ZIGGURAT : 1968–1994 HANS ULRICH OBRIST BRONSON AA

ZIGGURAT GENERAL IDEA 1968–1994 4

The Ruins of the 1984 Miss General Pavillion, 1977 ZIGGURAT GENERAL IDEA 1968–1994

AA BRONSON ZIGGURAT AS FRACTAL : THE VISUAL ECONOMY OF GENERAL IDEA

HANS ULRICH OBRIST IN CONVERSATION WITH AA BRONSON

GENERAL IDEA ZIGGURATS

NEW YORK CITY MITCHELL-INNES & NASH This catalogue was published on the occasion All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be used of the exhibition General Idea : Ziggurat, or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written November 30, 2017 to January 13, 2018 permission from the copyright holder.

Mitchell-Innes & Nash ISBN: 978-0-9986312-3-3 534 West 26th Street, New York, NY 10001 Available through DAP/ Distributed Art Publishers 212 744 7400 www.miandn.com 75 Broad Street, Suite 630, New York, NY 10004 Co-published in part by Maureen Paley, London ; Tel. : 212 627 1999 Fax. : 212 627 9484 Esther Schipper, ; and Mai 36, Zurich. Publication © 2017 Mitchell-Innes & Nash Essay © AA Bronson and Hans Ulrich Obrist All works © General Idea

Design : Matthew Polhamus and Fritz Grögel Printing : Phoenix Litho, Philadelphia, PA Publication Director: Cassandra Lozano Editor: Courtney Willis Blair ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank Lucy Mitchell-Innes and David Nash for Agustín Pérez-Rubio, Artistic Director of MALBA, Buenos encouraging me in this endeavor with humor and patience. Aires, who brought attention to the long-neglected Ziggurat I am especially grateful to Hans Ulrich Obrist for his inter- Paintings and championed them in his touring exhibition view, which I know took focused research and attention : General Idea: Tiempo Partido (2016-17). his deep knowledge of General Idea is always inspirational. This project would not have happened without the pa- Courtney Willis Blair and Cassandra Lozano were both key tient and ongoing support of Mark Jan Krayenhoff van de in making this publication happen ; I thank them for diving Leur, my husband, who propelled me in this direction, and into the editorial complications without complaint. Matthew first introduced me to Lucy Mitchell-Innes and David Nash. Polhamus has been a saint in his generous attempts to carry out my vague and contradictory requests in the design of this The book in your hands has been conceived as an hom- tome. Tymberly Canale, Kevin Choe, Lucy Dew, Elizabeth age to the Yale University Press publication of 1960, Katsura: DiSabatino, Robert Grosman, Isabelle Hogenkamp, Jeffrey Tradition and Creation in Japanese Architecture. Designed by Horne, Sheldon Mukamal, Isobel Nash, Josephine Nash, and Herbert Bayer, with texts by Walter Gropius and Kenzo Tange, Peter Tecu, I thank all of you for your part in bringing this and photographs of Katsura Palace by Yasuhiro Ishimoto, the book and the accompanying exhibition into being. book is an important milestone in visual publishing. Hans The Ziggurat Paintings were first shown at the Carmen Ulrich Obrist and I discuss Katsura near the beginning of our Lamanna Gallery, Toronto (1982); Galerie Montenay-Del Sol, interview on page 11: it is the book that marks the beginning (1986); and International with Monument, New York of my interest in book design, visual publishing, and book- (1986). making as community building. As unlikely as it sounds, it led I would like to thank the gallerists who most recently directly to endeavors like General Idea’s FILE Megazine and have been instrumental in bringing General Idea into the the founding of , and, as Hans Ulrich says, it is light: Frédéric Giroux, Paris ; Victor Gisler of Mai 36 Gallery, “a book by architects and artists,” a partnership central to Zurich ; Maureen Paley, London ; and the indefatigable Esther General Idea. Schipper, Berlin. From my own team, I thank Fern Bayer, Fritz Grögel and Sholem Krishtalka. A special thanks goes to — AA Bronson

7 Going Thru the Motions, 1975 ZIGGURAT AS FRACTAL : THE VISUAL ECONOMY OF GENERAL IDEA

Wednesday 18 October, 3 : 50 am Over the next 25 years the leitmotif of the ziggurat was woven into our daily lives. The elaborate semi-fictional reality I am sitting in the dark at 3 : 50 am in my apartment on that we created for ourselves over time was replete with zig- Fasanenstraße in Berlin-Charlottenburg, where artists once gurats, structured by ziggurats, but also decorated with zig- lived when West Berlin was a walled island. From here, my gurats. Our 1984 Miss General Idea Pageant was a platform view into my own past is a distant one. I peer over the bar- presented on a platform of ziggurats ; the 1984 Miss General ricades of time, trying to remember what happened when, Idea Pavillion, our own private (but very public) museum, was where, and to whom. I have promised to write about the zig- framed by ziggurats. Not only was the Pavillion built of ziggu- gurats, from the time when they entered our lives in the late rats, but the floor plan of the Pavillion was structured of inter- sixties, in the first days of what later became General Idea, to locking ziggurats to form 1,984 seats ; the upholstery on those those days frozen in time in 1994, when Felix sat hunched seats, and the carpet on the floor, were all decorated in the over a little desk, drawing ziggurats on a daily basis as his same ziggurat pattern. We invented costumes for the semi- death loomed up about him. The story of the ziggurat is the fictional participants—the infamousVenetian Blind Gowns— story of General Idea. in the form of ziggurated costumes, which functioned also as Felix painted the earliest ziggurat paintings in Winnipeg, architectural studies for the Pavillion. So the ziggurat was a Canada, before he moved to Toronto in the summer of 1969. kind of fractal, existing at every scale. He had returned from a no doubt druggy trip to North I had an acid experience on the floor of our little store- Africa with his friend Steve, and brought with him the ziggu- front at 78 Gerrard Street West, Toronto, our first home, in rat. Whether it was the stepped structures of Mesopotamia 1969, the year of the ziggurat paintings, in which my field of and Egypt or the woven intricacies of tribal carpets is unclear; vision was filled by an interlocking expanse of dancing Donald but the pattern had established itself in his mind. Felix was Ducks, with no negative space. As the ducks danced, they wrestling with painting at the time, doing his best to escape it. filled my complete field of vision. They were, in a sense, just With the early ziggurat paintings he sidestepped many of the a more animated version of the ziggurat paintings. I still hear conventions of painting : no ground (no gesso), no mixing of Felix’s voice in the background, wondering if they should take paints (straight from the can), no fancy artists paints (sign me to the hospital—I was apparently in a coma. But Jorge painter’s paints and house paint), no foreground or back- opted for procrastination, and eventually I emerged from my ground, no subject, no object. The dayglo paint was a sure swamp of dancing ducks/ziggurats. signal of the period : LSD. The brain reduced to dancing cel- In order to weave these ziggurats into our personal his- lular structure where positive and negative space each erase tory and our personal mythology, we realized we had to name the other. them. And it felt right, and good, to name the paintings after

9 10

our beauty queens : Mimi, Miss General Idea 1968, who had we went we completed a second series of ziggurat paintings, brought us all together on the heels of the summer of love ; based on the original drawings of 1968, six squares and five Granada, Miss General Idea 1969, who lived across the street, shaped canvasses, and we gave them extra thickness, that ex- and quickly became part of our gang, and then of our history; tra “object quality” that Jean Christophe Ammann had identi- Honey, Miss General Idea 1970, the star of our first beauty fied as characteristically General Idea. The paintings, built on pageant performance ; and Marcel, Miss General Idea 1971, a four-inch grid, now became four inches thick as well. who we crowned Miss General Idea through to 1984 in order And then began the adventure—quite literally—of our to avoid having to organize another pageant. Pascal was a lives. From 1986 through 1994 we devoted ourselves almost home-less glamour queen who moved in with us in 1971 and entirely to the subject of AIDS, at first through our Image Virus whose multi-octave vocal stylings dominated the 1971 Pag- series of paintings, posters and temporary public installations, eant at the ; we named her “the an- and then through the image of the capsule pill, which pro- drogyne bomb of the scene,” and she too was liferated into vast medical landscapes of AZT or unnamed immortalized by a ziggurat painting, or is it vice versa? One medications. By 1993, we had regrouped back in Toronto, painting remained, horizontal and stolid : we named it after where Felix and Jorge, both now living with AIDS, spent their our Toronto dealer, Carmen Lamanna. These six paintings last days making art : in the Toronto medical system, those were shown, unstretched, pinned to the walls of the Carmen who chose to die at home had the doctors and nurses sent to Lamanna Gallery in 1982. (Two more, the largest, remained them. Our last year was perhaps the most productive year of untitled and rolled up under Felix’s bed, too large for the our twenty-five years together. We knew we didn’t have much gallery walls.) time and we mobilized our forces to actualize our ideas. Every morning Felix retreated to a small desk in a back Friday 20 October, 0 :39 am room where he returned to the theme of the ziggurat. The 34 drawings that remain from that intense period touch on I am sitting in English candy-cane striped pyjamas in the every part of the ziggurat cosmology and legacy: from designs Berlin semi-darkness. On my feet I have heavy traditional Nor- for a ziggurat “No-End Table” and “Zig Planter” to a barrage wegian socks, sent to me by a young Norwegian artist and knit of diagrams for additional ziggurat paintings. Maybe one day for me by his mother. Pattern is generated through weaving, I will complete them on his behalf. knitting, and other activities of the human hand, and so too our ziggurats. Felix brought the ziggurat with him from North — AA Bronson, Berlin, 2017 Africa, but it was already in the new world : in the arts of Navajo or Salish Nation, for example, and before them in the architecture, ceramics and even the cosmology of the Aztecs. After 1984, we found ourselves strangely restless. We had made a pact to stay together until 1984, but when that year came, we discovered we had no reason to part. We found our- selves treading water, reviewing old projects, revisiting in- complete ideas. We moved to New York in 1986, but before CONTENTS

