Liveblog: McCready Lecture on Canadian Art by Philip Monk Marshall McLuhan, General Idea, and Me!

November 9th, 2011

Inaugurating their collective enterprise in the heyday of the “medium is the message,” General Idea were often dismissed as camp “triviality.” Yet they created a fictional system based on popular culture that was as coherent as the media analyses of Marshall McLuhan and the International Situationists. The lecture considers General Idea’s contribution to the Toronto School of communication theory. This liveblog follows along with Philip Monk,  Director of the Art Gallery of York University and former AGO curator, as he delves into the worlds of Marshall McLuhan and General Idea. The talk is due to begin at 7.00 – we hope you enjoy following along at home.  Holly, Internet & Social Media Content Coordinator

A bit about Philip Monk: Philip Monk is Director of the Art Gallery of York University and has served as a curator at both the Art Gallery of Ontario and the Power Plant. A published writer since 1977, he currently is finishing his eighth book Glamour is Theft: A User’s Guide to General Idea, a book as if written in the 1970s and as if written by Roland Barthes (in English translation).

19:04  Georgiana Uhlyarik, Canadian curator, is on stage to introduce Philip Monk.
‘Philip began as a critic and freelance curator in 1977. Last week he was announced as this year’s recipient of the Hnatyshyn Foundation prize for curatorial excellence in contemporary Canadian visual art.’

19.06 ‘Philip has been implicated in the history of General Idea for many years. It has been a complicated and ever evolving history – today is yet another chapter.’

19.07 Philip is now on stage.
‘I installed the 1984 General Idea retrospective – my first installation. (On screen is photos of that moment and of General Idea). What was is about Winnipeg? That’s the initial connection between Marshall Mcluhan, General Idea and me. But this is a talk about Toronto and the Toronto school of communications. It included McLuhan, why didn’t it include General Idea?’

19.10 … And baby makes four.

19.11 Mt title is a menage a trois, or a menage a cinq. MAT is the title of a General Idea exhibition. Two is the number of rivalry or mimicry, which are one and the same. Two insures we would talk about influence – the influence of Marshall McLuhan ON General Idea. It is mechanical. On the other hand we are already caught in the binary logic of either/or… the number three complicates matters.

19.13 The numbers two and three rule everything I say tonight. These numbers rule General Idea’s system – easy to remember, not easy to see. One-two-three – the numeric cosmology rules General Idea’s system.

19.15 GI were the first to recognise the pervasive influence of MM. A General Idea quote – ‘As children of the Summer of Love and spectators of the Paris riots, we were well aware of the International Situations and Society of the Spectacle on one hand, and of MM, drug culture, digger houses, underground papers and free schools on the other.’

19.16 For AA at least, McLuhan was a hero of sorts.

19.17 Commentary was the linguistic basis of much of General Idea’s fabrications. Rather than a specific medium, we need to discover the immersive environment in which General Idea’s system lived.

19.18 MM’s comments about invisible environments could also be applied to GI’s invisible system.

FILE Magazine could find its source in MM’s Industrial Bride. GI always proved that the dated was fertile, camp ground. Creating an archaeology of the past, images of the future, drawn from fortune magazine, where the same kinds that MM used. They were contemporary for MM and retro for GI.

19.20 FILE published from a Canadian point of view. At a high point in Canadian nationalism, GI were nationalistic too. Another MM trait perhaps?

GI’s criticism was produced from an artistic, not an academic point of view, mimicking advertising and popular culture at a higher semiotic level.

19.21 ‘The best weapon against myth is to mythify it in turn… since myth robs language of something, why not rob myth.’ (Barthes quote)

19.22 GI not limited to MM in their media analysis – extended to the Kabalah, de Bord’s Society of the Spectacle and the wildcard of William Burroughs.

19.24 Burroughs offered models, methods and lingo to assimilate and use magazines (1968 novel Nova Express). (Shows WB quote about newpapers and the image virus).

19.26 PM talking about the influence of Levi Strauss and his model of myth on General Idea

19.28 MM was only part of the mythic, subversive mix. I want to look at the relationship between MM and GI in a more diffused way than just tracking influence.

