General Idea - Audio Tour

Queer

Hi, I’m Rinaldo Walcott. I’m a Professor in the Women and Gender Studies Institute at the University of Toronto. My specialty is Black queer studies.

The word queer encapsulates an entire history – some might even say histories. Queer is a word that AIDS demanded LGBTQ people re-appropriate. Once launched against us to mark us unnatural, odd, out of the norm we took queer back as an affirmation of being otherwise in world. We took it back as a way to strike a blow against what was being offered as normal in a moment of mass deaths and suffering from AIDS. It is important to note we reclaimed queer in the moment of AIDS; we needed it to make sense of community formation in the face of large numbers of gay men dying; we needed it to make sense of how women — straight and lesbian — rallied to and cared for those men as they died. Queer was a community making word, one that exceeded our sexual practices. Not every gay man wanted to reclaim queer as a term that could capture their experiences, their sexuality, their community. Some refused, gay was more important to them. Reclaiming queer was a very important strategy and a contested term. An activist group like Queer Nation captured our imaginations in its direct action and in its apparent unruly formation of community. Queer allowed us to hold allies and solidarities without use for those encumbered words. It was a powerful term for taking up political space. Then there’s this work of General Idea that speaks back to these political formations.

Looking Ahead
1971

Hi. This is Luis Jacob. I’m a Toronto-based artist, writer, curator and educator.

General Idea was formed in 1969 and continued making art for two and a half decades. In this work, Looking Ahead, made only two years after they began working together, we see a portrait of the artists as a young man.

Conservatively dressed and with neatly slicked hair, he pauses from the book he is reading to look up at what he fantasizes to be the prospects of his rising stock-value. A far cry from the 1960s image of the artist as rebellious outsider. this young professional is ambitious and on the make. He looks ahead towards a successful future by conforming with — rather than rebelling against — the social order.

During the 1970s, when General Idea created him (probably by appropriating the image from another source) his straight-edge 1950s demeanour is already anachronistic, a thing of the past. His conservative appearance, in other words, is ironic, and creates a kind of visual double entendre.

The man is the very embodiment of what AA Bronson — in his 1983 essay titled The Humiliation of the Bureaucrat — would describe as the two Canadian national attributes: “the bureaucratic tendency and the protestant work ethic”. These artists from Toronto mean business.

But what business, precisely? The pink colour of the background alludes to sexualities more queer than meets the eye. The young professional is, in other words, an image of the artists in drag. The blank pages of his book and the way his gaze averts our own eyes, hint at something inscrutable — something enigmatic — to be elaborated in more than twenty years of work to come.

Villa dei Misteri
1982

Hi, I’m Rinaldo Walcott. I’m a Professor in the Women and Gender Studies Institute at the University of Toronto. My specialty is Black queer studies.

General Idea are masters of refurbishing and recontextualizing the history of art for their times and ours, thereby extending the history even further into our lives. The Unveiling of the Cornucopia continues General Idea’s flirtation with the thin line between fiction and reality. This work is a part of a larger series of works that allow General Idea to play as archeologists “rescuing” fragments of history from an imagined and destroyed by fire Roman pavilion. The occurrence of the poodle that becomes a signature feature of their work and even a stand-in for them prefigures how throughout the 1980s queer concerns would become central to their work. While the larger body of work references ancient Rome, its homosocial formations and the archeological so much more can be implied by it. Inventing an archeological site, one that has a significant historical reference General Idea draws on decay and mystery as central to art history. Imagined as a “rescued” fragment this work foreshadows the decay and decline that would come to mark queer life in that period. It is difficult not to read General Idea’s work in retrospect as almost like a prediction that AIDS would arrive. The repetition of the decayed historical pavilions of European art history and their insertion into contemporary art history as a fiction of sorts is one way that General Idea extends a metaphor of decline and decay to make a political statement without either being didactic or beating viewers over the head.

AIDS
1987

Hi. My name is Marlene Yuen. I’m a visual artist in Vancouver, and a studio technician at the Emily Carr University.

If I had walked down this street in the 1980s and seen General Idea’s AIDS poster repeatedly wheat pasted amongst gig posters and advertisements, I would have done a double take. The typography and bright colours would have been familiar, but something about it is different. AIDS is General Idea’s update of American Pop artist Robert Indiana’s iconic 1967 artwork, LOVE. General Idea created this work in 1987 at the height of the AIDS crisis, and LOVE has been replaced by AIDS.

The artwork is not displayed on a museum or gallery wall. Nor is it a precious piece of public art. It is art in the street, in a place where people go about their daily lives. Public art plays an important role in society. When art is accessible and strategically placed, people take notice and engage with it. In 2018, I was commissioned by the City of Vancouver to design a series of utility boxes located in Vancouver's historic Chinatown. I was informed that my artwork was to aid in the revitalization of the deteriorating neighbourhood. For years, Vancouver’s Chinatown has been dealing with racism, vandalism, and the opioid crisis. I purposely worked with image repetition and bright colours. Did people take notice? Yes.

The repetition of the AIDS piece mimics advertising strategies, but General Idea are also telling us that AIDS cannot be ignored. The virus is there, and it replicates itself just as the poster repeats. This work is part of a broader General Idea project called Imagevirus, that presented multiple versions of the work in public spaces across cities in North America and Europe starting in the late 1980s.

The Spirit of Miss General Idea
1995

Hi, I’m Rinaldo Walcott. I’m a Professor in the Women and Gender Studies Institute at the University of Toronto. My specialty is Black queer studies.

Calling to mind ghostly figures, The Spirit of Miss General Idea plays on our wide-spread knowledge and recognition of beauty pageant culture. In what can only be called prescience General Idea saw into the future of Reality TV and shows like RuPaul’s Drag Race, Next Top Model and the genre of television to give us a character or characters that refused gender norms, engaged consumer culture, made fashion and style central to identity and also offered it all up as parody and sly critique at the same time. The Spirit of Miss General Idea would repeat across General Idea’s presentation platforms and in this way this ghostly figure joins General Idea’s practice of repetition. Indeed, one can also see the resonance of Miss General Idea in the well-regarded Indigenous artist Miss Chief Eagle Testickle as inhabited by Kent Monkman. These gender-bending performances of both General Idea and Monkman cast a critique at the masculinist terrain of the artworld and its often silenced, contradictory or even hypocritical stance on questions of queer sexuality and gender differences. Finally, one might make sense of The Spirit of Miss General Idea as one concerned with the unreliability of history, the thin line between fiction and truth, and even the unreliability of time. And yet, The Spirit of Miss General Idea gives us insights into a past we might not have lived. Work by Kent Monkman can be viewed in the NGC’s Contemporary Art Galleries until September.