General idea artists biography silk

There are always good reasons to organize a General Idea exhibition—not because of new work or freshly discovered findings, but because the artistic collective’s only surviving member AA Bronson has cultivated an afterlife of General Idea that persists into the present day. First initiated in 1969, its central members AA Bronson, Felix Partz, and Jorge Zontal officially disbanded in 1994 when Partz and Zontal passed away. Over more than twenty years of collaboration, General Idea produced a unique artistic horizon that fundamentally questioned not only the social dignity of art, but also social systems of value and morality in general, using whatever medium necessary to create their art as an all-encompassing yet serious practical joke. It is within this horizon that Bronson has preserved its legacy since the mid-1990s, ingeniously demonstrating the continued relevance of General Idea. And today—as we face a perennial crisis, one that has taken hold of Europe as much as the United States for the past five years, and are witnessing the breakdown of traditional models of social and economic self-evidences—it is thus again the perfect time for some General Idea (GI).

The title of the exhibition is taken from one of GI’s more enigmatic and much reproduced works P is for Poodle (1982–89), a self-portrait of its three core members dressed as poodles in suits. Since the mid-1980s, these group self-portraits—which present the artists as a shared identity and are part of their ongoing “Three Men Series”—have played a central role in their artistic practice, and four of them serve to frame the Zürich show. In Nightschool (1989), the artists assume the guise of college graduates with white shirts, gowns, ties, and mortarboards in an airbrushed, moonlit setting. Although the triangular composition remains the same, with Partz facing the viewer, the arrangement of the artists in Playing Doctor (1992) is reversed:

Kwai Fung Salone is thrilled to present Human Silk — a group exhibition supported by the Consulate General of Italy and Italian Cultural Institute in Hong Kong, as the opening event of ITALIA on STAGE Autumn Festival Hong Kong. It presents three outstanding mid-career artists from Italy, Paola Angelini, Thomas Braida and Nebojša Despotović, all of whom received their education in the city of Venice and have developed their distinguished careers with various degrees of connection to the lagoon city, which inspired the title of the exhibition. From Venice to Hong Kong, China, such cross-continent dialogue connecting the East and West brings to mind Marco Polo and his famous voyage along the Silk Road, a well-travelled record of human histories, connections, civilizations, and cross-cultural exchanges. Approaching contemporaneity through history and heritage, all three artists manifest what we call Human Silk, an attempt to locate the complexity and fluidity of human relations and perception in the flux of time.

This exhibition is our first collaboration with guest curators, Aurora Fonda and Sandro Pignotti, who are both from Venice. With an anthropological overtone, this exhibition delves into the essence of human sensibility, human perception, human art and human treasures. Taking as a point of departure their shared roots in the tradition of twentieth-century European art and their parallel interest in reinterpreting its artistic heritage, this exhibition brings the three artists together for the first time to trace the legacy of Italian and European modernist paintings and offers a fresh look at their role in art history. 

Supported by

Paola Angelini (b.1983, San Benedetto del Tronto in Italy) works with motifs inspired by twentieth century statuary, Medieval tapestries, Italian art history, her own unconscious, and nature. Her work reveals influences from such Italian tradition as Magic Rea

About halfway into his twenty-five-year collaboration with Jorge Zontal and Felix Partz, AA Bronson described one major reason why the three came together in Toronto in 1969 to form the group General Idea: the absence of their own visibility or self-representation within a national art scene. “We forgot that we, ourselves, were real artists, because we had not seen ourselves in the media—real artists, like Frank Stella, appeared in Artforum magazine,” Bronson wrote. This exhibition presented a selection from the collective’s production through 1977 and consisted largely of ephemera documenting the group’s primary preoccupation during those early years: the construction of a myth that addressed the anxiety of geographic marginality, in tandem with a sophisticated deconstruction of mass media and the culture industry.

The earliest piece here was a silent 16-mm black-and-white film, God Is My Gigolo, shot in 1969 but never completed. The film’s central narrative, outlined in a handwritten script by Zontal—the original was also featured in the exhibition along with film stills and a drawing of the set—involves a giant toy penis discarded by a vagrant and then circulated among various protagonists until it finally washes up on a beach on Toronto Island, where it is discovered by a group of natives. The three principal female characters are played by Mimi Page, Granada Gazelle, and Miss Honey, all of whom would subsequently hold the title of Miss General Idea in a series of fictional and staged beauty pageants dating from 1968 to 1984. Four photographic works also depicted some of the iconography that emerged out of General Idea’s parodic obsession with glamour, including Hand of the Spirit, 1973–74, a prop that originally appeared in a photographic submission made by Vincent Trasov to the 1971 pageant, and the Miss General Idea Shoe, ca. 1973, a manly stiletto consistent with the pagea