P is for Poodle
Description:... This exhibition brings together two major installations dating from the early- to mid-1980s. Previously exhibited at the Musée d'art moderne de la Ville de Paris as part of General Idea's retrospective in 2012, these works will be on view in the United States for the first time, along with a selection of paintings, drawings and sculptural wall works. A fully illustrated catalogue will accompany this exhibition, which is available to purchase online. Founded in Toronto in 1969 by AA Bronson, Felix Partz and Jorge Zontal, General Idea were among the first artists to implement media critique and queer theory in their work. For twenty-five years, they created a pioneering and singular practice that addressed the intersection of art and commerce, the role of the artist and the museum, body politics and, later, the AIDS crisis. Using strategies of appropriation, audience participation, humor and irony, they staged performances and created paintings, posters, photographs, installations, videos, magazines and other multiples that together form a kind of meta-spectacle as much as a formal artistic oeuvre. As Bronson has noted, General Idea "emerged in the aftermath of the Paris riots, from the detritus of hippie communes, underground newspapers, radical education, Happenings, love-ins, Marshall McLuhan and the International Situationists....[It] was at once complicit in and critical of the mechanisms and strategies that join art and commerce, a sort of mole in the art world." --Exhibition website.
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