North America

General Idea

AIDS Ring

1993/1996

AIDS Ring, 1993/96

AIDS Ring is a cast metal ring, which takes as its basis Robert Indiana’s iconic “LOVE” design, appropriating its pop aesthetic, and totalizing, simplistic universal messaging to instead emphasize the severity of the AIDS epidemic that occurred in the 1970s. This visual detournement of Indiana’s sculpture into the form of a ring is an indictment of pop art’s apolitical nature, as well as of its increasingly commodified status. General Idea instead proposes that art’s expansive platform for messaging be used to spread awareness and create accountability for political negligence of the AIDS epidemic. The work equates Indiana’s universal message of love, with the devastating effects of the AIDS epidemic; this is just one of the many iterations of the AIDS image that the collective mobilized across a wide array of objects to generate extensive exposure for their message.

The Canadian artist collective General Idea (Felix Partz, Jorge Zontal and AA Bronson), active from 1967-1993, was an instrumental source of early conceptual art through their multidisciplinary practice. Their work often uses conceptual art to critically explore issues such as the myth of the artist, mass media, the body and identity, gender and sexual repression, and the HIV/AIDS epidemic, and in the process, advancing activism. Their AIDS body of work is what they are best known for ; a series of mass-market visualities and practices that drew widespread public attention to the epidemic. The trio often employed humorous approaches that still retained toothy critiques through the production of self-mythology, amongst other strategies. Patz and Zontal died of HIV related illnesses in 1994.

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General Idea AIDS Ring

General Idea

AIDS Ring