The AIDS Project, begun in 1987, is exemplary of the dialectic logic of General Idea's
working method and language. In that year, the AIDS logo first appeared, appropriating the
colour scheme and design of Robert Indiana's famous and ubiquitously disseminated
LOVE emblem. General Idea utilized their appropriated emblem for projects within the
boundaries of the institutional cultural space (in the form of paintings for the
gallery/museum), as well as in another type of 'public' space: the street (in the form of
posters).
One might imagine strolling down an urban street either actively or passively absorbing the
veritable pastiche of verbal/visual signs, when ones attention is suddenly caught by a field
of emblems that initially reverberate in the mind as LOVE logos, yet in the next instant
resonate as the AIDS signs. Perhaps an equivalence has now been established in the mind
of the public, perhaps the ambivalent signification of the AIDS emblem has produced the
conditions of a more stabilized social currency of meaning.
The substitution of AIDS for LOVE - in and of itself - has multiple political and cultural
implications. By injecting this linguistic term into a preestablished iconography connoting
the fusion of high art and mass culture into an ubiquitous emblem (i.e., LOVE), General
Idea facilitates a system of dissemination which can feed into any particular context. To use
the metaphor of viral proliferation, General Idea endeavored to 'infect' a mass-culture
emblem with new linguistic/symbolic meaning, enabling a distribution of this sign/logo
throughout the 'body' of the social.
Joshua Decter
The Theatrics of Dissemination: A General Idea Model
- from the calalogue of the 'Fin de siècle' exhibition, 1992-93.
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