a 1989 interview, AA Bronson describes the Colour Bar
Lounge, an installation of which Test Tube was a part, and General Idea’s use of the
cocktail as a metaphor for this navigation:
[W]e did the Colour Bar Lounge, which, on the one hand, was conceptualized
to be a real bar. On the other hand, it was a metaphor, a very complicated
metaphor for various ideological approaches. The key metaphor was the idea
of a cocktail, where you take a little bit of this, a little bit of that, and come out
with a hybrid form. And I suppose everything we’ve been involved with is
hybrid culture. Specifically, this is cocktail imagery, like alcohol, the notion of

10
Ibid.

170

intoxication and the consumption of the intoxicant.
11

The cocktail is a metaphor for General Idea’s method, and for its ideal form of politics.
This materializes most clearly in the commercials for the Colour Bar Lounge. With the
cocktails Nazi Milk, the Revolutionary Cocktail, Liquid Assets, and The Solution (the
first commercial was for the Colour Bar Lounge as a space), General Idea presents drinks
that represent the ideas it, and also Marianne, grapple with throughout the video. (89)
Cocktails serve as metaphors for political positions, but metaphor itself is an important
part of the group’s work, as it demonstrates the relational and iterable operation of
language and of meaning. Metaphor is a demonstration of the politics of signification and
the possibility for resistance within signification—within not just the objects or images,
but the very processes, of dominant culture. A metaphor presents one thing as a
description of something else, performing the action of “occupying empty shells” that
General Idea celebrated throughout its career.
12
But the idea of alcohol, and of
intoxication, writes this process directly on and in the body, returning the process to
everyday life.
The first four sections of the video offer different literal or metaphorical
references to artistic and political positions, to capitalism, marxism, and fascism but also
minimalism, conceptualism, and abstract expressionism. The last section celebrates the
opportunity to mix among all available positions, to create a hybrid as “The Solution” to
the fact that none of the available options fully satisfy one’s palate, or one’s palette. This

11
Mary Anne Staniszewski. “Mary Anne Staniszewski with General Idea,” Shift 6. V 3,
N 2, September 1989, p 17.
12
For a more detailed discussion of appropriation in the group’s work, and specifically of
its reference to “occupying empty shells” within its practice, see chapter two’s discussion
of the glamour editorial in the fall, 1975 issue of FILE.
General Idea. “Glamour,” Glamour Issue FILE. V 3, N 1, Autumn 1975, p 20-34.

171

idea of hybridity stands in for General Idea’s intervention into ideas about what
constitutes politics, which differed from the rigid binary of criticality and complicity that
dominated leftist discourses about politics, and art, in this moment. It also intervened into
discourses that kept art, politics, and the social field distinct. For General Idea
appropriation, recombination, and rearticulation were themselves political because they
demonstrate the fallibility and mutability of signification, and thereby undermine
ostensibly natural hierarchies, categories, and norms that benefit some and subjugate
others.
The group defines hybridity in its opening part to the last section, in terms of who
is to be allowed into the Colour Bar Lounge given its new-found popularity. It becomes
clear that its research and development has indicated how to successfully inject art into
the cultural mainstream. The people to be let in are the trendies, who Felix terms “the
reconnaissance troops of contemporary culture.”
13
Jorge clarifies this by explaining that
what these trendies do is exactly the appropriation and rearticulation that constitutes
General Idea’s practice:
[O]ccupying a context, emptying them of meaning, and then filling them right
back up again with new sensibilities, rarified sexualities, battle stances
disguised as dance steps, codified cocktails. In these days of reality shortage
trendies know that any context can house multiple meanings.
14

Art, for General Idea, was an ideal site for explaining different ways of using the
structures of dominant culture to enact a cultural politics of hybridity, and its attendant
forms of navigation, ambiguity, and multiplicity.

13
General Idea. Test Tube.
14
Ibid.

172

The final Marianne scene takes place at the Colour Bar Lounge, and she tries each
of the drinks featured in the previous commercials before coming to her preferred
selection, which is a celebration of the fact that she can have them all. She exclaims
“What an intoxicating idea: people create their own solutions!” (90) The final ad drives
the point home by combining language from fashion, cocktails, art criticism, and
ideology to present General Idea’s method for its artistic and political practice:
Do you resent the traditional dogma of wine in wine glasses, brandy in snifters?
Don’t you long to mix aesthetics, dodge expectations, be creative? Would you
like to vary your contents without being labeled neurotic or schizo? If you have a
drinking problem, General Idea has the answer. At the Colour Bar we call it ...
The Solution. With this handy tray and glasses you can mix yourself multiple
drinks and not worry about incompatible rhetorics. Tired of those same old
contents? With these magnetic glasses you can always spill the contents without
breaking the context and fill them up again. Remember, its the Solution.
Decision-making is obsolete at the Colour Bar Lounge.
15

“The Solution” is hybridity and navigation, in comparison to rigidly defined positions
with ostensibly “incompatible rhetorics.” (91) The group offered not only an explosion of
what constitutes political activity, but on a more fundamental level of signification as it
existed within popular consciousness. It constructed a politics out of refusing rigid
boundaries or fixed meanings by emphasizing their iterative materialization.
Many of these ideas and discussions appear esoteric and lofty, but General Idea
was diligent in rooting all of its work within a subcultural context. Its Special
Transgressions Issue of FILE Megazine is one such example of this grounding.
16
(92)
Published in the fall of 1979, the Special Transgressions Issue functions as a pendant to
Test Tube, expanding on the video’s themes and concerns through both the artist’s

15
Ibid.
16
General Idea. “Editorial,” Special Transgressions Issue FILE. V 4, N 2, Fall 1979, p
17.

173

editorial and gossip columns but also through the works by other artists and writers
included in the magazine.
17
Nazi Milk takes special prominence on the cover of the issue,
and the critical engagement of the image is framed by the subheading articles—
“Forbidden Sensibilities, Insect Love, and Modern Fairy Tales with Kathy Acker,
Pasolini, Jimmy De Sana, Jean Genet, and David Byrne of the Talking Heads.” The
articles express transgressions—forbidden sensibilities, insect love, and modern fairy
tales—rather than stronger actions like overthrowing governments. These transgressions
resonate as absurd in contrast to the typical actions of social change—protests,
demonstrations, sit ins, and boycotts. But these transgressions occur within the realm of
cultural production, with novels, films, photographs, theater, and music the sites of
transgression for Acker, Pasolini, De Sana, Genet, and Byrne, and as such they
participate in the kind of politics exemplified by General Idea.
These references to the world of underground culture surround Billy, who “wears
a milk moustache at the Colour Bar Lounge.”
18
Billy is the image of transgression for this
transgression issue of FILE, though what it is that might constitute his transgression is
left ambiguous—maybe his clothing’s Hilter Youth allusion; possibly the connection of

17
General Idea began publishing their periodical, FILE Megazine, in the fall of 1972. The
magazine functioned as part of the group’s participation in mail art, as a site to realize
and report on its and others’ projects, and as a method of art distribution and audience
creation, given the lack of a gallery system and domestic art market in Canada. After a
first issue print run of 1,500, General Idea published and internationally circulated 3,000
copies of subsequent issues, at newsstands, artist run spaces, and through subscriptions to
such figures as those from their local social scene through Andy Warhol and Joseph
Beuys.
18
General Idea. Cover, Special Transgressions FILE.

174

transgression with milk, the most wholesome of beverages; or perhaps the multiple layers
of queer eroticism within the image, including trade, youth, and Nazi imagery itself.
19

Like Test Tube, the editorial from the transgression issue of FILE combines art,
the mass media, commodification, and desire to present a different idea of politics, one
inexorably embedded within cultural practices as elite as avant-garde film and everyday
as beverage consumption.

The article begins, “To tell art’s story consistently and well, to
keep art in the top-of-the-mind segment of public attention – these are the artist’s first
responsibilities. The artist’s ability to fulfill this responsibility depends inevitably on his
expertise in the use of the mass media.”
20
Artists, then, have a responsibility to mass
culture, though they want to avoid the pitfall of making art that is only trendy. Toeing this
line constitutes “trendy responsibility,” precisely the stuff of “The Solution” from the last
section of Test Tube.
The editorial explains that the entire Special Transgressions Issue was compiled
in response to requests for the recipe for “trendy responsibility,” which General Idea
explained is the antidote for “drinking problems.” Within the editorial, ‘drinking
problem’ functions as a metaphor for both the unaware acceptance of dominant culture
without the possibility of an alternative, and also the discomfort of choosing only one of
the available positions for resistance to dominant culture—of subscribing to dominant
culture’s binary system of rigidly defined positions.

19
As described in chapter two, the term ‘trade’ refers to a straight identified man who
engages in gay sex. Carried with the term are connotations of working class masculinity,
and of some sort of economic exchange. The image associated with the term is of a
working class man who does not openly identify as gay engaging in prostitution, but the
erotics often lie in sexualized dynamics across gender, sexuality, and class boundaries.
20
Ibid, p 17.

175

“Trendy” likewise functions multiple ways here, as General Idea ponders the
relationship between art and popular culture at a moment of the return to the object after a
decade of dematerialized conceptualism, performance, process, and post-minimal art,
particularly given the skyrocketing value for neo-expressionist painting. The word carries
its own connections to cycles of capitalist culture, but for General Idea it carries an
additional valence, as a political concept: “[c]ertainly there is one peak moment when
trendiness rises to its most effective, when it becomes a powerful tool for dealing with
existing structures. It blooms for a night or a season and then is consumed by what many
call Capitalist chaos.”
21
The group addresses the phenomenon of fads, the ever-shifting
objects of popularity, but seem to be keying in on the moment before something becomes
a full-blown trend. Trendy responsibility is the moment that a cultural phenomenon has
its maximum exposure, is available to the greatest number of people, but before it is
inevitably completely commodified, at which point it loses its political potential. Rather
than lament the inevitable cooptation of subcultural forms within dominant culture,
however, General Idea was able to harness that cycle precisely because the group carried
no investment in any fixed political position or set of oppositional practices.
The movement of trends in fact reflects General Idea’s insistence upon the
unfixity of any object of culture. Specifically, the cycle served to further highlight its
point about the fallacy of mainstream politics and political positions. Art historian
Thomas Crow discusses the relationship between the artistic avant-garde and popular
culture in similar terms in his book Modern Art and the Common Culture.
22
He likens the

21
Ibid.
22
Thomas Crow. Modern Art in the Common Culture. New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1996.

176

avant-garde to subcultures, and describes how the avant-garde is part of a cycle wherein
cultural forms and gestures move from the fringes of commodity culture to its center.
That this cycle exists demonstrates that the avant-garde is as productive for dominant as
for resistant culture, which he compares to resistant subcultures as the research arm of
capital, sussing out new forms of commodification and consumption. Crow points to this
fact of eventual, seemingly inevitable incorporation as a limitation to the potential of the
avant-garde, and of subcultures, though he finds some solace in the fact that cooptation is
outrun by subcultural innovation, and the expansion of the culture economy creates new
spaces of resistance. General Idea lacks Crow’s investment in fixed forms of resistance,
however, and use this cycle to its advantage precisely because it demonstrates the fluidity
of cultural forms, and thereby the way that culture operates as a signifying process. The
political intervention for the group lay not in the fact of resistance, but in the
demonstration of fluidity—that was its theory of subcultural politics. The group did not
care that blue jeans or leather became staple materials for mainstream fashion, for
example, because the specific object was less important than the way an object facilitated
the demonstration of how culture functioned as a signifying practice, constantly
naturalizing and reinforcing itself. As such, trendiness is a tool of resistance precisely
because it manifests the shifts in value and meaning that constantly, albeit unspokenly,
occur within dominant culture and constitute how it functions semiotically.
Keeping the conversation within the realm of the mainstream was important to
General Idea at this point in its career, precisely because of the resistant possibilities that
the structures of culture within late capitalism offer to those who think beyond the

177

purported limits, those who embrace the borderline case discussed in chapter two. The
editorial explains further:
Like customs agents on the borders of acceptance, we smuggle transgressions
back into the picture, mixing doubles out of the ingredients of prohibition. Solve
your drinking problems with trendy responsibility, the drink which builds residual
effects and yet still lets you see double. All of this without the slightest taste of
stale rhetoric. Interested? Mix together a few of the ingredients found on the
following pages – we call them transgressions. Cultural, social, political, sexual,
take your pick.
23

The sought-after recipe for trendy responsibility, for General Idea’s explication of its
politics and its rationale for its relationship to popular culture, is to take bits and pieces of
the systems and structures that perpetuate dominant ideologies and use them not only to
demonstrate the fallacy of those ideologies, but also to create alternatives through that
demonstration.
The juxtaposition of these statements about politics with examples from another
underground context that blended art and social life—using aspects of social life as media
for artworks and using art as a locus for socializing—emphasizes the importance of
cultural practice within this equation. It also references a specific setting that manifested
the intermingling of art and subcultures. The editorial shared space in this issue with
pieces by author Kathy Acker, photographer Jimmy De Sana, and musician David Byrne,
each of whom practiced in a different medium but contributed to the milieu that
intertwined art, literature, and music that was coalescing in downtown Manhattan in the
second half of the 1970s and included such artists as Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring,
and David Wojnarowicz. Trying to summarize the phenomenon in 1984, curator Janet

23
General Idea. “Editorial,” Special Transgressions FILE, p 17.

178

Kardon describes, “[t]he crosscurrents among musicians, performers, and artists indicate
that we may be witnessing a kind of American Bateau Lavoir, eighties-style.”
24

General Idea participated in this downtown NYC scene, though it was less central than it
was in Toronto. The group continued to connect itself to art practices that were
inexorably connected to the creation of a social world. Given its new role within
subcultures in a new place, however, that connection manifested more through the
demonstration of the artistic production of that scene, through the display of art works
that participated in the production of subcultural life, than in the direct production of
subcultures itself.
In addition work by Acker, De Sana, and Byrne in the issue under consideration,
Debby Harry of the band Blondie was on the cover of the magazine for the fall 1977
Punk Til You Puke issue; De Sana’s photographs appeared often in the magazine, and he
guest edited the Punk issue with noted curator Diego Cortez and Cortez’ fellow Mudd
Club founder and punk scene figure Anya Phillips. Additionally, the “Bzzz Bzzz Bzzz”
column increasingly featured a veritable who’s who of the New York underground of the
late 70s and early 80s, for whom fashion, music, literature, and film were another part of
a social milieu. From this context, in 1977 Glenn O’Brien—a critic, culture-maker, and
impresario of New York City’s Downtown scene—wrote about this politics of
subcultural practice, frequently referring to General Idea as an exemplary model of his

24
The Bateau Lavoir is a nickname for a building in the Montmartre district of Paris that
served as a residence and meeting place for denizens of the artistic avant-garde in the
early twentieth century, including Pablo Picasso, Amedeo Modigliani, Henri Matisse,
Jean Cocteau, Guillaume Apollinaire, and Gertrude Stein.
Janet Kardon. “The East Village Scene,” The East Village Scene. Philadelphia: The
Institute of Contemporary Art, 1984, p 8.

179

argument.
25
This idea of “downtown” as a general space of overlap between artistic
avant-garde production and subcultural social materialization features in the summer
1980 issue of FILE, the Special Global Downtown Issue, but denizens of the epicenter of
this phenomenon, in New York, regularly appear in FILE throughout the late 70s and
early 80s.
26
(93)
In the context laid out by the by-lines on the cover of the Special Transgressions
Issue, with this blatant disregard for hierarchies, categories, and boundaries (other than
the way in which they provide rules to break), General Idea insisted upon forms of being
and of meaning-making that are always mutable, always hybrid, always multi-valent. The
magazine provides the ingredients for the group’s reconfiguration of the political,
including the transgressions of forbidden sensibilities, insect love, and modern fairy tales.
The group calls for each reader to take their pick of cultural, social, political, and sexual
transgressions as a part of their own navigation of the political landscape. They are not
entirely free to make up their own forms of life, but their own choices from available

25
O’Brien, Glenn. “Glamour Extremist: The Marquis de Sade Stalks the New Discos,
Beauty and the Beast are Comparing Notes and the Fashion Business is Revving up for
the New Look of 1984,” Oui. V 6, N 12, December 1977, p 120-128.
For more on Downtown Art as it materialized in New York, see:
The Downtown Book: The New York Art Scene 1974-1984. Ed. Marvin J. Taylor.
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005.
Interestingly, two issues of The Body Politic take up Test Tube to make a similar point
about the political operation of music, fashion, and art, indicating that this understanding
was not contained within the art world but was also an important part of subcultural self-
fashioning at the time.
David Mole. “Cocktail Revolution,” Body Politic, N 63, 4/1980, Our Image section, p 31-
32.
Martha Fleming and Douglas Durand. “Video is not Television, Performance is not
Theater,” Body Politic – A Magazine for Gay Liberation, N 64, 6/7/1980, p 29-32.
26
General Idea. Special Downtown Issue FILE. V 4, N 3, Summer 1980.

180

options to create the best possible form of life is an essential and constitutively political
act realized in the mutually determined fields of art and culture.
27

In addition to locating its work within a field of advanced cultural production, of
Kathy Acker’s postmodern literature and the Talking Heads’ new wave music, General
Idea continued to incorporate references to queer and fetish sexual practices that point to
the fact that it was explicating and enacting political strategies drawn from the activities
of subcultural participation. Many of the drinks available in the Colour Bar Lounge
clearly reference sadomasochism and other forms of bondage and role-play sex. Some of
these drinks are mentioned in Test Tube, but many more appear in the installation of The
Colour Bar Lounge (1979) and in the Getting into the Spirits Cocktail Book, whose
images were then editioned as Cocktail Cards (both 1980).
28
(94) In true General Idea

27
The similarity of this formulation to capitalist consumption, to shopping, would bring
the group no small amount of critique, even more so in relation to the next project I will
discuss, the Boutique for the 1984 Miss General Idea Pageant Pavillion (1980). I will
consider this point in more detail in relation to that project, but politicizing a gesture that
is a common part of everyday life within capitalism fits General Idea’s mode of cheekily
rearticulating aspects of dominant culture, empowering subjects to use the systems of the
mainstream against itself to create spaces and moments of resistance. The intervention
here is two-fold, the first being the intervention against the systems of capital, and the
second against definitions of politics within dominant culture that demand complete
opposition and permanent change in order to be deemed a success.
This articulation of the politics of how subjects navigate the demands of dominant
culture to form resistant articulations also resonates with Judith Butler’s discussion of
identification in Bodies That Matter.
Judith Butler. Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex.” NYC: Routledge,
1993.
28
The Colour Bar Lounge was an installation that featured five large photographs
installed over a bar. Under each photograph, on the bar, appeared a text bearing the title
of the cocktail imaged above and a description of the cocktail that also metaphorically
described the political position for which the cocktail was a stand in. Test Tube played in
the corner of the installation, though most of the cocktails in the installation do not appear
in the video. The installation is more closely connected to two other projects, the Getting
into the Spirits Cocktail Book from the 1984 Miss General Idea Pavillion and the
Cocktail Cards. The former is a small, hard cover book that goes into more detailed

181

fashion, parts of earlier works endlessly appear, with various permutations, in later
works, highlighting appropriation and iteration as signifying practices.
One of the drinks, also mentioned in the 1975 performance Going Thru the
Motions discussed in detail in chapter two, was the Golden Shower. A golden shower is a
slang term describing when one partner urinates on another, and the image for the
Cocktail Card for the Golden Shower shows a think stream of yellow liquid cascading
into a martini class. (95) A second example of this non-normative sexuality appears in the
Cocktail Card for the Young Artist Cocktail. (96) Here we see imagery that is evocative
of sado-masochism, in which a young man bends over to drink out of a flute that is
positioned in place of the stiletto under a high-heeled shoe, with his hands appearing to
be tied behind his back. The stiletto heel, and the subservience of masculine to feminine
gendering, are also typical aspects of power-based sexual play and locate the different
political positions on offer in the Colour Bar Lounge firmly within the field of everyday
life, intricately but completely tied to sex and sexuality. That the medium the group chose
as its metaphor is alcohol, which enters the body and alters its state to alter the subject’s
perception, is certainly not accidental.
Test Tube, and the various objects connected to it via the Colour Bar Lounge,
theorize the shape and scope of General Idea’s reconfiguration of the relationship among
art, culture, and politics. The work of the late 1970s also moves the group away from its
direct connection to subcultures, as social scenes appear through reference more than
directly, as they did in the Pageant performances, indicating that the group was deploying

description about how the cocktail functioned conceptually for General Idea, and the
latter a series of cards that repeat the images and texts from the installation, in addition to
a few additions that provide more context for the installation images.

