Skip to product information
1 of 2

Ingram

Glamour Is Theft: A User’s Guide to General Idea 1969-1978

Glamour Is Theft: A User’s Guide to General Idea 1969-1978

Regular price $40.00 USD
Regular price Sale price $40.00 USD
Sale Sold out
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.

Selected in conjunction with The Drawing Center's exhibition Ecce Homo: The Drawings of General Idea.

Materials

Shipping & Returns

Dimensions

Care Instructions

View full details

Image with text

Pair text with an image to focus on your chosen product, collection, or blog post. Add details on availability, style, or even provide a review.

  • Free Shipping

    Pair text with an image to focus on your chosen product, collection, or blog post. Add details on availability, style, or even provide a review.

  • Hassle-Free Exchanges

    Pair text with an image to focus on your chosen product, collection, or blog post. Add details on availability, style, or even provide a review.