The performance occurred as part of the show 25 Years Later: Welcome to Art in General, installed at the UBS art gallery on the occasion of the non-profit arts organization Art in General’s twenty-fifth anniversary. Rather than a retrospective of the organization’s work, the show was conceived of as a series of creatively staged encounters between art and the public. For more on the exhibition, see →.
Although the details of the story are ambiguous, over the course of the performances it becomes clear that for a time the lovers lived together in New York, until the absent lover’s family demanded that she leave the country, having something to do with the war in Iraq. Hayes’s speaker offered to accompany the absent lover, but the offer was refused. Thus began the epistolary exchange that provides the context for the performance.
Documentation of the entire piece, including audio, is available at the artist’s website here →.
The model of subcultures that I use throughout this essay draws from the work done at the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, particularly as enumerated by Stuart Hall and Dick Hebidge. Both scholars looked at the everyday activity that constituted participation in a variety of subcultures, from soccer hooligans to punks, and discussed how that activity constituted an active political engagement with creating space for alternative structures and values. Two aspects of their discussion of subcultures are particularly pertinent to this essay. The first is the fact that everyday social activity can constitute active political engagement, and the second is the prominence of détournement within subcultures, wherein subjects take a process or object from dominant culture and use it for a different purpose. Both of these scholars render everyday activity political—political because of the work it does in the present moment, rather than trying to affect change in the future. The artists discussed here likewise endow everyday life with political agency. See Resistance Through Rituals: Youth Subcultures in Post-War Britain, eds. Stuart Hall and Tony Jefferson (New York: Routledge, 2000); and Dick Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of Style (New York: Routledge, 2004).
For more on the role that subcultures play within this work, see Virginia Solomon, “Politics of Queer Sociality: Music as Material Metaphor,” exhibition catalog, Farewell to Post-Colonialism: The Third Guangzhou Triennial (Guangzhou: Guangdong Museum of Art, 2008), 314–317.
Julie Carson, “Now, then and love: Questions of Agency in Contemporary Practice, Interview with Andrea Geyer, Ken Gonzales-Day, Sharon Hayes, Adrià Julià, Juan Maidagan, Emily Roydson (LTTR), Stephanie Taylor, Bruce Yonemoto and Dolores Zinny,” Exile of the Imaginary: Politics, Aesthetics, Love (Vienna: Generali Foundation, 2007), 163.
In the first volume of his History of Sexuality, Michel Foucault describes biopower as a method through which the modern, capitalist nation-state controls populations by disciplining bodies via productive, and not just repressive, processes. This carries the consequence that norms and discourse create the possibilities and limits for bodies, in addition to explicit forms of regulation that allow and prohibit behavior. In the case of subcultures, power flows in the opposite direction, in the sense that subcultures provide a space to rearticulate norms and discourse, and for the bodies of the participants to enact that rearticulation.
Bronson, Partz, and Zontal were pseudonyms for Michael Tims, Ron Gabe, and Slobodan Siai-Levy, respectively.
AA Bronson, “Myth as Parasite/Image as Virus: General Idea’s Bookshelf, 1967–1975,” The Search for the Spirit: General Idea 1968–1975, ed. Fern Bayer (Toronto: Art Galley of Ontario, 1998), 18.
Interview with the author, March 10, 2008.
Any consideration of General Idea, particularly of its work through 1975, owes an impossible debt of gratitude to Fern Bayer, the group’s archivist, who helped organize the most thorough consideration of the group’s early work for the exhibition The Search for the Spirit: General Idea 1968-1975, and its attendant catalog. For more, see The Search for the Spirit, ibid.
The competition at the 1971 pageant occurred based on photographs submitted by friends of General Idea, who followed criteria that the group outlined in the submissions packet sent to each participant. Vancouver-based artist Marcel Dot (Michael Morris) was crowned Miss General Idea 1971–1984 for his photo, which “best captured glamour without falling into it,” parodying glamour without enacting it as a part of his persona. General Idea crowned Dot Miss General Idea 1971–1984 for a number of reasons. The date—because of its Orwellian connotations and its association with a general notion of the future—was evocative of the correspondence network of which General Idea was a part. Many of General Idea’s cohort also made work throughout the early 1970s that incorporated 1984, including Glenn Lewis’s The Great Wall of 1984, which consisted of a wall of cubby holes, each of which was filled with an object submitted by another member of this correspondence network. The Great Wall of 1984 was installed at the National Library of Canada in Ottawa. From a purely logistical standpoint, though, General Idea also granted Dot a thirteen-year rein because the group could not fathom organizing another competition in 1972, and because the year 1984, due to its connotations, seemed as good an end date as any.
Rough Trade was a new-wave band founded by Carole Pope and Kevin Staples in 1968, though it did not perform as Rough Trade until 1974. The band achieved relative success, due in part to its frank embrace of raw sexuality, with out lesbian Carole Pope frequently performing in bondage attire.
The work was commissioned by De Apel in Amsterdam as a part of the gallery’s series of artist videos made for Dutch TV. Steeped in Marshal McLuhan’s ideas about the power of technology, and witness to the ways in which TV disseminated American culture as a form of unmarked, universal global culture, the work nonetheless also continued General Idea’s exploration of the possibilities of subcultural politics.
The video tells the story of Marianne, an abstract painter struggling to juggle the conflicting demands of the market, a desire for critical cultural relevance, and a new baby.
General Idea, Test Tube (1979)
Julie Carson, “Now, then and love,” 163.
Ibid., 160.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Not coincidentally, each group has included Hayes within various projects, further demonstrating the social and discursive connections that inform their intertwined pursuit of art practices which highlight the politics of queer subcultural life.
See →.
For more on this interpretation of this genre, see Claire Bishop,Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship(New York: Verso, 2012).
Interview with the author, March 22, 2009.
Ibid.
Many of the artists who regularly work with LTTR and Ridykeulous also work with a number of queer of color social outreach organizations, including the Silvia Rivera Law Project, Queers for Economic Justice, and FIERCE, a member-led organization devoted to developing leadership and community improvement for queer youth of color. Each of these organizations include art as part of its outreach, and artists donate work to benefit auctions.