Exposición en Buenos Aires, Argentina
Tiempo partido
Dónde:
Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires - MALBA - Fundación MALBA / Avda. Figueroa Alcorta, 3415 / Buenos Aires, Argentina
Cuándo:
24 mar de 2017 - 25 jun de 2017
Inauguración:
24 mar de 2017
Descripción de la Exposición
Tiempo partido es la primera exposición retrospectiva en América Latina de General Idea, colectivo de artistas canadienses formado en 1969 por AA Bronson (n. Michael Tims, Vancouver, Canadá, 1946), Felix Partz (n. Ronald Gabe, Winnipeg, Canadá, 1945 - m. Toronto, 1994) y Jorge Zontal (n. Slobodan Saia-Levi, Parma, Italia, 1944 - m. Toronto, 1994). A lo largo de 25 años de carrera (1969-1994), el grupo produjo un importante cuerpo de obra en diferentes soportes y formatos, que abrió nuevos caminos y continúa siendo hoy una referencia para las nuevas generaciones de artistas de todo el mundo.
Curada por Agustín Pérez Rubio, Director Artístico de MALBA, la exposición es un repaso por la trayectoria de General Idea y aborda temas como la arqueología, la historia, el sexo, la raza, la enfermedad, la autorepresentación y el mito del propio grupo, objeto recurrente de su producción. Reúne cerca de 120 obras en todos los
...
formatos de su trabajo: performances, videoarte, fotografía, publicaciones, instalaciones y las ediciones múltiples de objetos de consumo masivo.
El proyecto pretende ampliar el horizonte y la difusión de su legado, desde sus primeras piezas conjuntas en 1969 y 1970, hasta sus últimas creaciones en 1994, año en el que mueren Partz y Zontal de enfermedades relacionadas al SIDA. La muestra hará foco en el concepto de la alteración del tiempo, lo efímero y la creación de un mito, a través de sus relaciones con la publicidad, el diseño, la moda, los concursos de belleza y los medios de comunicación.
Es célebre su trabajo con la revista FILE que General Idea editó entre 1972 y 1989, una apropiación del diseño de la famosa LIFE y en la que colaboraron algunos de los artistas más radicales de la época como el colectivo Art Language, el escritor William Burroughs o los grupos musicales Talking Heads y The Residents, entre muchos otros.
General Idea fue uno de los primeros colectivos en incorporar el tema del SIDA a su obra. En 1987 partieron de la obra LOVE de Robert Indiana y la convirtieron en AIDS (las siglas del virus en inglés) para crear un logotipo que plasmaron en muchas de sus obras presentes en la exposición. También se podrán ver sus proyectos experimentales de los años 60 y 70 como Double Mirror o Miss General Idea de 1984, Miss General Idea Pageant, Miss General Idea Pavillion y sus grandes instalaciones de pastillas, que dan cuenta de la dimensión social y política que sus trabajos tuvieron y tienen hoy para el público.
General Idea realizó 123 exposiciones individuales y participó en 150 exposiciones colectivas a nivel internacional con sedes en París, Sidney, la Bienal de Venecia y la Documenta de Kassel. En América Latina exhibieron únicamente en 1998 en la Bienal de San Pablo.
En el marco de la exposición, MALBA editará una publicación con ensayos del curador Agustín Pérez Rubio, Gabriel Villalobos, Francesco Scasciamacchia e Ivo Mesquita, que repasa la producción y estética del grupo.
Esta exposición fue coproducida por MALBA y Fundación Jumex, donde se presentó previamente entre el 27 de octubre y el 12 de febrero.
Cuenta con el apoyo de la National Gallery de Canadá.
ENGLISH
t is MALBA’s pleasure to present Broken Time, the first retrospective in Latin America of General Idea, a collective of Canadian artists formed in 1969 by AA Bronson (b. Michael Tims, Canada, 1946), Felix Partz (b. Ronald Gabe, Canada, 1945-1994), and Jorge Zontal (Italy, 1944 - Toronto, 1994). Over the course of its twenty-five-year career, the group produced work that blurred the lines between art, design, and life. Thanks to its distinctive avant-garde mark, General Idea is a point of reference for new generations of artists around the world.
