Toronto, early seventies. AA Bronson, Felix Partz and Jorge Zontal are working as an artists’ collective under the name General Idea. Their performances and actions are public spectacles – they borrow gestures from television shows and beauty contests to make them absurd. At the time, they describe themselves as a threesome that wants to construct the future as they please: “We take whatever form our triple queer masculinity needs: a poodle gang, a baby love triangle, a theater made of doctors.” The Gropius Bau is now dedicating a comprehensive retrospective to them, looking back at their work with more than 200 pieces. From the beginning, General Idea wanted to reach people: Their art should be accessible to all. It wasn’t unusual for them to take self-portraits: sometimes as serious-looking poodles, sometimes as the Three Graces. They satirized themselves and the mechanisms of the art world, appropriated motifs from their forefathers such as Caspar David Friedrich and Mondrian in order to get their own messages across to the people.
A central theme they deal with again and again is the AIDS epidemic. When the HIV virus started spreading in the eighties, they wanted to counteract the stigmatization and exclusion. Taking their cue from Robert Indiana’s 1964 pop art emblem “LOVE”, they developed posters with “AIDS” written on them, which they papered on the streets of New York, San Francisco, Toronto and Berlin. Their posters were a radical act of visualization at a time when the disease was only talked about behind closed doors. The installation “Fin de siècle”, a sea of ice made of Styrofoam that takes up the atrium of the Gropius Building, has also been read as a commentary on the AIDS crisis: Society does everything it can to save baby seals, but has only coldness for those infected with HIV. Shortly after the actions, Felix Partz and Jorge Zontal learned of their own HIV diagnoses in the early nineties. The three also translate their lives with the disease into art – they turn medications into sculptures and portray themselves as doctors. With the death of Partz and Zontal, General Idea came to an end as a collective in 1994, but AA Bronson-who now lives and works in Berlin-remembers the collaborators to this day. The result is a moving exhibition that speaks to the past, but especially to friendship, love and activism.
Text: Laura Storfner / Credits & Photos: Gropius Bau, Luca Girardini, Royal Bank of Canada Art Collection
Gropius Bau, Niederkirchnerstr.7, 10963 Berlin-Kreuzberg; map
The retrospective “General Idea” is running until 14.01.2024.
Mon, Wed, Thu, Fri 11–19h, Sat+Sun 10–19h
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@generalidea_
