Will 1984 be the year of Orwell’s Big Brother or of the Miss General Idea Pageant—or are they somehow in cahoots? General Idea is a group of three Canadian artists—AA Bronson, Felix Partz, and Jorge Zontal. General Idea, we are told, is for them the artist; Miss General Idea is their art and muse; a “Pavilion” (reconstructed from show to show) is their museum; a magazine they publish, called FILE, is their mass media; and the Pageant, which can mediate nearly any information, is their format. There have been several such projects; the Pageant itself is scheduled for 1984. So much for the artist alone with his canvas—art as total spectacle is (again) here. But, whose totality is it?
The latest edition of the Pageant included projects from 1975 to 1980. One is a long series of “showcards,” each with illustration and text, that act as “sketch records” scenarios or skits for the Pageant. According to one card, “General Idea is basically this: a framing device within which we inhabit the role of the artist as we see the living legend. We can be expected to do what is expected within these bounds. . . . Each card is an episode in this artist legend—the Quest for Miss General Idea, Grail and Guinevere in one. Another card describes the search for her spirit as a “ritualized pageant”: “Elevated, she reigns; idealized, she contains; artfully, she maintains; dominantly, she sustains our interest.” General Idea, it is soon clear, is a frame without limit. Yet another card reads: “Wanted,” “Impossible Situations,” and “It is always the impossible that comes true.”
One situation that has both come true and hasn’t happened yet is described in a project called Reconstructing Futures. This room of the Pavilion documents the Pavilion’s destruction (a full-scale ruined Pavilion was executed in 1976). Two vessels of light mark a passage; on either wall is a photo mural of the Pavilion in ruins: culture destroyed by war. On the floor are marble barbells (for cultural strength?) and two black chairs (bipolar seats of power?). Behind an iron screen (an “iron curtain”) is a photograph of the three artists escaping from the Pavilion—as if it were a palace turned bunker in the next world war.
Weary from futures impossible and otherwise, the victim/viewer comes at last to the Colour Bar Lounge (reminiscent of the milk bar in A Clockwork Orange). The bar proposes cultural cocktails: art, an “elitist drink,” is mixed with media elixirs, and sold to us, the public. One of the dangers (which is also one of the drinks) is fascism. What is basic, Oedipal, and mythically pure? we are asked. Milk, of course, and Nazism. So the bar offers “Nazi milk,” a “new cocktail to help us remember.”
If milk is somehow contaminated, then everything, and everyone, is too. The general idea of General Idea seems to be paranoia turned to play. It is not so much “If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em” as it is “You are them, so play it to the hilt.” General Idea presents a universe of capital and communication in which art becomes the paradigmatic spectacle. But do these artists mimic the network of commodity, display, and consumption in order to defy it? Or is it, in fact, the “general idea” to which they aspire?
—Hal Foster
