THE ESTATE OF GENERAL IDEA GI Photographs_FINAL | Page 3

GENERAL IDEA
PHOTOGRAPHS, 1968–1980
In the early years of their collaboration, from 1968 to 1980, AA Bronson, Jorge Zontal and Felix Partz of
the Canadian artist group General Idea produced a large number of photographs in both private and public
spaces.
Since its creation fifty years ago, this body of work has been largely unseen, stored in AA Bronson’s archive.
Recently recorded as Appendix B – Ancillary Photographic Work in the forthcoming General Idea Catalogue
Raisonné edited by Fern Bayer, the archive of vintage General Idea photographs have recently come to
attention in the 2017 exhibition General Idea: Photographs 1969-1982 organized by MAMCO in Geneva,
curated by Lionel Bovier as a reflection on the mediatic and physical versatility of the image.
During the 1960s-1970s, the photographic medium played a major role in the development and
documentation of performance and conceptual art. For General Idea, photography became a tool to reflect
upon the representation of the body through self-portraits, visual experimentations, and documentation of
film shootings and performances. General Idea’s photographs features some of the group’s major themes
and motifs, such as the 1971 Miss General Idea Pageant, Lux-On V.B. and V.B. Gowns, the Hand of the
Spirit, the Light-On mirror, among others. Many of these photographs were reproduced in FILE Megazine
published by General Idea from 1972 to 1989, and designed to mimic the popular American news magazine
LIFE, acting as a “parasite within the magazine distribution system.”
For Catch me if you can!, curator Frédéric Bonnet has selected a group of photographs that use mirrors
and reflective surfaces as iconographic and conceptual tools. All photographs are vintage gelatin silver prints
developed by Jorge Zontal, originally trained as a photographer prior to the forming of the group.
Jorge Zontal’s 1968-69 Mirror Self Portrait (Jorge in Distorted Mirror), AA Bronson’s 1969 Mirror
Sequences (also in the Collection of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution,
Washington, DC), as well as the series of Mirror Self-portraits from 1969-74 present the artist’s visual
experimentations with mirrors and the representation of their own body.
The 1971 Light-On series, shot during June 1971 while General Idea was filming what became the film
Double Mirror Video (1971, 5:50 min, b&w, sound), documents the group’s experimentations with two large
rotating mirrors during a trip through Canada.
The Lux-On prints—the most famous and prolific part of General Idea’s photographic work—picture friends
and frequent collaborators of General Idea staged in their 1973 installation Luxon V.B.: a 114-kilo structure
made of 168 double-sided mirrored horizontal Venetian blind (hence V.B.) slats fitted t o the window of the
Carmen Lamanna Gallery in Toronto.