Imagining Resistance: Visual Culture and Activism in Canada

General Idea and AIDS

95 General Idea and AIDS KIRSTY ROBERTSON AND J. KERI CRONIN Passersby walking down the streets of New York and Toronto in the late 1980s and early 1990s may have found themselves confronted with a series of posters, each a brightly coloured red, green, and blue square with a stack of four letters—A.I.D.S. General Idea’s AIDS logo, an appropriation of Robert Indiana’s LOVE paintings, is one of the most iconic images of AIDS activism, up there with the Names Project AIDS Memorial Quilt and work by other collectives such as ACT-UP, Gran Fury, and Group Material.1 AA Bronson, often described as the “sole survivor” of General Idea, witnessed firsthand the effects of AIDS on the art community in Canada and elsewhere. The other two members of the collective General Idea, Jorge Zontal and Felix Partz, had both died of AIDS-related illness by 1994. Much of Bronson’s recent work, such as the exhibition Negative Thoughts, shown in 2001, is a testament to this loss. In the exhibition, three empty chairs, each with a plain cushion either blue, red, or green, speak eloquently to the absent members of the group, and to the destruction of a collective of three men who worked together, lived together, and created art together for more than twenty-five years. In turn, the title “Negative Thoughts” is a play on words, referring to the relief felt when a negative result is returned from an H.I.V. test. General Idea’s work on AIDS and Bronson’s work on loss came late in their careers. General Idea came together in 1968, but it could be said they began in 1971 with a pageant. “We approached the Art Gallery of Ontario about doing a big theatrical dance pageant,” Bronson writes. “Much to our surprise they went for it.” Kits, including 1940s dresses, were sent out to artists across Canada (most of them male), who then photographed themselves in drag, masquerading as contestants for “Miss General Idea.” The AGO hosted the awards ceremony.2 The campy drag queen glamour of the Miss General Idea pageant echoes the subversive humour of General Idea—the attempt “to [capture] glamour without falling into it.”3 In turn the pageant was rolled into The General Idea Pavilion, and an archaeological dig/happening outside of Kingston that “discovered” the artifacts of a lost General Idea Pageant (an archive of an event that never happened). Imagining Resistance 96 Then came FILE magazine (a play on LIFE magazine) and the photographic images of General Idea—always as a threesome, but as a pack of three poodles cavorting and copulating, or three seal pups lying on the snow. Built in are critiques of individualism and capitalism, of the nuclear family and consumerism, as General Idea queered the scene of Canadian art. This was all done through glamour, glitz, and the language of media and advertising, as Peter Gallo puts it—to co-opt promotion for the sole purpose of generating more promotion.4 “[We were] emerging from the late ’60s psychedelia of student revolution, florescent posters, underground newspapers and Marshall McLuhan,” Bronson later recalled, “we pooled our fantasies in the druggy way characteristic of the time to actualize our Burroughsian dream of a trans-Canada art scene.”5 “Huddled against the Canadian winter of 1968,” as their “auto-legend” has it, George Saia, Ronald Gabe, and Michael Tims left behind their birth names and became, respectively, Jorge Zontal, Felix Partz, and AA Bronson. “Being a trio,” they wrote in a manifesto, “frees us from the tyranny of the individual genius.”6 As the 1960s and ’70s gave way to the 1980s, rumours began to circulate about a mysterious disease affecting homosexual men in New York and San Francisco. Though it quickly became obvious that AIDS was not a “gay disease,” anti-gay sentiment flourished around the illness, coalescing in a campaign from the Christian right in the United States, whose supporters argued that AIDS was a punishment for homosexuality. Given the lack of support for medical research from the US government (thenpresident Ronald Reagan did not mention the word “AIDS” in public until late 1985, by which time thousands of people had died) it seemed that such judgments were acceptable.7 Said artist David Wojnarowicz in a now infamous statement, victims of AIDS were dying “slow and vicious and unnecessary deaths because fags and dykes and junkies are expendable in this country.”8 As government refused to...