182

subcultural strategies rather than participating in specific subcultures. General Idea’s use
of television participated in artistic debates at the time about TV as a medium. It also
continued the group’s interest in using the tools of dominant culture to point out the
interests served by common sense, while also using those tools to create an alternative
social order. Much of the dialog in General Idea’s section in each part draws on the
language of capitalism, however, to discuss research and development and the productive
marshaling of desire as extended metaphors for political engagement. General Idea, like
many on the left at this time, considered capitalism the dominant ideology of
contemporary culture, not just economics, and as such it was a perfect vehicle for its
practice. It materialized this in its 1980 installation, The Boutique for the 1984 Miss
General Idea Pageant Pavillion, which sold among other items the editions and multiples
connected to the Colour Bar Lounge.

183

Capitalism as its Discontents
29

The Cocktail Cards and the Cocktail Book were both produced as editions, along
with small sculptural tschotchkes based on different serving containers for the various
cocktails, including Liquid Assets and The Magic Palette. (97) General Idea displayed
these items as part of a number of different installations, but they also feature
prominently in the group’s first major project of 1980—The Boutique for the 1984 Miss
General Idea Pageant Pavillion. The Boutique was intended to be a functioning store,
installed in the gallery of a museum. (98) It consists of a desk shaped like a dollar sign,
displaying various General Idea wares including the Colour Bar Lounge material. It also
displays issues of FILE, other objects and ephemera from the Pageant, and various

29
In his landmark book, Civilization and its Discontents, Sigmund Freud discusses how
civilization instills a set of rules that limit the human drives towards individual
satisfaction, in the interest of social order. As such, civilization is founded on
fundamental precepts that cause discontent in individuals, rendering discontent a
condition inherent to living in civilized society.
Contemporary theorists have applied this line of thinking to capitalism in a larger
sense, in ways that dovetail with General Idea’s engagement with the subject in the
Boutique. One such example, which has been formative in my reading of the politics of
the work in this chapter, is Roderick Ferguson’s Aberrations in Black (2004). Here,
Ferguson discusses how capitalism carries within it seemingly antagonistic formations
and contradictory positions—not just the ideal subject of capital but also precisely its
opposite. As such, capital provides the means by which to undermine it. This
constitutively contradictory space, the discontent inherent to capital, is the space that
General Idea attempted to occupy through its rearticulation of capitalism with the
Boutique.
Sigmund Freud. Civilization and Its Discontents. Ed. and Trans. James Strachey. NYC:
W. W. Norton and Company, 1962.
Roderick Ferguson. Aberrations in Black: Towards a Queer of Color Critique.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004.

184

smaller scale projects.
30
A proprietor would sit in a chair inside the desk, enabling any
transaction that someone might want to initiate.
The work was only properly installed in one location, however: at the Hamburger
Bahnhoff.
31
Each other location that showed the piece refused to let it actually function as
a store, both because they wanted to drive business to their own gift shops, but more
insidiously (which was in fact the point of the Boutique) because they resented the
implication of the non-profit museum space as intertwined with exchanges of capital.
32

This work exemplifies General Idea’s method of occupying the structures of mainstream
society to point out their internal contradictions; not to overthrow them but to
demonstrate how dominant structures can be repurposed to different ends. The group
reveled in the Borderline Case as the condition of late capitalism. Changing conditions
within the art world, and with General Idea’s stature within that world, opened capitalism
itself as a structure for the group to occupy. Reception of the Boutique, both by the

30
The following 9 elements appeared at each installation site—Large Palette, Ziggurat
Test Tube Holder, Nazi Milk Test Tube Holder, Architectonic, Liquid Assets, Double
Palette, The Magic Palette, and a postcard display for the Cocktail Cards.
Carmen Lamanna Inventory, General Idea Collection, National Gallery of Canada
31
A number of galleries allowed people to handle the editions and multiples and included
a salesperson sitting within the dollar sign, and museums either didn’t sell items, or didn’t
install the piece in proper galleries. Lilian Tone discusses the different conditions of
installation for the work, and the significance to the piece’s intervention.
Lilian Tone. “Affording the Ultimate Creative Shopping Experience: The Boutique of the
1984 Miss General Idea Pavillion,” On The Edge of Everything: Reflections on
Curatorial Practice. Ed. Catherine Thomas. Banff: Banff Centre Press, 2000, p 59-68.
32
While no written evidence of this exists, AA Bronson and Fern Bayer, the group’s
archivist, both agree that this was the case for the institutions that installed the Boutique
improperly. Precedents exist for this kind of reaction to work that highlights the financial
stakes related to museums, as the response to Hans Haacke’s notorious series,
Shapolsky et al. Manhattan Real Estate Holdings, a Real-Time Social System, as of May
1st, 1971 (1971) demonstrates. The work provided the basis for canceling the artist’s solo
show at the Guggenheim that year, though, contrary to popular belief, the slum lord
targeted in the work was not on the Guggenheim’s board.

185

institutions that refused to properly install it and the critics who reviled it, demonstrate
that the group really touched a nerve with the piece. The strength of this reception also
indicates the continued impact of the kind of political intervention General Idea pulled
from its subcultures, as this method of occupying mainstream systems and redeploying
processes constituted the basis of the group’s presentation of subcultural politics.
The issue of FILE pendant to the Boutique was the March, 1981 $pecial $ucce$$
Issue, which featured an image of “Lone Shark Sherry Huffman,” who “gathers interest
for General Idea’s new line of Test Tube Cocktail Holders designed to exchange cold
cash for Liquid Assets.”
33
(99) Sherry Huffman was the lead singer for the band The
Sharks, a staple in the Queen Street bars in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Liquid Assets
refers to the sculpture that appears in the foreground of the image on the cover. It is a
sculptural multiple based on the Cocktail Card of the same name, and includes a large S
with a hole through it large enough to hold a tall, narrow test tube that, when inserted
through the S, forms a dollar sign. Even the caption to this photograph plays with the
language of capitalism, drawing upon two meanings of the word interest as financial
interest—income generated from an investment—but also intellectual interest—curiosity.
Puns abound, however, as liquid assets also refers to both the material state of the
cocktail, and also a form of investment that can easily and reliably be converted into cash
without much risk of lost value. Two title articles place this wordplay, and this
engagement with capitalism, within its political context: “General Idea’s Capitalism as
Found Objects” and “Gossip Against Fascism: Bzzz Bzzz Bzzz.”

33
General Idea. Special $ucce$$ Issue FILE. V 5, N 1, March 1981.

186

The editorial for this special issue, “Coming Up for Air,” makes the political
stakes of General Idea’s appropriation of capitalism even clearer.
34
In it, the group
redefines some of the key terms of capitalism in an era of direct and indirect government
intervention into the social field, with specific reference to “Reagan’s recent budget and
Toronto’s police raids.”
35
To begin with, it redefines success itself as not “getting to the
top and staying there,” but rather “learning to surf without hyperventilating.”
36
Success is
learning to survive within current conditions without being defined or overwhelmed by
them. Success is also not about money or power, but “powerful money... regardless of the
amount.”
37
In a culture designed to subjugate the poor and the queer, just to take the two
examples General Idea mention, success is the refusal to be defined by dominant
culture’s framing of those positions.
Success here stands in for what General Idea presented, throughout its career, as a
way of being that was always already political on the basis of its active engagement with
and re-articulation of dominant culture. As such, success is an enactment of subcultural
politics. The group directs, “Approach success as being reflexive and cash-referential.
We believe you can make success a lot more interesting than those who control it now.
Once you’ve got it, customize it.”
38
This call to customize takes on particular significance

34
Ibid, p 13.
35
Immediately upon taking office, congruent with campaign promises, Reagan cut
funding to social welfare programs while also cutting taxes substantially on large
corporations. At the same time, in Toronto on February 5, 1981, police conducted raids
on gay baths that made international news. Although I have as yet been unable to find
documentation of it, Mapplethorpe contributed a photograph to a Village Voice article
about the incursion.
Ibid.
36
Ibid.
37
Ibid.
38
Ibid.

187

as a call to redefine the field of politics altogether. Test Tube calls for a politics of
opportunism, hybridity, and navigation—of picking and choosing what works for the
individual in a given situation, rather than having to accept whole scale the established
positions set out by dominant culture, exemplified by the video’s reference to marxism,
fascism, capitalism, etc. The editorial highlights these categorizations as themselves
politically inflected, as doing a particular sort of work within dominant culture. General
Idea explains that conservative moves against subaltern subjects were “signals to the left
from the right to occupy battle positions, assume territorial stances (oh, the old routines)
and act out the importance of being earnest.”
39
In addition to referencing treatises on
these different terms in earlier works, including the “Borderline Cases” article discussed
in detail in chapter two, this section highlights the power operative in categorization and
definition, contextualizing the group’s politics of appropriation, redefinition, and
disidentification. When it claims “[w]e believe all Marxists should be rich,” it makes a
cheeky jab against militant leftism but also positions cultural activity as a site of radical
political potential.
40
By presenting its politics, or at least its political method, within this
framework of self-parody and contradiction, General Idea highlights the stakes of its
intervention as being about an embrace of the lack of logic and rationality within
dominant culture, despite mainstream society’s claims to the contrary.
This explication of the political significance of General Idea’s form of cultural
practice suggests the work being done when the group “raid[s] the world of popular
formats—this time boutique culture and mail-order catalogues.”
41
The magazine features

39
Ibid.
40
Ibid.
41
Ibid.

188

a register of the editions and multiples for sale in the Boutique, in the form of a mail
order catalog.
42
The catalog, which isn’t technically an insert but was printed to appear as
one, displays images of the items for sale, with a brief description of each. (100) It is also
in color, while the majority of the issue is in black and white. Running along the top and
bottom of the pages, printed in a strip of red, reads the tag line “General Idea’s Cocktail
Boutique from the 1984 Miss General Idea Pavillion, turning ideas into cash and cash
into ideas.”
43
The group is entirely unapologetic about its embrace of capitalism as a
format, and of shopping as a metaphor for its subcultural politics.
The opening text on the first page of the catalog, though, suggests that the
capitalism presented by General Idea is not precisely the same form of capitalism lauded
by dominant culture. Prominent Toronto-based art critic Philip Monk described the
political significance of the group’s use of capital as an extension of its engagement with
myth, as a way to produce different ideologies: “capitalism is the consummation of [its]
mythic system.”
44
Supporting this reading of General Idea’s capitalism, the insert’s
introduction pokes fun at precisely the critique of capitalism assumed in oppositional
cultures, mocking the guilt of desiring and accumulating things:
That vaguest little longing [...] a fluttery hope for your wildest dreams ... That
momentary twinge of ... is it guilt? ... that holds its own naughty thrill. And
then ... the elation that follows. Something unattainable finally attained. Mine!
Is it really so dreadful to say it?
45

42
General Idea. “The Boutique from the 1984 Miss General Idea Pavillion,” Special
$ucce$$ Issue FILE. V 5, N 1, March 1981, p 24-30.
43
Ibid.
44
Philip Monk. “Money Was the First Multiple,” General Idea: Editions and Multiples,
1968-1995. Ed. Barbara Fisher, Mississauga: Blackwood Gallery, 2003, p 294.
45
General Idea. “The Boutique from the 1984 Miss General Idea Pavillion,” p 24.

189

This cheeky poke at the self-seriousness of the art world left also revels in the importance
of pleasure, and relates consumerist pleasure with sexual pleasure—“the climax of
possession.”
46
This line reminds us of the role that sexuality plays within General Idea’s
practice, both as art and as politics. The mention of “climax” in the introductory text to
the catalog for The Boutique echoes Granada Gazelle’s intro to the 1975 performance
Going Thru the Motions, discussed in detail in chapter two. The passage ends:
Tonight, after thirteen years of Searching for the Spirit and Searching for the
Site, after thirteen years of Ambiguity without Contradiction, after thirteen
years of survival on the subliminal, at last in 1984 … FORM FOLLOWS
FICTION … and the Spirit of Miss General Idea is revealed in the possibility of
climax.
47

With these references to sex, and to orgasms in particular, General Idea implies the
pleasure of subversively and critically participating in mainstream culture. That many of
the items for sale in the catalog, and at the Boutique itself, reference, if not represent,
fetish play reinforces this connection to sex and, through it, General Idea’s deployment of
sexuality as subcultural politics.
The play with dominant culture, though, the traversing back and forth between
critique and complicity and the refusal to take seriously the categories and positions
offered by dominant culture, equally constitute sexuality for the group. As it points out in
Test Tube, desire and the rubric of sex certainly appear within advertising and
consumption. General Idea uses this fact, this instance of sex serving other purposes, to
highlight its own rearticulation of sexuality. It presents sexuality as an embodied critique
of the very systems and structures that create and perpetuate dominant culture, but which
used that critique as the basis of presenting alternative social orders. The remainder of the

46
Ibid.
47
Transcript, Going Thru the Motions, National Gallery of Canada archive, Ottawa.

190

text highlights the performative aspects of consumption to emphasize that General Idea
isn’t whole-heartedly embracing capitalism, but rather occupying capitalism in order to
enact the critical intervention contained within sexuality as a modality of subcultural
politics. A passage from the $pecial $ucce$$ Issue “Bzzz Bzzz Bzzz” gossip column
hilariously drives home this point, demonstrating connections among sex, sexuality, and
semantic play as part of a critical subcultural practice:
Filmmaker Ross Maclaren overheard October critic Douglas Crimp tell
Parachute critic Thierry de Duve that the party was simultaneously
subversive and complicit hence post-modern. As if to prove his point a Miss
Piggy look-a-like jumped into frame and protested the practice of calling
police Pigs. “It’s a personal slur,” she said, “and I refuse to attend their Balls.
48

(101)

Miss Piggy, a surreally adult and sexualized figure from children’s entertainment, plays
with double entendre and multiple meanings by taking offense at others calling police
pigs but then conflating balls as a tool of fundraising but also a slang term for testicles,
performing the very post-modernity that Crimp and de Duve discuss.
Certain conditions of economics and politics in the late seventies and early
eighties made capitalism particularly ripe for General Idea’s prescient picking as a
subject and an object of intervention. Changes in the place of the museum in popular
culture, as well as changes in the scale of the art market, put art into a different
relationship to the economy at large in this time period. Museums had been spaces for the
purveyance of official culture for centuries, and certainly since their inception in North
America.
49
But beginning with the King Tut exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of

48
General Idea. “Bzzz Bzzz Bzzz,” $pecial $ucce$$ Issue FILE. p 49.
49
While not specifically addressing a North American context, H. Glenn Penny’s study
of ethnographic museums in Germany offers a systematic explanation of how cultural

191

Art in 1978, marking the rise of the blockbuster exhibition, museums occupied a place in
popular culture that they hadn’t in their previous role as repositories of the objects of high
culture.
50
Art museums became a part of the popular consciousness and, as such, became
another mass media site available for General Idea to occupy. Foreshadowing
Institutional Critique as practiced in the late 1980s and early 1990s by such artists as
Andrea Fraser with her gallery talks and Fred Wilson with his Mining the Museum,
General Idea operated within institutional spaces to highlight the ways that those
institutions reinforce dominant norms and values. (102)
At the same time as the rise of the blockbuster exhibition, the art market
experienced a parallel expansion, but in the value of the products available. This time
period saw an explosion of high value salable goods being produced, in sculpture but

institutions and the state combined to reinforce different kinds of ethnic and national
identity.
Performance and video artist Andrea Fraser makes similar connections in her
Museum Highlights tours, performed at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 1989. In these
tours, Fraser would guide visitors through galleries, under the pseudonym of Jane
Castleton, and describe the objects contained therein—paintings and fire alarms alike—in
overly dramatic and verbose terms that also detailed the correlation between museums
and, for example, insane asylums or jails as civic institutions.
H. Glenn Penny. Objects of Culture: Ethnology and Ethnographic Museums in Imperial
Germany. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2007.
50
Often referred to as the first blockbuster exhibition, The Treasures of Tutankhamen
toured around the world between 1972 and 1981. Over 8 million people saw the show
while it was on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in Manhattan, where it ran from
17 November 1976 through 15 April 1979. This blew attendance numbers for previous
shows out of the water. The exhibition also appeared at the Art Gallery of Ontario, from
November 1 to December 31, 1979.
While art museums have always functioned as repositories of high culture, there
is also a tradition of museums, and even contemporary museums, also archiving notable
objects from popular culture. For example, from its outset, the Museum of Modern Art in
Manhattan collected films alongside painting and sculpture. As such, like with most of
its work, General Idea highlighted the underbelly of structures and institutions, and their
constitutive aspects that otherwise existed in the shadows, by bringing cheap kitschy
tchotchkes into galleries.

192

even more so in painting.
51
It became impossible to ignore the status of the art object as a
commodity as items sold in primary and secondary markets for increasingly higher
values, and as such artists as Jeff Koons garnered notoriety precisely because of the
prices their work fetched. It is no coincidence that the very next issue of FILE, following
the $ucce$$ issue, was The Re-materialization of the Art Object Issue.
52
(103) General
Idea connected these two phenomena through the Boutique, highlighting the role that the
museum, as the arbiter of taste, played in legitimizing work that was very much part of a
high stakes market.
As it did with television, and with other structures of contemporary culture
previously, General Idea occupied capitalism itself as a Borderline Case, to demonstrate
its inherent contradictions while using its processes as a way to present an alternative.
Connecting museums to commodities and to popular culture carried different stakes than

51
A 1990 article from the business section of The New York Times indicates both the
magnitude of the bubble within the art market, and also the reach of this bubble into
popular culture. The author, Peter C.T. Elsworth, quotes gallerist Mary Boone about the
role of art as a commodity in the 80s, and she celebrates the burst that occurred alongside
the market crash for its removal of art from the realm of speculative investing: "A person
buying to speculate tends not to have an emotional involvement with art," said Mary
Boone, another SoHo dealer. “Even those who have ridden the 1980's boom welcome the
change because art lovers never like to see works reduced to mere commodities.”
Peter C.T. Elsworth. “The Art Boom: Is It Over, or Is This Just a Correction?” The New
York Times. December 16, 1990, Web 10/2/2012.
Neo-Expressionism constituted a significant part of the 1980’s art boom, and the
wild, bestial masculinity with which such artists as Julian Schnabel were associated
inspired General Idea to adopt the poodle as its stand-in in the 9180s. As artist and critic
Tim Guest described in his contribution to the group’s 1984 retrospective catalog, “The
poodles were General Idea’s response to ‘new figuration’, to the renewed interest in
painting and the decline of non-object art.”
Tim Guest. “From Ziggurats to Curlicues: Principle Features in the Art of of General
Idea,” General Idea. General Idea 1968 -1984. Eindhoven: Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum,
1984, p 18.
52
General Idea. The Re-materialization of the Art Object Issue, FILE. V 5, N 2, Fall
1981.

193

highlighting magazines and TV as arbiters of contemporary mores and desires, however,
and it garnered the group a different, more pointed form of criticism than the usual claims
of inaccessibility, in-group jargonism, smug self-servingness, or a good idea that had just
run its course. The group summarized this new criticism:
The truth is, the truth about museums and art galleries as popular culture haven’t
gone over very well. Nobody wants to hear about it. People immediately think
you’re being complicit or think all we’re doing is playing the correct role so we’ll
get shows in museums and art galleries.
53

This cry of complicity rings with the dismissal of the group’s earlier work as frivolous
and decadent, as partaking in and perpetuating dominant ideology and its mechanisms of
promulgation rather than undermining it.
54

The response to General Idea’s embrace of capitalism through the Boutique,
however, was rather more forceful and pointed. This response was most thoroughly and
systematically presented by the art critic Philip Monk, a figure as important to and
influential on the Toronto art and underground scene as General Idea.
55
In a talk
delivered at the Rivoli Cafe and Club in the heart of the Queen St. West district on

53
General Idea. “General Idea on the Armoury.” The Armoury of the 1984 Miss General
Idea Pavillion. NY: The Buffalo Fine Arts Academy, 1986, p 7.
54
A similar argument was leveled at artist run spaces and the tactic that many Canadian
artists adopted in the 1970s of the artist as bureaucrat, predominantly fueled by the fact
that artist run centers and artist practices in general were so heavily funded by the Canada
Council, artist travel grants, and local initiative project funding. Dot Teur makes this
argument in relation to the Centre for Experimental Art and Communication in Toronto.
Dot Tuer. ““The CEAC was banned in Canada”: Program Notes for a Tragicomic Opera
in Three Acts,” Mining the Media Archive: Essays on Art, Technology, and Cultural
Resistance. Toronto: YYZ Books, 2005, p 55-90.
55
Philip Monk is a prominent curator and critic in Toronto, and is a contemporary of
General Idea. While he often butted heads with the group through the 1980s, both happily
acknowledge each other’s importance to art discourse in general, and to forming an art
scene in Toronto specifically. AA Bronson discusses Monk’s importance in a 1995
interview with Deborah Waddington.
Deborah Waddington Interview with AA Bronson, 4/1995, Correspondence Files,
General Idea Collection, National Gallery of Canada.

