From Satire to High Art

General Idea’s Puns on Copyright

General Idea, Copyright (Bleach on Denim) #5, 1988 Courtesy: the artists and Esther Schipper, Berlin/Paris/Seoul, photo: Jörg von Bruchhausen

Known for their occupation of images, General Idea subverted notions of copyright. They were self-declared “plagiarists, intellectual parasites”, who remorselessly appropriated the copyright symbol itself, which under their spell becomes a target of mockery and a subject of reflection.

Mickey Mouse as the sorcerer’s apprentice in Walt Disney’s Fantasia (1940) is the animated character that AA Bronson has avowed he relates to the most. On 1 January 2024, the 1928 copyright for the earlier version of Mickey Mouse (as it appeared in Steamboat Willie) is set to expire and enter the public domain. Concerns and debates over the duration and extension of copyright protection are not new and have subsisted since the Engravings Act of 1735, the first legislation to grant copyright protection to an image. This lecture looks at the different ways in which the Canadian trio General Idea explored and manipulated (often tongue-in-cheek) copyright, leaving the matter unresolved. It celebrates their creative spirit by laying emphasis on their playful appropriations of trademarks. General Idea’s insistent and clever jostling with copyright continues to provoke, inform and amuse with the powerful questioning it instills.

The lecture is followed by a Q&A with Zippora Elders

Cristina S. Martinez is an interdisciplinary art historian who holds a PhD from Birkbeck College, University of London. She first wrote an extensive essay on General Idea in the late 1990s, and has been connected to the group through Toronto’s art community. She has published essays on eighteenth-century British art, the work of William Hogarth, the history of copyright law and artistic practices of appropriation. She currently teaches in the Department of Visual Arts at the University of Ottawa.