General Idea at The Arts Club of Chicago - August 25th, 2024

In April 1997, The Arts Club of Chicago inaugurated its current headquarters at 201 East Ontario Street with the opening of “The Sensuous Whiteness of Life's Interruptions,” the first Chicago exhibition of the Canadian artists’ collaborative General Idea: AA Bronson, Felix Partz, and Jorge Zontal. 

In 1972, the mouthpiece of General Idea was FILE Megazine, a quarterly publication and fashionable site of national and international activity for the mail/correspondence-art movement. As a means for other artists to access their collection of mail-in submissions, General Idea founded Art Metropole, an artist-run distribution center, in 1974. Art Metropole, which still exists today, became a focused archive of artists books, periodicals, video, audio, and other ephemera. 

From 1987 to 1994, General Idea focused exclusively on projects dealing with the implications of AIDS. For example, in response to a New York amfAR (American Foundation for AIDS Research) benefit that year, General Idea resuscitated Robert Indiana’s LOVE painting of 1967, substituting the words AIDS. “We want to make the word AIDS normal,” they stated. “Keeping the word visible… will hopefully play a part in normalizing people’s relationship to the disease [and] make it something that can be dealt with as a disease rather than a set of moral or ethical issues.”

For “The Sensuous Whiteness of Life's Interruptions” at The Arts Club of Chicago, General Idea presents their white-on-white AIDS logo wallpaper and paintings, as well as the major installation, Fin de Siècle (1990): three life-size synthetic harp seal pups adrift on an ice floe made of hundreds of sheets of polystyrene. 

24 pages
10 x 10 in
Softcover
ISBN-10: 0964344068
First edition.
Mint, extremely rare

Published by The Arts Club of Chicago (1997), featuring text by Joshua Decter and Kathy Cottong.