“Huddled against the Canadian winter of 1968,” George Saia, Ronald Gabe and Michael Tims dispensed with their birth names and became, respectively, Jorge Zontal, Felix Partz and AA Bronson, and collectively, General Idea. Thirty-eight years later, their work finally made it to Ireland. The recent retrospective at Project Arts Centre presented some of the lesser-known, early preparations for a fantastic non-event that occupied many of those years – the Miss General Idea Pavilion.

From 1971 onwards, following a loopy trajectory that connects Rrose Sélavy to the Stonewall riots, General Idea hosted a series of beauty pageants in search of their elusive muse, Miss General Idea. These pageants were a means of ‘going through the motions’ and building the audience’s expectations in preparation for the construction of a Pavilion in honour of their muse. Blueprints and seating plans were drawn up, followed later by dry-runs, hoardings and promotional videos. In these early pageants, gender mutants, teddy bears, erotic voluptuaries and other ‘flaming creatures’ accompanied the figure of Miss General Idea.

An important but rarely exhibited precursor to the pageants was What happened (1970), a re-interpretation of Gertrude Stein’s 1922 play. An appropriate beginning, indeed: in a show of postmodern self-reflexivity avant la lettre, nothing happens; nothing is narrated in Stein’s play except the play itself. The play is what happens.

When in 1978, one year after announcing the construction of the 1984 Miss General Idea Pavilion, General Idea informs the public that the Pavilion has been destroyed by fire (General Idea emerged shaken, smoked, but stronger for it), they abandon “the possible future to concentrate on a fictive past” (Nicolas Bourriaud). As they exhume the Pavilion’s scattered ruins, General Idea learns how to desire in the present. Their libidinal economy is based upon a closed circuit that never reaches its goal, the Pavilion, and in this continuous postponement of the object that would provide fulfilment, and its corresponding elaboration in fantasy, General Idea realise their desire. Thus, they develop an erotics of reconstruction and archiving; a sensuous meeting of surfaces, fragments and part-objects to tickle one’s fancy. Similarly, an erotics of dissemination and promotion. General Idea use art to ride “piggyback on all sorts of different distribution systems, media distribution systems and travel into the world” (AA Bronson). Plagiarist and parasite catching a ride, General Idea proliferates images like viruses, spreading fantasy and expectation. Major vehicles of this infection were FILE magazine, a glamorous, reappropriative masquerade and networking tool shown here in its entirety, and Art Metropole, a Toronto-based publisher and distributor of multiples, books, and other ephemeral curiosities.

General Idea is a ‘borderline case’, and the Luxon V.B. blind (1973/ 2006) offers a prime example. Drawn at the boundary between inside and outside, day and night, domestic and public, each in and against the other, the double-sided mirror slats of the Luxon V.B. turn in- and out-side back upon itself, crossing it with glimpses of the other side in counterpoint.

According to Nicolas Bourriaud, the borderline case makes a fold in the visual economy of promotional objects, causing a temporal displacement. Identifying itself with the regime of consumables, deciphering the secret heterogeneity of the commodity fetish, art becomes the promotion of an event that has not yet taken place (and, moreover, never will) and the memory of an event that never took place – it is ‘pure potentiality’.

Along the border a double movement takes place, dividing and multiplying, making words and objects pile up: “Images overloaded the words and the words continued to pyramid. In other words, the words attempted to divide and conquer or multiply” (General Idea, The Borderline Case, 1973). The height of the pyramid is a measure of the wealth of such an exercise. Following the familiar avant-garde gambit of self-mythologisation, General Idea’s party trick was to have balanced for so long upon the precarious summit of this ziggurat on the move.

The borderline case marks the extension of the framing device. The Pavilion and the search for Miss GI are both such devices; a second-order elaboration of the apparatuses (commercial, libidinal, fashionable, and so on) art is threaded through, a theatre of operations wherein these apparatuses are examined, a halfway house for miners of the museum, a displacement from work to frame which “subverts and subordinates to itself the conditions from which it stems” (Craig Owens).

0“Collage or perish,” General Idea proclaim. The framing device provides a ground upon which to add collage elements on an international scale; the adhesive is the sharing of desires, the convergence of expectations and the participation in glamorous divergences.

As diffusion and divergence overtake production, as concepts de-centralise, formal motifs multiply and grow in complexity, and the art event is constantly deferred (whilst the debris which heralds it stacks up), a ‘time-slot’ remains open for ideas to stretch their legs… And what better walking-wear than the multifunctional? At once ‘blocking devices’ to disguise identities, models for the Pavilion, ‘eternal triangles’, and mobile monuments to the First General Idea International, the various parade a ‘logic with legs on the march’.

As the AIDS epidemic grew throughout the 80s and activists took to the streets, General Idea eschewed direct action and appropriated Robert Indiana’s iconic love logo by converting it to AIDS. In this simple conversion can be read the history of a movement coming to terms with a brutal chastening of its ideals. Begun in 1987, the AIDS logo was massproduced and distributed according to a familiar, but now far more poignant, viral logic, on posters, billboards, lottery tickets, stamps and even the cover of the Journal of the American Medical Association. Where LOVE spoke openly of hard-won, carefree pleasures and their political charge,AIDS meets political denial with its own terribly mute insistence. Displayed as wallpaper in Project, the dazzle of the logo’s colours traced Ellsworth Kelly-like complementary arcs across the space, spreading inverted reflections and retrospectively colouring the whole project of General Idea by the sickening light it cast.

Both Partz and Zontal died of AIDS in 1994. Partz was remembered by a monumental digital death portrait on the wall outside Project taken a few hours after his death by AA Bronson. General Idea was concerned that its construction would be strong enough to hold up the audience’s expectations. After the show at Project, one can say confidently that its ideas still have legs

Tim Stott is a critic based in Dublin