194

November 22, 1982, later published as an essay in Parachute 33 in the winter of
1983/1984, Monk considered the group’s editorials from FILE as a case study for the
dangers of appropriation and structuralism as false oppositional political practices.
56
He
lambasted GI for recreating the forms, structures, and systems of capitalism under the
guise of critical engagement, arguing, “General Idea’s resort to ambiguity, the
multiplicity of meanings, and an expanding system of verbal puns and paradoxes, all
referenced to current theories of interpretation or textual reading, and their own self-
referencing system reflect the form of capitalism [it wishes] to criticize.”
57
He read the
work as tautalogical rather than performative, taking General Idea at its word rather than
thinking through the tertiary operations that occur. Monk presented a reading, in
particular, of the “Glamour Editorial” and described how it uses Barthes’ idea of myth
without having any sense of an original. His discussion concluded with the $ucce$$
issue, as the instance that rendered the group’s ultimate capitulation to capitalism, the
ultimate succumbing of what was, in the 1970s, a critical framework into a legitimization
of the established economic and social order.
I dwell on this critique of the group because it exposes precisely where I locate
General Idea’s politics, in the intervention that materialized in the interaction of form and
content. This was evident and remarked upon even at the time, as is clear in artist Ian
Carr-Harris’ response to Philip Monk’s talk at Rivoli, published in Parachute 30 in the

56
Philip Monk. “Editorials: General Idea and the Myth of Inhabitation,” Parachute 33,
12/1983-2/1984, p 13-22.
57
Ibid, p 14.

195

spring of 1983.
58
Carr-Harris rejected an automatic dismissal of appropriation as
supporting the social order from whence its object emerged, and also of reading General
Idea purely in relation to structuralism. General Idea itself voiced the importance of this
level of its practice, explaining in an interview with Louise Dompierre in the summer of
1991 that, “glamour is to mythology as mythology is to reality ... that was our definition
of glamour, which Philip Monk, unfortunately, completely misses.”
59
The group used the
modes of mainstream society to create alternatives that didn’t negate dominant culture,
per se, but simply highlighted its artifice and its contradictions to make space for
different modes of social organizataion and forms of life. Its work was performative, not
tautalogical.
By demonstrating the constant need to reaffirm and reinforce the structures of
capital, General Idea highlighted their iterability, their precarity, and ultimately their
fallibility. Glamour for the group was not a re-proposition of Barthes and of dominant
culture, but rather a counter-proposition. So too was shopping. While General Idea
celebrated multiple readings of its works, and did not try to stamp any kind of authority
on any one interpretation, it did demand a close reading, and a reading attentive to all
parts of its practice. This kind of engagement mimicked a subcultural model of
participation, providing another example of the group’s use of subcultural methods
outside of literal, material, recognizable subcultures. Just as someone might read the
latest zine cover to cover, or scour the thrift store for the perfect vintage item to cut up in

58
Ian Carr-Harris is a writer and artist, working predominantly in sculpture and
installation. He was represented by Carmen Lamanna, who also showed General Idea,
and as such was a peer of the group’s.
Ian Carr-Harris. “Philip Monk, Sentences on Art,” Parachute 30, 3/1983, p 52.
59
Louise Dompierre. Interview with General Idea, July 1991, Manuscript Files, General
Idea Collection, National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa.

196

just the right way, General Idea demanded close attention and personal investment.
60
It
received a not insignificant amount of negative press throughout its career, but this
criticism of its politics was the only one to garner sustained response. One of these
responses was the video Shut the Fuck Up, which let those critics know precisely what
General Idea thought of their interpretation, and why.

Not Your Mother’s Poodles

Nineteen Eighty Four came and went with a bang for General Idea, with a major
mid-career retrospective as well as a substantial retrospective issue of FILE.
61
(104) By
this point, the group was a major player in the international art world, with an impressive
exhibition resume including many of the major institutions in both North America and
Europe. With this increasingly prominent profile came access to a different view of how
the art world functioned, and where and how meaning coalesced in relation to the re-
materialized art object. As art took a more prominent place within popular culture,

60
This model of subcultural participation productively parallels certain queer theories of
readership, which have emerged particularly strongly in relation to archives, to reading
queerness in archives and to reading archives queerly. I co-chaired, with Tirza Latimer, a
panel on this topic of queer archives at the 2012 meeting of the College Art Association,
in Los Angeles, which we are currently editing a special cluster of CAA’s Art Journal.
For a more in depth discussion of queer archives, see:
Ann Cvetkovitch. An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public
Cultures. Durham: Duke University Press, 2003.
Tirza True Latimer. “Life in the Archives,” Open Space. SFMoMA Blog. 1/27/2012.
Web, 4/8/2012.
61
General Idea presented the retrospective as the 1984 Miss General Idea Pageant
Pavillion, and the exhibitioned showed at Kunsthalle Basel, Basel; Stedelijk Van
Abbemuseum, Eindhoven; Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto; and Musée d'art
contemporain, Montreal. The catalog for the show, much like the issue of FILE, reprinted
material from earlier General Idea works, but while the magazine focused on important
editorials and articles, the catalog focused more on texts from performances.

197

General Idea observed that the artist took on different roles, responsibilities, and
expectations as well.
After its ultimate, final destruction of the 1984 Pageant Pavillion in 1980, as
discussed in chapter two, General Idea shifted the mode of its practice from architecture,
from constructing different aspects of the Pavillion, to archaeology, or excavating the
structure’s ruins.
62
The group saw a return to the production of objects in the form of
artifacts from and reconstructions of the Pavillion, from shards of pottery to reinstalled
murals. (105) This shift, the group explained, stemmed in part from its audience’s lack of
familiarity with the entire Miss General Idea myth, but also from the art viewing public’s
general desire for work that was more easily and quickly comprehensible.
63

General Idea addresses the entire apparatus around generating meaning for a work
in its 1985 video titled, both humorously and entirely seriously, Shut the Fuck Up. The
video specifically addresses the clichés that abound concerning the artist as a creative
persona. It also laments the focus on the artist as a celebrity and a site of spectacle instead
of on the objects that artists create, in fact presenting the artist as the art object in a
manner both reenacting and simultaneously misapplying the Warholian gesture of the
persona as the work of art.
Shut the Fuck Up was commissioned for a series on Amsterdam television titled
“Talking Back to the Media,” an initiative between De Appel and Time Based Arts, a

62
General Idea progressively destroyed the Pavillion in performances, photographs, and
installations from 1977 to 1980, replicating its construction only through its
documentation but never in any real physical space.
63
General Idea discusses the shift in its practice, based on the attention span of a New
York audience, in its interview with Louise Dompierre from 1991.
Louise Dompierre. Interview with General Idea, July 1991, Manuscript Files, General
Idea Collection, National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa.

198

video distribution center in that city. The work unfolds in a number of parts, including
scenes appropriated from the original Batman television series (1966-1968); the notorious
documentary Mondo Cane (1962) by Paolo Cavara, Franco Prosperi, and Gualtiero
Jacopetti; and footage from a performance the group staged in 1984 at the Centre d’Art
Contemporain, Geneva, titled XXX Bleu.
64
Scripted scenes featuring, alternately, a
monologue by Jorge and dialog between AA and Felix, appear between each
appropriated episode, building towards a call for audiences to retain their own
engagement with art outside of its presentation by the mass media. It is precisely in that
engagement, that space of interpretation, General Idea argued, that the political potential
for art resides.
The video opens with a reference to Test Tube, replaying scenes that locate the
current work within a politicized populism that nevertheless embraces aspects of
mainstream culture precisely for their subversive political potential. First, Jorge reminds
the audience about General Idea’s political engagement with mass media, saying, “We
don’t want to destroy television, we want to add to it, stretch it until it loses shape,”
reinforced by AA’s comment about how artists are increasingly turning to popular media
to reach a general public.
65
After recapping the earlier work, and alerting the audience
that the current video will “look at a media cliché of the artist,” the soundtrack changes to

64
Mondo Cane is a travelog-esque collection of vignettes intended to shock western
audiences. Although presented as a documentary, many scenes are staged or highly
manipulated to increase their shock value. While there is no real continuity or narrative,
scenes focus on sex, animals, death, and debauchery. The film’s title translates to A
Dog’s World, and collectively the vignettes communicate a grisly and beastly view of
humanity.
Paolo Cavara, Franco Prosperi, and Gualtiero Jacopetti.Mondo Cane (1962). Color Film,
108:00 minutes.
65
General Idea. Shut the Fuck Up (1985). Color video, 14:00 minutes.

199

a rising din of barking dogs, as text rolls across the screen that reads, “In this videotape
we look at the media cliché of the artist. As the artist struggles to muffle the cacophony
of the media in his larger context we heard these words rising above the din... SHUT
THE FUCK UP.” (106) This intro presents the group’s political engagement with the
media within the context of mass media attempts to shape and contain art and artists, and
to remove art from the spaces and processes within which it can realize its political
potential. The piece progresses with examples of these attempts, surrounded by
commentary from General Idea that both laments this condition and uses it for a larger
purpose.
The scene from Batman that follows the introduction stems from the episode “Pop
Goes the Joker.”
66
In the episode, the Joker breaks into an art museum and defaces all of
the paintings, only to have his work praised as art. He gains further lauds after winning an
art competition, and that competition is the scene that appears in Shut the Fuck Up. The
scene, titled “Death of a Mauve Bat,” shows a number of competitors, each embodying
different stereotypes of the modern artist, including an artist who paints with his feet and
an artist who has a monkey throw tomatoes at a canvas.
67
(107) While the conservatively

66
This episode originally aired on March 22, 1967, during the second of the show’s three
seasons. It was directed by George Waggner, and written by Bob Kane and Stanford
Sherman.
67
From the beginning of its career, General Idea self-consciously engaged with the
history of art, enacting a kind of art history that suggests a lineage of a queer avant-garde,
of which it was a part. The group frequently name-checked and re-enacted gestures and
figures from art history, from Duchamp to Joseph Beuys. I will discuss this in more detail
in the following chapter, but a number of art historians have discussed this clip from Shut
the Fuck Up in the context of a discussion of art as art history.
See:
William Poundstone. “Meet Warhol’s Evil Twin: “Pop Goes the Joker,”” William
Poundstone on Art and Chaos, artinfo.com. March 9, 2011. Web, September 19, 2012.

200

dressed audience appears by turns bemused and befuddled by the proceedings, Joker wins
the contest with his composition, Death of a Mauve Bat, which depicts the death of the
eponymous creature, who died in 1936, “a very bad year for bats.”
68
(108) The canvas is
untouched, and wins for its symbolism of “the emptiness of modern life.” This
interpretation, and the judges’ pronouncements towards the other canvasses in the
competition, such as “an excellent example of neo-expressionism,” or “a fine
representation of harmonic balance,” reek of meaningless art-speak. The scene both
exemplifies and critiques the place of modern art in the popular consciousness after Andy
Warhol, indicated both by the title, “Pop Goes the Joker,” and the fact that the MC of the
competition is a blonde woman named Baby Jane, a clear play on the Warhol Superstar
Baby Jane Holzer.
Immediately following this scene, Jorge goes on a deranged-seeming rant using
metaphors from post-war painting to issue a screed against the media and the demands it
places on artists to conform to its stereotypes. (109) With such statements as, “I don’t
wanna be a figure in their landscape [...] play boho to their bourgoisie,” and “I’m not
gonna shit on canvas so they can frame it and call it art...” Zontal manifest’s General
Idea’s sense of humor and play alongside its astute analysis of the work that such
stereotypes of art do to rob art of its place within larger cultural practices. The answer he
demands? “Stop the fucking presses. Change the fucking channel.” Again, he doesn’t call
for an abandonment of the media, or a destruction of it, but rather a different use of it.
Stop the presses and change the channel, not smash or just turn off your TV.

Betty Ann Brown. “The Artist as Crazy, as Fraud, as Psychopath,” artscenecal.com.
2005. Web, September 19, 2012.
68
George Waggner (director). “Pop Goes the Joker,” Batman. 3/22/1967. Color,
Television.

201

This tirade sets up the remainder of the video, which offers a critique of artists
who comply with these stereotypes instead of using them within an engaged, critical
practice. The orchestral music from the Yves Klein scene from Mondo Cane plays while
taxidermied poodles rotate, monumentally, in front of a large canvas painted with a large
‘x’ in chromakey, or Yves Klein, blue. (110) As the poodles rotate, it becomes clear that
each ‘x’ was painted with one of the poodles, as the blue paint dripping off of half of its
body comes in and out of view. This introduces part two, titled after the Italian
documentary. The first minute, however, is consumed by a clip that the group recorded
off TV, discovered by happenstance, of a number of people dressed in spandex with
poodle shaped helmets, gloves, and booties executing a complicated dance to the
soundtrack of a cheesy 80’s tune replete with synthesizers and melodic dog barks. (111)
Over this choreography floats different versions of General Idea’s painting series Mondo
Cane Kama Sutra (1984), which depicts three poodles, rendered in a hard edge, neon,
neo-geo style, in different arrays of sexual activity—in one painting all three poodles, one
yellow, one orange, one pink, line up in a train of anal sex; while in another they form a
triangle of anal sex, fellatio, and rimming.
69
(112)
While ridiculous and hilarious, these scenes form the heart of General Idea’s
critique of popular contemporary art, and exemplify its strategy of occupying mainstream
positions to rearticulate them as replete with subversive potential. Dialog between
Bronson and Partz clarifies this. Their section opens with AA, his eyes appearing above
an open copy of the Sunday Times, relaying to Felix certain animal-themed descriptions

69
Mondo Cane was a series of paintings of a trio of poodles, each in a different shade of
neon on a black background. The three poodles appear in different arrangements, and in
different sorts of sexual interaction, in each image of the series. They were published in
the pages of FILE and of ArtForum, and also exist as paintings and as prints.

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of the celebrity of noted neo-expressionist painter Julian Schnabel, whose paintings
contributed to the exploding art market described above, including “a baby hippo, beef on
the hoof, and a Strasbourg goose.” (113) The scene moves on as they discuss their
preference for poodles, which was a motif for the group across different projects in the
first half of the 1980s.
70
(114) General Idea took up the poodle for a number of reasons:
as a response to the contemporary art world, as a gay icon, and as another floating
signifier that the group could occupy, embracing multiple meanings as part of its
rearticulation of dominant culture.
General Idea identified with the poodle, going so far as to make a poodle self-
portrait, P is for Poodle (1983). (115) This identification was a pointed rejection of the
terms of popular painting within the mainstream art world, as the ascendant Neo-
Expressionists (including Schnabel) were often referred to as wild ones and savage
beasts. Neo-expressionism was received as a return to personal expression and artistic
mastery after such intellectually engaged and artisanally disinterested movements as
Minimalism and Conceptualism. As a movement, it presented a front of cool, rugged
masculinity (despite the participation of, albeit marginalized, female artists) to which the
poodle was anathema. Bronson and Partz revel in this bratty cheekiness, resplendent in
neon poodle wigs and dark eye shadow while daintily holding petit fours. (116) They
alternate lines through this section, celebrating “poodles, banal and effete [...] their wit,

70
Since its first appearance on the cover of Parachute in 1981, as a reprint of the print A
Poodle Creates a Portrait of General Idea as Three Pee Holes in the Snow, the poodle
stood in as a mascot for the group. The dogs appear in many different forms and formats
through the first half of the 1980s.
Parachute. N 25, Winter 1981.

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pampered presence and ornamental physique ... their eagerness for affection and
affectation.” The fey poodle was the polar opposite of the savage wolf.
The poodle was the opposite of the neo-expressionist, but at the same time it was
a metaphor for them, and for the relationship between the artist and the media. General
Idea projects a kind of syncophantism onto contemporary popular painting in Shut the
Fuck Up, describing their “instinct to please” as well as “their eagerness for affection and
affectation, their delicious desire to be groomed and preened for public appearances, in a
word, their instinct to please!” Art critic John Bentley Mays termed it “the artist as a
housepet for the rich and powerful.”
71
Bronson and Partz cap off their evaluation by
stating, “[t]hose that live to please must please to live,” embracing this as a Borderline
Case of artistic existence: “[w]e know how to please and we know how to live.” The
artists point to the symbiotic relationship between artists, on the one hand, and the media
and critics on the other, but rather than spurn it they occupy it and rearticulate it as a
position of subversion. While this has always been General Idea’s method, Bronson and
Partz articulate it in terms related to sexuality and identity, discussing this dance with the
media in terms of “artists in artist’s drag.” Shut the Fuck Up might not literally
materialize the group’s subcultures like earlier performances and videos did, but here
Felix and AA emphasize that this does not mean that the group moved away from the
political ethos of its social foundation. It links art to that social foundation, wherein a
video and the assumption of a mutable and iterative identity are related in meaningful
ways.

71
John Bentley Mays. “From the FILEs of General Idea,” The Globe and Mail,
7/21/1984, Entertainment section, p 13.

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As did the second section, the third begins with the same rotating poodles dipped
in paint in front of a large X painted on a canvas, but “XXX Bleu” explains the origin of
the concept, locating the poodles further within a set of General Idea projects that play
with this nexus of sex, identity, art, and the media. This part opens with extended clip of
the Yves Klein scene from Mondo Cane, where the artist first directs an orchestra playing
his Monotone Symphony and then moves to directing a number of models to produce
some of his Anthropometries.
72
(117) The group highlights the overt and yet unremarked
upon by the film’s narrator sexiness of the process by including images of two tuxedoed
men staring at the proceedings, mouths agape, as a violin bow slowly moves into the
frame as an echo of the erection that their visages imply. (118) General Idea’s editing of
this clip from Mondo Cane, and transitively Klein’s process as a microcosm for the
artistic process in general, emphasizes the way that gender, sex, sexuality, and desire
figure as an umarked part of the mainstream and art world culture that the media and
critics demand.
In a back and forth exchange similar to the previous section, Partz and Bronson
describe General Idea’s performance, XXX Bleu, which was based on Klein’s piece. In
their account of the work, AA’s proceeds with more affect and description, and in
complete sentences, while by contrast Felix, humorously, simply delivers the facts and
armature for the performance in short, bullet-type form. They explain that in fact there
were three taxidermied poodles, and three 3x5m canvases that the artists painted on

72
Yves Klein’s Anthropometries were paintings made with live nude female models as
brushes. Models would cover themselves in paint and then lie on or lean against a canvas,
per Klein’s direction.
For the most recent take on Klein, and the Anthropometries, see:
Yves Klein: With the Void, Full Powers. Ed. Kerry Brougher. Minneapolis: Walker Art
Center, 2010.

