General Idea S/HE, 1976

The two groups of five b/w photographs play with gender in much the same way as the 1971 Miss General Idea Pageant. The two models, one male, one female, both professional fashion models from General Idea’s circle of friends, each illustrate five roles more usually assigned as male or female: Celebrity, Architect, Muse, Olympian, and Empress. The postures or silhouettes are lifted from the relentlessly optimistic 1950s advertising in Fortune Magazine, when European postwar reconstruction and North American corporate expansion both were positioned as aspirational and heroic, as Progress: the images hark back to a time when the female image was used to portray the muse, the future, peace or prosperity, while the image of the male (often in trios, by the way) portrayed the architects of that shining future as athletes, industrialists or politicians.

By 1976, that picturing was suspect: Progress was banished and post-modernism replaced it. In the artists’ captions—every advertising image has to have a text—General Idea makes the gender drag explicit, using their typical arch phrase-craft; each photo is accompanied by a list of probing questions whose lingo springs in equal measure from Polari (the gay and drag sub-cultural coded vernacular of the 1950s) and fashion ad-copy, but is of course entirely General Idea’s cunning creation. By transposing and cross-pollinating the dubiously gendered images and texts, they produce two sets of muddled role play, in which male and female are interchangeable. Much as a man can be the ideal of supple beauty, so a woman can be the conquering hero.

The works were first exhibited at the Carmen Lamanna Gallery, Toronto, in January, 1977. Not happy with the quality of the prints—which were cheaply printed by a photomural company at the time—the artists destroyed them in 1987. They were reprinted in their current form under the direction of the Estate in 2014.