Acknowledgements 5 Ziggurat as Fractal : the Visual Economy of General Idea 7 by AA Bronson Hans Ulrich Obrist in Conversation with AA Bronson 11 Ziggurats 27 General Idea Biography 75 List of Illustrations 76 Reconstructing Futures (detail) HANS ULRICH OBRIST IN CONVERSATION WITH AA BRONSON

HUO : Our first interview happened on the move. This is our first interview where we sit. I wanted to begin at the begin- ning. Obviously you’re doing this interview for a book and books play an important role in your life. So, I wanted—in a meta way—to talk a little bit about books and what books mean to you and how you got into books. Not only have you made amazing books but you’ve also been instrumental in getting artist books as they deserve, out of the ghetto. They are very marginalized and they are such an important art form. The NY Art Book Fair and Printed Matter and Art Metropole: you’ve been instrumental more than anyone else in getting these books out to give them more visibility. By the time people read this conversation, they’ll have a Katsura : Tradition and Creation in Japanese book in their hands. So let’s talk about books. Architecture, New Haven : Yale University I went to see the MoMA re-hang about two, three years Press, 1960 ago and Kathy Halbreich and Christophe Cherix had put a Grapefruit book in the center of the collection ex- Eventually the woman in the bookstore hid the book hibition. The curator made this statement that Grapefruit is because she didn’t want anybody else to get it. Every Saturday as important as a painting or a sculpture by anyone in the I would come in and look at this book and then back under collection. the counter it would go. It’s such a physical book. It was re- AAB : That was the first artist book I ever bought, Grapefruit. ally the first book I came into contact with that was extremely aesthetic. It has a very coarse linen cover. The photographs HUO: Really ? are completely abstract. It is as if the photographs were taken AAB: The first art book that was especially important to me, by Mondrian. Incredible book. I still look at it 57 years later ! the first book that I ever purchased was Katsura : Tradition and Creation in Japanese Architecture by Kenzo Tange with HUO : You kept it ? an introduction by Walter Gropius and photos by Yaushiro AAB : (Laughs) Yes. Ishimoto. The book was designed by Herbert Bayer and pub- lished by Yale University Press in 1960. I was 14 years old, and HUO : That’s a book by architects and artists. I saved up my money for months to buy that book. AAB : Well, I studied architecture you know. My mother says

13 14

that I declared at the age of three that I wanted to be an artist. But I ended up going to architecture school rather than art school, because I felt that art was too selfish and architecture was for the benefit of the people.

HUO : Architecture is collaborative. AAB : Collaborative but as I found out, architecture was mostly about working in an office. So, in architecture school I lasted less than two years.

HUO : So, you’re in architecture school. Your love of books is already there, your book fetish. When did your art epiphany happen ? Do you remember the day when art came to you or you came to art ? AAB : I do. I dropped out of university with a classmates and we started a commune, a free school and an underground newspaper. It was through that paper that I first came into contact with and with the International Situ- ationists. One of the earliest covers I designed for The Loving Couch Press was an illustration of Yoko Ono. A year later I found The Loving Couch Press, vol. 1, no. 9, Winnipeg : 1968 myself living in Toronto and then General Idea began in ’69. I found Yoko’s book not at an art bookstore but in a AAB : I guess it’s the program to The 1970 Miss General Idea massive heap at a mass-market bookstore. I think they were Pageant. In our conceptual way, we actually produced it in ’71, thinking of Beatlemania ! So Yoko Ono’s Grapefruit was the but pretended we produced it in ’70. So it was a retroactive first artist book that I bought. Grapefruit was a big influence. publication. Already we were playing with time. You can see that in the early work of General Idea. HUO : That was an artist book ? Can you tell me about it ? HUO : How ? Can you describe ? AAB : In 1970, we were invited to produce an event for the AAB : Well, I think it was the idea of an instructional artwork. Festival of Underground Theatre in Toronto, a gigantic three- When nothing actually has to happen or be physical or mani- week festival that included groups as diverse as the Charles fest itself as an object or as a performance, but it’s just a set of Ludlam’s Theater of the Ridiculous, The Living Theater and instructions. The idea that art can be completely conceptual- the Cockettes. Our project was called What Happened ? after ized and invisible and didn’t have to be in the physical realm ’s play of the same name, and the centerpiece to was very interesting for me. its rather sprawling structure was something called The 1970 Miss General Idea Pageant. Our little book, produced the fol- HUO : When was your first book as General Idea ? lowing year, glamorizes and inflates what the performance 15

XXX Voto (for the Spirit of Miss General Idea), Montreal /Toronto : 1995 really was and turns it into something real when in fact it was HUO : Can you tell me about it ? extremely marginal. AAB : It’s like a little bible. It has a black linen cover and it So, the book creates the event and the history in a kind has a ribbon. I think it’s 64 pages, and it has only Klein blue, of dry and documentary—maybe a little bit silly—way. But it’s fluorescent pink, and black print. It has some drawings but certainly not an art book in the normal way. It’s very much a mostly it’s just text. Certain pieces of text are picked out in piece of ephemera. either pink or blue. It’s based on the text that wrote to Santa Rita of Cascia. It’s based on the text that he wrote but HUO : What’s your favorite General Idea book ? Artist book ? it’s transformed into a thank you to the Spirit of Miss General Your own Grapefruit ? Idea for bringing us together and for allowing us to work to- AAB : Well since we have talked about General Idea’s first gether for 25 years and so on and so forth book, I would say our last book called XXX Voto. That’s par- tially because it was the last and it’s a kind of goodbye work HUO : How many books have you done ? Because there hasn’t where we say goodbye to working together. So, it has a very been a meta-book, the book of all your books. personal meaning for me. AAB : There is a catalogue raisonné of General Idea’s editions and books published in 2003, but of course that does not 16

include my own production. There are 251 editions but I’m always closed and there was always the infamous little sign on not sure how many of those are books. And then there are all the door that said “Back in 5 minutes.” the things I’ve done since then, yes. I think for myself, since then I’ve probably done maybe another ten books or so. HUO : That’s amazing! AAB : (Laughs) It wasn’t a Post-it because they hadn’t been HUO : So, the General Idea catalogue raisonné doesn’t exist invented yet, but it would be a Post-it today. yet? AAB : No, we’re working on it. It’ll be published by JRP/Ringier HUO : Yes, you have to do it afterwards. I found a lot of inter- in Zurich. It’s vast, and it includes all the General Idea books, views with you where you explain the beginnings through this of course. show, that there was a misunderstanding because the gallery thought it was your name in that group show. HUO : Just to end this first chapter of the introduction, it would AAB : The gallery was called A Space. be interesting to tell us about the beginnings of General Idea because you started with a misunderstanding. Yet it wasn’t a HUO : You came up with the proposal called General Idea, misunderstanding because you had that desire to work more and you were interested in corporate anonymity. But what I collaboratively. I think it’s also interesting that somehow that never found in interviews is the exact explanation of the day whole experience of having gone into architecture, wanting to and the minute and the context where you found that word ; do something in terms of society, never left you General Idea, because then of course it became the title of AAB : No, it never left me. It’s true ; it’s true. We began by ac- everything. cident because we had a mutual friend who wanted to keep AAB : To tell you the truth, I don’t remember. We were really us all together. She rented a small house, a storefront really, in interested in media theory which of course was big in the downtown Toronto, and about seven of us moved in together. sixties and especially in Marshall McLuhan’s Toronto and We were all unemployed, so we began to entertain our- the idea of what is a “general idea,” what makes a general- selves by collecting garbage from the streets and turning the ization and in what way could an artwork be a general idea ? garbage into fake shops. One of the first shops that we didn’t Or a general idea of an artwork ? It’s something that [Joseph] open was a bookstore for nurses’ romance novels. Kosuth and many other artists were doing at the time, but I don’t actually remember where that title came from. I remem- HUO : So, that’s unrealized ? ber the project, but I don’t remember how we came to the AAB : No, no it was realized, but the door was always locked, word, to the expression, to the title: General Idea. so nobody could ever get in. We found boxes and boxes of discarded nurse romance novels on the street. This is ’69. So HUO : Can you tell us about the piece ? we found all these boxes of nurse romances on the street and AAB : We put an ad on the radio asking people to phone in we put them in the window. We had a shop window into our to participate in a project. When they phoned living room, and we made a display. There was a nurses’ res- us, we took a record of their home address and told them we idence around the corner from us. The word got around ; all would visit them without warning. If they were home, they the nurses came and would look in the window, but it was were home and they’d participate, and if they weren’t home, Installing Betty’s at General Idea’s storefront at 78 Gerrard St. West, Toronto, 1969 Line Project, 1970 19

