Description

Catalogue of the exhibition General Idea. Split Time , co-organized by the Museum of Latin American Art of Buenos Aires and Jumex Contemporary Art Foundation and presented at Malba between March 24 and June 25, 2017.

Over a twenty-five-year career, the Canadian artists' collective General Idea, formed in 1969 by AA Bronson (Michael Tims, Canada 1946), Felix Partz (Ronald Gabe, Canada 1945-1994) and Jorge Zontal (Italy, 1944 - Toronto, 1994), produced a significant body of work in different media: performances, video art, photography, publications, installations, and multiple editions of mass-circulation objects.

As part of its first exhibition in Latin America, Malba published a book that pays homage to the concept of the mythical FILE Megazine , the mail art magazine that the collective published between 1972 and 1989 as a parodic critique of LIFE . The book includes a selection of historical photographs that review the group's production and aesthetic, as well as various gallery views from the exhibition at the Jumex Museum, where the show was previously presented. Accompanying the images are the curatorial text "Mythical Time: A Guide to Not Getting Lost in the Viral Trajectory of General Idea," by the exhibition's curator and artistic director of Malba (2014-2018), Agustín Pérez Rubio, and three essays specially commissioned from curators Gabriel Villalobos (Jumex), Ivo Mesquita, and Francesco Scasciamacchia, which delve into the work of this unclassifiable collective from diverse perspectives.

“Working together, and sometimes separately, we sought to structure—or rather untangle—the post-sixties spaghetti that was our minds, the artists’ galleries, the artists’ videos, and the artists’ magazines. This allowed us to see ourselves as an art scene. And we did.” —AA Bronson

Authors
Agustín Pérez Rubio
Gabriel Villalobos
Ivo Mesquita
Francesco Scasciamacchia

Technical specifications
Published by: Malba
Year: 2017
Type: Exhibition catalog
Binding: Paperback
Dimensions: 28 x 22 cm
Weight: 730 gr
Spanish
Pages: 180
ISBN: 978-987-46496-0-7