19.29 ‘Perhaps the mere speed up of human events and the resulting increase of interfaces among men and institutions insure a multitude of innovations that upset all existing arrangements whatever.’ – Marshall McLuhan

19.30 In light of MM’s quotation conside this GI quotation:

‘When the junkie, when the art junkies gotta get our fix, we gotta make a connection, we need our correspondences’

19.31  ’In this article seeing art as a system of signs in motion as an archive and indicator and stabilizer of culture as a means of creating fetish onjects as residence for the field of imagery defining a culture, seeing all this and more in many ways we have become aware of the necessity of developing methods of generating realizing stability alternate myths alternate lifestyles.’ General Idea

19.34 ‘We take General Idea at their word as much as we don’t take them at their word. Their work appeared visually as artworks but its event of appearing was performative. The system put their Pavillion in place and kept it standing – a priority given to language.’

19.35 The systematic nature of their work has even now yet to be addressed. Whilst it does not appear, all their operations are linked through it. The systems ruling term, glamour, is a concept who’s operations are achieved through the applications of techniques, produced by strategies and insinuated by tactics.

ONE CONCEPT: GLAMOUR
ONE OPERATION: REVERSIBILITY
ONE TECHNIQUE: CUT-UP
ONE STRATEGY: THEFT
ONE TACTIC: CAMOUFLAGE

19.36 Showing a diagram of Glamour’s operation of reversibility. (Barthesesque diagram)

19.38 I want to cover the early ground that instituted this system. The Pavilion was built on a spacial and temporal fault line – we don’t go far back enough in figuring out where this came from. GI were architect advocates. Through their verbal advocacy the Pavilion was erected. ‘This is the story of General Idea,’ they said. We believed them, but behind every story is a back story.

19.41 Everything is permitted was a Nietzsche slogan GI took from Burroughs. Talking about images banks and the collage/cut-up method.

19.42 Perpetually changing, constantly colliding, different alignments of words and images, ever new configurations.

19.45 The Borderline was a concept MM and GI shared. An ambiguous model signifying domains in politics and psychology, it was a major operative concept for General Idea. ‘Ambiguity is not a symptom of a schizophrenic who travels back and forth across the line’. Mirror, cutup and borderline were one and the same – ‘the vacuum created by your invisibility has to be filled with words.’ The Pavillion was built on this unstable fault, borderline, were the border dweller (GI) performed in stolen moments.

19.49 ‘Two heads are better than one, but it’s really just one more mouth to feed on’ – General Idea

19.51 Words are a method of invasion, even of the image.

19.52 As in the tripod, a motif of their late 1970s work, is a symbol of stablity. They are all each other’s right hand man and would hate to be reduced to a couple. They weren’t always a threesome – a three man they became. They did not conceptually consolidate until 1975 – portraits of themsevles as architects, poodles, baby seals, etc.

19.54 Their association with McLuhan ends in 1975 with the passage of two to three. From Borderline, where one and two dominates, to three. This number three was all about control, constructing our vision. Their fixed point of view was a throwback.

19.57 We cannot judge or argue with a mythic system such as General Idea’s.

19.58 General Idea were a laboratory, a studio, an advertising agency. Their collective dream was the 1984 Miss General Idea Pavilion.
The talk is over – time for some questions for the audience. 

Q. Would you say that some of General Idea’s work, or details or their works, fell out of this system by accident, experiment or chance?

A. Crisis was repeated – and they were always able to cope. Whilst the system seems to have continued throughout – there was a deviation of sorts but with the burning down of the Pavilion they turned their back on their early system. In 1986 there was a crisis in moving to New York and they had to dumb it down for Americans which fell out of the system.

‘I Sent my interperatation to AA (Bronson) and he thought it was fundamentally true and groundbreaking.’

‘Everything that they say in their work is related to everything else.’

Q. What do you think happened in 1975? Until 1975 there’s an interest in the mirror and after it’s the interest in the menage a trois… from two to three.

A. They began to consolidate themselves… in 1975 they had to brand themselves because people were confused about them and who they were. It was necessary – that’s how the portrait came about and how the story began. They consolidated into a trio and the business model came up then.A collective dream became more specifically focussed. They had to have an artistic identity when they began showing commercially.

‘Everything in General Idea is coded – you have to read the code words.’

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