they were out of the project. We rented a car and drove in the HUO : But also the framing device implies a form of limita- same sequence they had phoned no matter what part of the tion, a constraint. city they were in. We drove in the same sequence to the vari- AAB : Well, it’s a role. It was definitely a role. We played a ous people’s homes and took a photo of them sitting in front of certain kind of role. I find that these days a lot of artists play their house. Then, we got a big map of Toronto, and we drew the part of academics. I don’t really understand why. I don’t the line that resulted from that trip on the map. We took rope mean that they shouldn’t be interested in academic subjects or and created a model of that line to scale, big enough that all they shouldn’t teach or anything like that, but it seems to me the people were invited to the opening and they each got to that their behavior becomes a sort of performance of being in hold the knot in the rope that was their home. Then, they all academia. What we were trying to do was to perform being stood out on the street and drew the resulting line in chalk artists in quotation marks. We were interested in clichés, let’s underneath them. This was their relationship to each other say: the cliché of the artist, the cliché of an artwork, the cliché through the radio ad. of a gallery, the cliché of a museum, and so on.

HUO : Like a cartography. HUO : I was looking at the ziggurat works, which are the AAB : After the opening, we brought the rope inside, and the theme of this book. The ziggurat has an architectural dimen- rope was exhibited together with the Polaroid photos of the sion. It’s your connection to architecture. When does this participants and the map of Toronto and so on. We call it The ziggurat epiphany start ? A ziggurat is a massive structure. It Line Project now, but at the time, it was called General Idea. comes from ancient Mesopotamia and the rest of the Iranian plateau. It has the form of a terraced compound of succes- HUO : You often said that the idea of General Idea was a fram- sively receding levels, so it’s almost pyramidal. ing device, so obviously Duchamp talks about this. [Philip AAB : It’s also Aztec, of course, but also Navajo. The ziggurat Gilbert] Hamerton always said we only remember the exhi- is a basic form you get when you weave. Any culture that has bitions that invent a display feature or framing device. What’s weaving develops this idea of the ziggurat. the meaning for you of General Idea as a framing device ? AAB : Well, because we were a group, especially back then, HUO : How did General Idea’s ziggurat theme begin? Obvi- the idea that a group could be an artist was something that ously it’s Sumerian. It’s Elamite. It’s Assyrian. I looked at all many people refused to accept. But the way that we thought these different ziggurats last night, and it’s always a platform. of it was that the general idea of the three us, stood in for the It’s interesting to go from the framing device to the platform. artist, that we were a representation of the artist. We were a It’s sometimes oval, sometimes rectangular, sometimes square. kind of a framing device we framed for our own devices. So, AAB : We were brought up in the post-war period, and we we started to take pictures of ourselves dressed as artists with were interested in the idea of progress and images of progress. berets or paintbrushes. We could play the part of the artist, We didn’t believe in progress as a concept. We were interested but we were more interested in the artist as a figure in the cul- in how it dominated the post-war imagination. If you look at tural landscape. We were interested in how that landscape was business magazines from the ’50s, for example Fortune Mag- changing. We weren’t actually so interested in the traditional azine, the advertising features a lot of skyscrapers, which are role of the artist. always stepped. This image of the ziggurat always dominates. 20

It was an image of power or even male power. It is repeated gan General Idea, this image of the ziggurat seemed to creep over and over again. It is coupled with images of architects into everything we did. At a certain point we decided retro- and CEOs, usually in groups of three weirdly enough, at draft- actively to claim those paintings as General Idea paintings but ing tables or on a building site. The plans on their construc- they’re actually made by Felix. They originally had names that tion drawings are always some sort of ziggurat monument were the names of First Nation tribes, of indigenous tribes. or a tower with a ziggurat on top on the ziggurated skyline. One of the ways that we tried to brand them as General Idea In that period of the ’50s, the ziggurat came to represent the works was to give them the names of the various Miss General future, the strength of progress and technological change and Ideas. The first Miss General Idea was supposedly in 1968. the male power of construction. HUO : Can you tell me of the epiphany of Miss General Idea ? HUO : What is this ? That leads us to The Miss General Idea Pavillion. AAB : This is from an ad in Fortune Magazine from around AAB : The first pageant was in 1970. At that pageant we in- 1950, a ziggurat tower from around 1950. cluded a Miss General Idea ’68 and ’69 as judges, so we back- dated the whole project to ’68 as the very important year of HUO : The archeologist Harriet Crawford said “It’s usually the Paris Riots. Then in 1971, we chose a Miss General Idea assumed that the ziggurat supported a shrine” and the evi- who would reign until 1984. We decided it was too much dence for that is in Herodotus. There’s no physical evidence, work to do a pageant every year. From now on, we thought, but that’s what people assume. Of course, the recent idea that we’ll do rehearsals for the 1984 Pageant, and then there will the ziggurat is a kind of a platform, like a display feature for be an ultimate Miss General Idea in 1984, which, of course, an exhibition on top of which something else can be place is there never was. another meaning. AAB : Yes, exactly, a podium. HUO : When did you have an epiphany of The Pavillion ? It’s a very interesting idea of architecture because there were a lot HUO : Are these the very first paintings where the ziggurat of these questions at that time. The moment when you start is appears ? also the moment of radical architecture. It’s the moment also AAB : Yes, there are some previous studies for those paintings of Archigram. It’s the moment of Metabolism in Japan. but those are the earliest ones. AAB : Well, I was a big fan of all these people. I was completely immersed in the work of the Metabolists and Archigram, and HUO : Can you tell me about the genesis of those, because a little later Super Studio. Archigram also had their magazine, they’re from ’68 ? of course. They were very sensitive to publishing as a part of AAB : Yes, a very important year for General Idea and our their practice. The same year that I dropped out of architec- hypothetical year of formation. ture school, I published a fake magazine called Junkigram—it only ever had the one issue. It was that kind of a moment. HUO : These first ziggurat paintings have names always. It’s “Carmen,” “Granada,” “Honey,” “Marcel.” HUO : In this fantastic moment, you came up with the epiph- AAB : The earliest paintings are by Felix [Partz]. When we be- any of The Miss General Idea Pavillion. It’s a radical idea of 21

Showcard 2-015 (Slow Zoom Into Ziggurat Tower), 1975 22

The 1970 Miss General Idea Pageant, 1970. Granada Gazelle, Miss General Idea 1969, crowns Miss Honey as Miss General Idea 1970

The Ruins of the 1984 Miss General Idea Pavillion (a. k. a. The Burning of the 1984 Miss General Idea Pavillion), 1977 23

architecture because it’s not occupying. It’s dispersed. Do you remember the moment ? AAB : It was just after The 1971 Miss General Idea Pageant, toward the end of 1971 and around the time we began to pro- duce FILE Megazine. Much as General Idea was a represen- tation of the artist, The Pavillion was a representation of the museum. Our idea was that The Pavillion could take shape as a series of installations. When an installation was installed in a museum, we would claim that museum as a wing of The 1984 Miss General Idea Pavillion. So, The Pavillion was assembled from a series of exhibitions. Our first opportunity to actually install a “room from The Pavillion” in a museum setting did not come until 1978 when Jean Christophe Ammann invited us to install Reconstructing Futures at the Kunsthalle Basel. In the meantime, there were many unrealized works. There were many projects using the ziggurat. For example, there’s this labyrinth, Tunnel of Love, which has a spiraling ziggurat form. There’s another labyrinth, which is a double ziggurat where they wrap around each other. The Seating Plan for the 1984 Miss General Idea Pavillion has 1,984 seats. There are the The Tunnel of Love, 1986 VB Gowns from the 1975 performance, Going thru the Mo- tions, which we conceived as both performance costumes and HUO : It’s kind of fascinating that there’s a return of that zig- architectural studies for The Pavillion. gurat motif. It migrates. By 1977, we realized we might have to build The 1984 AAB : Over and over. It just keeps transforming in different Miss General Idea Pavillion ; 1984 was only seven years away. ways. So, we introduced a new wrinkle into the narrative, which is that The Pavillion would burn down during the 1984 Pageant HUO : What is your definition of the ziggurat ? What does it and before the winner was announced, so we would never stand for, for you ? have to have a winner. For our performance/installation, the AAB : It’s such a basic form. It can be used for anything. It Ruins of the 1984 Miss General Idea Pavillion, we found an becomes a signature device. In the early ’80s when we became abandoned ruins of a factory outside Toronto, really just the archeologists, we were creating paintings that played the part foundations. We cleared it away to a ziggurat shape with the of the ruins from The Pavillion. We introduced a lot of ziggu- help of students and set smoke bombs. We borrowed a heli- rats as architectural borders and so on. The ziggurats cropped copter from the local news channel, and we shot a lot of foot- up everywhere. When we began the poodle works, they were age of the burning remains of The Pavillion, which was later all situated in a kind of ziggurated context. incorporated into the video Hot Property. 24

Poster edition for Going Thru the Notions, 1975 25

Portrait of General Idea in Reconstructing Futures, 1977 26

HUO : That’s interesting that it’s a signature, I’ve never thought of that. AAB : It is like the handprint on the cave paintings. It was our version of the handprint.

