General Idea Messages to the Public: AIDS

General Idea’s animation features their AIDS logo, based directly on Robert Indiana’s famous LOVE image of the mid-1960s. As Indiana’s LOVE was an icon for the sixties, so General Idea’s AIDS is an icon for the eighties. In this work, seamless fields of AIDS logos wipe across the screen, successively obliterating each other, until, in conclusion, a collision of two AIDS logos gives birth to the original LOVE emblem, which then stands alone.

According to General Idea, “The AIDS Projects utilize every form of media to carry the AIDS image, like the virus itself, into the mainstream of our culture. We see the AIDS image then as a sort of image virus, inhabiting the host structures of the mass media and their systems of dissemination. The AIDS logo has been used as a poster, postcard, billboard, window display, magazine cover, postage stamp, and even as wallpaper. The Spectacolor board, with its computerized fields of AIDS images, provides another level of metaphor: the AIDS image is transformed into a prototypical computer virus, awaiting distribution.”

General Idea was formed as a collaboration in 1968 by AA Bronson (b. 1946, Vancouver, BC), Feliz Partz (1945–1994, b. Winnipeg, MB), and Jorge Zontal (1944–1994, b. Parma, Italy). They lived and worked in Toronto and New York.

Messages to the Public formed a key part of the Public Art Fund’s long-term commitment to media-based artworks. Running from 1982 to 1990, the show featured a series of artists’ projects created specifically for the Spectacolor board at Times Square.

As Russell Miller from Ohio newspaper The Toledo Blade explained in his article on February 19, 1984, “every month, a different artist presents a 30-second animation on the Spectacolor light board—an 800-square-foot array of 8,000 red, white, blue, and green 60-watt bulbs that dominates the Times Square vista. The spot is repeated more than 50 times a day for two weeks, wedged into a 20-minute loop of computer-animated commercials.

“Jane Dickson, a painter, was working for Spectacolor, Inc. as an ad designer and computer programmer when, three and a half years ago, she first thought to use the light board to display noncommercial art.

“‘I picked that title,’ she said of Messages to the Public, ‘because I thought the propaganda potential from this project was terrific.’ The board, she noted, was regularly used for ‘commercial propaganda.’

“Dickson sought help from the Public Art Fund, an organization based here and dedicated to taking art out of the galleries and placing it in the city’s streets and parks.”

Project director of the Public Art Fund Jessica Cusick explained, “We’re trying to do art that’s timely, has a message, is visually potent and is trying to deal with the fine line dividing fine art and commercial art.”