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ladders. Partz emphasizes how the performance, and General Idea writ large, highlight
these many layers of work that occur within any manifestation of culture. These layers
include explicit meaning, but also the conveyance of unspoken assumptions, values, and
hierarchies. He intones, “The context: images flooded with multiple associations,” where
“XXX equals poison. XXX as kisses. XXX as epitaph. XXX as targets. XXX as
signature.” As always, General Idea makes a point to present its embrace of simultaneous
different meanings. But by enacting this insistence within the context of a performance
that featured the artists sending up the role of the artist-as-media-darling, it fights back
against attempts not only to contain meaning as such, but also to contain the political
operation of multi-valence across fields of culture, the popular as much as the artistic.
The video closes with another rant by Jorge, empowering the audience with
questions that address us directly, in contrast to the media, who Bronson and Partz had
previously described as “just another element in the joke. Just another straight man. Just
another one liner. Just another set-up. Just another chicken crossing the road.” Repeating
each line, in a manner that adds to the air of lunacy in his delivery but also offers a form
of emphasis and a performative iteration of how culture operates through reiteration,
Zontal provides a summary of the politics of the video and of General Idea’s practice.
Multiple meanings, contradiction, satire, each of these build to a refusal to participate in
the gestures expected within dominant culture, often another word for lunacy:
“[e]verything turns upside down, inside out. One set of relationships turns into another
[...] the new emergent meaning and the old retiring meaning indulge in a battle of wits on
the border between content and context.” Jorge describes the semiotic function of culture,
and presents that as the site of the group’s intervention, as its work existed precisely

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where “the new emergent meaning and the old retiring meaning indulge in a battle of wits
on the border between content and context.” General Idea had no interest in making sense
within normative forms of logic, as those forms carry their own juridical operation. It
observed that the interpretive capacity of mass media was unable to present this kind of
mutability, even though its format demonstrated iteration as a constitutive part of its
existence. With Shut the Fuck Up, General Idea called for audiences, including mass
media, to ignore what the words of mainstream interpretation communicate, and pay
attention instead to what is communicated by the process. Culture is a semiotic
phenomenon, the group demonstrated, and by abdicating participation in that process,
subjects lose a potential site to refuse the values and assumptions of the dominant social
order. This was the context for its call to just “shut the fuck up.”

Conclusion

For General Idea, art was an integral part of participating in culture, as much as
getting dressed or listening to the radio. Let alone reading a magazine or watching
television, evident in the fact that it took up both of those formats as media for its work.
As discussed in earlier chapters, its work through the mid 1970s served as sites for the
materialization and distribution of its various subcultures—people came together at its
performances and through its videos and issues of FILE, observing who was wearing and
listening to what and how people constructed not only their self-presentation but their
very identities. The work considered in this chapter participated less in specific
subcultures: punk rock or mail art or fetish sex. But it presented a general theory of

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subcultural politics drawn from the ways that specific subcultural practices create
alternative forms—through actions that highlight and harness culture as a signifying
process.
General Idea emphasized its belief in the inherently political operation of culture,
and thus the resistant potential of any sort of cultural participation. It used references to
literal aspects of various subcultures to signal its presentation of the structural, abstract
intervention enacted by subcultures generally. For example, from fetish and s&m
practices to the poodle, General Idea took up icons of gay culture not to present the
artists’ individual gay identities, but because leather, bondage, and poodles are signifiers
that demonstrate culture itself as a signifying practice. For the group, sexuality continued
to be an embodied rearticulation of the systems of dominant culture more than a
particular orientation of sex and desire. As such, its engagement with signification and
demonstrating the power inherent to signification—and thereby the resistant potential of
resignification—was part and parcel of this sexuality, and the locus of sexuality as a form
of subcultural politics. At the same time, the group created work that offered the
opportunity to experience a subcultural mode of participation; from rewarding close
reading, prolonged attention, and specialized knowledge in Test Tube to celebrating the
audience that went along with the group’s ideas about art and the artist (in contrast to the
mass media’s) in Shut the Fuck Up. General Idea no longer created literal spaces for its
subcultures to interact, but it continued to materialize them by enacting their modus
operandi, and as such highlighting their politics.
Perhaps because of this turn from literal social practices, and because of the fine
line that the group toed between reifying and subverting dominant culture, the group and

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critics both discussed politics more frequently in relation to the work under consideration
in this chapter. By refusing to be a lapdog to critics or the mass media, General Idea
refused to comply with the roles prescribed to it by dominant culture while clearly
participating in dominant culture—by displaying its work in the spaces of prestigious
museums and art fairs and the pages of internationally renowned publications. Zontal
described the group’s aims: “[w]e are trying for subversity in complicity. We are trying
not to get too complicit.”
73
Although, as Zontal would also point out, at times the group
would go against the progressive tendencies of its politics, as was its bratty nature’s
wont.
74
In response to a question about the political utility of art, Bronson proffered the
following explanation, clarifying that the answer to that question depends on one’s
definition of politics: “For us it’s not so direct, we’re not doing work that comments
directly on any particular situation or organization or government or whatever. What
we’re involved in is creating a consciousness of culture. We bring up issues, almost on a
subliminal level, that alter people’s perceptions of culture.”
75
General Idea embraced art,
itself a cultural practice, as the site to enact its cultural politics.
The question of signification as a subcultural practice, and its politics, would take
on new urgency in relation to another cultural development in the 1980s. Even before
Jorge and Felix got sick, General Idea’s world, like many’s, was torn asunder by HIV.
The last chapter of this dissertation will address the group’s engagement with AIDS,
which was both the pinnacle of abstraction in relation to the group’s subcultures, and at
the same time desperately concrete. This simultaneous abstraction and concreteness caps

73
Scott, Jay. “Going through the Notions,” Canadian Art. Fall 1984, p 82.
74
Vereschagin, David. “What’s the Big Idea?,” The Body Politic. N 115, 6/1985, p 31.
75
Ibid.

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General Idea’s assertion about the politics of culture, and of art as a part of everyday
cultural expression. The group took the lessons about art as a part of everyday life, about
the politics inherent in cultural practice, and about the political potential of art, and
applied them to a context more dire than it ever could have imagined when it
choreographed dancing bears in What Happened (1970), though each project applies the
same understanding of the political efficacy of art as an everyday cultural practice.

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Chapter Four – Literal Metaphors: AIDS, Infection, and Abstraction

Intro

When General Idea first conceived of its more or less quarterly publication, FILE,
it could reasonably imagine that an unsuspecting reader would absent-mindedly and
unwittingly pick it up, thinking that it was LIFE Magazine. Not only is FILE is an
anagram of LIFE, but the group also printed its title in exactly the same font and format–
white all-caps text on a field of red. (119) The resemblance, and therefore the potential
for confusion, was so great that Time-Life in fact sued General Idea in 1974, forcing the
group to change the logo. The group embraced this kind of confusion and misreading,
playing with the processes of signification and meaning-making throughout its practice,
as discussed in the previous three chapters.
While the FILE/LIFE example demonstrates how it appropriated from the visual
culture of popular media, the group equally drew upon avant-garde traditions, mimicking
the historic practices of Dada and Suprematism and the literary canon of Gertrude Stein
and William Burroughs, not to mention more contemporary work by figures as disparate
as Andy Warhol and Joseph Beuys. In doing so, the group not only deployed established
artistic methods (if not established works of art!), but also highlighted how these artistic
strategies oftentimes overlap with the processes through which oppositional subcultures
coalesced and intervened into dominant culture. While the still-powerful art criticism of
Clement Greenberg established a definition of modernism that valued art precisely for its
distance from culture and politics, General Idea turned to practices that sought precisely
the opposite, drawing upon the literary theory of Roland Barthes and others to fit no less
than abstraction and the monochrome into a history of art as a simultaneous history of

211

mass culture and politics. It mimicked even art history to present its argument about the
absolute interdependence of art, culture, and politics, in fact using art history, and
queering art history, to demonstrate the forms of politics that materialize through
subcultures.
It is fitting, then, that in a moment in which the relationship between culture and
politics was at its most self-evident—at the height of the AIDS crisis in which activist
groups turned to the spaces of everyday life as sites of intervention and frequently used
visual means to make that intervention—General Idea turned most explicitly to language.
The group’s AIDS logo, conceived in 1986 but not executed and displayed until 1987,
displays a similar potential for confusion as its magazine.
1
(120) The work appropriates
the form, the font, and the color scheme, of Robert Indiana’s famous LOVE logo (1965),
but instead places an A and an I over a tilted D and an S, creating a grid of red, blue, and
green that could well be mistaken for the earlier work. (121) For example, in the summer
of 2009 I was installing General Idea’s Imagevirus series (1991), a set of posters
displaying the AIDS logo installed in a variety of public settings, on a gallery wall clearly
visible from the street (122).
2
A woman and a young child, likely not yet able to read

1
AIDS first appeared as a painting in 1987, for that year’s amfAR (The American
Foundation for AIDS Research) annual fundraiser. That fall, it also began appearing as
posters, and was displayed in every imaginable setting, from bill posts to transportation
kiosks. It would eventually take on an exceptional variety of media. AIDS circulated as
wallpaper, posters, paintings, and monumental sculptures but also as stamps, medical
journal covers, rings, and handkerchiefs. For a full catalog of the range of objects that
circulated the AIDS logo, see:
General Idea: Editions and Multiples 1967-1995. Ed. Barbara Fischer. Mississauga, ON:
Blackwell Gallery, 2003.
2
Imagevirus was a key work in a show that I curated with Steven Lam at the La Mama
La Galleria in June of 2009. The show considered how artists since the onset of the AIDS
epidemic drew upon the forms and systems of dominant culture to explore alternative
forms of social organization. This curatorial project was an offshoot of the larger

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well, strolled by, and the boy pointed at the posters, yelling, “Look, Mommy, LOVE.”
His mother corrected him, saying it looked like that picture, but was something else. She
asked him if he could look closely and recognize the letters but, within my earshot, didn’t
explain what AIDS meant, and then they continued on their way.
This chapter discusses General Idea’s AIDS project in all of its manifestations, as
the very promiscuity of its medium, be it a painting, scarf, or monumental sculpture, was
vital to the group’s intervention. (123) While well-reviewed by critics, the project was
negatively received by many AIDS activists, who were understandably invested in the
use of art to inspire direct action or convey specific information about how to stem the
epidemic. In response, the group took the red, blue, and green color scheme of the
original logo, themselves signifiers of the AIDS project, and applied them to a number of
other pieces, including large-scale installations that commented on the volume of pills
someone on a retroviral regimen would need to consume, but also its Infe©ted series,
which presented canonical works of abstract modernism overlaid with the three tell-tale
colors. (124) These works played with abstraction and literalization, with metaphor and
didacticism, continuing the process that the group began in the 1970s of extracting the
forms of its subcultures to manifest their politics without literally representing them. At
the same time, however the work was intensely literal, offering images that allowed a
terrorized community to wrap its head around biological phenomena and public health
processes that were, it seemed, deliberately confusing and obtuse. This interplay of

concerns of this dissertation, both in terms of the argument presented by the show but
also in terms of my own investigation of the role that form (in this case a dissertation vs.
an art exhibition) plays in the investigation of the politics of cultural production.

213

apparent opposites highlighted General Idea’s rearticulation of the political potential of
culture, and art’s role in that reformulation.
While visually very different from its earlier work, General Idea’s projects
between its move to Manhattan in 1986 and the death of Partz and Zontal in 1994
continued to manifest the group’s commitment to expressing the politics of everyday
subcultural life. More than ever, however, this work demonstrated how these subcultural
tactics paralleled those of both artistic and literary modernism, linking the artistic
intervention of the avant-garde to the sociopolitical intervention of subcultures. The
preponderance of art historical references in the work of this period echoes the allusions
to other practices throughout the group’s career, from Duchamp to Warhol, creating a
lineage of queer art practices and also modeling a form of queer art history. Earlier in its
career General Idea made art banal by pointing out the artful moments of everyday life
and using its practice as a way to structure its existence, from its household arrangements
to its very identity. Through the art history it presented, however, it also demonstrated
how all forms of art are connected to culture. As products of culture, then, all art works
contain politics even if the only thing they represent is surface or medium. By modeling
different ways of conceptualizing, making, and presenting art history, General Idea also
demonstrated how subcultures legitimize themselves and their forms of being within and
against the mainstream social order.
General Idea’s AIDS-related work presented a culmination and also a summation
of its career-long commitment to collapsing art, culture, and politics. Appropriation,
resignification, parodic inhabitation and imitation, opportunism, and a commitment to the
ephemeral and the fleeting characterized its artwork and its understanding of political

214

activity. The emphasis on explicitly literary methods—words—in the project that
launched this next and final stage of its practice emphasized that art has not only the
potential to be, but always is a part of the politics of everyday life, irrespective of the
degree to which art represents that life. The use of a sexually transmitted disease as the
locus for this work juggled literal sex with the group’s expanded notion of sexuality as a
process of cultural analysis, as AIDS referenced the most frequently discussed means of
transmission for the human immunodeficiency virus while demonstrating the group’s
method of subcultural politics—re-articulating the significatoy processes of dominant
culture to create alternative social orders.
This practice further reinforced the politics of art to the extent that those
politicized subcultural tactics that General Idea termed “sexuality” were also processes of
art-making. General Idea connected these abstract subcultural tactics to the body with
AIDS–a move that proved distasteful to the many AIDS activists who objected to the
work because they saw anything but concrete reference to the specificity of the body as
serving the agenda of racist, sexist, and homophobic inaction in the face of the pandemic.
The group also rendered the body as a site of politics not just for what it did but precisely
for what it was, or more specifically how what it did rendered what it was. This was its
idea of sexuality: a performative and self-conscious demonstration of identification and
subjectivization that applied linguistic concepts of signification to the body, undermining
the logic through which mainstream society legitimizes some bodies and delegitimizes
others on the basis of ostensibly natural and essential characteristics inherent to those
bodies. For General Idea this rendering was as political as voting, marching,
demonstrating, and boycotting. Its work throughout its career emphasized how the means

215

through which bodies acquire meaning parallel how anything else within the cultural
field—a word, an image, an object—acquires meaning. The AIDS crisis demonstrated to
devastating effect the concrete consequences of this abstract concept. Dominant culture
defined AIDS as a disease afflicting bodies that were not worth saving, and it fell to
AIDS activism to undermine the means by which the mainstream came to that definition.

AIDS Activism

Throughout its career, General Idea offered a semiotic intervention into dominant
culture, not the least of which was to demonstrate how culture itself is a semiotic
phenomenon.
3
With its AIDS project, the group demonstrated how even politics takes its
shape and object within a cultural context, which renders certain activities political and
others frivolous. This section will focus on the public clash between General Idea and
Gran Fury, an activist art group within the larger AIDS activist organization ACT UP, to
illustrate how General Idea’s politics could be misunderstood, even by people who shared
the same fundamental critiques and goals, because of General Idea’s rejection of
mainstream ideas about what politics looks like, and how its efficacy is to be measured.
ACT UP began in New York City in March of 1987 in response to government inaction
and public indifference towards the raging AIDS epidemic whose death toll in the US
alone had pushed past sixteen thousand people, and quickly spread across the country as

3
This understanding of culture stemmed from the group’s reading of Roland Barthes and
also Luis Althusser. For the models of culture enumerated by each, see:
Louis Althusser. “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes toward an
Investigation),” Lenin and Philosophy, and Other Essays. Trans. Ben Brewster. NYC:
New Left Books, 1971, p 127-188.
Roland Barthes. Mythologies. Trans. Annette Lavers. NYC: Hill and Wang, 1972.

216

a grassroots, member driven organization that operated via every imaginable channel to
address and try to end the AIDS crisis.
4
Unlike the direct engagement of such AIDS
activist groups as Gran Fury, General Idea’s was a subcultural form of politics that did
not address tangible changes in public policy, but changes in public policy were not the
group’s objective. The purpose of this subcultural politics was to offer a broader critique
of the fundamental systems and structures that perpetuate dominant culture, including
ideas about the appropriate form, subject, and object of politics, and how to judge their
efficacy.
5
Politics, too, derived its meaning and criteria of judgment through significatory
systems. Just as conservative forces in the US waged a war against PWAs through the
systems and structures of culture as much as it did through official institutions, General
Idea turned to culture as a political site able to contain a response to AIDS as a publicly
precipitated pandemic.
General Idea emphasized culture as a series of systems that gave meaning to
objects, images, gestures, and bodies, in a constant feedback loop that made the
significance granted seem natural and inherent, and the hierarchies organic and
unmotivated, but that in fact was anything but. The AIDS crisis brought this condition to
a head, as it precipitated a very public discussion about meaning and value, about which
bodies were victims and which predators, which behaviors were risky and which safe,
and even what constituted illness and what punishment. With its AIDS works, General
Idea spoke to the semiotic nature of culture through a literal, and literary, project—it

4
“The AIDS Epidemic: 1981-1987,” The New York Times. Web, 10/17/2013.
http://partners.nytimes.com/library/national/science/aids/timeline80-87.html
5
The purpose of this dissertation, and of this chapter in particular, is not to denigrate a
traditional view of politics, or to advocate for subcultural politics as any ideal form of
resistance. Both are necessary, vital parts of any advocacy for social justice

217

investigated what and how the word ‘AIDS’ signified.
6
Rather than define the word,
however, the group highlighted its ultimate unknowability and illegibility, embracing
indeterminacy as a political position.
7
Like General Idea’s earlier work, AIDS mimicked
the systems of culture, in its content and its multi media and viral methods of distribution,
as a way to denaturalize them.
General Idea and Gran Fury were two collectives who did much to establish the
popular visual culture of AIDS activism in the late 80s and early 90s. Gran Fury was a
subgroup within the larger AIDS activist group ACT UP, and it viewed itself as the
branding arm of the larger organization. Gran Fury also presented itself as ACT UP’s
voice within the art world, although it was not the only source of ACT UP’s visual
culture. It is important to note that ACT UP was, by design, an exceptionally
heterogeneous organization. I specify that these were Gran Fury’s views on art and
politics because, despite the group’s identity as a mouthpiece for ACT UP, it was not the
only mouthpiece. Anyone who had the energy could form an affinity group within the
larger structure, and as such the umbrella organization could contain many varying
viewpoints on almost anything. General Idea and Gran Fury showed together within the

6
Although it is outside of the scope of this dissertation, AIDS also exists in relation to a
tradition of abstract poetry, as well as abstract painting and activist art. In a book to be
discussed later in this chapter, artist and critic Gregg Bordowitz discusses the work in
relation to conceptual and concrete poetry, arguing for the logo’s place in a history of
queer, modernist literature as much as visual art.
Gregg Bordowitz. General Idea ‘Imagevirus.’ London: Afterall Books, 2010.
7
Joshua Decter, a friend to and frequent interpreter of General Idea, discusses this
insistence upon indeterminate meaning as part of a politics of communication and of
interpretations. He argues that the group empowers the viewer of the work because of the
space it offers them to inject their own meaning, playing with its career-long commitment
to multivalence while also commenting on the AIDS crisis as, in part, a crisis of meaning.
Joshua Decter. “The Theatrics of Dissemination: a General Idea Model,” General Idea’s
Fin de Siècle. Ed. Dr Tilman Osterwold. Stuttgart: Württembergischer Kunstverein
Stuttgart, 1992, p 15-27.

218

same gallery for the first time towards the end of 1988, at the Neue Gesellschaft für
bildende Kunst in Berlin.
8
Each had work in Vollbild AIDS: Eine Kunstausstellung über
Leben und Sterben (AIDS – The Complete Picture: An Art Exhibition on Life and
Death), a show organized for NGBK by Frank Wagner as a consideration of artistic
responses to AIDS.
9

Upon hearing that General Idea would be showing its iconic AIDS image, Gran
Fury decided to include among its contributions a painting, RIOT, that it made
specifically for this exhibition to critique of the political operation of General Idea’s
project—its refusal to enrage, inform and mobilize people to take direct action to end the
AIDS crisis.
10
(125) In AIDS Demo Graphics (1990), a history of the first few years of
ACT UP that pays particular attention to the group’s visual culture, Douglas Crimp and
Adam Rolston describe the rationale behind Gran Fury’s piece:
The group wanted to comment on the show’s inclusion of the art world’s best-
known graphic work about AIDS – General Idea’s appropriation of Robert
Indiana’s famous pop art LOVE logo. The Canadian art collective’s square AIDS
paintings, posters and stickers exhibited their usual cynical detachment. What can
the word AIDS mean in this format? Did sixties’ love lead inexorably to eighties’
AIDS? Gran Fury contributed a six-by-six-foot hard-edge painting of RIOT,
using the red, black, and gold of the German flag, an image easily reworked for

8
General Idea had a long history of showing in art spaces by the time of Vollbild, but it
was the first time that Gran Fury’s work appeared in a museum.
9
Translations mine.
Work included in Vollbild ran the gamut from the text-based and didactic to the
expressionistic and melancholic. Although Wagner acknowledges an awareness of certain
controversies in America concerning the appropriate form, content, and outcome of AIDS
activist art—controversies that policed acceptable and inacceptable responses to the
epidemic—Vollbild sidesteps the question of which one form is right in the interest of a
thorough consideration of the different artistic responses to AIDS, and also in the interest
of heterogeneity.
Vollbild AIDS: Eine Kunstausstellung über Leben und Sterben. Ed. Frank Wagner.
Berlin: Neue Gesellschaft für Bildende Kunst, 1988.
10
Douglas Crimp and Adam Rolston. AIDS Demo Graphics. Seattle: Bay Press, 1990, p
102.

