Educational Media Reviews Online

General Idea became the name under which three artists worked, collectively and by consensus, from 1969 to 1994. After they met in 1969, they became Jorge Zontal, AA Bronson and Felix Partz. When director Annette Mangaard was a student at the Ontario College of Art in the 1980s, she was fascinated by their work and admired their irreverence and intelligence. Her high regard for them as well as for their work is evident in this thoughtful and very moving exploration of their lives’ work and its influence on other artists.

AA Bronson, the now sole survivor of the collective, participates in a very personal journey through recollections of how they met, worked, and in effect lived together for 25 years, sublimating their individualities to the cause of becoming one art-making being. They initially took on the role of a collective of business men whose core tradition was conceptual art. Later they became architects of ideas, growing to become monuments of art. Using clips from their video art projects and documentary footage of such events as “The Miss General Idea Pageant” in which they investigated the concepts of glamour and celebrity, they critiqued media and culture in a fundamentally dada and surrealist fashion. For their first museum show in 1979 in Amsterdam they did their own merchandising for the gift shop and sold their own pieces of art as a way of extending the show in which the work was about appropriating the structures of the art system. They regarded mass media as a way of networking around the globe complicit with its workings while at the same time criticizing and parodying it. They came out with a magazine parody of LIFE before Warhol came out with Interview, in fact they made art in parallel with Warhol in terms of their concerns about celebrity. They were intelligent, camp, and pushed the envelope in terms of sexuality but as Bronson remembers, no one wrote about it until AIDS became a horrible reality in the early 1980s and two of the three artists succumbed to it in 1994.

Annette Mangard’s documentary provides a comprehensive overview of the work generated by General Idea and contextualizes it in terms of the growing awareness of AIDS and its impact on the art world and culture in general. Highly recommended.