Under the title “Haute Culture: General Idea” the Modern Art Museum of Paris (Musée d’Art Moderne de la ville de Paris/ARC) presents the first world retrospective of the Canadian collective General Idea that shook up and irradiated the art world from 1969 to 1994.

300 multimedia works including paintings, photographs, videos, publications and installations that seem on many levels visionary as they foreshadow and anticipate the currents and trends in today’s art.

Although the essential of the work and the myth rests on the famous founding trio on the date of their creation in 1968, or 1969, according to the historians they also welcomed other artists.

We find this trio in the self-portraits and parodies: in Poodle (“Mondo Cane Kama Sutra” 1989 -), in seal babies (“End of the century” -1994), “Baby Makes 3” -1984-1989, and certainly “P is for Poodie” from 1983, which was used as the image for the poster and the catalogue exhibition cover. In 1969, the founders were: AA Bronson, né Michaels Tims in Vancouver, British Columbia, in 1946, and whose activities include photography, architecture and editing for “The loving couch press” as well as directing performances; Felix Partz, né Ronald Gabe in Winnipeg in 1945 and Jorge Zontal, né Slobodan Saia-Levy in Parma in 1944.

The group sees itself as a metaphor of the artist whose objective and goal is “to be liberated from the tyranny of the individual genius”.
The exhibition’s hanging is not chronological, instead it links themes that federate the group’s preoccupations of the collective. What is a realist artist, Mass image/Mass culture, architect/archeologist – a questioning by contemporary artists on social reasoning as well as an engagement in the fight against AIDS (the AIDS series) in the later years of the collective, before two of its members, Félix and Jorge, fell victim.

The hanging illustrates the group’s multimedia expression as well as the range of their creation, focusing on some important milestones, some lesser known. As in 1977, the destruction of “Pavillion” that never existed and for which they created the ruins after a supposed fire. We find ourselves in a sort of “reality/fiction” because for them, “reality” does not really exist. They want to create their own world “a sort of parody, an imperfect illusion of a perfect world”.

The exhibition also puts an emphasis on infiltration as an art, a “virus spreading”, even before their last period called AIDS where posters, canvases and publications plagiarize the famous “LOVE” by Robert Indiana. And certainly from its publication in April of 1972, “FILE Megazine” that plagiarized the well-known magazine LIFE. In spite of the menacing lawsuits, 26 issues were published until 1989.

For AA Bronson, only survivor and present at the opening of the exhibition, “General Idea” was born out of the events of May 1968 in Paris, out of the rubbish of the hippy communities, out of the underground newspapers, out of radical education, happenings, the “love-ins”, Marshall McLuhan and the Situationist International. “We believed in a free economy, the abolition of copyrights and in a horizontal structure fixed on a base, which preceded the Internet…”.

A 224 page catalogue published in “Paris Musées” Editions gives precisions and information to those who wish to better understand this collective. Included are texts by Fabrice Hergott, director of the Modern Art Museum of Paris, by Frédéric Bonnet, commissioner of the exhibition along with Odile Burluraux, of AA Bronson. And, an encouter with the three founders of the collective by Louise Dompierre.
“FILE” Megazine (26 issues) was republished in its integrality in 6 volumes in 2008 by JPR Ringier Zurich.

Bernard Perrine
Correspondant for L’Institut de France
Bernard.Perrine1@orange.fr

“Haute Culture: General Idea”
Une rétrospective, 1969 – 1994

Until April 30
Musée d’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris/ARC
11 avenue du Président Wilson
75116 Paris