Acquisitions/
2010/
General Idea/
White AIDS #3

AA Bronson (Canadian, born 1946), Jorge Zontal (Italian, 1944-1994), Felix Partz (Canadian, 1945-1994)

For 25 years, the collective General Idea forged a single, mythologized identity in which the artists worked as a collaborative unit that presented self-conscious parodies of the art world and consumer culture. Inserting humorous and politically charged content into existing mass media and entertainment formats, General Idea produced subversive advertisements; a popular glossy magazine entitled FILE, a takeoff of LIFE; corporate logos; television documentaries; and beauty pageants.

In response to an invitation to create work for the Art against AIDS benefit, in 1987 General Idea appropriated the colors and design of Robert Indiana’s widely quoted LOVE (1965), reconfiguring his image to read “AIDS.” Producing wallpaper, stamps, public sculpture, posters, and billboards, General Idea spread its AIDS logo throughout art institutions and transportation systems in the United States and Europe. AA Bronson explained, “We want to make the word AIDS normal. . . . By keeping the word visible, it has a normalizing effect that will hopefully play a part in normalizing people’s relationship to the disease—to make it something that can be dealt with as a disease rather than a set of moral or ethical issues.” In contrast to the traditional color-saturated logo, the letters in White AIDS #3 are obscured by layers of white gesso, a reference to modernist abstraction. Here the ghostly appearance of the message, covered up and hidden below the surface, is a haunting, somber reflection on the epidemic that would take the lives of two of the three members of the group.