219

the celebration of the most famous riot in gay liberation history.
11

Crimp and Rolston’s description displays many of the assumptions about art and activism
that fueled Gran Fury’s work. But Gran Fury and Crimp and Rolston’s response also
points to many of the contradictions within Gran Fury’s stance on political art,
contradictions that point to precisely the argument about politics that General Idea made
through its AIDS project. I will focus on Gran Fury here not because it represents any
totality of artistic response to the AIDS crisis in the late 1980s and early 1990s, but rather
because its objections help crystallize the intervention into discourses about art and
politics, and politics in general, that I hope to make through this discussion of General
Idea’s work, and that General Idea itself sought to make with its practice over the course
of its career.
Gran Fury’s antagonistic response to General Idea’s AIDS occurred within a
larger trajectory of AIDS activism, which played out in an entirely different type of
institution where the groups also showed together—the streets of lower Manhattan. Late
in 1987, General Idea wheat pasted posters with its AIDS image all over Manhattan’s
East Village and Lower East Side.
12
(126) Just around the way, in the window of the New
Museum on Broadway, stood a work, Let the Record Show..., by a collaborative group of
ACT UP members, the Silence = Death collective. (127) Gran Fury would form out of

11
Gran Fury also used the image as part of ACT UP’s actions commemorating the
Stonewall Riots of 1969, commonly considered the beginning of the contemporary gay
rights movement, which saw its 20
th
anniversary in 1989.
Douglas Crimp and Adam Rolston recount that RIOT is six feet by six feet square, but the
painting in Gran Fury’s archive is eight feet by ten feet.
Douglas Crimp and Adam Rolston. AIDS Demo Graphics. Seattle: Bay Press, 1990, p
102-104.
12
Exhibition information for General Idea can be found in
General Idea: Editions and Multiples.

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this collective but, to be precise, contrary to colloquial attribution it was not a Gran Fury
installation. AIDS activism underwent a public shift in form, address and aims in 1987
with the formation of ACT UP in March of that year.
13
By starting at the beginning of
this shift, we can trace how Gran Fury’s stance on political art developed, and consider
the stakes of its rejection of General Idea for how we understand what constitutes the
political within art more generally.
Crimp and Ralston’s critique of General Idea as detached, ironic and
insufficiently committed to enraging, educating, and mobilizing people to direct action to
end the AIDS crisis reflects a specific sensitivity based on problems that ACT UP
encountered in earlier cultural responses to AIDS, problems that led to the group’s
formation in March of 1987. Beginning in 1981, when headlines began reporting on
strange cases of ‘gay related immune deficiency’ or ‘gay cancer,’ mass cultural responses
to AIDS ran the gamut from the indifferent to the openly homophobic, racist, sexist and
classist (in fact, the aim of much AIDS activism was to point out that indifference itself
was homophobic, racist, sexist, and classist). ACT UP had a particular set of goals that
specifically involved official institutions—increasing funding for AIDS research and
AIDS education, improving healthcare to provide services for people with AIDS
(PWAs), enacting laws to protect PWAs from getting evicted from their housing or fired
from their jobs, etc.
The dominance of direct action, however, and the proponents of direct action’s
subsequent rejection of other forms of political engagement, negates a whole range of

13
ACT UP NY maintains a website that demonstrates the group’s continuing
involvement in grass roots activism but also contains valuable resources on the group’s
history. For more information, see:
www.actupny.org

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interventions that are an important part of the larger history of leftist politics in the
United States, and that were present within a range of artistic responses to AIDS, not just
those of General Idea. ACT UP rejected the political potential of art that was elegiac or
personal, although many of the most ardent AIDS activists made this kind of work,
including celebrated pieces by figures as revered as Felix Gonzales-Torres or David
Wojnarowicz, whose work in fact demonstrates how personal and elegiac statements can
also lay out stark political stakes. (128) It also overshadows the ways in which ACT UP
enacted a semiotic project, seeking to rearticulate what AIDS was and the affect with
which resonated in an effort to achieve desperately needed reforms in public health
policy.
This project of ACT UP’s, to rearticulate what AIDS meant, precipitated one of
the strongest objections to General Idea’s AIDS. One major strand of the response to
AIDS within mainstream culture, and also certain spaces of gay culture, was to blame the
disease on the promiscuity that dominated stereotypes of gay male sexuality. This line of
thought informed the screed by William F. Buckley, which appeared in The Silence =
Death collective’s Let the Record Show..., discussed below, that everyone with AIDS
should be tattooed on the forearm and on the buttocks to protect other hypodermic needle
users and those engaging in gay sex. In the famous AIDS issue of the art journal October
that Crimp edited in 1987, literary theorist Leo Bersani describes how the mainstream
media handled the AIDS crisis as a sexual threat, not a public health crisis, playing upon
stereotypes of gay male promiscuity by portraying gay men as predators ‘getting what

222

they deserved.’
14
As such, in a 2003 interview in Art Journal, Crimp remembers that one
of the initial goals of ACT UP was to challenge the assumptions of the discourse about
AIDS: “ACT UP radically changed the public discussion about AIDS in the media from
one of hysteria and blaming the victim to one of recognizing AIDS as a public health
emergency.”
15

This approach to the public discussion about AIDS as a primary site of political
intervention structures Douglas Crimp’s influential essay “AIDS: Cultural
Analysis/Cultural Activism,” which serves as the introduction to this October issue.
16

Crimp’s essay functions as a polemic of sorts, intended to shake up how not only the
mass media but also the art world addressed the AIDS crisis. Until 1987, art that had
responded to AIDS typically did so in one of two ways, as characterized by Robert
Rosenblum in his introductory essay to the catalog for the American Foundation for
AIDS Research’s (AmFAR) first auction. He states that art cannot directly save lives, but
it can raise money for research and it can fortify the spirit.
17
In his essay Crimp starts at
this very point in his explicit engagement with what constitutes the political within
cultural practice. He acknowledges that this need to fortify the spirit and to raise money
was a dire necessity, stemming from the very real fact that corporate greed and

14
Leo Bersani. “Is the Rectum a Grave?” AIDS: Cultural Analysis/Cultural Activism. Ed.
Douglas Crimp. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988, p 197-222.
15
Tina Takemoto “The Melancholia of AIDS: Interview with Douglas Crimp,” Art
Journal. V 62, nN4, Winter 2003, p 83.
16
Douglas Crimp. “AIDS: Cultural Analysis/Cultural Activism,” AIDS: Cultural
Analysis/Cultural Activism. Ed. Douglas Crimp. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988, p 3-
16.
17
Robert Rosenblum. “Life Versus Death: The Art World in Crisis,” Art Against AIDS.
NYC: American Foundation for AIDS Research, 1987, p 28-33.

223

government inaction and indifference had precipitated a public health crisis. But his
agreement with Rosenblum ends there.
Within this essay, Crimp carefully lays out the ways in which art constitutes
cultural activism and as such operates politically. He begins with the following assertion:
AIDS does not exist apart from the practices that conceptualize it, represent it,
and respond to it. We know AIDS only in and through those practices. [...] If we
recognize that AIDS exists only in and through these constructions, then
hopefully we can also recognize the imperative to know them, analyze them, and
wrest control of them.
18

He lays out an understanding of the power and the politics of representation, of the ways
in which phenomena are presented within the realm of culture and how that presentation
mediates our conception of those phenomena. For example, homophobic, racist, sexist
and classist mass media coverage and government refusal to fund research constructed
AIDS as an illness visited upon gay men and IV drug users as punishment for their
deviant behavior. Those deviants in return terrorized normal people with the risk of
infection. This, clearly, does not represent anyone’s experience of AIDS outside of a
phantasmagoric construction of dominant culture. But it enabled a justification for not
finding a cure for AIDS, and also for not providing education about the virus and its
modes of transmission. In response to this, Crimp asserts that, “until a cure for AIDS is
developed, only information and mobilization can save lives.”
Crimp calls not only for the use of representation, of art, to construct significance
for AIDS that rejects a homophobic, racist, sexist and classist logic. He also calls for “a
vastly expanded view of culture in relation to crisis,” a “critical, theoretical, activist
alternative to the personal, elegiac expressions that appeared to dominate the art-world

18
Crimp. “AIDS: Cultural Analysis/Cultural Activism,” p 3.

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response to AIDS.”
19
If the problem with personal and elegiac expression is that it
complies with a “traditional idealist conception of art, which entirely divorces art from
engagement in lived social life,” which insists upon art as universal and transcendent,
then an expanded view of culture in relation to crisis weds art to an engagement with
lived social life.
20
Crimp calls for an understanding of art as always engaged with social
life, and rejects any understanding to the contrary as complicit with the values that enable
AIDS as a public health crisis.
This argument is based entirely upon the premise of an “engaged, activist
aesthetic practice.”
21
In an oft-quoted passage, Crimp declares,
[A]rt does have the power to save lives, and it is this very power that must be
recognized, fostered, and supported in every way possible. But if we are to do
this, we will have to abandon the idealist conception of art. We don’t need a
cultural renaissance; we need cultural practices actively participating in the
struggle against AIDS. We don’t need to transcend the epidemic; we need to end
it.
22

This declaration is often mobilized to indicate the limitations of art, but Crimp’s
intervention is not to point to the limitations of art itself, but rather to the limitations of a
notion of art understood to be universal and transcendent, within the ideology of the art
world. He elaborates: “no work made within the confines of the art world as it is
currently constituted will reach these people [PWAs]. Activist art therefore involves
questions not only of the nature of cultural production, but also of the location, or the
means of distribution, of that production.”
23
Art can save lives by interrogating the forms

19
Ibid, p 15.
20
Ibid, p 5.
21
Ibid, p 6.
22
Ibid, p 7.
23
Ibid, p 12.

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of culture itself, by exposing ideology and creating new common senses and alternative
understandings about ways of knowing and being in the world. This describes with
uncanny similarity General Idea’s understanding of the relationship among art, culture,
and politics, despite Crimp’s adamant rejection of the group’s intervention.
24

In accordance with ACT UP’s goals, Gran Fury created graphic projects that
highlighted specific homophobic, racist, sexist and classist policies and representations,
including a lack of funding for AIDS education, prevention and research, and corporate
profiteering from AIDS medication. Creating simple, direct text and image graphic
designs drawn from contemporary advertising strategies, the group contributed to ACT
UP’s project by providing another avenue of clear, direct communication about the AIDS
epidemic. This use of direct address to critique specific people, policies, and phenomena
appear in the work mentioned earlier that precipitated the formation of Gran Fury, 1987’s
Let the Record Show.... At the same time, the installation demonstrates how politics and
public policy function culturally, thus rendering culture political. The multi-media work,
displayed in the window of the New Museum on Broadway, contained a photo from the
Nuremberg trials, which tried upper level Nazi war criminals for their part in the

24
ACT UP clearly saw a place for art within politics, although more often than not the
collective viewed the art world as a site that promulgated conservative ideology. Two
protests that occurred at the Museum of Modern Art in 1988 demonstrate this fact, which
Crimp and Rolston detail in AIDS Demo Graphics. The first instance to draw the group’s
ire was the show Committed to Print: Social and Political Themes in Recent American
Printed Art, which displayed political posters since the 1960s. ACT UP protested the lack
of inclusion of any graphics from either the gay liberation or AIDS activist movements in
the show. The second occasion was a teach-in organized in response to Nicholas Nixon’s
show of portraits of PWA’s, which ACT UP saw as reinforcing mainstream media
stereotypes of PWAs as isolated, despairing victims. Both of these instances demonstrate
art as a space of politics within the social field, independent of increased funding for
AIDS research, or other more specific policy goals.

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Holocaust.
25
In front of this image sat 6 figures behind 6 tombstones, 6 AIDS criminals—
columnist William F. Buckley, televangelist Jerry Falwell, senator Jesse Helms,
Presidential AIDS commission member Corey SerVaas, an anonymous surgeon, and then
president Roland Reagan. Each figure depicted a person implicated in the AIDS
epidemic, and printed on the tombstone in front of each figure was a quote that
represented that individual’s contribution to the health crisis. The tombstone in front of
Reagan was left blank, rendering his refusal to mention the word ‘AIDS’ as an example
of his inaction to stem the epidemic.
Above the large-scale photograph sat an LED sign that alternated between
statistics about the scale of AIDS and what would become ACT UP’s de facto slogan –
Act up! Fight AIDS! Fight Back! Crowning the entire installation was a design by the
Silence = Death group, which inverted the pink triangle that homosexuals were forced to
wear in Nazi Germany. The group printed the text ‘Silence = Death’ underneath the
triangle logo. The piece appropriates from historical archives and advertising strategies,
as well as artistic methods that would have immediately been associated with such
critical artists as Hans Haacke and Jenny Holzer. The work combines formal artistic
devices with a direct address and political engagement that would structure Gran Fury’s
work for ACT UP. The group’s critique of General Idea revolved around precisely these
issues of communication and immediate efficacy.
AIDS was the first project that General Idea made upon moving to New York, and
its first piece that explicitly engaged with the AIDS crisis. First produced as seriographs

25
The Broadway windows of the New Museum were an active exhibition space, and in
fact General Idea installed AIDS there in the winter of 1988, as large-scale color
transparencies that were constantly visible by the varied travelers along one of lower
Manhattan’s major thoroughfares.

227

for the Koury Wingate Gallery in 1987, the image circulated internationally both as an art
object but also as a logo within the visual culture of AIDS activism. The image appeared
wheat pasted in New York, Montreal, Chicago and San Francisco; on busses, subways
and trains in the US but also in Germany and Holland; and as wallpaper and paintings in
galleries around the world. General Idea made a range of objects with its AIDS logo—
rings, handkerchiefs, scarves and note cards; and it allowed the image to be used by a
whole host of other organizations for the purpose of raising awareness about AIDS and
money for AIDS research. The critical cultural theories upon which the group drew
throughout the course of its career, and the artistic strategies it deployed within this
project share a logic that enacts the very cultural intervention called for by Douglas
Crimp, a critical social practice operating precisely on and through culture.
By appropriating Robert Indiana’s LOVE, General Idea utilized an artistic strategy
that had a recognizable critical meaning in 1987. The group had been working with
appropriated imagery throughout its practice, and certainly the use of objects and images
from mass culture was not new to 80s art, but appropriation as such practically
constituted its own genre within that decade. The group’s gesture participated in the
critiques enacted by appropriation. It collapsed and thereby presented as arbitrary the
divisions between high art and mass culture. Also, consistent with contemporary
postmodernism, it highlighted the ways in which culture operates ideologically,
structuring our understanding of our relationship to our material conditions of existence.
By redeploying Indiana’s grid-like structure—his font, his red/blue/green color scheme
and his indifference towards authorship, General Idea was able to engage both with the
art world, because of Indiana’s status as an artist, but also with mass culture, because of

228

LOVE’s status as a popular icon for the sexual revolution.
26
The group formalized this
dual engagement by displaying the work in both high art and mass cultural contexts. This
simultaneous engagement with art and mass culture, and the commensurate implication
of the entanglement of art with mass culture, is an important piece of General Idea’s
AIDS activism, and of its contribution to the formulation of the political within culture in
that moment.
It was precisely this appropriation from Indiana, however, that drew ire towards
the AIDS project. As noted earlier, ACT UP objected to the work’s association of AIDS
with the sexual revolution. Crimp and Rolston ask, “Did sixties’ love lead inexorably to
eighties’ AIDS?” This interpretation of General Idea’s work assumes a particular
interpretation of Indiana, though, an interpretation that is specific to the US and not
necessarily attentive to the facts of the original image’s production, and its varied uses
from the outset. Meaning is always contingent upon and constructed through relation, so
Crimp and Rolston’s reading of the work is not wrong, per se. But General Idea made
AIDS on the basis of a different understanding of Indiana’s piece. Dismissing the work on
the basis of a presumed, singular interpretation—its equation of the sexual revolution and
AIDS—presumed a model of meaning as natural and pre-determined, a model that
disregarded General Idea’s longstanding commitment to maximizing the number of

26
AIDS did not always appear in red, blue and green. General Idea created paintings of
the logo across the spectrum of the rainbow, or in monochrome, and when the image
appeared on ephemera produced by AIDS organizations in Germany it was reproduced in
black, red and yellow. But the AIDS posters that the group produced, and subsequent
appropriations of the work in North America, always use the red, blue and green version.
In the only English language book length study of General Idea, art historian
Deborah Barkun details the similar movement of Indiana’s LOVE through popular
culture, comparing it to other viral precedents, including the smiley face.
Deborah Barkun. Art, AIDS, and Collective Identity: Configuring General Idea’s
Collaborative Body, 1969-2000. Unpublished dissertation: Bryn Mawr, 2005.

229

possible interpretations for a work. The group critiqued precisely this model with its
AIDS project.
In a 2003 interview with Mike Kelley, in response to a question about the
controversy surrounding the work in America, Bronson explained:
It’s [LOVE] read by Americans as “free love,” right? It is about sex, really, and
I think that is how it was intended, and I only realized that after working with
the image for some years. We thought of the LOVE image as representing so-
called brotherly love, universal love, it was much grander ... and for
Europeans too it had a much grander meaning. But doing the project in the
US, there were so many people who were totally outraged by it, and it took us
by surprise at first because we hadn’t figured out that people thought we
were saying that if you have sex you’ll get AIDS, right? That equation hadn’t
occurred to us, the ironies were different in our minds than they were in the
eyes of American observers.
27

Crimp and Rolston’s interpretation of AIDS is based upon reading LOVE as addressing
the sexual revolution. But Indiana made the work in 1966, the year before the “summer
of love.” While the logo was taken up by sexual revolutionaries, and that certainly has
contributed to its meaning and its popularity, in Canada, where the sexual revolution
functioned differently, Indiana’s work spoke more directly to a particular notion of
community, to a notion of universal love and communitas as opposed to romantic love or
the free love of the sexual revolution, according to Bronson. The installation of a sculpted
version of LOVE in Philadelphia, the city of brotherly love, acknowledged two things:
General Idea’s interpretation was possible within Indiana’s original intention, and, as a
corollary, Indiana did not insist upon a singular meaning for this work. (123) While its
interpretation is no more valid than anyone else’s, General Idea meant to call for a

27
AA Bronson and Mike Kelley. “Excerpts from a Conversation: Mike Kelley and AA
Bronson,” General Idea: Editions and Multiples, 1967-1995. Ed. Barbara Fischer.
Mississauga, ON: Blackwell Gallery, 2003, p 283-288.

230

coming together in the face of the epidemic, rather than blame AIDS on the sexual
promiscuity that was made possible by the sexual revolution of the late 1960s. To dismiss
the work on the basis of one singular meaning, and a homophobic and anti-sex reading
that runs contrary to the logic of the piece and the rest of General Idea’s practice, at that,
contributed to Crimp’s inability to realize the political intervention present within the
project.
28

In addition to forcing a singular reading upon General Idea’s appropriation of
Robert Indiana, this rejection of AIDS as a political work ignored the many formal and
critical similarities between the AIDS-related work of the two groups. Each looked to
corporate models of advertising and branding, utilizing both the look and the strategies of
Madison Avenue as both the form and the object of their AIDS activism. Both groups
engaged with private capital, addressing the ways that corporate greed impacted the
epidemic, but they also shed light upon the government inaction and indifference that
similarly retarded the development of medicine, the distribution of information, and the
extension of basic rights and protections to combat AIDS. Alongside these elements
particular to the AIDS crisis, however, both groups also addressed larger questions about
representation, about how meaning and value come to be through visual and material
culture, both high and low. Despite these significant similarities, however, the distinction
between each group’s understanding of what constituted politics, what constituted an
appropriate response to AIDS, proved unbridgeable in the heat of the crisis. General
Idea’s commitment to ambiguity and to undermining mainstream ideas about politics did

28
Individuals I worked with in the context of my exhibition, Tainted Love, to be
discussed later in this chapter, recount a similar block. Separate conversations with Zoe
Leonard, Gregg Bordowitz, and Doug Ashford each confirm that AIDS now reads
completely differently, and more complexly, than it did when they first encountered it.

