General Idea
Life & Work by Sarah E.K. Smith
Glossary
Anger, Kenneth (American, b. 1927)
A celebrated and controversial underground filmmaker who made his first film, the oftenbanned Fireworks, at age fifteen. His films and books demonstrate a lifelong fascination
with the occult and the scandals of Old Hollywood. Anger’s influence has been wideranging, from commercial and experimental filmmakers to artists working in other media.
artist-run gallery/centre
A gallery or other art space developed and run by artists. In Canada these include YYZ,
Art Metropole, Forest City Gallery, Western Front, and formerly 20/20 Gallery, The
Region Gallery, and Garret Gallery. Not-for-profit organizations, these centres exist
outside the commercial and institutional gallery system. They aim to support the
production and exhibition of new art works, dialogue between artists, and avant-garde
practices and emerging artists.
A Space, Toronto
A not-for-profit, artist-run exhibition space that emerged out of Toronto’s Nightingale
Gallery in 1971. A Space was an important centre for innovative art in all disciplines
throughout the 1970s and remains a key site for the exhibition of contemporary visual art
in Toronto. Its programming emphasizes inclusivity and political engagement.
Barthes, Roland (French, 1915–1980)
A major figure in twentieth-century intellectual history, Barthes was a semiotician, literary
and social critic, philosopher, and essayist. Works such as Writing Degree Zero, 1953,
and Mythologies, 1957, helped to usher in structuralism as a dominant theoretical
framework, while Camera Lucida, 1980, his rumination on photography, remains one of
the most influential books of photo theory ever written.
Beuys, Joseph (German, 1921–1986)
A versatile visual artist, performer, teacher, and political activist whose “expanded
concept of art,” as he put it, held that every individual could act creatively and that
creativity could infuse every aspect of life. Animals are an important theme in Beuys’s
frequently Symbolist and expressionistic works. He also made use of felt and fat in his
artworks, materials that held personal symbolism for him.
Burroughs, William S. (American, 1914–1997)
A prolific and celebrated Beat Generation writer, best known for the novel Naked Lunch,
1959. Permeated with an anarchic attitude, his work influenced later countercultural
groups including hippies and punks. His life was famously marked by drug and alcohol
addiction, criminality, and violence, including the murder of his second wife in Mexico,
for which he never served a sentence.
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