Haute Culture: General Idea — A Retrospective, 1969 – 1994

ART GALLERY OF ONTARIO
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“This is the story of General Idea and the story of what we wanted. We wanted to be famous, glamorous, and rich. That is to say, we wanted to be artists and we knew that if we were famous and glamorous we could say we were artists and we would be.”

— General Idea, excerpt from “Glamour,” FILE Magazine, vol. 3, no. 1, fall 1975. 

The exhibition features 336 works by the groundbreaking multidisciplinary group, including 107 works from the AGO collection, spanning their prolific and influential 25-year career.  

Curated by Paris-based independent curator Frédéric Bonnet, Haute Culture is the first comprehensive retrospective devoted to General Idea, a collaboration between artists AA Bronson, Felix Partz and Jorge Zontal that began Toronto in 1969. The group’s transgressive concepts and provocative imagery challenged social power structures and traditional modes of artistic creation in ever-shifting ways, until Partz and Zontal’s untimely deaths from AIDS-related causes in 1994.  

“General Idea is a truly seminal Canadian artist group whose diverse and increasingly influential production warrants deep and comprehensive consideration,” says Matthew Teitelbaum, the AGO’s Michael and Sonja Koerner Director, and CEO. “We are so pleased to mount an exhibition of their work on this large a scale, as I know that our visitors will find their exuberant and exacting vision to be intensely rewarding.” 

Haute Culture is organized around five themes central to the trio’s production: “the artist, glamour and the creative process”; “mass culture”; “architects/archaeologists”; “sex and reality”; and “AIDS.” In addition to the works on view inside the exhibition, the AGO will install the artists’ two-metre-tall AIDS sculpture at the corner of Dundas West and Beverley streets.  The lacquered metal sculpture, created in 1989, is based on Robert Indiana’s 1970 LOVE sculpture and will be on view throughout the exhibition’s run.

“Through a prolific creation, General Idea’s body of work reveals a complex combination of reality and fiction, and of parody and rigorous cultural critique,” says Bonnet. “Treating the image as a virus that infiltrates every aspect of the real world, the group set out to colonize it, modify it and so present an alternate version of reality. Their visionary influence has only become more apparent with the passage of time.” 

Haute Culture was first exhibited at the Musée d’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris, from February 11 to May 29, 2011. The AGO’s presentation of the exhibition is curated by David Moos, the Gallery’s former curator of modern and contemporary art, and Georgiana Uhlyarik, the AGO’s assistant curator of Canadian art.  

A 224-page hardcover catalogue has been published to coincide with the exhibition. Edited by Bonnet, General Idea features more than 200 colour and black-and-white reproductions and includes contributions from Bonnet, Bronson and Moos, among others. Published by JRP|Ringier and distributed by Distributed Art Publishers, the publication is available at shopAGO for $44. 

Haute Culture: General Idea — A Retrospective, 1969 – 1994 is conceived and organized by the Art Gallery of Ontario in conjunction with the Musée d’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris. The exhibition is generously supported by the Volunteers of the Art Gallery of Ontario, Thomas H. Bjarnason & Woodrow A. Wells and Paul E. Bain & Isa Spalding. Contemporary programming at the AGO is supported by the Canada Council for the Arts.