General Idea
Life & Work by Sarah E. K. Smith
Tims( AA Bronson) was born in Vancouver in 1946 to a military family, living in cities across Canada. He moved to Winnipeg in 1964 to study architecture at the University of Manitoba. It was at university where Tims met Gabe, through their mutual friend Paige. In 1967, before completing his degree, Tims and several classmates dropped out to form an alternative community comprised of a free school, commune, free store, and newspaper. The newspaper was called The Loving Couch Press and Tims served as a contributing editor. During this period Tims also worked as a volunteer apprentice for a therapist specializing in intentional communities. Through this work he travelled across Canada, which led to Tims meeting Saia-Levy in Vancouver and also put the work of Intermedia on his radar. Tims became interested in exploring other communes,
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travelling to Montreal and Toronto. In Toronto he settled at Rochdale College, where he quickly became involved in Coach House Press and Theatre Passe Muraille.
The three artists’ experiences in architecture, theatre, film, art, intentional community, Gestalt therapy, and independent publishing informed their later work as General Idea. The group, according to Bronson, was born out of the“ late Sixties psychedelia of student revolution, fluorescent posters, underground newspapers and Marshall McLuhan, and inspired by Canada’ s first artist-run centre … Intermedia.”
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General Idea in front of Test Pattern: T. V. Dinner Plates from the Miss General Idea Pavillion( detail), 1988. Collection General Idea, photograph by Tohru Kogure. This installation view is from SPIRAL( Wacoal Art Center), Tokyo, 1988
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Becoming a Group By 1969 Ronald Gabe, Slobodan Saia-Levy, and Michael Tims were all in Toronto and came into contact at Theatre Passe Muraille during rehearsals for the production Home
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Free. The theatre, founded out of Rochdale College— an experimental free university
in Toronto— offered a countercultural scene that attracted many visual artists. As Bronson noted,“ The counterculture scene was small at that time. The three major nodes were Rochdale College, Theatre Passe Muraille, and the Coach House Press.”
Shortly after meeting, the three moved to a house at 78 Gerrard Street West in downtown Toronto along with Mimi Paige( Gabe’ s then-girlfriend) and Daniel Freedman( a friend and actor). Bronson recalls that the members of the household were unemployed and amused themselves by creating fake window displays in the house, a former store.
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One project— targeting a nearby nurses’ residence— involved a display of romance novels about nurses. This gave the impression that the house was a bookstore, but prospective customers were prevented from visiting by a sign on the door that indicated
the shopkeeper would return in five minutes. Significantly, the group didn’ t see these early experiments as artwork.
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78 Gerrard Street West, Toronto, the house where General Idea formed and lived from 1969 – 70, photograph by Jorge Zontal
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