Search results for ""art gallery of york university,canada""

From its origins in the mail art movement through to its “destruction” of The 1984 Miss General Idea Pavillion in 1977, the Canadian collective General Idea constructed a comprehensive body of work as a performative fiction. Glamour Is Theft examines this “pageantry of camp parody” through the logic of its mythic system. The book reconstructs this system from statements that were dispersed and disguised within General Idea’s work and writing as a whole, including the publication FILE Magazine. In General Idea’s system, there is one concept: Glamour; one operation: reversibility; one technique: cut-up; one strategy: theft; one tactic: camouflage. Following the collective’s strategies, the book in turn mimics the language of structuralist and semiological publications of the 1970s while also considering the influences of Roland Barthes, William Burroughs, Guy Debord, Claude Lévi-Strauss and Marshall McLuhan on General Idea’s work.

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The Brazilian-German artist duo of Barbara Wagner (born 1980) and Benjamin de Burca (born 1975), formed in 2011, counter the impulse to categorize culture in terms that are fixed or deemed folk by organizations such as UNESCO by exploring cultural change across generations and geographies. Their work celebrates and reframes vernacular cultural forms as they have manifested through time; as popular traditions become pop culture, for instance. Through their films, the artists examine a space in between, where cultural forms of the past adapt in response to changing economic conditions particularly in emerging economies or post-colonial geographical contexts and where popular genres persist through cultural mixing and diasporic refashioning. The artists look to how performative forms of colonial cultural resistance in Brazil's northeast, in particular, continue today but in revised expression. This book, designed by Lisa Kiss, leads a discussion about their films, including the work slated to premiere at the 2019 Venice Biennale.

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