During the early 1970s General Idea founded two key institutions. The group
expressed their interest in the appropriation of media formats in establishing FILEMegazine. Launched in 1972, the publication adopted the logo of the popular Americannews magazine LIFE. General Idea designed FILE to be a “parasite within the magazinedistribution system.” As Bronson explained, “We knew that if it looked familiar,people would pick it up, and they did. We thought of it as a kind of virus within thecommunication systems, a concept that William Burroughs had written about in theearly ’60s.”
http://ccca.concordia.ca/c/writing/d/danzker/danzker001t.html
"We wanted to be artists and we knew that if we were famous and glamorous we could say we were artists and we would be.... We knew Glamour was not an object, not an action, not an idea. We knew Glamour never emerged from the 'nature' of things. There are no glamorous people, no glamorous events. We knew Glamour was artificial. We knew that in order to be glamorous we had to become plagiarists, intellectual parasites."
https://www.thefreelibrary.com/Glad+Rag.-a085459250
In the mid-1980s, "General Idea (AA Bronson, Felix Partz and Jorge Zontal) created a symbol using the acronym AIDS, boldly arranging the letters in a manner that resembled Robert Indiana's famous LOVE logo. This launched Imagevirus, a series of paintings, sculptures, videos, posters, exhibitions and ephemera that from 1987 to 1994 used the mechanism of viral transmission to investigate the term AIDS as both word and image."
infected Mondrian
