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Glamour Is Theft: A User's Guide to General Idea: 1969-1978

By (artist) General Idea, Text by Philip Monk

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normal price: R 1,121.95

Price: R 1,009.95

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| book description |

From its origins in the mail art movement through to its â€œdestructionâ€ 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 â€œpageantry of camp parodyâ€ through the logic of its mythic system. The book reconstructs this system from statements that were dispersed and disguised within General Ideaâ€™s work and writing as a whole, including the publication FILE Magazine. In General Ideaâ€™s system, there is one concept: Glamour; one operation: reversibility; one technique: cut-up; one strategy: theft; one tactic: camouflage. Following the collectiveâ€™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 LÃ©vi-Strauss and Marshall McLuhan on General Ideaâ€™s work.