General Idea Retrospective

General Idea Retrospective
Originally uploaded by killerfemme.

At the Kunswerke, a really interesting center for modern and contemporary art, this Canadian artists collective had a retrospective. They also worked with ideas of design, art, media and life, but in a much, much different way than the Bauhaus. They designed publicity to call attention to AIDS (their most famous being the word AIDS in the style of Robert Indiana's LOVE sculpture), staged a beauty pageant by mail and published an art magazine called FILE based on LIFE magazine. The best part was you could read photocopied versions of FILE and look at the originals in glass cases. Though it was a magazine, it seemed to have a zine ethic and even reviewed early fanzines, and I think for me it was quite an inspiration for riffRAG to see that...