HUO : It also goes back to what you said about Yves Klein because Raymond Hains, the French artist, once told me that the artist personified abstractions. With Klein, it’s the blue. Maybe then we can say that the ziggurat is General Idea’s per- sonified abstraction? Almost like a logo. AAB : Like branding but more subtle than a branding.

HUO : It appears in the sketches for The Pavillion, and maybe Cornucopia: Fragments from the Room of the Unknown it’s interesting to talk a little bit more, before we talk about the Function in the Villa dei Misteri of the 1984 Miss Gen- destruction of The Pavillion, to talk about the genesis, about eral Idea Pavillion, 1982-83 the construction, because you used it for several exhibitions. I think it’s a super relevant idea in terms of architecture. Now, entire installation uses a ziggurat base and ziggurats feature your architecture doesn’t occupy space, but you disperse the in the video. building in a way. There’s also The Colour Bar Lounge and also The Bou- AAB : My favorite unrealized project is the labyrinth from The tique from the 1984 Miss General Idea Pavillion. We had our Pavillion, the Tunnel of Love, which was to take the form of a first museum show at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam ziggurated spiral. We first proposed it for a big group exhibi- in 1979, where we first showed The Colour Bar Lounge. The tion in Montreal, which took place in an abandoned shopping museum had a fantastic gallery shop, but they refused to sell center. The Tunnel of Love was a plywood labyrinth with glory our editions. We thought, “Well, we should have our own gal- holes, so it was like some sort of gay sex fantasy. The exhibi- lery shop and then every time we have a museum exhibition tion refused the project on the basis that it was not wheelchair we can have our own gallery shop as part of the show.” So a accessible. few months later we showed The Boutique from the 1984 Miss Reconstructing Futures in 1977 is the Green Room from General Idea Pavillion in Toronto, and from then on it became The Pavillion but it’s wallpapered with images of The Ruins of part of our museum exhibitions. Although it’s been presented the Miss General Idea Pavillion, the ziggurat ruins from the in many, many museums, only once have they allowed us to same year. sell multiples from The Boutique. The installation is participa- Then there’s the Cornucopia installation that is owned tory, of course. It includes a salesperson and it needs people by SFMoMA [San Francisco ]. That shopping to be complete. So, it is always a little bit castrated. takes the form of a museological display, showing fragments It’s interesting because usually the museum shop has a mo- from the destruction of The Pavillion. It comes with a docu- nopoly on sales in the institution. mentary video, which mimics a museum documentary. The The Boutique from the 1984 Miss General Idea Pavillion, 1980 28

HUO : So they don’t want you to enter that economy ? AAB : Exactly, that was something we hadn’t anticipated when we made that piece. There’s actually three boutiques. The very first was in one of the shows we did when we first moved in together in 1969, called The Belly Store. That was immediately after the nurses romance bookstore and it consisted of a sales counter with stacks of plastic bottles filled with cotton batting. There was a label on each bottle that said “Belly Food.” It was a kind of general idea of a product. It was a generic product with our name on it—it’s actually before General Idea so it doesn’t say General Idea. The bottles were arranged in ziggu- rats on the counter, the typical old-fashioned way to organize Jorge Zontal at the counter of The Belly Store offering canned goods or whatever. bottles of George Saia’s Belly Food, 1969 HUO : That’s another idea of the ziggurat ! AAB : The Belly Store was open for one month, and we sold not a single bottle of belly food. Nobody wanted it.

HUO : A bit like Duchamp’s failed Rotorelief booth at the [Concours Lépine] trade fair. AAB : In 1980, when we did The Boutique in the shape of a dollar sign, we took that old project and put a new spin on it. By then, we had quite a lot of multiples and publications and FILE Megazines and so on, all of which were available in The Boutique.

George Saia’s Belly Food, 1969 ( continued on page 57 ) 29

ZIGGURATS 30

Drafting Board and Hand of the Spirit, 1974 31

Untitled (Skwah, Skway, Skulkayn), 1968 32

Untitled (Potawatomi, Pasqua, Penelakut), 1968

Floor Plan for 1984 Folding Chairs in Four Colors, ca. 1972 33

Bottleneck Entrance to the 1984 Miss General Idea Pavillion, ca. 1972

Untitled (Mistawasis), 1968 34

Untitled (Squamish), 1968 Granada, 1968-69 Marcel, 1968-69 Honey, 1968-69 Mimi, 1968-69 Pascal, 1968-69

Carmen, 1968-69 Untitled (Ziggurat Painting # 2), 1968-69

1968 General Idea Shaped Ziggurat Painting # 1, 1986 1968 General Idea Shaped Ziggurat Painting # 2, 1986 1968 General Idea Shaped Ziggurat Painting # 4, 1986 1968 General Idea Shaped Ziggurat Painting # 5, 1986 1968 General Idea # 1, 1986 1968 General Idea # 6, 1986 1968 General Idea # 2, 1986 51

Ziggurat Test Tube Holder, 1980 52

Luxon VB with Sandy Stagg, 1973

VB Gown from the 1984 Miss General Idea Pageant, Urban Armour for the Future, 1975 53

Sandy Stagg and the Miss General Idea Shoe, 1975 54

Proposed Seating Arrangement (Form Follows Fiction), 1975 55

Miss General Idea Glove Pattern (Form Follows Fetish), 1975 56

Luxon Louvre (Ambiguity Without Contradiction), 1975

Dr. Brute Colonnade and Drop Ceiling Detail, 1975

The Ruins of the 1984 Miss General Pavillion, 1977 59

HANS ULRICH OBRIST IN CONVERSATION WITH AA BRONSON pian flying hearts but in the red, green, and blue color scheme continued from page 26 of our AIDS logo. Here is an unrealized project: The Rotating Doors of the Future. It’s the entrance to The Pavillion, and it’s made by or- HUO : Are there other examples ? ganizing a series of rotating doors into a ziggurat plan. If you AAB : This is the Luxon VB. It’s a venetian blind made of go through one door on one end, then on the other end you double-sided mirror so that the reflections of inside and out- exit by seven different doors, so there’s a kind of labyrinth of side are collaged together. rotating doors that you can find your way through. But if you go in the other direction, it creates a kind of traffic jam be- HUO : That was always something you wanted to have in The cause there’s seven people coming in at once and there’s only Pavillion. Can you tell me about that because it’s that two- one exit door. That’s a little bit based on Duchamp’s Door: 11, sided mirror ? What prompted that idea ? Was it to multiply rue Larrey of 1927. the point of views ? AAB : Well, there are two aspects. One is, if you set the vene- tian blind slats at forty-five degrees, reflections of the inside and the outside collide. We were very interested at that time in the subject of borderlines and in particular borderlines be- tween inside and outside, between nature and culture. Our project Borderline Cases already appears in FILE in 1973. And this venetian blind represents that borderline. And when you photograph it, it fragments reality and creates a lot of ziggu- rated visual forms. That’s another kind of ziggurat.

HUO : Anything else here in terms of unrealized projects ? Rotating Doors of the Future, 1982-84 Or realized ? AAB : This is the third boutique, Boutique Coeurs Volants, Here is The Armory from the Miss General Idea Pavil- based on Marcel Duchamp’s design for a magazine cover, the lion, which is an armorial hall full of crests. These big crest flying hearts. paintings are like a grammar book or a dictionary of General Idea’s various emblems. There’s this little model here for it. The HUO : Is that a ziggurat ? thing about the armory as a cultural form is that it presents AAB : It’s a ziggurated form in the shape of a heart, yes. For the first visual language of Western culture, which is heraldry. me, it’s a ziggurat. One of the things we were working on at The armorial hall was, in a way, the first art gallery. Of course, the time of Jorge’s and Felix’s deaths in 1994 was this idea of we incorporated the ziggurat into many of the designs, but in The Boutique Coeurs Volants. And it was supposed to be full of fact, the ziggurat is a pattern that you find in heraldry anyway, the most standard museum gift shop items possible—mugs, usually with rampant lions on each side of it. It has a history t-shirts—but all imprinted with our version of their Ducham- as a heraldic form. Here it is on our box of cigars, Sigarbox. Luxon VB with Ashram Rrac, 1973 61

HUO : What about the titles: Expulsion from the Cornucopia, Houndstooth Virus, Passion over Reason, Third Degree, they all have very special titles. AAB : They do. It’s our fascination with the idea of the cliché. Each title is a collision of images and ideas and words. That was always our preferred kind of title, titles that you could read in various ways. By 1986 there was already the specter of AIDS on the horizon, so some of these pieces are related to that.

