Pill-shaped balloons and pills the size of bombs: the art of General Idea

There are only a few weeks left to see the giant pills in Ottawa. An exhibition at the National Gallery of Canada that features the work of the Canadian artist group General Idea closes on Nov. 20. General Idea was composed of three Toronto-based artists, Jorge Zontal, Felix Partz and AA Bronson. From 1969 to 1994, the trio created playful multi-media works that anticipated social developments such as social media, reality TV, digital avatars and recognition of fluidity in gender identity. General Idea got their name when a gallery mistook the name of an artwork for the name of the artist group itself. What might stand out to healthcare professionals is the incorporation of pills in their later works. Zontal and Partz were both diagnosed as HIV positive by 1990 and the pills that featured so prominently in their lives seeped into their art. The installation One Day of AZT and One Year of AZT from 1991 takes up an entire room in the gallery. As the title suggests, it shows a large version of a year’s worth of AZT, the antiviral prescribed to delay the onset of AIDS. Other giant pills greet visitors to the gallery before they even reach the exhibition entrance. Three yellow and red capsules hang from the gallery’s cupula, a recreation of a 1992 installation called Pharma©opia. “Drugs the size of bombs, they are simultaneously cheerful and ominous, warning of the looming epidemic while the copyright symbol comments on pharmaceutical profiteering,” Kate Taylor wrote in a June 2022 review of the exhibition in the Globe and Mail. Visitors to the exhibition can witness pill-shaped silver Mylar balloons inflated with helium hugging the ceiling in another installation, called Magi© Bullet. When the balloons sink to the floor, gallery visitors can take them home, spreading the art outside of the gallery. “The installation will empty out over the course of the exhibition—a testament to those who have died from AIDS-related illnesses,” according to the National Gallery of Canada’s notes on the exhibition. The artists moved to New York in 1986 and witnessed AIDS ravaging the city’s artistic community. It had a huge impact on their work even before Zontal and Partz’s diagnoses, as the group played with the idea of a virus. In 1987 General Idea created a graphic of the acronym AIDS, replicating the stacked letters of Robert Indiana’s LOVE graphic. They displayed it all over New York, infecting the whole city and bringing the disease into the spotlight. AA Bronson revisited the concept with a new poster displayed around Ottawa this summer. He also created VIDEOVIRUS for the National Gallery of Canada’s exhibition, a short video using the AIDS logo. General Idea also took well-known contemporary art pieces and “infected” them with their trademark colours, red, green and blue. The final room in the exhibition features these familiar-looking works, such as a Piet Mondrian-styled piece in General Idea’s colours, alongside more large pills. Zontal and Partz both died in 1994, within four months of each other. “This show is a definitive survey of the trio’s art-making from the joyous counter-culture of the 1970s through to those final dark days, but in the midst of a new epidemic it is the art about AIDS that really stands out – and endures,” Taylor wrote about the exhibition. The exhibition was organized by the National Gallery of Canada in collaboration with AA Bronson. Read: Art to boost healthcare workers' morale

Pill-shaped balloons and pills the size of bombs: the art of General Idea

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