Curated by Agustín Pérez Rubio, artistic director of MALBA, the exhibition provides an overview of General Idea’s production. It addresses topics like history, sex, race, disease, and the group’s self-representation—a recurring theme in its work. The show encompasses close to one hundred and twenty works in all of the formats the collective used (performance, video, photography, publication, installation), works that currently form part of both public and private collections.
The aim of the project is to expand the horizon and scope of the group’s legacy. It encompasses their first joint works, produced in 1969 and 1970, as well as their final creations, produced in 1994, the year when both Partz and Zontal died of complications related to AIDS. The layout of the show begins with the work Untitled (for GI), 1999 (RGB Bertoia Chairs)—three Bertoia chairs, each one with a cushion in red, green, or blue, the classic palette of General Idea’s work. This is the first work that AA Bronson produced after the demise of the group; it is an homage to his companions in life and work.
The show addresses the problem of altered time connected to the ephemeral nature of General Idea’s art and to how the collective created a myth of its own existence through advertising, design, fashion, beauty pageants, and the mass media in general. In the words of Agustín Pérez Rubio, “From fragments of a society standardized by capitalism, General Idea constructs an iconography full of glamour, subtle and hilarious irony; it plays at creating a time that stretches out, that heads forward and contracts, that mutates, that makes reference to a past that could not be inhabited or that expresses itself in a future that vanished well before it came into being.” He goes on, “By means of systems of representation that straddle reality and fiction, the natural and the cultural, General Idea creates simulacra that constitute a real memory of the group itself and of the different phases of its production.”
One hundred and twenty-three solo shows of General Idea’s work have been held; the group has participated in some one hundred and fifty international group shows, including presentations at the Venice Biennale and Documenta in Kassel. The only show of the group’s work in Latin America prior to this one was in 1998, at the São Paulo Biennial. Over the course of twenty-five years (1969 -1994), the group produced a major body of work on different supports and in different formats that demonstrates the skill with which it used the language of the mass media.
Catalogue
In the framework of the exhibition, MALBA has published 180-page edition with an appendix in English. The volume includes a wide selection of photographs that provide an overview of General Idea’s production and aesthetic, as well as gallery views of the version of the show held at the Museo Jumex from October 2016 to February, 2017
The book includes the essays “Tiempo mítico: una guía para no perderse en la trayectoria viral de General Idea” (A Guide To Navigating General Idea’s Viral Trajectory) by curator Agustín Pérez Rubio; “Parafernalia” (Pharaphernalia) by Gabriel Villalobos; “Páginas de historia. El dorado (Maracaibo) y Fin de Siècle” (Pages of History Maracaibo (El Dorado) and Fin de Siècle) by Ivo Mesquita; and “Espectros de un virus” (Spectres of a Virus) by Francesco Scasciamacchia.
Mail Art and FILE magazine
Many of General Idea’s early projects are related to mail art. While some of those works were never fully developed, they did have a specific relationship to the dynamics surrounding epistolary communication, that is, reading, reproduction, sending, and telling. General Idea corresponded with Ray Johnson, the father of mail art; it worked with other artists on artistic, literary, and conceptual projects, some of them Brazilian or Mexican (Ulises Carrión, for instance)
That network of relationships gave shape to the rich experience of FILE Megazine (1972-1989), a publication that ironically copied the graphics of LIFE magazine. After all, for General Idea art imitates life just as life imitates art. FILE became the group’s vehicle for experimentation and means to generate the mythology surrounding the collective. It was also the center of operations for managing many of General Idea’s projects. As one of the editorials published on its pages explains, “FILE was a cultural parasite carried along in the mainstream bloodstream of commercial distribution systems and subtly altered the body of its host.” Contributors to FILE included some of the most radical artists of the time, such as the collective Art Language, the writer William Burroughs, and bands like the Talking Heads and The Residents, to name a few.