HUO : How do the heraldic works link to AIDS ? Sigarbox, 1985 AAB : This one is called the Houndstooth Virus. This repeating pattern around the poodle is a houndstooth pattern, a tradi- HUO : As a teenager in the ’80s, I grew up in Switzerland. The tional textile pattern, but here it’s like a virus. It’s like a bug or ziggurat heraldic one of the first things of yours I had seen in an insect, and one feels that it is replicating. The poodle has the ’80s. It was actually at STAMPA gallery in Basel. three tails to represent General Idea. So, it’s General Idea in an AAB : We showed a group of the small crests at STAMPA in environment of this virus. That’s probably the most important 1986. one in terms of the relationship to AIDS. It prefigures every- thing that came after. HUO : When did the heraldic series start ? AAB : We came to Amsterdam in ‘79 for three months to HUO : It prefigures all theAIDS paintings ? produce our video Test Tube, and we were invited to various AAB : It does. Visually maybe not, but in terms of the concept, places to give talks. Spending that much time in Europe for absolutely. the first time, going to all these little towns in the Nether- lands, we became aware of the heraldic emblems of each HUO : What’s the meaning of this year, 1984 ? You said often town, that each town had its own flag and its own crest. Each that from the beginning you set yourself that date as an ex- family had its own crest. This made a huge impression on us, piry date. Cedric Price said architecture should have an expiry because there’s no equivalent in North America. The closest date. thing might be corporate branding, but it’s not a language. AAB : It’s based on George Orwell’s book, 1984. We started Heraldry tells a story which has a narrative, which is also in- working together in 1969 and our idea was to find some sort teresting. So, we began to develop these heraldic devices in of end date. Whenever you write a contract with somebody, it the early ’80s. We completed The Armory from the Miss Gen- has to have an end date. It can’t go on to eternity. So in a way eral Idea Pavillion installation in 1986, and it was first shown it was our informal contract with each other. We pledged to in its complete form, 40 paintings, at the Albright-Knox Art work together until 1984, then we gave ourselves permission Gallery in Buffalo. to disband and do other things. But as the years rolled by, we became more and more like one person. When 1984 arrived, 62

Expulsion from the Cornucopia, 1985 Passion Over Reason, 1986 Third Degree, 1986 63

Houndstooth Virus, 1986

The Armoury of the 1984 Miss General Idea Pavillion, 1986 64

it seemed like there was really no reason to break up. It was differentiated them from the earlier paintings by making the just our reality that we were a group of three at that point. The depth of the stretcher equal to one unit in the ziggurat. So, meaning of 1984 had dissolved. Mind you, in the meantime, we made the ziggurats into three-dimensional elements. The the theme of Orwell’s book was rapidly becoming true. His paintings became architectural devices. We produced those in vision of society was looming around us already at this time. ’86, as an homage to ’68. Our Orwellian year of 1984 had already gone by, and HUO : Surveillance ? from ’84 to ’86, there was a period for us that was a hiatus. We AAB : Yes, surveillance and there’s a study for the surveillance had no idea what we were doing. So, we invited projects to system in this Miss General Idea Pavillion. keep ourselves treading water, to try and figure out what we were doing. One of the projects we developed in that period HUO : Can you tell me about this ? was to recreate these early paintings that hadn’t been carried AAB : Yeah, it’s not known at all. We came across it a couple out, but to produce them in a more architectural form. of days ago when we were working on the catalogue raisonné. It consists of 12 or 16 small photographs, which are all taken HUO : The paintings stand out of the wall into space. from a television monitor, and they show the different rooms AAB : Yes, they’re four inches deep, and the ziggurat itself is of The Pavillion seen through the television, through the vi- on a four-inch grid. So they go into three dimensions. Part of sual noise of the monitor. They’re set into a grid of aluminum, the reason was to give them a stronger object-quality. I think which almost has a feeling of a jail cell. The idea was at some even the ’68 ones have a pretty strong object-quality, but the point to create a bigger piece, a video installation, but that ’86 ones are emphasized enormously. And then in ’93 and ’94, never happened. Felix again became totally obsessed with these ziggurat forms at the end of his life, and he started drawing more and more HUO : So that’s another unrealized project ? The surveillance of these ziggurats. video installation. You have so many ! AAB : I know. There’s a lot more, I’m sure. HUO : So it’s the beginning and the end of his life. AAB : I think there are another 35 proposed paintings at the HUO : So the ziggurat is your personified abstraction and it end of his life that have never been realized. migrates through all the different mediums and through all the different works. It also goes beyond 1984 particularly HUO : Did he ever tell you why the ziggurats ? through these heraldic works. Then the whole body of work AAB : They are like visual puzzles in a way. The placement of about AIDS, which is an entire decade of your work, that’s less the colors is like placing colors on a map. It’s like doing a jigsaw connected to the ziggurat. Does the ziggurat pop up again ? puzzle. You have to find a sequence and the way the patterns AAB : The ziggurat does pop up again, just before the first interrelate and so on. When Felix was a student in art school, AIDS paintings. The ziggurat paintings of 1968-69 were orig- he took a year off and went to Morocco. When he came back inally drawings. Some of them were realized in ’68. In ’86, after spending time in North Africa and finding these patterns we decided to complete two more series from the original everywhere he went, he realized that the same patterns are ev- drawings, so I think we did another 11 ziggurat paintings. We ident in North American native culture, as well. For example, Tomas Arana and VB Gown 5 in the Giardini, Venice, 1980 66 67

VB Gown: Massing Study for the 1984 Miss General Idea Pavillion, 1977 68

Showcard 2-091 (The Spirit (to herself)), 1979 69

Navajo rugs. That’s when he started to really obsess about these ziggurated form. It was a very common thing to find in thrift forms. Also there’s a whole thing about negative and positive shops back then. We kept looking at that thing, and then the space. These patterns fit together in such a way that there’s idea came up for a rehearsal for The Miss General Idea Pag- no negative space ; there’s only positive space. This seemed to eant. How do we mask the identities of the participants ? We fascinate him. don’t know in advance who the participants will be but this is a rehearsal for 1984. We thought, we’ll just put these lamp- HUO : There’s also no foreground and no background. There’s shades over their heads. The idea of wearing a lampshade at no perspective. a party is also a cliché in post-war North American culture AAB : I suppose they are typical problems of abstract art of anyway: the husband gets drunk and wears the lampshade the period. The canvas is not gessoed. It’s unprepared, just raw at the party. canvas. So, the paint is like a stain. The actual paint he used was very conceptual: one color was artist acrylic ; one was HUO : It became a gown. It’s like walking buildings. It always raw canvas; one was something that was then called Designer connects to your architecture. Paint, which was a house latex but in more vivid colors, and AAB : The architecture thing keeps coming up. You know that the last one was a house paint. So, it was a mixture of art ingre- famous photograph from 1931 of William van Alen dressed dients and domestic ingredients, high culture and low culture. as the Chrysler building—there’s seven men in architectural costumes of the empire state building and so on at the Van HUO : That’s a very important thing to understand—that the Alen Institute Beaux Arts Ball. That photo, which we found Moroccan and then the Native American come together, that in LIFE Magazine, was a big influence, the idea of dressing up it appears in so many different geographies and cultures. It as a building. seems to be a pattern that connects. It’s truly global. Another kind of appearance of the ziggurat the VB Gowns. The gown always reminded me of the triad, of the ballet, of Schlemmer. AAB : Yes, I’m a big Oskar Schlemmer fan, I have to admit.

