Art Metropole

#14645

Glamour Is Theft: A User’s Guide to General Idea 1969-1978

Writer

Philip Monk

Artist

General Idea

Price

$40.00

Date

2013

Publisher

Art Gallery of York University

Format

Monographs

ISBN

978-0-921972-66-2

Size

20 × 25 cm

Length

256 pp

Genre

Canadian, Art History

From its origins in the mail art movement through to its “destruction” of The 1984 Miss General Idea Pavillion in 1977, the Canadian collective General Idea constructed a comprehensive body of work as a performative fiction. Glamour is Theft examines this “pageantry of camp parody” through the logic of its mythic system. The book reconstructs this system from statements that were dispersed and disguised within General Idea’s work and writing as a whole, including the publication FILE Megazine. In General Idea’s system, there is one concept: Glamour; one operation: reversibility; one technique: cut-up; one strategy: theft; one tactic: camouflage. Following the collective’s strategies, the book in turn mimics the language of structuralist and semiological publications of the 1970s while also considering the influences of Roland Barthes, William Burroughs, Guy Debord, Claude Lévi-Strauss, and Marshall McLuhan on the work.