General Idea
Life & Work by Sarah E. K. Smith
AIDS Projects In 1987 the artists were invited by their gallery Koury Wingate in New York( previously International With Monument) to contribute to a June exhibition in support of the American Foundation for AIDS Research( amfAR). General Idea created a painting, AIDS, 1987, that mimicked Robert Indiana’ s( b. 1928) famous painting LOVE, 1966, but replaced the word“ LOVE” with“ AIDS.” From this moment on, the majority of General Idea’ s work focused on addressing HIV / AIDS in ways both explicit and implicit.
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The AIDS logo was central to many of these works, the bulk of which were temporary public art projects, as well as art created for display in museums and commercial galleries. For example, the group created an extensive series of posters, painting installations, a sculpture, and an animation for the Spectacolor Board in Times Square, New York City, all of which were based on the AIDS logo. The group’ s aim was to use AIDS as a means to name what, at the time, was unnamable: raising AIDS as a topic of discussion in the public sphere.
General Idea’ s works took a brazen approach to AIDS. In the late 1980s AIDS was a taboo topic and a climate of fear surrounded the disease due to widespread and extreme homophobia. This was because initially the disease was thought to exclusively affect gay men. For instance, in 1981 the first article in the New York Times to address AIDS identified it as a cancer that only affected homosexuals. This was not helped by the fact that inaccurate and inflammatory information about the disease circulated widely
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were not at first understood. Tremendous prejudice— including within the medical community— was widespread given the initial impact of AIDS in the gay community and its sexual transmission. As such, there was a moral dimension to the AIDS pandemic that activists, as well as artists, sought to address.
In 1989 General Idea produced the last issue of FILE Megazine, closing the publication after twenty-six issues over seventeen years. This was the start of a productive but difficult period for the artists. Felix Partz was diagnosed HIV-positive in 1989; Jorge Zontal was diagnosed the following year. The artists publicly disclosed their HIV status— Zontal addressed his illness in a 1993 interview on CBC Radio. Such public disclosure was significant given the politics of the era and the stigma associated with the disease.
Partz and Zontal’ s diagnoses gave a new urgency to General Idea’ s projects. A key exhibition in the 1990s was the touring retrospective General Idea’ s Fin de siècle, which focused on the group’ s works since 1984, primarily AIDS-related projects. Initiated
by the Württembergischer Kunstverein in Stuttgart, Germany, this show toured in Barcelona and Hamburg in Europe and in Columbus, San Francisco, and Toronto in North America in 1992 and 1993.
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General Idea, AIDS, 1987, acrylic on canvas, 182.9 x 182.9 cm, private collection
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Robert Indiana, LOVE, 1966, oil on canvas, 182.6 x 182.6 x 6.4 cm, Indianapolis Museum of Art
General Idea, FILE Megazine,“ Final Issue, The City,” no. 29( 1989), offset periodical, eighty-eight pages plus cover, black and white reproductions and spot colour, edition of 1,500, various collections
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