HUO : Can you tell me about the epiphany of the gown and how the ziggurat gown came about ? Because it connects to The Pavillion. AAB : In the early ’70s, because our life was so filled with all these ziggurats all the time, people would give us things that Burning Ziggurat (detail), 1968 used that image. I have a tin box for candies in black, aqua and pink ziggurats probably from the ’30s, probably a deco HUO : Early in the interview we talked about ’68. There’s one candy box. That was sitting by Felix’s bedside for his entire project that is unknown to me which anticipates by many life, that tin box. Another thing that somebody gave us was years the burning of The Pavillion. It’s the burning ziggurats. one of those American lamps from the ’40s with a black jag- It’s a project of Ron Gabe ? uar base and the lampshade made of venetian blind slats in a AAB : That’s Felix, yes. 70

HUO : Can you tell me about that ? AAB : Yes, the fin of the shark. This comes out of the mail art AAB : He had this idea that he could make three-dimen- scene at the time, and artists like in New York sional vacuum-formed ziggurats, and then fit them together and Image Bank in , who were all in communica- to recreate his paintings and perhaps spray paint them from tion with each other. A Vancouver artist by the name of Glenn the inside to make the colors. But because of the nature of Lewis formed the New York Corre-Sponge-Dance School vacuum-formed plastic, it doesn’t form exactly square cor- based on Ray Johnson’s New York Correspondence School, ners, and they wouldn’t fit together properly. In disgust, he and he was organizing water ballet. He had people wearing burned them as a kind of statement about the whole project. bathing caps in the shape of shark fins. This was, for him, a In the process he documented it, and it became another ver- form of mail art because he would involve artists from the sion, another project. It’s funny actually how important that mail art scene—they would come together to participate in was to us because we had no idea what it was going to become. his swimming extravaganzas. It’s a reference to that. There’s a point in 1971 where we made a book of all our most important proposals that hadn't really yet been realized . Ev- HUO : Then there is another unrealized project here early erything was un-realized at that point. on, Drawings Towards the Pavillion, also ’72, ’71. You literally wanted to propose buildings. You proposed building designs. HUO : So you did a book of your unrealized work ? You went back to architecture. Can you explain these build- AAB : An edition of two, but yes, we did. It was titled the 1971 ings to me ? They’re like fortresses. Can you tell me about this General Idea Tour de Force. That series of four photographs idea of buildings ? Did you consider building buildings ? was in that book. God, I’d like to be able to pull that book to- AAB : We did think about it, but there never seemed to be gether again. It would be wonderful to be able to do it. any avenue towards it, so it kind of petered out. If you think of a building like a memory, these are a kind of mirage, this HUO : Where is it ? kind of dream building of what The Miss General Idea Pavil- AAB : Well, it’s all been taken apart. I have the cover. It was all lion might be like. original photos just in loose leaf binders. HUO : They were then dispersed ? HUO : It makes me think of the architecture of Louis Kahn AAB : Well, yes, but I think I can probably find most of them. in Bangladesh, which at the same time connects to antiquity They’re in the General Idea archive. and to the archaic. That’s the power of Kahn, that it’s modern yet it could be of another time. And then the ziggurat mi- HUO : Well that would be the ultimate answer to my question, grates from buildings into very mundane objects like a cock- what is your unrealized project ? tail holder. It goes from macro to micro. Like a fractal. AAB : Oh, yes, to actually publish that book would be fan- AAB : It was our version of a fractal. It was a picture of reality tastic. that works at any scale.

HUO : Another thing from ’72, that’s another ziggurat mo- HUO : Beautiful. A fractal is a curve or figure where each part ment, is this Miss General Idea Pavillion shark. Can you ex- has the same statistical character as the whole. I interviewed plain that ? The tale of the shark ? Benoit Mandelbrot, and he explained to me that he once 71

Phase 1 of the 1984 Miss General Idea Pavillion with Shark Fin Weather Vane, ca. 1975

Proposed Building Design, 1979 Liquid Assets, 1980 73

entered a classroom and the black board had not been washed artist books. Of course this is the time when the conceptual properly and then he suddenly saw fractals. The ziggurat is and Fluxus artists and everyone is producing all these books your fractal. and editions. We had a philosophy of trying to reach differ- AAB : It is. It really is. ent audiences through libraries, through bookstores, through different kinds of venues to send these objects out into the HUO : That can almost be the conclusion but I have a few world. Printed Matter was started in 1976, two years later, by more questions. So, the fact that there is this migration of Sol Lewitt, Lucy Lippard and friends as a distributor of artists the ziggurat into mundane objects, daily objects : a cocktail books, and the Franklin Furnace started at the same time with holder, a glass. It goes back to the beginning of our conver- Martha Wilson as an archive of similar materials. sation where we talked about books. It seems to me that in General Idea there is a blurring of hierarchies, that a book is HUO : Art Metropole triggered Printed Matter and then you as important as a merchandise object, of different circuits of took over Printed Matter in 2004, so it came full circle. distribution, the gallery system. Can you talk a little about AAB : Sol was pissed off at Art Metropole because the Cana- that, because it seems relevant in relation to the ziggurat situ- dian dollar had a different value than the U.S. dollar, but back ation ? Because the ziggurats appear everywhere. then Americans never understood that. So, if his book was AAB : One of the first ideas that grabbed our attention in $10 US, we were selling it for $12 Canadian, because that was 1969 was ’ production of low cost multiples as the equivalent value. Sol would phone us and say, “It’s not a form of alternate art distribution. His editions output had 12 dollars, it’s 10 dollars.” And we would say, “Yes, but Sol, an alternative life, and we were really influenced by that idea this is Canadian dollars, not American dollars.” But he could throughout our time together. So, the ziggurat can inhabit never seem to comprehend the difference. any distribution form. You can take any distribution form and create some sort of object or image that can inhabit that HUO : So, he began his own. There’s going to be a General distribution form and take it out into the world. That’s not a Idea exhibition in New York City in 2017. A lot of people in very clear answer ! the U.S. right now talk about Canada, a bit like ’68. When you started in ’68, because of the Vietnam War, a lot of Americans HUO : It is an answer because it ties into all these other wanted to leave the United States for Canada. things that you were doing. From the very beginning, with AAB : It’s very similar. Unbelievably similar. Canada was over- Art Metropole, you set up structures for distribution. Can you whelmed with draft dodgers in 1968, but of course they were tell me about that? Because that was another General Idea the smartest, best-educated and most interesting people. epiphany. AAB : So, we started FILE Megazine in 1972. It was enor- HUO : There seems to be a lot of parallels and connections mously successful because it traveled out into the world very to Canada. It’s also interesting because in the late ’60s, the fast. Artists started to send us their publications as gifts and father, Pierre Trudeau, was the Prime Minister. Now it’s the to ask our advice on how they should distribute their books son, Justin Trudeau. There are so many places in the world or their magazines. We set up Art Metropole as an archive of where democracy is crumbling. artist books and so on and also as a distribution center for AAB : Yes, Canada is the # 1 destination. 74

HUO : Exactly. So, there are all these parallels. I want to hear about self-government. It basically paid them salaries for a a little bit more about this moment of Canada in the late ’60s year while they worked on their project. It was a very enlight- and early ’70s and how you connect to it now. ened time. The idea of networking was so new and fresh. It’s AAB : Well in the late ’60s, early ’70s, Canada benefited enor- interesting the degree to which the government was support- mously because the most interesting young Americans moved ing and funding and trying to create networks among people to Canada. And all of my friends, it seemed, were involved so that they could help each other. It was a very interesting with helping them. I live in Berlin now and it seems that all time. my friends are helping the refugees in one way or another. Back then, my friends in Toronto were all busy working with HUO : Rainer Maria Rilke wrote a little book with advice to lawyers trying to get citizenship for American draft dodgers a young poet. What would be your advice to a young artist ? and helping people find apartments. A lot of Americans are AAB : Yesterday, I had coffee with an artist. He is 29, and he’s talking about moving to Canada right now. I think that if freaking out. He feels like he has to do something to put him- a war were to break out, they would move to Canada. And self on the map. What can he do ? And I said just do exactly again, Canada would benefit by having the most educated and what you’re doing. Just do it. Just keep on doing it. That’s my intelligent and open-minded of the Americans move to Can- advice to young artists. ada. It’s a very strange time. HUO : The last thing we should do is that you do the Post-it HUO : That moment in Canada in the late ’60s, early ’70s about the nurse. Because I’ve got lots of Post-its here. sounds like an incredible laboratory because all the cities start- ed to be connected. You connected Montreal to Vancouver on the cover of the first FILE Megazine. You connected it also to Halifax. AAB : That was the original idea of FILE Megazine. Living in Canada, artists were isolated in their own little cities. Cultural life was very, very confined and narrow and kind of horrify- ing in a way. The same way that Canada is joined together by the railway and the highway, we felt that it needed to be joined together in McLuhan’s way with media. That’s why we started FILE Megazine, as an artists’ tool of communication. It addresses the idea of—and this is when mail art was so active in Canada—linking people together and also linking them to the outside world. The first three issues of FILE were funded from the Local Initiatives money from Pierre Trudeau and that pro- gram allowed young people to come together and to devise a project that would benefit their community. It was an idea 75

Installation view of General Idea Tiempo Partido, MALBA, Buenos Aires, 2017 Self-portrait with Objects, 1981-82 GENERAL IDEA BIOGRAPHY

