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General
Idea’s Miss General Idea Pageant: Humor and the Politics of Queer Cultural
Practice
Virginia
Solomon
Department
of Art History
University
of Southern California
The
Miss General Idea Pageant was a long-running
conceptual and performance project by Canadian artist
group General Idea. Drawing
on both the international art scene of the late 1960s and
1970s and also General Idea’s local queer Canadian
context, the Pageant
project offers a critique of the avant-garde art system
and the role of representation within culture at large.
The artists frequently cite such figures as Roland
Barthes, William Burroughs, and Guy Debord in their
performance and text-based works.
The dual address of their work, both its art
historicity and also its intervention into the social,
enacts a politics of humor that is distinct from the more
often discussed politics of rage within queer cultural
practice. This
politics of humor is the primary focus of my paper.
Through
a consideration of three moments within the Pageant
project – The
1971 Miss General Idea Pageant, the Mondo
Nudo issue of FILE
Megazine and Luxon,
V.B. installation in 1973, and the Glamour
Issue of FILE and Going thru the
Motions performance of 1975 – I locate General
Idea’s work within both its artistic and its cultural
moment. FILE
Megazine is a magazine that the artists published as a
space both to realize their own and others’ artworks but
also to document Canada’s avant-garde art scene from
1974-1989. The
highly collaborative nature of the Pageant,
which involved artists from across the nation, reflects
the alternative modes of exchange that supported artistic
production in post-war Canada.
The conceptual, performance and text-based nature
of their practice enabled its circulation in a context
that was supported through government grants for artist
run spaces and artist travel grants, as opposed to the
sale of autonomous objects.
Their work also functions as part of a conversation
among other conceptual projects like mail art, land art as
manifest in site/non-site practices, and institutional
critique.
At
the same time, their project reflects the participants and
the practices of their queer milieu as well as offering an
intervention that foreshadows contemporary queer theory.
From the outset, their project explicitly and
self-consciously presented a commitment to gender
ambiguity. They
engage with Glamour as a major structuring principle for
this work, and embrace all of the camp associations that
the term brings to mind.
They crown Marcel Dot – Vancouver-based artist
Michael Morris – Miss General Idea 1971 for best
embodying Glamour without falling into it.
Likewise, the 1973 and 1975 moments demonstrate an
interest in Glamour precisely for its artifice – for its
connection to ideology and social construction.
General Idea inhabit and parodically perform
Glamour in their Miss
General Idea Pageant project to illuminate it as the
mechanism of ideology and social construction but also as
the means through which ideology and social construction
are naturalized. This
paper calls that we take their intention seriously while
we appreciate the comedy of its execution.
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