231

not gain access to participation in drug trials, or prompt research into a cure for AIDS,
and as such did not register as political to Gran Fury with its insistence upon direct action
and clear communication of a take-away message. While the groups share strategies and
objects of critique, they diverged to prompt direct action, on the one hand, and to address
underlying structures of meaning and value, on the other.
The clearest similarity between the two groups was their use of corporate
advertising, in fact drawing upon advertising’s purpose of defining products in such a
way that inspires a consumer to action. The design and direct address of Gran Fury’s
work referenced advertising’s manipulation of subjects—art historian Richard Meyer
describes Gran Fury’s aim as “to provoke them [audiences] to anger and political
action.”
29
One project in particular makes this use of advertising explicit. Kissing Doesn’t
Kill is a project that ran as cards, posters and on city busses in New York, Chicago and
San Francisco in 1989 and 1990 as part of the project Art Against AIDS: On the Road.
(129) Three interracial couples, one heterosexual, one gay, and one lesbian, dressed in
typical late ‘80s fashion, appear under the banner “Kissing Doesn’t Kill: Greed and
Indifference Do.” This image specifically references the contemporary advertising
campaigns that were run by the clothing retailer United Colors of Benetton, making
explicit Gran Fury’s appropriation from popular culture within artistic production, both in
the form of advertising but also in its methodology of signification.
General Idea’s name evokes such industrial giants as General Motors and General
Electric, but more than inhabit corporate forms, as discussed in chapter three, the group

29
Richard Meyer “This is to Enrage You: Gran Fury and the Graphics of AIDS
Activism,” But is it Art?: The Spirit of Art as Activism. Ed. Nina Felshin. Seattle: Bay
Press, 1995, p 55.

232

self-consciously appropriated capitalism itself as a space with contingent oppositional
potential. It continued this engagement with corporate branding with AIDS, whose image
resembles corporate logos with their simplicity, bright colors, and basic geometry.
Similarly, with its Imagevirus (1989-1991), a series of posters documenting various
settings in which the AIDS image appeared, General Idea cited the popular Absolut
Vodka campaign. Absolut Vodka ran a series of ads documenting auspiciously fleeting
moments in normal life that created the shape of the telltale Absolut Vodka bottle. For
example, in one poster pigeons in a piazza in Venice group in such a way as to
approximate the bottle’s shape, and under the pigeons runs a text reading “Absolut
Venice.” (130) Mimicking this design, General Idea not only referenced a specific ad
campaign, but also nodded towards the entire nexus of product and lifestyle branding that
the Absolut campaign trades on. All of this comes to bear upon the group’s AIDS project,
and how it operated politically in relation to the AIDS crisis; to homosexuality, IV drug
use, and poverty; and to subjectivity writ large.
Alongside their appropriation of the appearance of advertising, General Idea and
Gran Fury both adopted advertising’s methods and spaces of distribution. Both groups
made works to be displayed within official art institutions, but each also made ephemera
to be distributed for free as a viral intervention within public spaces and popular culture.
As time passed, ACT UP became increasingly adept at manipulating the media, educating
news outlets about the take away messages of their actions. As such, Gran Fury’s posters
and fliers were not only visible and available at protest sites, they also appeared on the
television screens of anyone watching news programs that reported on ACT UP
demonstrations.

233

The express purpose of Gran Fury’s work was to distribute and replicate within
popular visual culture, enraging and mobilizing people to take direct action to end the
AIDS epidemic while also mobilizing avant-garde art experiments by incorporating
forms and technologies from mainstream society into critical art practices. AIDS likewise
mimicked the strategies of advertising and corporate branding by circulating virally,
much to General Idea’s delight. Since the group’s beginnings within the context of mail
art, General Idea had utilized viral methods to circulate its work, both because of the lack
of a formalized art market in Canada but also because of the critical operation inherent
within making work that didn’t insist upon a singular author, didn’t insist upon autonomy
or upon art as a distinct category of value. General Idea’s practice involved inhabiting
phenomena within popular culture and causing them to resignify to demonstrate the
arbitrariness of meaning, and the extent to which this strategy parallels that of advertizing
highlights how subcultural politics redeploys the significatory practices of dominant
culture, but for oppositional purposes. Using a method that it had explored from the
beginning of its practice, General Idea allowed the image to be distributed and
reproduced freely, making AIDS one of its most successful works because of the extent to
which the group completely lost control of it.
Gran Fury and General Idea also offered similar critiques of the institutions that
instantiated AIDS as a public health crisis—corporate greed manifested in
pharmaceutical profiteering from AIDS medications and government indifference
manifested in the refusal to fund prevention research and education and to provide
adequate healthcare to PWAs. With Kissing Doesn’t Kill Gran Fury addressed the false

234

belief that AIDS can spread through kissing, an attack on the lack of accurate information
about AIDS and the lack of AIDS education. By stating “Kissing Doesn’t Kill: Greed and
Indifference Do,” the group reclaimed sexuality, taking the blame off of AIDS victims
and instead blaming government inaction and pharmaceutical profiteering for the
continued existence of the AIDS epidemic. Echoing the argument raised by Leo Bersani
within the same October issue, Douglas Crimp discusses the importance of sexuality for
AIDS activism within his essay, “How to Have Promiscuity in an Epidemic,” both
because promiscuity provides a laboratory and an eroticized site for exploring safe sex,
but also because performing any non-normative sexuality retaliates against the
homophobic demonization of gay sex within dominant culture.
30
Gran Fury insisted upon
the importance of gay sexuality in the face of homophobic censure. In addition to
affirming erotic gay life, this insistence also redefined the epidemic, highlighting the
responsibility that governmental indifference and corporate greed, not promiscuity,
carried for the crisis.
General Idea too spoke to problems of representation, asserting a different
meaning for AIDS within mass culture and implicating mass culture’s significatory
systems in the epidemic. When AIDS first appeared, as if out of nowhere on the streets of
Lower Manhattan, Reagan had not yet said the word ‘AIDS’ in public. AIDS was
unfamiliar, threatening, and nebulous. The dissemination of the work mimics the
appearance of illness in the early 1980s. General Idea drew upon the history of the human
immunodeficiency virus, and combined that with its own use of the viral as a method of

30
Douglas Crimp. “How to have Promiscuity in an Epidemic,” AIDS: Cultural
Analysis/Cultural Activism. Ed. Douglas Crimp. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988, p
237-271.

235

political cultural practice. In a climate of fear stemming from misinformation, AIDS made
a gesture towards familiarity, towards a kind of security that comes not from safety, but
from a kind of understanding that isn’t about a traditional view of knowledge as mastery.
Deborah Barkun, author of the only English book-length consideration of the group in her
2005 dissertation, Art, AIDS, and Collective Identity: Configuring General Idea’s
Collaborative Body, 1969-2000, describes “General Idea, saturating the visual landscape
with AIDS, and thereby divesting it of its exoticism.”
31
Or, it maintained the exoticism
but deployed it as a familiar other and as a symbol that could stand in as a cipher of
signification itself.
The group took control over the representation of AIDS, though, true to its
understanding of what constitutes politics, it used the processes of definition available
within dominant culture to different ends. By refusing to impart a specific meaning to its
work, in the context of a public health crisis fueled by mis- or absent information,
General Idea interrogated the relationship between culture and signification. The image
reads ‘AIDS,’ but what does it say? Like many of General Idea’s projects, AIDS contains
an inherent difficulty, even unintelligibility. As Bronson explained, “We didn’t intend it
to have a meaning. We intended it to create this void of no meaning, and to create some
sort of field of discussion or dialogue.”
32
In this case, indeterminacy carries particular
relevance given the work’s visual similarity to corporate logos and tactical similarity to
advertising, each of which are emblematic of how power flows through circuits of
definition that occur within the field of culture. General Idea branded the streets of Lower

31
Deborah Barkun. Art, AIDS, and Collective Identity, p 104.
32
“Excerpts from a Conversation: Mike Kelley and AA Bronson,” p 287.

236

Manhattan with AIDS, commenting on the ubiquity of the disease while implicating
corporate America and Madison Avenue in the epidemic.
By refusing to impart an easily comprehensible meaning within the form of the
advertisement, however, the group made that system strange, highlighting how it, as a
system, constructs meaning itself. General Idea equated the viral transmission of AIDS
with advertising and corporate America, implicating the latter with the former. But the
group expanded beyond that specific critique to deconstruct the larger systems that
enables both advertising and the AIDS epidemic, systems based upon a certain
understanding of how meaning and value are assigned within culture. Therein lies one of
the most impassioned objections to the project—while Gran Fury insisted upon clarity
and the take away message, General Idea embraced the critical potential of ambiguity.
The material conditions and urgencies of the AIDS crisis highlighted the political tactic
that General Idea employed throughout its career.
Likewise, government indifference—its refusal to transmit accurate information
about AIDS and its routes of transmission, its refusal to allocate funds either for medical
research or education—created a vacuum of information about AIDS that General Idea
productively marshaled with its AIDS logo. The logo pointed to the vacuum by filling the
street with the word “AIDS” at a time when there was limited public information about
the disease, but it refused to fill the vacuum with a specific meaning. Writing in 1993,
Gregg Bordowitz, an ACT UP artist and filmmaker, discussed AIDS and the politics of
AIDS activism in relation to this refusal of sense-making, what he terms the ridiculous.
33

He locates this ridiculousness in terms of Queer Theater, and in particular the work of

33
Gregg Bordowitz. “The AIDS Crisis is Ridiculous,” The AIDS Crisis is Ridiculous and
other Writings, 1985-2003. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006, p 43-68.

237

Charles Ludlam, who staged plays that refused understanding in terms of narrative, stage
sets, acting methodology, or any other theatrical conventions. AIDS itself, according to
Bordowitz, operates outside of the rubric of understanding. An embrace of this operation
enacts a specific kind of politics, because it asserts a notion of subjectivity that refuses
wholeness, sense, understanding, and autonomy, all of the qualities that structured
subjectivity within mainstream white, western, straight, patriarchal society.
Bordowitz expands upon this connection between meaning and identity within the
systems that enable each in a beautifully crafted rumination on AIDS specifically, for the
Afterall Books One Work series. He argues, “[w]resting control of AIDS meant gaining
mastery of the language used to describe it. I talked about AIDS obsessively. For years it
was the only subject for me. Identity is a form of repetition.”
34
But gaining mastery over
the language meant deploying it to different ends: “[General Idea] entered the fray of US-
AIDS-art-politics and made a hugely significant, unique contribution because they
drained the meaning out of the letters constituting the acronym AIDS precisely at the
moment when there was a terrible battle over the meaning of the disease itself.”
35
AIDS
activism sought to redefine AIDS, by redefining the stakes for signification within mass
culture. That was the object of General Idea’s intervention throughout its career, though
in moments of urgency its mimicry was frequently seen as complicit rather than ironic.

34
Bordowitz. Imagevirus. p 18.
35
Ibid, p 108-109.

238

Art as Cultural Activism

Responses to General Idea’s AIDS project varied, from those who wholeheartedly
praised its conceptual intervention into the underlying structures that precipitated the
AIDS epidemic, to those who matched Gran Fury’s vehement offence at the work’s
presumed implications. Although the logo appeared on the streets of New York in 1987,
and continued to be installed in public contexts—both by General Idea and by individuals
and organizations that the group freely allowed to use the image—reviewers consistently
contain their discussions to the pieces that appear within the context of art institutions,
ignoring the posters wheat pasted on bill posts in the interest of wallpaper wheat pasted
onto gallery walls. These reviewers insist upon keeping the work within the field of art,
literally within the spaces of art, even when, as was the case with the Imagevirus posters,
the images were of public installations of the project. Whether or not these reviewers
considered the work successful as an artwork, though—New York Times art critic Roberta
Smith referred to it as “brilliant” while numerous critics lamented the work as another
example of the group resting on simply being clever—they allowed it a critical operation
and a socio-political intervention that was not granted to the work on the street.
36
One
reviewer, David Levi Strauss, commented, as an aside to a review of an installation in
San Francisco, that posters in that city were torn down almost as soon as they were put
up. He argues that the work fails because AIDS is a symbol that can’t be emptied out and
refilled, “not in 1988, not in San Francisco.”
37

36
Roberta Smith. “Review/Art: Response to AIDS Gains in Subtlety,” The New York
Times, 2/18/1994. Web, 10/12/2012
37
Levi Strauss, David. “Reviews – General Idea,” Artscribe. 3-4/1989, p 86-87.

239

This disparity between the political operation of the work within an art context, on
the one hand, and its offensiveness on the streets, on the other, corroborates the
recollections of members of ACT UP who, like Bordowitz, recall abhorring AIDS when it
first appeared but now recognize it as an ingenious intervention given the maelstrom of
factors that contributed to the pandemic of AIDS. Images within the context of a gallery
did not need to be didactic or instrumentalized to be politically engaged. Gran Fury
extolled that “art is not enough” in its call to “take collective direct action to end the
AIDS crisis,” thus claiming that art could not constitute direct action.
38
Reception for
General Idea’s AIDS project, however, demonstrated that art remained a space for a
different kind of political intervention, one that was more in line with that held by the
group—rather than the definition of politics as direct action available within dominant
culture, one that reflected the embodied, contingent mode of cultural engagement present
within subcultural participation.

This discussion of the political address of AIDS within the context of art—an
address that was not possible within the context of the street—highlights the extent to
which activists and critics understood art to serve as a site of experimentation and
exploration. As spaces for experimentation and exploration of different values and ways
of determining and assigning meaning, subcultures pa/ralleled art in a manner that proved
fruitful and provocative for General Idea, although by this moment it was not directly

38
The cover for the December 1988–January 1989 calendar of events for The Kitchen, an
artist center in downtown Manhattan, printed the details of the calendar in small print
below a significantly larger body of text by Gran Fury. The entirety of the text read,
“With 42,000 dead art is not enough. Take collective direct action to end the AIDS
crisis.” By its logic, art and collective direct action were distinct phenomena. For General
Idea, however, they were not separated by so wide a gulf, as art was part of a different
kind collective direct action—that of subcultural participation.

240

connected to any specific subcultures in either Toronto or Manhattan. As it continued to
make work in response to the AIDS crisis, General Idea would increasingly turn to
canonical moments in the history of art, further emphasizing the importance of art within
the practice of subcultural politics.
While the first version of AIDS appeared in the red, blue, and green color scheme
of Indiana’s LOVE logo, General Idea immediately began to iterate on the idea, not only
in terms of format and installation, but also in terms of color. As early as 1988, the group
created eleven paintings with different permutations of the AIDS logo, mixing at times
garish colors together within the same shapes laid out in 1987. (131) This almost
coloring-book type treatment played with avenues of inquiry drawn from different post-
war art movements—the seriality of Pop or Conceptualism, the hard edge abstraction of
color field painting, even the color choices of Neo-Geo. (132) At the same time, the
paintings mimic both the mutations of a virus and the changes to a cell wrought by
infection by a virus, using artistic strategies to demonstrate the process of viral infection.
The AIDS paintings of 1988 thereby present gestures from the history of art as a means to
impart a form of understanding about AIDS as a nexus of cultural phenomena that was
still not readily available within dominant culture.
The group continued to make AIDS paintings that more directly referenced
histories of post-war modernist abstraction, connecting the investigations of artists
ostensibly concerned only with questions of medium, surface, and scale with a
demonstration of how the systems of signification within dominant culture precipitated
the current health pandemic, and thus rendering abstraction political. Beginning in 1991,
with AIDS (Black), General Idea executed a series of monochrome paintings in black and

241

in white. (133) These series reference a range of artists who looked to seriality,
abstraction, and the monochrome, though for different purposes—from investigating the
limits of painting as a medium to exploring different forms of knowledge as the basis for
a new society. Serial monochromes have appeared across the continuum from apolitical
to consumately political, and it is this flexibility that General Idea draws upon in its
monochromes.
Although abstraction has held different meanings for its practitioners throughout
the history of painting, the one most present to audiences seeing the AIDS paintings, at
least in New York, where they first showed, was likely that of Ad Reinhardt and Robert
Ryman. Reinhardt and Ryman were both artists who executed series of monochrome
paintings in black and in white, respectively, as exercises in painting meant to examine
the limits of the medium, and of perception. Reinhardt was a giant of abstract
expressionism, long since deceased by 1991 but still a figure to be contended with,
particularly in relation to black monochromes.
39
(134) Likewise, as artists living in New
York in the late 80s and early 90s, General Idea was sure to have been familiar with
Ryman’s white monochromes.
40
(135) Despite any personal commitments to politics that
either artist possessed, including Reinhardt’s involvement in both radical left publications
and anti-Vietnam demonstrations, neither painter connected his investigation of painting

39
The file in the General Idea Collection at the National Gallery of Canada related to this
series contains cut out articles about Reinhardt, demonstrating his relevance to the work
for the group.
For more on Reinhardt, see:
Ad Reinhardt. Art as Art: The Selected Writings of Ad Reinhardt. Berkeley: The
University of California Press, 1991.
40
For more on Robert Ryman, and his work as an extensive and committed investigation
of the conditions of painting, see:
Suzanne Hudson. Robert Ryman: Used Paint. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009.

242

with any particular ideology. Seriality and the monochrome were issues pertaining to art
for artists like Reinhardt and Ryman. By including this understanding of abstraction as
solely concerned with the art world within its AIDS paintings, though, General Idea
highlighted the absurdity of separating art from everyday culture, because even questions
about painting as an autonomous activity occur against a cultural backdrop. The group
related investigations into the role and significance of paint on canvas to those of a
community struggling to understand what it was experiencing socially and politically,
suggesting an equivalency between the concerns of artistic practices ostensibly
uninflected by the social field, on the one hand, and the very cultural processes that give
the social field its significance, on the other.
The monochrome was not always kept separate from popular culture, however,
and General Idea also referenced artists’ uses of abstraction as a way to work through
how culture determines meaning with the AIDS monochromes. In particular, the white
AIDS works echo Jasper Johns’ monochromes. Johns’ treatment of various symbols in
white not only presented repetition as the root of signification, but also highlighted that
within every repetition there is inherently some form of variation, pointing to repetition
as an active process and not simply a manifestation of an inherent or given meaning for a
symbol. (136) By painting symbols, Johns investigated the ostensible boundaries between
object and sign, and between sign and signified, using painting, a form of representation,
to demonstrate how meaning itself is representation. Johns’ investigation of repetition,
and presentation of how repetition inevitably includes variation that then shows an image
as a copy without an original, offers a historical precedent for an observation that Judith
Butler would later make about drag as a performance of gender that highlights how

243

repetition gives gender its meaning. By highlighting that gender is a phenomenon that
acquires meaning through repetition, drag then undermines both gender and sex as
natural and given phenomena.
41
This overlap speaks to the connection that General Idea
drew between artistic strategies and subcultural strategies, as Johns exposed invisible
significatory processes within everyday culture, and thereby enacted subcultural politics
without representing specific subcultures.
Although Johns used serial monochromes to consider how popular culture
deploys repetition and representation to produce meaning, abstraction was even more
explicitly politicized within another reference made within General Ideas AIDS paintings
– to Suprematism and more specifically to the work of Kasmir Malevich. Art historian
T.J. Clark describes Suprematism, and Malevich in particular, as using abstraction and
the monochrome as a means through which to construct a new, revolutionary social
order.
42
Clark presents Black Square, which the artist executed in various versions
between 1915 and the early 1930s (a final square was shown in 1932 but its exact date of
creation is unclear), as his primary example of how Malevich used abstraction as a space
to examine different social orders and even different forms of knowledge that do not rely
on bourgeois forms of rationality and clear meaning. (137) Black Square rejected old
values of direction and resolution as part of a rejection of being itself, attempting to think
about how to rebuild a world on the basis of the commune. For Marxist Socialist and
Communist revolutionaries across Europe in the 19
th
and 20
th
centuries, changing forms
of government and changing culture were part of the same aim of changing society. This

41
Judith Butler. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York:
Routledge, 1990.
42
T.J. Clark. “God is Not Cast Down,” Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of
Modernism. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999, p 225-297.