General Idea was formed in 1969 by AA Bronson, Throughout its 25-year-long career, the Canadian group pro- and Jorge Zontal. AA Bronson, born Michael Tims, Vancou- duced an important body of work in various media and for- ver, British Columbia, Canada (born 1946). Felix Partz, born mats, which continues to be a reference point for generations Ronald Gabe, Winnipeg, , Canada, 1945-1994. Jorge of artists around the world. Their works touch upon topics Zontal, born Slobodan Saia-Levy, Parma, Italy, 1944-1994. such as archaeology, history, sex, race, illness, and the myth of The three artists worked and lived together until the deaths of the group itself through self-portraits, a recurring subject of Felix and Jorge in 1994. their production. General Idea began making AIDS-related works in 1987 SURVEY EXHIBITIONS —they were pioneers in incorporating the issue of AIDS in 2017 — General Idea : Broken Time, MALBA / Museo de art—and produced countless installations on this theme until Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires Felix Partz and Jorge Zontal's deaths from AIDS-related ill- 2016 — General Idea : Broken Time, Museu Jumex, nesses in 1994. Mexico City General Idea published FILE Megazine between 1972 2011 — Haute Culture : General Idea. Une rétrospective, and 1989. They founded Art Metropole, an artist archive and 1969-1994, Musée d’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris and distribution center for artists’ books, audio, video and other Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto non-traditional media, in Toronto in 1974. The archive of 2003-2007 — General Idea Editions : 1967-1995, The Henry General Idea and The Art Metropole Collection are held in Art Gallery, Seattle ; Centro Andaluz de Arte Contempo- the Library & Archives of The National Gallery of Canada, raneo, Seville ; Kunstverein Munich ; Kunst-Werke, Berlin ; Ottawa, Canada. Kunsthalle Zürich ; Museum, Pittsburgh, PA, and Blackwood Gallery, University of Toronto, Mississauga (touring 18 venues) 1992 / 93 — Fin de siècle, Württembergischer Kunstverein, Stuttgart ; Centre d’Art Santa Mònica, Barcelona ; Kunst- verein, Hamburg ; The Power Plant, Toronto ; Wexner Center for the Visual Arts, Ohio State University, Columbus, OH, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA (touring)

77 ILLUSTRATIONS

All photographs are by General Idea except where otherwise cred- 19 Showcard 2-015 (Slow Zoom Into Ziggurat Tower), 1975, ited. Works indicated with an ✳ are included in the exhibition. chromogenic print, India ink and screenprint on card, 18 × 14 inches (45.7 × 35.6 cm). “VOICE OVER : The extras have become more aware, and learned to be severe, simple & dépouillé in their way of dressing. The extras know that individuality 2 The Ruins of the 1984 Miss General Idea Pavillion cannot be tolerated in the Miss General Idea Pavillion. They mix (a. k. a. The Burning of the 1984 Miss General Idea Pavillion), 1977, and match culture & nature with a discriminating eye. In this gelatin silver print, 8 × 10 inches (20.3 × 25.4 cm). massing study for the Pavillion we see a fashion note : a severe pattern motif to maintain a balance of content cut out of context.” 6 Going Thru the Motions, 1975, performance, staged in Walker Court, Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto (18 September 1975) with 20 The 1970 Miss General Idea Pageant, 1970. Granada Gazelle, an audience of 698 people. Photograph by Mary Canary. Miss General Idea 1969, crowns Miss Honey as Miss General Idea 1970 during The 1970 Miss General Idea Pageant, as part of the 10 Reconstructing Futures (detail), 1977, installation photo, Festival of Underground Theatre, St. Lawrence Centre for the Arts, General Idea : Tiempo Partido, JUMEX, Mexico City, 2016. Toronto, Canada 1970. Photograph by Andrea Rosetti, courtesy Esther Schipper, Berlin. 20 The Ruins of the 1984 Miss General Idea Pavillion (a. k. a. 11 Katsura : Tradition and Creation in Japanese Architecture, The Burning of the 1984 Miss General Idea Pavillion), 1977, perfor- New Haven : Yale University Press, 1960. mance view : site-specific installation, found rubble, chalk, with performative elements, reproducing the smoking ruins of 12 Loving Couch Press, Vol. 1, No. 9. Winnipeg : 1968, web offset the 1984 Miss General Idea Pavillion. on paper, duotone, 17 × 11 7⁄16 inches (43 × 29 cm). 21 The Tunnel of Love from the 1984 Miss General Idea Pavillion, 13 XXX Voto (for the Spirit of Miss General Idea), 1995, offset 1986, graphite, India ink on watercolor paper, 29 3/4 × 27 3/4 inches publication, 128 pp., colour reproductions, black linen hard (75.6 × 70.5 cm). Photograph by Andrea Rossetti, courtesy cover with metallic blue hot-stamping, 5 11⁄16 × 4 5⁄16 inches of Esther Schipper, Berlin. (14.5 × 11 cm). Edition of 900 plus 1 A /P, signed and numbered (rubber stamped), published by Galerie René Blouin, Montreal ✳ 22 Going Thru the Notions, 1975, poster edition. Screenprint and S. L. Simpson Gallery, Toronto. GI’s last publi- on paper, 48 1/2 × 28 3/4 inches (123.3 × 73 cm). cation, it contains a text written by the group in their final days, thanking the Spirit of Miss General Idea for giving them twen- 23 Portrait of General Idea in Reconstructing Futures, 1977. ty-five years together. It is based on a text by Yves Klein. Photograph by Jeremiah Chechik.

15 Installing Betty’s at General Idea’s storefront at 78 Gerrard 24 Cornucopia : Fragments from the Room of the Unknown Func- Street West, Toronto, 1969. tion in the Villa dei Misteri of the 1984 Miss General Idea Pavillion, 1982-83, installation with video component : wood, formica, Plexi- 16 Line Project, 1970, performance view. Participatory multi- glas, ceramic, gold, silver. Overall installed : 96 × 168 × 96 inches media project with installation and performative components. (243.84 × 426.72 × 243.84 cm). San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco (Accessions Committee Fund purchase, 1997).

78 79

25 The Boutique from the 1984 Miss General Idea Pavillion, 1980, ✳ 31 Bottleneck Entrance to the 1984 Miss General Idea Pavillion, installation (originally conceived to also operate as a commercial ca. 1972, graphite and colored pencil on graph paper, sales venue, both in a performative sense and as a “real” sales 11 5/8 × 16 9/16 inches (29.5 × 42.1 cm). outlet). Counter in the shape of a dollar sign [$], displaying various GI editions (multiples, prints, poster, publications) : galvanized ✳ 31 Untitled (Mistawasis), 1968, graphite on graph paper, sheet metal, Plexiglas. Overall installed : 59 × 132 × 102 inches 8 3/8 × 13 4/5 inches (21.3 × 35.1 cm). (150 × 335 × 260 cm). Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto (gift of Sandra Simpson, 1998). ✳ 32 Untitled (Squamish), 1968, graphite on graph paper, 13 4/5 × 8 3/8 inches (35.1 × 21.3 cm). 26 Jorge Zontal at the counter of the Belly Store offering bottles of George Saia’s Belly Food, 1969. GI’s first “boutique” was pre- 33 Granada, 1968-69, fluorescent acrylic, acrylic, latex sented in GI’s living room at 78 Gerrard Street West, Toronto, as on unprimed canvas, 118 1⁄2 × 79 1⁄2 inches (301 × 202 cm), a component of the collaborative installation Belly Store with Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto. Canadian artist Johnny Neon (a. k. a. John Masciuch, b. 1944). Opening December 11, 1969, it included GI’s first edition for sale, ✳ 34 Marcel, 1968-69, fluorescent acrylic, acrylic, latex on George Saia’s Belly Food (1969). Other GI boutiques followed : unprimed canvas, 118 1⁄4 × 79 3⁄8 inches (300.4 × 201.7 cm), Art Metropole (1974), The Boutique from the 1984 Miss General Carmen Lamanna collection, Toronto. Idea Pavillion (1980), ¥en Boutique (1989) and Boutique Coeurs volants (1994/2001). ✳ 35 Honey, 1968-69, fluorescent acrylic, acrylic, latex on unprimed canvas, 118 1⁄4 × 79 3⁄8 inches (300.4 × 201.7 cm), 26 George Saawia’s Belly Food, 1969, plastic bottle, cotton batting, Carmen Lamanna collection, Toronto. offset label, each 6 3⁄4 × 2 inches (17 × 5 cm). Edition of approxi- mately 50, some signed, unnumbered. 36 Mimi, 1968-69, fluorescent acrylic, acrylic, latex on unprimed canvas, 118 1⁄4 × 79 3⁄8 inches (300.4 × 201.7 cm), ✳ 27-28 Drafting Board and Hand of the Spirit, 1974, gelatin silver Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto. print 8 × 10 inches (20.3 × 25.4 cm). The Hand of the Spirit of Miss General Idea lends a helping hand in the design of the Seat- 37 Pascal, 1968-69, fluorescent acrylic, acrylic, latex on ing Arrangement for the 1984 Miss General Idea Pavillion. unprimed canvas, 118 × 79 1⁄4 inches (300 × 201.3 cm), National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa (gift of AA Bronson ✳ 29 Untitled (Skwah, Skway, Skulkayn), 1968, graphite on graph in memory of Felix Partz and Jorge Zontal, 2006). paper, 13 4/5 × 8 3/8 inches (35.1 × 21.3 cm). 38-39 Carmen, 1968-69, fluorescent acrylic, acrylic, latex on ✳ 30 Untitled (Potawatomi, Pasqua, Penelakut), 1968, graphite unprimed canvas, 75 3⁄4 × 150 inches (192.4 × 381 cm), on graph paper, 8 3/8 × 13 4/5 inches (21.3 × 35.1 cm). Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto.