It was in FILE [Vol. 3, No 1, 1975 "Glamour Issue"] that General Idea published its “Glamour Manifesto”:
This is the story of General Idea and the story of what we wanted. We wanted to be famous, glamorous and rich. That is to say, we wanted to be artists and we knew that if we were famous and glamorous we could say we were artists and we would be.
We never felt we had to produce great art to be great artists. We knew great art did not bring glamour and fame. We knew we have to keep a foot in the door of art. We were conscious of the importance of berets and paintbrushes. We made public appearances in painters’ smock. We knew that if we were famous, if we were glamorous we could say we are artists and we would be. We did and we are. We are famous, glamorous artists
This is the story of Glamour and the part it has played in our art
Miss General Idea and the AIDS issue
In 1970, General Idea embarked on what would perhaps be the collective’s most important action—the result of its work with the relationship between myth and time: Miss General Idea. This project pervaded much of their work, from the performance What Happened (1970) to the destruction, in 1977, of The 1984 Miss General Idea Pavillion. It also marked a definitive veer in General Idea’s aesthetic, a turn from the conceptual, ephemeral, and performative to the sculptural, pictorial, and videographic.
Miss General Idea makes reference to the competition at stake in the art world as strategy for getting ahead and holding one’s own. The event draws on a popular cultural formation (beauty pageants) and once again demonstrates the relationship between the real and the artistic, between what art imitates and how it is imitated, as well as art’s mythological power. “ This action undertaken in the privileged realm of mass culture would become a major work of performance art. The artists understood that they no longer drew solely from a romantic past that revolved around the acts of making and hanging paintings; they had become commentators on social reality. Perhaps naively, they thought that the museum could mock its own institutional function as source of legitimation,” Pérez Rubio explains.
Irony and humor turned into outrage and guerrilla warfare starting in the late eighties. AA Bronson and Jorge Zontal lived in New York from 1986 to 1993; Felix was there for only one year, since he worked from Toronto. These were the years of the AIDS crisis and of the struggle over the representation of the disease, the years when conservatives attacked the communities most affected by it. In those years, they produced works about their daily life. One Year of AZT (1991), for instance, consists of 1,825 white pills with blue bands mounted on the wall, a sort of calendar of the disease that records the passage and breakdown of time during a period when that medication was the only possible treatment for HIV.
During this final stage, the way General Idea’s work was displayed grew larger in terms of format, venue, and time. The AIDS tapestries and posters, for instance, were put up throughout cities—New York, San Francisco, Toronto, Berlin—on walls, buses, and subways, as well as on t-shirts, bags, and other objects. In “Burroughsian” fashion, the virus took over everything, even time. That idea makes itself felt in the Imagevirus series (1989-1991), a set of five posters that attests to the virulent power of the image and of the project. One of their most widely known public works—and one in which the medium becomes the message—was the projection of the word AIDS (1993/1994) on the Spectacolor Board in Times Square.
On exhibit in the museum’s main hall is Pharma©opia (1992). This work consists of three giant helium-filled pills secured by cords as they hang in the air. It serves to remind us not only of the conditions endured by those who lived with AIDS in the past, but also of the persistence of the virus into the present and the issues around the pharmaceutical industry.
Fin de siècle
General Idea. Broken Time extends into MALBA’s gallery 3 (level 1) with the installation Fin de siècle (1994). The work consists of a large romantic glacier landscape built from hundreds of sheets of Styrofoam—the image is taken from Caspar David Friedric’s Sea of Ice (1823)—with three white seal pups located in a non-time or mythical time.
In a certain way, this work—like all the works in the exhibition that show three figures—is a “self-portrait” of the group. The situation of white seal pups was polemic in the eighties and nineties; they were declared a species in danger of extinction in many countries, but not in Canada, where they reproduce copiously. Indeed, in Canada seal pups were hunted and clubbed to death to kill them without harming their valuable skins; the image of their red blood on the white snow because an iconic media image in those years. General Idea produced Fin de siècle around the time that Partz and Zontal were diagnosed as carriers of HIV and, hence, the work has been interpreted as a portrait of the artists as victims.
Entrada actualizada el el 20 abr de 2017
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