BUENOS AIRES.- MALBA is presenting 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.