General Idea
Life & Work by Sarah E.K. Smith
The 1971 Miss General Idea Pageant 1971
General Idea, The 1971 Miss General Idea Pageant, 1971
Various media (including mail art project, performance,
photography, and ephemera), dimensions variable
Various collections, including Collection of the Carmen Lamanna Estate,
Toronto; documentation and ephemera held at the National Gallery of Canada,
Ottawa
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The 1971 Miss General Idea Pageant is one of General Idea’s best-known conceptual
projects. This mail art and performance piece was one of a series of faux beauty
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pageants the group created to interrogate glamour, fame, and the art world. The project
can be traced back to an earlier work by the group: What Happened, 1970. This
multimedia piece—with a pageant component—was presented at the 1970 Festival of
Underground Theatre in Toronto. The pageant format and the figure of Miss General
Idea were key elements of the group’s mythology, structures around which they
continued to create art in subsequent years.
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