Glamour Is Theft: A User's Guide to General Idea (Hardcover)

General Idea

ISBN 10: 0921972660 / ISBN 13: 9780921972662

Published by Art Gallery of York University,Canada, Toronto, 2013

About this Item

Hardcover. From its origins in the mail art movement through to its destruction of The 1984 Miss General Idea Pavillion in 1977, the Canadian collective General Idea constructed a comprehensive body of work as a performative fiction. Glamour Is Theft examines this pageantry of camp parody through the logic of its mythic system. The book reconstructs this system from statements that were dispersed and disguised within General Ideas work and writing as a whole, including the publication FILE Magazine. In General Ideas system, there is one concept: Glamour; one operation: reversibility; one technique: cut-up; one strategy: theft; one tactic: camouflage. Following the collectives strategies, the book in turn mimics the language of structuralist and semiological publications of the 1970s while also considering the influences of Roland Barthes, William Burroughs, Guy Debord, Claude Levi-Strauss and Marshall McLuhan on General Ideas work. Shipping may be from multiple locations in the US or from the UK, depending on stock availability.

Seller Inventory # 9780921972662

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Glamour Is Theft: A User's Guide to General Idea (Hardcover)
• Publisher: Art Gallery of York University,Canada, Toronto
• Publication Date: 2013
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0921972660
• ISBN 13: 9780921972662
• Binding: Hardcover
• Condition: new

About this title

Synopsis

From its origins in the mail art movement through to its “destruction” of The 1984 Miss General Idea Pavillion in 1977, the Canadian collective General Idea constructed a comprehensive body of work as a performative fiction. Glamour Is Theft examines this “pageantry of camp parody” through the logic of its mythic system. The book reconstructs this system from statements that were dispersed and disguised within General Idea’s work and writing as a whole, including the publication FILE Magazine. In General Idea’s system, there is one concept: Glamour; one operation: reversibility; one technique: cut-up; one strategy: theft; one tactic: camouflage. Following the collective’s strategies, the book in turn mimics the language of structuralist and semiological publications of the 1970s while also considering the influences of Roland Barthes, William Burroughs, Guy Debord, Claude Lévi-Strauss and Marshall McLuhan on General Idea’s work.