Glamour is Theft

Beschrijving

Tent. The 1984 Miss General Idea Pavillion, Toronto, Art Gallery of York University, 15-09-2009, 06-12-2009. - Publicatie in de vorm van een handleiding naar aanleiding van een reconstructie van het paviljoen uit 1984 van de kunstenaarsgroep General Idea, opgericht in 1969 door A.A. Bronson (pseud. Michael Tims), Felix Partz (pseud. Ronald Gabe) en Jorge Zontal (pseud. Slobodan Saia-Levy). Op ironische wijze stelden zij de rol van de kunst, het kunstenaarschap, de positie van galerieën en musea aan de kaak. - From its origins in the mail art movement through to its "destruction" of The 1984 Miss General Idea Pavillion in 1977, the Canadian collective General Idea constructed a comprehensive body of work as a performative fiction. Glamour Is Theft examines this "pageantry of camp parody" through the logic of its mythic system. The book reconstructs this system from statements that were dispersed and disguised within General Idea's work and writing as a whole, including the publication FILE Magazine. In General Idea's system, there is one concept: Glamour; one operation: reversibility; one technique: cut-up; one strategy: theft; one tactic: camouflage. Following the collective's strategies, the book in turn mimics the language of structuralist and semiological publications of the 1970s while also considering the influences of Roland Barthes, William Burroughs, Guy Debord, Claude Lévi-Strauss and Marshall McLuhan on General Idea's work