AA Bronson Untitled (For General Idea), 1997

Untitled (for General Idea) consists of three white Bertoia Side Chairs, an icon of mid-century modernist design, aligned in a row and outfitted with red, green and blue vinyl cushions.

Untitled (for General Idea), was the first solo work produced by AA Bronson after their deaths. The white Bertoia chairs and red/green/blue cushions were originally a gift from General Idea to Art Metropole, the center for artists books and editions that they founded in 1974. But after Jorge and Felix died, AA realized that the three chairs and cushions had become an icon of General Idea itself, or at least the memory of General Idea. He first exhibited it as an installation in 1997.

The three colors of the cushions reference the RGB colour model of video and television displays. The colour scheme appears frequently in General Idea’s oeuvre, which appropriated formats and aesthetics from sources in mass media, advertising and popular culture. It is the colour scheme of General Idea’s iconic AIDS logo, a re-configuration of Robert Indiana’s widely quoted LOVE (1966) image to read “AIDS.” Producing posters, wallpaper, stamps, public sculpture and billboards, General Idea spread their self-described Imagevirus throughout art institutions and public spaces worldwide, in an attempt to normalize the word, and hopefully, normalize people’s relationship to the disease. As AA Bronson recounted at the time: “to make it something that can be dealt with as a disease rather than a set of moral or ethical issues.”