OTTAWA.- Bold, provocative, visionary, the Canadian artist group General Idea—active from 1969 to 1994—was groundbreaking in their anticipation of contemporary concerns, foreshadowing the development of social media, reality TV, digital avatars and fluidity in sexual and gender identity. This Friday, June 3, a major retrospective exhibition of the trio, composed of Jorge Zontal (1944–1994), Felix Partz (1945–1994), and AA Bronson (b. 1946), opens at the National Gallery of Canada. With more than 200 works on view, this is the most comprehensive exhibition ever produced of General Idea, organized by the National Gallery of Canada in close collaboration with AA Bronson, the surviving member of the group. It will be on view until November 20, 2022. The exhibition is accompanied by a monumental publication presenting a visual survey of the group’s artworks.

“The National Gallery of Canada was the first museum to acquire a work by General Idea in 1973. We are thrilled to present this major exhibition and important publication 50 years later.” said Dr. Sasha Suda, Director and CEO, National Gallery of Canada. “General Idea’s provocative engagement with critical issues continues to drive important conversations that challenge the status quo and celebrate art and irreverence.”

For the opening of the exhibition, the Gallery also announced today the naming of the Reading Room of the NGC Library and Archives the General Idea Reading Room. A space devoted to the highest levels of scholarship and research in the visual arts in Canada, the library holds a number of collections associated with General Idea that can be consulted by visitors, including the Art Metropole Collection and the AA Bronson Collection. The archive for the artists group, which consists primarily of General Idea's professional and working materials for their many projects and artworks, is among the Library and Archives most consulted artists fonds.

“AA Bronson believes in the centrality of museum libraries and archives and has long loved those of the National Gallery. The General Idea Reading Room is a space that is personally meaningful to him. This special tribute strengthens the connection between the Library and Archives collection and the powerful vision of artists and the important role that research plays in society,” said Dr. Suda.

The Gallery also unveiled the name of the first recipient of the General Idea Fellowship, which will be awarded annually to encourage and support advanced research in contemporary art, emphasizing the use and investigation of the collections of the National Gallery of Canada, including the Art Metropole Collection, the General Idea Fonds, the AA Bronson collection, and related materials in the Gallery’s collections. Jacob Korczynski, this year’s recipient, will focus his research on Art Metropole’s distribution of artists’ film and video, and the intersection between that aspect of their activities and the Art Metropole Collection of artists’ books, editions, and multiples. Open to Canadian and international applicants, the award is in the amount of $15,000.

General Idea: the exhibition—a panoramic experience spanning a 25-year career

Covering a career spanning 25 years from the late 1960s to 1994, the works on view range from the very small (instructions written on index cards) to the very large (room-sized installations). They form a body of work that explores forms of expression as varied as painting, sculpture, photography and video, and reflect the group’s performances, publication projects and retail shops. These works reveal the great diversity of General Idea’s activities and the breadth of their project.

“Always looking to the future, General Idea’s work has only grown in importance in recent years,” said Dr. Adam Welch, Curator of the retrospective exhibition General Idea, and Associate Curator of Canadian Art, National Gallery of Canada. “The single-most influential postwar artist group to have emerged from Canada, they manipulated mass media, invented identities and histories, and devised queer strategies that anticipated so much of our contemporary culture. I hope that this exhibition finds General Idea an even larger and more appreciative audience, and that their astonishing work is amplified and celebrated.”

Among the many works on view in the exhibition is Evidence of Body Binding, 1971, the first work by General Idea to enter the NGC permanent Collection in the early 1970s. The work is an example of General Idea’s “Inner Media Research,” which involved documenting bodies in detail: skin, parts, functions, membranes and mutations. Challenging boundaries between art, science and pornography, this installation features a series of photographs of AA Bronson bound by elasticated thread.

Watchdogs, retrievers, and gay companions, poodles are figures that General Idea featured in their art as avatars for themselves. Viewers will notice the representation in several of the works on view, including in The Three Graces (Mural Fragment from the Villa dei Misteri of The 1984 Miss General Idea Pavillion),1982; as well as in the photographic works P is for Poodle, 1983/89 and Self-portrait with Objects, 1981–82.

As part of their body of work in response to the HIV/AIDS crisis from 1987 until 1994, the installations One Day of AZT, 1991, and One Year of AZT, 1991, respectively occupy a whole gallery of the exhibition. The works render in high relief the drug AZT that is prescribed to HIV-positive patients to delay the onset of AIDS. The pills are arranged on the wall in monthly doses. The composition recalls the look of pharmaceutical packaging.

The installation Magi© Bullet is made of hundreds of silver Mylar balloons inflated with helium and evokes Andy Warhol’s Silver Clouds, 1966. Over time, the balloons deflate and fall to the ground, transforming a site-responsive work high against the gallery’s ceiling into hundreds of individual multiples. Visitors to the exhibition are invited to take the fallen balloons home with them.

Long before YouTube and TikTok, General Idea were pioneers of video art. Two of General Idea’s video works are on view in the exhibition. Along with four other video works, they are also being streamed free of charge on General Idea Television—at generalideatv.com—for the duration of the exhibition. These works borrow mass media formats and stage performances.

Beyond the walls

The Gallery brings General Idea beyond its walls, with the AIDS Sculpture, 1989, located on the Gallery’s plaza, and the work AIDS, 2022, a billboard by AA Bronson, on the corner of St. Patrick and Dalhousie streets in the Ottawa ByWard market. In addition, VIDEOVIRUS, an animated video work by General Idea and AA Bronson, will be on display on the National Art Centre’s Kipnes Lantern, a five-story high glass tour located above its main entrance.

In collaboration with AA Bronson, the Gallery has also produced a new poster edition: AIDS (Ottawa). Included in the exhibition itself, it will circulate on the streets of Ottawa during summer 2022, reactivating this signal project by the group first realized in New York in late 1987.

Adam Welch, Ph. D., Associate Curator of Canadian Art at the NGC is the curator of the retrospective exhibition General Idea. He worked in close collaboration with AA Bronson.