Complete Set of Five Self‑Portraits

This series of self-portraits by the Canadian trio, made between 1983 and 1994, present their authors as members of an unabashed ménage à trois. General Idea appropriated a photographic technique often used by fashion magazines, namely airbrush retouching to create smooth, perfect surfaces. Whether evoking the style of a fantasy film (Nightschool, 1989) or a portrait of old nobility (P is for Poodle, 1983–1989), the images are characterised by a sense of constant derision, as in Baby Makes 3 (1984–1989), an infantilised vision of three adults in the same bed. A dark sense of humour runs through Fin de Siècle (1994), in which baby seals take the place of the trio, alluding to their massacring for their furs, as it does in the photograph of the doctors who all examine each other (Playing Doctor, 1992). The wallpaper, which was also produced by General Idea, uses colours reminiscent of the test patterns generated by the cathode ray tubes of the time.

General Idea, a group of Canadian artists formed in 1969, then a trio made up of Felix Partz, Jorge Zontal, and AA Bronson, set out to enter the world of the collective imagination fed by the marketers and advertisers of the 1980s, contaminating it with a subversive perspective, against conventions. In particular, the militant trio produced a series of self-portraits in which they appear as if on magazine covers, presented here on a wallpaper echoing the test pattern (coloured stripes used to judge the quality of an image on screen) of cathode-ray television, with its exaggerated intensity of colour. The artists are presented as part of an assertive ménage à trois, sometimes the dark heroes of the fantasy film Nightschool, sometimes bitingly ironic, dressed in curly wigs that evoke both the ancient nobility or certain courts, and the image of the poodle derived from the mockery hurled in the face of the gay world of which they claim to be a part (P is for Poodle). The same derision can be found in Baby Makes 3, an infantilized vision of three adults in a bed, in Fin de siècle with its three baby seals, or again in the doctors examining each other in Playing Doctor, under a constellation of pills evoking the treatment that the AIDS epidemic was cruelly lacking at the time.