Shop > Monographs
#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.
Related Items
- Art Metropole
- 896 College St
- Toronto, Ontario
- M6H 1A4 Canada
- +1 416 703 4400
- Hours:
- Wednesday to Sunday
- 11AM to 6PM
Art Metropole is a non-profit artist-run centre established 1974 as a division of Art-Official Inc. We are grateful for the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, the City of Toronto through the Toronto Arts Council, as well as our donors, members and volunteers.
Your donation assists in the development of contemporary art practices and programs for the general public. Art Metropole is certified by the Ontario Living Wage Network.
- Toronto Arts Council
- Ontario Trillium Foundation
- Canada Council
- Ontario Arts Council
