General Idea

GENERAL IDEA, formed by AA Bronson, Felix Partz and Jorge Zontal in 1969 worked together as a group until the death of two founding members in 1994.

GENERAL IDEA sweeps through the formal repertoire of recent art history and enters into a critical, contradictory and ironic discussion. The trio was primarily interested in classical modern art, which they infected with the General Idea bacillus. Their work covers a wide range of media and includes installations, objects, performances, photographs, works on canvas, videos and drawings, as well as multiples, magazines, postcards and posters. The aesthetics oscillate between banal to kitschy forms from the everyday world and the appropriation of works of art and styles as examples of individual artistic metaphors. Since 1994, AA Bronson has been the caretaker of their legacy and, with that, of a social and media critical oeuvre covering virtually every possible form of artistic expression. —Dominique von Burg