Curated by Agustín Pérez Rubio

Whether staging satiric beauty pageants to crown a “Miss General Idea,” covering art and punk rock in their great magazine FILE (1972–89), or lambasting the mass media’s stereotypical treatment of artists (most memorably in their 1984 video Shut the Fuck Up), Canadian collective General Idea challenged authority and queered heteronormative identity with a blend of humor, eroticism, and expertly styled artifice. The trio—AA Bronson, Felix Partz, and Jorge Zontal—were active from 1969 to 1994, when Partz and Zontal died of AIDS-related illnesses. In the intervening years, their work has lost none of its power to shock and inspire, as the group’s first retrospective in Latin America will show. Featuring approximately one hundred works that track the twenty-five-year arc of General Idea’s practice, the exhibition will be accompanied by a catalogue raisonné. Travels to Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires, March–June 2017.

— Bill Arning