✳ 30 Floor Plan for 1984 Folding Chairs in Four Colors, ca. 1972, ✳ 40-41 Untitled (Ziggurat Painting # 2), 1968-69, fluorescent graphite on graph paper. acrylic, acrylic, latex on unprimed canvas, 71 1⁄2 × 141 inches (181.6 × 358.1 cm). Photograph by Cheryl O’Brien. 80

✳ 42 1968 General Idea Shaped Ziggurat Painting # 1, 1986, ✳ 50 VB Gown from the 1984 Miss General Idea Pageant, Urban fluorescent acrylic, acrylic, latex on unprimed canvas, Armour for the Future, 1975, gelatin silver print, 10 × 8 inches 62 13⁄16 × 94 3⁄8 × 4 inches (159.5 × 239.7 × 10.2 cm). Photograph (25.4 × 20.3 cm). by Cheryl O’Brien. ✳ 51 Sandy Stagg and the Miss General Idea Shoe, 1975, gelatin ✳ 43 1968 General Idea Shaped Ziggurat Painting # 2, 1986, silver print, 10 × 8 inches (25.4 × 20.3 cm). fluorescent acrylic, acrylic, latex on unprimed canvas, 62 13⁄16 × 94 3⁄8 × 4 inches (159.5 × 239.7 × 10.2 cm). Photograph ✳ 52 Proposed Seating Arrangement (Form Follows Fiction), 1975, by Cheryl O’Brien. diazotype and enamel on acetate, 37 1/8 × 77 3/4 inches (94.3 × 197.5 cm). Edition of 5, signed and numbered. ✳ 44 1968 General Idea Shaped Ziggurat Painting # 4, 1986, The ziggurat-shaped seating plan accommodates the 1,984 mem- fluorescent acrylic, acrylic, latex on unprimed canvas, bers of the audience at the 1984 Miss General Idea Pageant in the 62 13⁄16 × 94 3⁄8 × 4 inches (159.5 × 239.7 × 10.2 cm). Photograph 1984 Miss General Idea Pavillion. Photograph by Cheryl O’Brien. by Cheryl O’Brien. ✳ 53 Miss General Idea Glove Pattern (Form Follows Fetish), 1975, ✳ 45 1968 General Idea Shaped Ziggurat Painting # 5, 1986, diazotype and enamel on acetate. Edition of 5, signed and num- fluorescent acrylic, acrylic, latex on unprimed canvas, bered, 17 1⁄4 × 24 inches (43.8 × 61 cm). 62 13⁄16 × 94 3⁄8 × 4 inches (159.5 × 239.7 × 10.2 cm). Photograph by Cheryl O’Brien. ✳ 54 Luxon Louvre (Ambiguity Without Contradiction), 1975, diazotype and enamel on acetate, craft paper, 25 3/8 × 57 3/4 inches ✳ 46 1968 General Idea # 1, 1986, fluorescent acrylic, acrylic, latex (64.5 × 146.7 cm). Edition of 5, signed and numbered. on unprimed canvas, 63 × 63 × 4 inches (160 × 160 × 10.2 cm). Photograph by Cheryl O’Brien. Photograph by Cheryl O’Brien. ✳ 54 Dr. Brute Colonnade and Drop Ceiling Detail, 1975, diazotype 47 1968 General Idea # 6, 1986, fluorescent acrylic, acrylic, latex and enamel on acetate, 24 × 45 11/16 inches (61 × 116 cm). Edition on unprimed canvas, 63 × 63 × 4 inches (160 × 160 × 10.2 cm). of 5, signed and numbered. Photograph by Cheryl O’Brien. Photograph by Cheryl O’Brien. 55-56 The Ruins of the 1984 Miss General Idea Pavillion, 1977, ✳ 48 1968 General Idea # 2, 1986, fluorescent acrylic, acrylic, latex Installation and performance view. on unprimed canvas, 63 × 63 × 4 inches (160 × 160 × 10.2 cm). Photograph by Cheryl O’Brien. ✳ 57 Rotating Doors of the Future, 1982-84, Graphite and felt pen on graph paper. Study for a labyrinth constructed of rotating ✳ 49 Ziggurat Test Tube Holder, 1980, gelatin silver print, doors for the entrance to the 1984 Miss General Idea Pavilion. 10 × 8 inches (25.4 × 23 cm). ✳ 58 Luxon VB with Ashram Rrac, 1973, gelatin silver print, ✳ 50 Luxon VB with Sandy Stagg, 1973, gelatin silver print, 7 15/16 × 10 13/16 inches (20.1 × 25.9 cm). 7 15/16 × 10 3/16 inches (20.1 × 25.9 cm). 81

59 Sigarbox, 1985, wood-burning on wood box, metal, pack- ✳ 66 Showcard 2-091 (The Spirit (to herself)), 1979, chromogenic aging label (offset on paper), 10 cigars, 5 5/16 × 6 5/8 × 1 inches print, India ink and screenprint on card, 18 × 14 inches (13.5 × 16.8 × 2.5 cm). Edition of 200, unsigned and unnumbered, (45.7 × 35.6 cm). Photograph by Cheryl O’Brien. published by Publishing House Bébert, Rotterdam. 67 Burning Ziggurat (detail), 1968, a project of Ron Gabe 60 Expulsion from the Cornucopia, 1985, latex, fluorescent (a. k. a. Felix Partz), gelatin silver print, 3 × 5 inches (9 × 12.5 cm). acrylic and metal [gold] leaf on escutcheon shaped wood panel, 59 7/8 × 47 7/8 inches (152 × 121.5 cm), Art Gallery of Ontario, ✳ 69 Phase 1 of the 1984 Miss General Idea Pavillion with Toronto. Shark Fin Weather Vane, ca. 1975, graphite on graph paper, 11 11/16 × 16 1/2 inches (29.7 × 42 cm). 60 Passion Over Reason, 1986, latex, fluorescent acrylic and metal [gold] leaf on escutcheon shaped wood panel, 20 × 16 inches ✳ 69 Proposed Building Designs, 1979, marker on onionskin paper (50.8 × 40.6 cm), Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto. (“1984 Miss General Idea Pavillion Foundation” Letterhead). One of a set of three, 9 13/16 × 7 7/8 inches (25 × 20 cm) each. 60 Third Degree, 1986, latex, fluorescent acrylic and metal [gold] leaf on escutcheon shaped wood panel, 20 × 16 inches 70 Liquid Assets, 1980, acrylic base, upright acrylic holder, glass (50.8 × 40.6 cm), Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto. test tube, Plexiglas, glass test tube, in a printed black clamshell box with label and die-cut foam inserts, object 13 × 7 × 5 1/8 inches ✳ 60-61 The Armoury of the 1984 Miss General Idea Pavillion, 1986, (33 × 18 × 13 cm) ; case 14 1/2 × 14 1/2 × 3 13/16 inches (37 × 37 × 10 cm). offset on paper mounted on linen fold-out, cotton ties. Folded : Edition of 10 plus 3 A/ Ps and 2 P/ Ps, signed and numbered, 11 × 5 1/2 inches (28 × 14 cm) ; unfolded : 22 × 28 3/8 inches (56 × 72 cm) ; published by Bywater Bros. Editions, Toronto. assembled : 5 3/4 × 16 3/4 × 11 inches (14.5 × 42.5 × 28 cm). Edition of 50, signed and numbered. The edition unfolds to create a 73 Installation view, General Idea Tiempo Partido, MALBA, 3-dimensional replica of the Armoury in the 1984 Miss General Buenos Aires, 2017. Photograph by Andrea Rossetti, courtesy Idea Pavillion. of Esther Schipper, Berlin.

61 Houndstooth Virus, 1986, latex, fluorescent acrylic and metal 74 Self-portrait with Objects, 1981-82, montage, gelatin silver [gold] leaf on escutcheon shaped wood panel, 59 7/8 × 47 7/8 inches print, 11 × 14 inches (27.7 × 35.6 cm). Edition of 10 (only 1 pro- (152 × 121.5 cm), Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto. duced). Collection National Gallery of Canada.

✳ 63 Tomas Arana and VB Gown 5 in the Giardini, Venice, 1980, gelatin silver print, 8 × 10 inches (20.3 × 25.4 cm).

✳ 64-65 VB Gown : Massing Study for the 1984 Miss General Idea Pavillion, 1977, gelatin silver print, set of four, 4 × 10 inches (10.2 × 25.4 cm) each. — ✳ —

83 MITCHELL-INNES & NASH