244

focus on using art to change how culture functioned, as the path to a new society, carried
particular resonance with General Idea.
By carrying so many different references to multiple moments in the history of
the monochrome within its AIDS paintings, General Idea presented an argument for the
relationship among art, culture, and politics. By keeping in play different ways that the
monochrome has functioned in the twentieth century, General Idea demonstrated how
questions of color, surface, and scale could participate in experiments with alternative
social orders. The group also highlighted how all of these questions are themselves
political, even though they pay no mind to governmentality, because they interrogate
meaning, value, and significance within the dominant ideological framework of any
given culture. These modernist investigations about the essential nature of a thing, or a
process of perception, translated, within the context of the AIDS epidemic, into General
Idea’s deconstruction of the possibility of an essential nature in the first place. By
working in series with its monochromes, the group once again demonstrated the role that
repetition plays within normalization, making a gesture towards destigmatizing AIDS by
underlining the arbitrariness of that stigma. General Idea overlaid the processes of
abstraction with processes of mass culture in its series of monochrome AIDS paintings,
highlighting a similarity of operation between the two that renders art an active site
within the political operation of popular culture, and figures artistic strategies as part of a
larger tradition of cultural politics.
The monochrome AIDS paintings mimic the operation of a virus, inserting
General Idea’s AIDS logo into the shell of abstract painting. The group used AIDS to
infect the monochrome as a category, given the paintings’ ability to reference many

245

different historical works simultaneously. It took up the idea of infection specifically in a
later invocation of the canon of high modernism, within its Infe©ted series (1994). With
this project, General Idea took the red/green/blue color scheme of AIDS and overlay them
onto icons of modernist art and design. (138) The colors of Indiana’s LOVE had become
their own language, signaling the group’s investigation of the AIDS virus, virality as a
tactic of art and of politics, and how each participated in processes of signification within
dominant culture that had very real consequences across society. Much like many of the
references and icons of the Miss General Idea Pageant, or Canadada, discussed in earlier
chapters, red, blue, and green became a short-hand and a connective tissue for this
ongoing project as it metastasized in different directions, such that individual works
combined to make a larger point of cultural analysis. So, in and of itself, a Rietveld chair
with red, green, and blue planes did not make a direct comment about the
commodification of medicine, but it operated in tandem with a work like Placebo
(Helium) (1992) to implicate both the art world and the pharmaceutical industrial
complex within a system of dominant culture that enables a pandemic because of bodies
and behaviors that it defines as deviant and not worthy of public attention and care.

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Modeling Art History

As part of its Infe©ted series, General Idea created three other works, in addition
to Infe©ted Rietveld. Infe©ted Mondrian is itself a multi-part work that appropriates
different Mondrian paintings. The group also made two works, Infe©ted Pharmacie and
Coeurs Volants, that take up works by Duchamp. (139) This series was not the group’s
first foray into the history of artistic production, or even the first time that it appropriated
from these specific artists. From its outset, General Idea turned to the history of art as
much as it did to contemporary and historical popular visual culture for the raw material
of its practice. Through this process, it highlighted productive overlaps between the
critical interventions of certain artistic practices and the activity of participating in
subcultures. It also pointed to a queer avant-garde, which cohered around the use of
strategies of appropriation, rearticulation, parodic inhabitation, and disidentification—the
very strategies of subcultural politics. That many of these practitioners were also gay is
not irrelevant, but General Idea created its lineage on the basis of a form of cultural
analysis, rather than an artist’s sexual object choice. Heterosexual artists could make
queer art, and being homosexual did not guarantee an artist a place in General Idea’s
history of a queer avant-garde, whose lineage the group represented. General Idea
modeled a queer form of art history that manifested forms of inquiry and knowledge that
would become tenants for queer theory as it would be enumerated at the turn of the
twenty-first century.
General Idea was born out of an art scene in Canada in the late 1960s that, as
described in chapter one, partly defined itself, its practice, and its intervention by quoting

247

William S. Burroughs—“surfacing on the subliminal.”
43
The group highlighted this
connection to queer modernism by framing the performance that would come to define its
work through the first half of its career, The Miss General Idea Pageant, with another
canonical figure of gay and queer modernism: Gertrude Stein. The 1970 pageant occurred
as part of a five-part performance titled What Happened? The winner of the 1970 pageant
in fact won with the talent of telexing lines from the Stein play of the same name back
and forth to a group of artists at Simon Fraser University, in Vancouver.
44
(140) The
subsequent pageant, in 1971, saw Marcel Dot crowned Miss General Idea 1971-1983 on
the basis of a photograph that he submitted that, as the judges said, “best captured
glamour without falling into it” but also clearly echoes Man Ray’s portraits of Marcel
Duchamp as Rrose Selavey. (141) After winning the title, Dot changed his name to
Marcel Idea, combining General Idea and Marcel Duchamp into one conceptual figure
who personified the group’s queer version of art history.
While Duchamp deliberately played with sexuality and identification through his
Rrose Selavey work, General Idea incorporated the work of artists who were even more
tenuously connected to gay identities within its sphere of influence.
45
For example, the
group prominently incorporated the practice of one of the titans of post war art, Joseph
Beuys, into its practice. There is much in Beuys’ material and conceptual practices that
appears in the group’s work, but of greatest consequence to this argument is the way that

43
William S. Buroughs. Nova Express. NYC: Grove Press, 1992
44
What Happened? was written and produced in 1913, and is a play in which, not
surprisingly, nothing in fact happens.
Gertrude Stein. What Happened: A Five Act Play (1913). The Selected Writings of
Gertrude Stein. NYC: Random House, 1945, p 491-496.
45
Amelia Jones. “”Women” in Dada: Elsa, Rrose, and Charlie,” Women in Dada: Essays
on Sex, Gender, and Identity. Ed. Naomi Sawelson-Gorse. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
2001, pgs 142-172,

248

General Idea drew upon Beuys’ creation of a persona. References to Beuys, and
specifically to his self-fabrication, appear throughout the spring 1977 Special People
Issue of FILE, signaled on the cover by the caption to a large photograph of German
artist Katerina Sieverding, which reads, “I like to look at America and America likes to
look at me.”
46
(142) This caption references a Beuys performance from 1974, titled I Like
America and America Likes Me.
47
(143) Much of Beuys’ work draws upon an apocryphal
tale he told about surviving a plane crash while he was serving in world war two. By his
account he lived through his ordeal because he was found by a group of Tartars, who kept
him alive by swaddling him in fat and felt. He incorporated these elements into much of
his later work, including the felt he was wrapped in over the course of I Like America,
and America Likes Me. Like Beuys, General Idea created an identity for the group as part
of its artistic practice.
Beuys’ creation of a persona did not stop with his origin myth and signature
elements in his work that reference this myth—he also created a signature look for
himself, which General Idea would reference in the Special People FILE. In 1976, people
in the group’s circle started appearing in a t-shirt that read “fetish” in white block letters
on a field of black cotton.
48
These shirts sold well enough that they are visible in

46
General Idea. Special People Issue FILE. V 3, N 3, Spring 1977.
47
In this performance, Beuys flew from Germany to New York, and was carried,
wrapped in felt, from the plane to a waiting ambulance on a stretcher. He was taken to the
Rene Block Gallery, where he spent the better part of three days in the gallery with a wild
coyote. After three days, he was carried back to an airplane in an ambulance, still
wrapped in felt, to fly back home.
48
The fetish logo was designed by John Jack Baylin, a Vancouver-based artist and poet
who frequently collaborated with General Idea on projects through the first half of the
1970s. It would appear in a wide array of items, including stickers and tote bags, each of
which were available for sale at Art Metropole, a store for artist editions and multiples
that General Idea founded in 1974.

249

snapshots from performance and social events in the late 1970s. (144) Never one to let a
joke pass, Felix Partz upped the ante in relation to Beuys in the spring 1977 FILE. In the
frontispiece of the magazine, Partz appears in the “fetish” t-shirt, but in this case it reads
“feht-ish,” demonstrating the witty word play that characterized so much of the group’s
work, as ‘feht’ is the German word for fat.
His clothing also references characteristic Beuysian elements, including the
distinctive felt fedora hat that Beuys always wore in public appearances, and a fur collar
that echoes the wolves and hares that play such an active part in Beuys’ mythology. (145)
The aspects of Beuys’ work that the group referenced are those that manifest the
subcultural politics of sexuality that defined its own intervention—that of presenting a
critical engagement with the processes of meaning-making that tied these processes to the
body, including those of identification and subjectivization that figure so prominently in
Beuys’ self-fashioning. The group did not queer Beuys in the sense that it claimed him as
a homosexual, but it included him in a lineage of artists who highlighted how culture
determines meaning and value, irrespective of whether or not the appropriated practices
intended to offer this critique, and thus highlighted the queer nature of his process and his
intervention. Beuys’ creation of a mythic origin story for himself, and his practice, which
was constantly reified through his work, manifested the critical intervention that General
Idea drew from its subcultures, thereby cementing his place in a queer avant-garde
alongside Duchamp and Warhol.
General Idea’s Infe©ted series combines the queer art history discussed above
with the politicization of the strategies of High Modernism discussed in the previous
section. With this series, in the context of the AIDS crisis, the group was able to

250

dramatize the consequences of its observations about the political operation of the social
field. The group used objects created within a discourse of purity and autonomy to
demonstrate how all objects of cultural practice function politically, and are subject to
significatory processes and thus susceptible to rearticulation. High Modernism was no
less insulated from culture than scientific discourse and pharmaceutical research.
Piet Mondrian and Gerrit Rietveld were paragons of modernist abstraction,
dealing with questions of medium and of purity through form, scale, and color. Both
artists worked extensively with red, yellow, and blue, Mondrian by refusing purity to any
non-primary color and thus painting exclusively in those three hues, and Rietveld by
producing his most famous and lasting work in the Red Blue Chair of 1923, which also
contained yellow in addition to the two titular colors. (146) In the Infe©ted project,
General Idea replaced the yellow in the works of these two men with green, infecting the
purity of the original color scheme but also imbuing the modernist masterpieces with
AIDS, in the sense that they now carried the color scheme that, within the group’s oeuvre,
signified that project. Art historian Mark Cheetham discusses General Idea’s interest in
the impurity that constitutes the dialectical other of modernism painting, locating that
interest as in lineage with Malevich and Yves Klein, whose influence on the group I
discussed in detail in chapter three.
49
By infecting Rietveld and Mondrian, the group did
not claim a social commitment for the earlier artists, but it did highlight that it is possible
to use objects originally conceptualized by their makers to eschew direct cultural
intervention for political purposes within a subcultural context. Imagining this social
function for autonomous artworks was part of General Idea’s queer art history.

49
Mark Cheetham. Abstract Art Against Autonomy: Infection, Resistance, and Cure Since
the 60s. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006.

251

Modernism was another found format for General Idea to inhabit and rearticulate,
facilitated by a creative relationship to process, and to history.
Taken together, these two pieces might seem like just another cheeky gesture by
the Canadian troublemakers, spoiling the intent of the original objects and connecting
them to a social significance that neither artist would have accepted. But the other two
works in the series, the Infe©ted Duchamps, suggests that there is more to the
appropriation than forcing works into a context to which they do not belong, and running
roughshod over any claims to the legitimacy of authorial intent. While both the Mondrian
and Rietveld works are direct appropriations, literally re-presenting Mondrian and
Rietveld works simply with the yellow replaced with green, the Duchamps do not. This is
most obvious in the case of Pharmacie (1914), in which General Idea added to the
original, instead of simply substituting colors. (147) The Duchamp contained drips of red
and green, which General Idea expanded to form shapes that echo the pills, which had
also become a motif of its work. To make this reference clear, it added a blue pill to the
forest-scape to complete the color trinity.
Beyond appropriation and rearticulation, then, the inclusion of a Duchamp print
augmented by more than simply color substitution points towards the assisted readymade,
which were found objects that Duchamp modified, rather than simply display as they
would be found in their normal setting. Art historian Benjamin Buchloh argues that
Conceptual art developed along two distinct strands, depending on the lessons each took
from the work of Duchamp.
50
He derides as “the aesthetics of administration” the strand

50
Benjamin Buchloh. “Conceptual Art 1962-1969: From the Aesthetics of
Administration to the Critique of Institutions,” (1989) Conceptual Art: A Critical

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that looked only to the unassisted readymades and took as Duchamp’s defining gesture
the making of art on the basis of naming it as such. On the other hand, he claims that the
true significance of Duchamp stems from the assisted readymades, which demonstrate
art’s position as a sign within a larger linguistic system of culture and politics. By
including Duchamp’s Pharmacie within its Infe©ted series, by in fact making an assisted
readymade with a Duchamp print, General Idea made bedfellows of Duchamp, Mondrian,
and Rietveld. Through its creative, queer art history, the group framed Mondrian and
Rietveld by Duchamp, casting its very use of art history as itself a Duchampian gesture.
General Idea took the motifs (the red, blue, and green color scheme, and the pill shape)
and the strategy (viral infection) of its AIDS work to demonstrate parallels between the
visual cultures of AIDS and of art. Both were part of larger significatory systems that
were available for appropriation and rearticulation within the scope of subcultural
politics.
General Idea created an avant-garde of artists whose practices modeled the tactics
of subcultural politics by appropriating distinctive forms and gestures from its
predecessors. In so doing, it highlighted the ways in which these previous practices
rearticulated the systems and structures of dominant culture to present alternative social
orders. Its queer avant-garde cohered around a literary interrogation of how meaning and
value come to be, thus materializing subcultural politics. But it also modeled a queer
form of art history, a way of engaging with the history of artistic practices and the
connections among artistic practices that is more interested in gossip and innuendo than
evidence, in suggestion rather than declaration, in possibility rather than proof. This

Anthology. Eds. Alexander Albero and Blake Stimson. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
2000, pgs 514-537.

253

method of deploying art history as an artistic practice opened up possibilities for new
forms of knowledge, participating in the group’s larger concern with how culture deploys
significance as a way to privilege some and subject others. The connections that the
group drew outlined affinities as much social and sexual as they were artistic, though
they all materialized within the practices in question, building upon General Idea’s
insistence upon art as a site of subcultural politics.
By performing its own version of art history and creating this legacy of a queer
avant-garde, General Idea not only legitimized its work as an artistic practice, but also as
a socio-political practice. Just as it created a community and an audience with the
rehearsals for the 1984 Miss General Idea Pageant and attendant issues of FILE, as
discussed in chapter two, the group created a group of interlocutors considering the
question of art as a form of political subcultural expression, even if those artists were
doing so in General Idea’s eyes only. The group’s art history was speculative and
conjectural, one that brought objects from the past into the present as the medium for new
practice, but thereby also re-writing the work that those objects did in the past. It
connected practices to subcultures that weren’t part of the works’ original interpretation,
queering them not based on the sexual orientation of the producer but rather on the basis
of their critical engagement with and analysis of dominant culture as a set of signifying
practices. For example, White AIDS highlights the subcultural politics of Jasper Johns’
White Numbers (1957) not because General Idea approached the work based on Johns’
homosexuality, but because of the comment the painting made about how symbols come

254

to have meaning, and how that process is rendered invisible.
51
By referencing the earlier
work within the context of the AIDS crisis, General Idea highlighted the politics of
Johns’ gesture. Likewise, the group connected it directly to subcultural experience not
based on the painting’s use within a specific subculture, but because its intervention
demonstrates a subcultural means of engagement—demonstrating the status of culture as
a signifying practice. The actual veracity of Johns’ involvement with any subculture or
another was irrelevant to his work’s function for General Idea, because whether or not
Johns (or any other artist) actually participated personally in any subculture, his work
manifested that form of political engagement.
General Idea’s use of art history reinforced its argument about the role of art
within subcultures, and the ways that art can perform subcultural political strategies. It
demonstrated the way that historical objects functioned subculturally by using them as
the basis for producing its own subcultures—creating frameworks for subcultural
activity, constituting the group’s own subcultural participation, and enacting the
intervention of subcultures in ostensibly unrelated contexts. Its art history was another
contribution to its subcultures, and another demonstration of the process of subcultural

51
I see this approach to queer art history as a reckoning with queer methods in art, rather
than a history of art made by queers, which is the approach that Jonathan D. Katz took
with his landmark show, Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture, at
the National Portrait Gallery. It is more in alignment with the view of queer art presented
by In a Different Light, co-curated by Nayland Blake and Lawrence Rinder at the
Berkeley Art Museum in 1995. This show, which set out to investigate “the resonance of
gay and lesbian experience in twentieth-century American art,” traced how the marks of
participation in queer subcultures materialized in art practices.
Jonathan D. Katz and David C. Ward. Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American
Portraiture. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Books, 2010.
In a Different Light: Visual Culture, Sexual Identity, Queer Practice. Eds. Nayland
Blake, Lawrence Rinder, and Amy Scholder. San Francisco: City Lights Publishers,
1995.

255

politics. That General Idea redoubled its attention to art history within the context of its
response to AIDS points to the group’s commitment to this matrix of art, politics, and
everyday subcultural life.

Conclusion

Despite the ferocity of self-identified activist artists’ response to AIDS, many
nevertheless produced work that demonstrated the very subcultural politics that General
Idea espoused throughout its career. The group drew upon subcultures that embraced the
political importance of iterative and relational identification—Canadada and Queen
Street West, as discussed in chapters one and two, respectively. These subcultures
rejected the bourgeois subject that is a complete, fixed and autonomous individual by
creating personas that self-consciously materialized through performative demonstrations
of identification and subjectivization. General Idea’s work also emphasized the different
ways in which subcultural participation revolves around rearticulating the significatory
processes of dominant culture to form an alternative social order; deploying the systems
and structures of mainstream society to create alternative kinship arrangements, for
example, or different forms of economic exchange. Irrespective of the specific
intervention, though, the group resolutely insisted upon the fact of subcultural
participation, of subcultural politics, as an embodied interrogation culture as a process of
signification that is replete with power because of its relationship to values and
hierarchies that normalize some forms of life while subjugating others. The group
deployed the language and iconography of deviant sex, but used them as a form of
cultural analysis gathered under the term “sexuality.” This subcultural politics is evident

256

in the work of even AIDS activist artists, and is a legacy of the AIDS era that artists still
grapple with to this day, when questions about the relationships among art, culture, and
politics still resonate with people disillusioned with the ability of the government to enact
real social justice.
Even the most ardent critic of General Idea, Gran Fury, ended up embracing the
form of politics that was always present, though often suppressed, in its work. Richard
Meyer has discussed Gran Fury’s Untitled (1993) in the context of the waning of the
ACT UP moment and model of AIDS activism based on rage and civil disobedience.
(148) He describes how the affective register of the work signals a shift towards an
intimate and individual address, away from collective militancy.
52
The four questions
printed in black ink on white paper and wheat pasted both in public and art world spaces
read as follows:
Do you resent people with AIDS?
Do you trust HIV-negatives?
Have you given up hope for a cure?
When was the last time you cried?

More than address one coherent individual, the questions present an inherently
contradictory subject. This begins with the difficulty in determining singular versus plural
address in the pronoun ‘you.’ Singular or plural, though, the questions address a ‘you’
that occupies auspiciously contradictory positions, both positive and negative serostatus,
both despondent and resigned. This contradictory address acknowledges a flexibility, a
mutability, and a relationality of being that echoes the experience of General Idea’s
subcultural life. The piece’s interrogation of the presumptions of dominant culture

52
Richard Meyer. Outlaw Representation: Censorship and Homosexuslity in Twentieth-
Century Art. NYC: Oxford University Press, 2002.

257

(including fixed and singular identity) likewise shares the mode of engagement that
structures General Idea’s work, although the group never engaged so deliberately with
emotion.
Another wheat pasted text work demonstrates a similar destabilization of identity
through contradictory address, but also through an emphasis on the performative nature
of identification. An AIDS activism that privileged the bodies, experiences and concerns
of gay men dominated queer visual culture of the late 1980s and early 1990s. Public art
collective fierce pussy, many of whose members were also active within ACT UP,
created projects between 1991 and 1994 that asserted lesbian sexuality as a site through
which to critique not only dominant culture’s homophobia and sexism, among other
injustices, but also gay male hegemony within queer culture.
53
Its text and image-based
production—wheat pasted posters, buttons, stickers and other ephemeral practices –
presented a lesbian history while simultaneously insisting upon an understanding of
identity as mutable and relational. By claiming auspiciously contradictory identities
within one poster, simultaneously declaring “I am”: mannish and femme, a bulldagger
and an amazon, fierce pussy reclaimed the streets of New York as a space of the politics
of the everyday, with identity itself as the locus of intervention. (149) Fierce pussy
created spaces within the fabric of New York City that acknowledged its members and
constituents’ experience of identification and embodiment.

53
Fierce pussy was a constantly morphing group of individuals, but core members
included Pam Brandt, Nancy Brooks-Brody, Joy Episalla, Alison Froling, Zoe Leonard,
Suzanne Wright, and Carrie Yamaoka. After more than a decade-long hiatus, Brooks-
Brody, Episalla, Leonard, and Yamaoka have been producing fierce pussy projects
together since 2009, creating installations for a number of institutions including the
Lesbian Herstory Archive in Brooklyn, the Harvard Art Museum in Cambridge, MA, and
in conjunction with Tainted Love, at the La Mama La Galleria in Manhattan.

