General Idea Editions at The Andy Warhol Museum

Tuesday, 11 October 2005 10:39

PITTSBURGH, PA.-The Andy Warhol Museum presents the retrospective exhibition, General Idea Editions. Organized by the Blackwood Gallery at the University of Toronto at Mississauga, the internationally-touring exhibition features more than 200 mass produced objects - including prints, postcards, posters, photo-based projects, multiples, serial publications, flags, and crests - produced from 1968 to 1994 by Canadian-based art collective General Idea. The Warhol will be the only East Coast U.S. venue to host the exhibition. “Andy Warhol was a significant influence on the work that General Idea produced, and seeing this important survey of their work in the context of The Warhol will be a rich and resonant experience,” says John Smith, Assistant Director for Collections and Research at The Warhol. “The complexity and continuing relevancy of General Idea’s work allows for a multitude of topical discussions. Art and activism, the nature of artistic collaboration, and questions of originality and authenticity in contemporary art are just a few of the issues we will explore with this exhibition.” Pioneers of conceptual and media-based practices in Canada, General Idea’s work involved everyday promotional culture (postcards, press releases, magazines) and evolved into high gloss advertising forms (posters, balloons, pins.) General Idea editions were not just a commercial product however; they formed a discourse that established the group’s broader artistic concepts, such as the role of the media, the dissemination of marginalized identities, and the devaluation of originality and artistic genius. Masters of appropriation, General Idea bent popular icons to their own needs, transforming bastions of Americana such as LIFE Magazine and the Miss America Pageant, into vehicles for subverting the culture’s reigning values. In 1987, General Idea realized one of its most famous pieces, AIDS, a screenprint logo appropriated from the Pop artist Robert Indiana’s famous “Love” painting from 1966. The resulting project was General Idea’s most intensive media campaign. In the height of the AIDS epidemic, the image was disseminated by the group and eventually others on a massive scale, becoming an international logo that instantly and poignantly brought home to the general public a crisis from which many had remained detached. In the form of paintings, wallpaper, posters, stamps, and magazine covers, the AIDS logo became the means to counter the silence surrounding the disease which eventually ended the General Idea collaboration when it took the lives of Jorge Zontal and Felix Partz in 1994. To this day, General Idea’s work remains acutely relevant for younger artists, not only as a model for collaboration, but also for the articulations of queer identity and the imaginative formation of alternative communities. In connection with the exhibition, The Warhol will present several education programs that will focus on collaborations with local artists and organizations and explore contemporary notions of social activism.

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