258

In the summer of 2009, Steven Lam and I co-curated Visual AIDS’ annual
exhibition. The show, Tainted Love, considered love as a political tactic within queer art
practices since the onset of the AIDS epidemic. (150) Rather than romantic love,
however, we defined love in reference to Roland Barthes’ A Lover’s Discourse:
Fragments.
54
Per Barthes, we disidentified with love as the sentiment that affirms the
autonomy of the individual within hegemonic Western notions of subject formation and
re-articulation. A subject is not its most unique and actualized self once it finds another
subject to love. To the contrary, within the work included in the exhibition love is that
which exceeds the subject; that which refuses meaning, understanding and narrative in
the interest of a different model of knowledge and understanding. This love ultimately
demands a different mode of being itself, constructing an alternative model of
subjectivity through which to live politically.
55
Many of the players in this chapter were a
part of that show, including General Idea, Gran Fury, fierce pussy, and Gregg Bordowitz.
The exhibition was a space for working out many of the ideas of this chapter, and this
dissertation as a whole, but it was also its own piece of cultural production that
participated in a contemporary conversation about art, culture, and politics both
historically and in our current moment.
We introduced the show, in the catalog, stating:
Tainted Love is a group exhibition that considers love as an activist tactic
within artistic production. Featuring works made between 1987 and 2009,
the show takes its inspiration from cultural/political activity within the
moment of AIDS activism, from both its promises and its contradictions,
though the projects included do not all strictly address AIDS. We present

54
Roland Barthes. A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments. Trans. Richard Howard. NYC: Hill
and Wang, 1978.
55
Virginia Solomon and Steven Lam. “LOVE/AIDS/RIOT/LOVE?,” Tainted Love.
NYC: Visual AIDS, 2009, pgs 4-5.

259

work that mobilizes love as a political tactic, with an understanding of love as
collective and communal, rather than romantic and individual. Love is often a
tainted affect, and art a tainted cultural practice, within activism. Tainted
Love embraces this condition and features projects that trouble the easy
divide between the aesthetic and the political.
56

Conversations around the show were vibrant. Our programming was all standing room
only, and lasted well past posted hours for events, demonstrating that these questions
continue to be open—the political possibilities of art and the appropriate relationship
between art and the social sphere still inspire gallons of ink and forests of paper, not to
mention hours of conversation. General Idea’s work provides insight into this set of
relationships, both on the basis of its contemporary intervention and also its incorporation
of the history of visual culture into its practice. This is the ethos that inspired Tainted
Love, and inspires this dissertation. Both that project, and this, hope to entangle the past
with the present, not only through the juxtaposition of historic and contemporary works
but also through the inclusion of work whose own logic points to its own simultaneous
historicity and continued communicability. All of these projects draw upon the systems
of sense-making within contemporary culture—art, television, magazines, movies,
language, the archive, identity, community—making them strange while recruiting them
to construct a different set of systems that allow for multiple ways of being and knowing
within the field of culture. This is the lesson of General Idea’s practice, of AIDS
activism, and of a subcultural approach to the politics of social life.

56
Ibid, p 4.

260

Coda - Queer Subcultures and the Political Present

As this dissertation has explored, General Idea’s viral methods occupied dominant
cultural forms and systems—magazines and television, but also signification itself—and
rearticulated them to create alternative social orders. It used the mechanisms that
mainstream culture employed to naturalize and reproduce itself to make different
cultures, with different values and priorities: fluidity instead of fixity, questions instead of
answers, process instead of ontology. The group’s work also demonstrated the extent to
which this viral methodology of occupying dominant systems and deploying them to
other ends was a constituent part of subcultural social life, of the everyday activity of
participating in subcultures—of getting dressed in the morning, of reading magazines and
listening to records, and of nightlife. The specific articles of clothing, magazines, bands,
or clubs were irrelevant; what mattered was the process and the ways in which that
process demonstrated a particular critical engagement with and rearticulation of dominant
culture. It also highlighted the political nature of this phenomenon, presenting an
alternative form of politics whose purpose was not to affect future change—to repeal
anti-sodomy laws or institute non-discrimination policies—but rather to use the systems
and structures of dominant culture against itself to allow different possibilities for
identification and subjectivization in the present.
By rejecting notions of policy-based instrumentality and efficacy in favor of
cultural engagement as a basis for judgment, General Idea’s subcultural politics presents
a different temporal address. Rather than work for change in the future, subcultural

261

politics work in the present through an active relationship with the past.
57
As discussed in
the introduction to this dissertation, questions about time and history, and the ideological
function served by linear time and teleological history were a part of the landscape by the
time General Idea started working with those concepts. The group took up those
questions as a foundational part of its practice, however. It played with time in its earliest
works when it back-dated the pageants, and thus the group’s origins, two years to 1968.
At the same time, it consistently reinvigorated past objects and gestures through the
historicity of its appropriation of work by artists from Casper David Friedrich through
Duchamp and Warhol to Robert Ryman, and its incorporation of found objects from the
program at the Foiles Bergere to contemporary television commercials.
Whether re-performing gestures from the history of activism or the history of art,
General Idea presented an art history of queer art works and queer practices, constructing
a legacy and legitimacy for itself while also creating a space, in the contemporary
moment, for the construction of an alternative social order. The group looked to the
everyday practices of subcultural participation as its model, demonstrating how the
practices that constitute subcultural life engage with and rearticulate the past. In so doing,

57
Contemporary discussions about time and futurity within queer theory, though, echo
the observation that General Idea made about a politics of the present, as opposed to a
politics of the future. While Lee Edelman is typically the scholar cited in relation to
critiques of futurity as a construct of reproductive capital, Jack Halberstam and José
Esteban Muñoz offer analyses of specific queer cultural practices that demonstrate a
different idea of time that suggestively dovetail with that offered by General Idea.
For more, see:
Lee Edelman. No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. Durham: Duke University
Press, 2004.
Judith Halberstam. In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives.
NYC: NYU Press, 2005.
José Esteban Muñoz. Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. NYC:
NYU Press, 2009.

262

General Idea presents a historical and object-based intervention into an oftentimes over-
theorized and abstract set of concerns and questions about art, social life, and politics,
using art to demonstrate the alternative forms of politics present within the field of
culture.
263
Sharon Hayes. Performance Photograph.
Everything Else Has Failed… Don’t You
Think it’ s Time for Love? (2007)
1
Images

264
Sharon Hayes. Performance Photograph.
Everything Else Has Failed… Don’t You
Think it’ s Time for Love? (2007)
2
265 265
AIDS
1987
265
Robert Indiana
LOVE (1967)
3
266
Vincent Trasov, Mr. Peanut for Mayor
Campaign Poster, 1974
4
Cover, Annual Artists’ Directory
FILE (February 1974)
267
5
268
Self-Portrait, Architects (1975)
detail from “Glamour,”
Glamour Issue FILE (1975)
6
269
Façade of General Idea’s
house at 78 Gerrard St West
7
270
Marcel Dot submission to the 1971
Miss General Idea Pageant. Photo
by Vincent Trasov
8
271
AA Bronson and EE Claire emceeing
The Hollywood Decca Dance (1974)
AA Bronson with finalist at The
1971 Miss General Idea Pageant
9
272
Detail, “Borderline Cases,” IFEL
Special Paris Issue FILE
(September 1973)
10
273
Poster, Going
Thru the Motions
(1975)
Cover, Glamour Issue
FILE (Autumn 1975)
11
274
Still, Shut the Fuck Up (1985)
Test Tube Poster (1980)
12
275
AIDS, installed in
Soho, NYC, 1989
13
276
Detail, Submissions
Packet for the 1971
Miss General Idea
Pageant (1971)
14
277
General Idea Artist’ s
Conception:
Miss General Idea 1971
15
278
Other submissions for
the 1971 Miss General
Idea Pageant
16
279
Arrival to the Art Gallery of Ontario for
the 1971 Miss General Idea Pageant
17
280 280
Marcel Dot submission to the 1971
Miss General Idea Pageant. Photo
by Vincent Trasov
18
281
Ray Davies playing the Canadian
and American national anthems at
the Hollywood Decca Dance (1974)
19
282
George Brecht and Robert Filliou,
poster announcing the creation of
the Eternal Network
20
283
Mondo Cane
(1984)
21
284
The Body Politic Collective. Cover, The
Body Politic. v1 n1, November-
December 1971
22
285
Business Cards (1971)
23
286
Photograph from the 1971 Miss General Idea Pageant Submissions
Kit featuring an article on the group’s installation, Betty’ s, featuring
the Miss General Idea Gown, from The Globe and Mail, 1/22/1970
24
287
Detail, pamphlet about the 1970 Pageant included
in the submissions packet for the 1971 Pageant.
25
288
The Miss General Idea Gown (1971)
26
289
Dorothy Cameron and Daniel Freeman judging
the submissions installed in A Space, 1971
27
290
Pascal performing at the 1971
Miss General Idea Pageant
28
291
Miss Honey performing her talent at
the 1970 Miss General Idea Pageant
29
292
Poster for An Evening with the Maids
for the Theatre Passe Muraille (1970)
30
293
AA Bronson with the three finalists at
the 1971 Miss General Idea Pageant
31
294 294
Detail, Marcel Dot’s submission to the 1971 Pageant
32
295
Man Ray. Marcel Duchamp as Rrose Selavy (1921)
33
296
Photo of Michael Morris and Vincent Trasov at the
Halifax/Vancouver Exchange, marking the first
appearance of Trasov as Mr Peanut, 1972
34
297
Mr. Peanut and Gazelle at Babyland, 1972
35
298
AA Bronson and Glenn Lewis as EE Claire
emceeing the Hollywood Decca Dance (1974)
36
299
Robert Filliou in Aachen, Germany
celebrating art’s one millionth birthday
37
300
John Down (third from right, in FETISH shirt)
with the Corres Sponge Dancers performing
The Gold Diggers of ‘84 at the Hollywood Decca Dance
38
301
The Gold Diggers of ’84 (1972)
39
302
Cover, Annual Artists’ Directory
FILE (February 1974)
302
40
303
Cards advertising art’s birthday and
the Hollywood Decca Dance, Annual
Artists’ Directory FILE, pages 59-60.
41
304
Poster advertising the
Halifax/Vancouver Exchange, 1974
42
305
Group Photograph of participants
in Halifax/Vancouver Exchange
43
306
Flakey Rose Hips Better Body Works (1974)
44
307
Documentary photographs from the
Little Hot Stove meeting in Halifax.
45
308
Ray Johnson Untitled
(Mona Lisa Bunny) (1984)
On Kawara Oct. 31, 1978 (Today Series) (1978)
46
309
Poster, Going Thru the Motions (1975)
47
310 310
Poster, Going Thru
the Motions (1975)
Cover, Glamour Issue
FILE (Autumn 1975)
48
311
Inside back cover, Manipulating the
Self Issue FILE (May/June 1972)
49
312
Cover, IFEL Special Paris Issue
FILE (September 1972)
50
313
“Borderline Cases,” section
1 – Now You See It
51
314
“Borderline Cases,” section 2
– Imitation of Life (Mimicry)
52
315
“Borderline Cases,” section
3 – Self Conscious
53
316
“Borderline Cases,” section 4
– Graven Image (Mockery)
54
317
“Borderline Cases,”
section 5 - Split
55
318
“Borderline Cases,” section
7 – Out of Your Element
56
319
“Borderline Cases,” section
8 – Strange Customs
57
320
“Borderline Cases,” Section 9 -
Consummation
58
321
“Borderline Cases,” section
10 – Now You Don’t
59
322
Invitation, Lux On VB at
the Carmen Lamanna
Gallery,
Installation detail,
Lux On VB (1973)
60
323
Installation detail,
Lux On VB (1973)
61
324
Performance photograph,
Lux On (1974)
62
325
Cover, Glamour
Issue FILE (1975)
63
326
Self-Portrait, Architects (1975)
detail from “Glamour,”
Glamour Issue FILE (1975)
64
327
Hannah Höch,
Marlene (1930)
65
328
Detail, “Glamour,” FILE (1975)
66
329
Detail, “Glamour,” FILE (1975)
67
330
Detail, “Glamour,” FILE (1975)
68
331
Detail, “Glamour,” FILE (1975)
69
332
Detail, “Glamour,” FILE (1975)
70
333
Manipulating the Self (1972)
71
334
Detail, “Glamour,” FILE (1975)
72
335
Still, Towards an Audience Vocabulary (1978)
73
336
Carole Pope and Kevin Staple, Rough Trade
74
337
Still, Going Thru the Motions (1975)
75
338
The Dishes Hot Property! (1978)
Album cover designed by General Idea
76
339
Advertisement for FILE, in New York City
Edition Issue FILE (Spring 1976)
77
340
Dr. Brute Colonnade with
Drop Ceiling Detail (1975)
78
341
Felix Partz. Ziggurat Paintings (1968-1969)
79
342
Reconstructing Futures (1977)
80
343
The Ruins of the 1984 Miss General Idea Pavillion (1977)
81
344
Exhibition Poster,
Reconstructing Futures
(1977)
82
345
Detail, “BZZZ BZZZ BZZZ,” Special
Transgressions Issue FILE (Fall 1979)
83
346
Claes Oldenburg The Store (1961)
George Brecht and Robert Filliou
La Cedille qui sourit (1965-1968)
84
347
Flyer for broadcast of Pilot
85
348
Test Tube Poster (1980)
86
349
Still, Test Tube (1979)
87
350
Stills, Test Tube (1979)
88
351
Stills, Test Tube (1979)
89
352
Still, Test Tube (1979)
90
353
Still, Test Tube (1979)
91
354
Cover,Special Transgressions
Issue FILE (Fall 1979)
92
355
Cover, Special Downtown Issue
FILE (Summer 1980)
93
356
The Colour
Bar Lounge
(1979)
The Getting into the Spirits
Cocktail Book from the
1984 Miss General Idea
Pavillion (1980)
Cocktail
Cards (1980)
94
357
The Golden Shower, detail from
The Colour Bar Lounge (1979)
95
358
Young Artist, detail from The
Colour Bar Lounge (1979)
96
359
Liquid Assets (1980)
Magic Palette (1980)
97
360
The Boutique for the 1984 Miss
General Idea Pavillion (1980)
98
361
Special $ucce$$ Issue
FILE (March 1981)
99
362
Detail, “The Boutique from the 1984 Miss General Idea
Pavillion,” Special $ucce$$ Issue FILE. (March 1981)
100
363
Detail “BZZZ BZZZ BZZZ,” $pecial
$ucce$$ Issue FILE (March 1981)
101
364
Video Still
Andrea Fraser. Museum Highlights: A Gallery Talk
(1989)
Fred Wilson. Metalwork, 1723-1880 (1992)
from “Mining the Museum” at the
Baltimore Historical Society
102
365
The Re-materialization of the Art
Object Issue FILE. (Fall 1981)
103
366
General Idea’ s 1984 and the 1968-1984
FILE Retrospective Issue (1984)
104
367
The Unveiling of the Cornucopia: A Mural Fragment from
The Room of Unknown Function in the Villa dei Misteri of
The 1984 Miss General Idea Pavillion (1982)
Sketch for use in video Cornucopia: Fragments from the room of
Unknown Function in the Villa dei Misteri of The 1984 Miss General
Idea Pavillion (1982-3)
105
368
Still, Shut the Fuck Up (1985)
106
369
Still, Shut the Fuck Up (1985)
107
370
Still, Shut the Fuck Up (1985)
108
371
Still, Shut the Fuck Up (1985)
109
372
Still, Shut the Fuck Up (1985)
110
373
Still, Shut the Fuck Up (1985)
111
374
Still, Shut the Fuck Up (1985)
112
375
Still, Shut the Fuck Up (1985)
113
376
Special General Idea Issue –
Mondo Cane Kama Sutra FILE (1983)
Armoury Post
Cards (1987)
The Unveiling of the Cornucopia: A Mural Fragment from
The Room of Unknown Function in the Villa dei Misteri of
The 1984 Miss General Idea Pavillion (1982)
114
377
P is for Poodle (1983)
115
378
Stills, Shut the Fuck Up (1985)
116
379
Still, Shut the Fuck Up (1985)
117
380
Still, Shut the Fuck Up (1985)
118
381
Mastheads for LIFE and
FILE
119
382
AIDS
1987
120
383
Robert Indiana
LOVE (1967)
121
384
Imagevirus (1991)
Installation View,
Tainted Love (2009)
122
385
AIDS Scarf
(1990)
AIDS Stamps
(1988)
AIDS (1989)
123
386
Blue (Cobalt)
Placebo (1991)
From Left:
Couers volants (1994)
Infe©ted Rietveld (1994)
Infe©ted Pharmacie (1994)
AIDS Wallpaper (1990)
Infe©ted Mondrian (1994)
124
387
Gran Fury
RIOT
(1988)
125
388
AIDS, installed as a
Public art project in
Lower Manhattan in
1988
126
389
Silence = Death Collective
Let the Record Show…
installed at the New Museum , 1987
127
390
Felix Gonzalez-Torres Untitled 1991
David Wojnarowicz
Untitled
(Face In Dirt)
(1990)

128
391
Gran Fury
Kissing Doesn’t Kill
(1989)
129
392
Advertisement, Absolut V odka
130
393
Left to Right, all 1988:
AIDS (Cadmium Green Light), AIDS (Ultramarine Blue),
AIDS (Cadmium Orange Light), AIDS (Lascaux Green Light),
and AIDS (Permanent Rose Deep)
131
394
Andy Warhol. 25 Marilyns
(1962)
Sol LeWitt. Six Geometric
Figures in Three Colors on Three
Colors and All Their
Combinations (1978)
Frank Stella. Color Maze
(1966)
Peter Halley
Red Cell with Conduit
(1982)
132
395
Black AIDS #1
(1991)
White AIDS #3
(1993)
133
396
Ad Reinhardt
Abstract Painting
(1960-1966)
134
397
Robert Ryman
Untitled
(1961)
135
398
Jasper Johns
White Target
(1957)
Jasper Johns
White Flag
(1955)
Jasper Johns
White Numbers
(1957)
136
399
Kazimir Malevich
Black Square
(1915)
137
400
Infe©ted Rietveld
(1994)
On Ceiling:
Placebo (Helium)
(1992)
138
401
Infe©ted Pharmacie
(1994)
139
402
Miss Honey (Honey Novic) at the Telex
Machine during the 1970 Miss General
Idea Pageant, part of What Happened?
(1970)
140
403
Marcel Dot’s winning submission
for the 1971 Miss General Idea
Pageant.
Photo: Vincent Trasov
Man Ray
Marcel Duchamp as
Rrose Sélavy (1921)
141
404
Cover, Special People
Issue FILE (Spring 1977)
142
405
Joseph Beuys
I Like America and America Likes Me
Performance photograph
(1974)
143
406
Detail, Special New York City Issue FILE.
(Spring 1976)
144
407
Detail, Special People
Issue FILE (Spring 1977)
Willoughby Sharp
Film Still, Joseph
Beuys’ Public Dialog
(1974)
145
408
Piet Mondrian
Broadway Boogie Woogie
(1942-1943)
Gerrit Rietveld
Red Blue Chair
(1923)
146
409
Marcel Duchamp
Pharmacie
(1914)
147
410
Gran Fury
Untitled
(1993)
148
411
fierce pussy
I AM: poster
(1991)
149
412
Cover, Tainted Love catalog
150

413

Works Cited

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Albright, Thomas. “New Art School: Correspondence,” Rolling Stone. 4/13/1972.
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Allen, Gwen. Artists’ Magazines: An Alternative Space for Art. Cambridge, MA: MIT
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Althusser, Louis. “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes toward an
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Anonymous. "FILE: The Great Canadian Art Tragedy." The Grape, Vancouver, May 24-
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Ant Farm. Art’s Stars in Hollywood (1974). Black and white video, 53:00 minutes

http://www.artingeneral.org/exhibitions/425

Barkun, Deborah. Art, AIDS, and Collective Identity: Configuring General Idea’s
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Barthes, Roland. “Death of the Author,” Aspen n 5+6, 1967, item 3.

Barthes, Roland. Image-Music-Text. Trans. Stephen Heath. NYC: Hill and Wang 1978.

Barthes, Roland. A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments. Trans. Richard Howard. NYC: Hill
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