Death and the Maiden (2022)

Philip Monk, “Death and the Maiden,” General Idea, ed. Adam Welch (Ottawa: National Gallery of Canada; Geneva: JRP Ringier, 2022), 332-335.

Death and the Maiden

We enter under the pall of death. We are in the house of death. Silence and order are due. We come to show our respect. A corpse is absent yet still has a presence. An aura lingers. An otherworldly aura.

We are considering a difficult image, this image of Felix Partz, member of General Idea, barely just departed: an icon of his death, captured almost thirty years ago. Ron Gabe, I knew him as. Likewise Felix. These were names to use between worlds, between one world and another. His switch from one name to the other, from Ron to Felix, was rather a borderline crossover. He was a borderline artist, General Idea’s theoretician of the borderline. His new identity as Felix, contrariwise to its assumption, rather was a means of de-individuation. Private Partz: he was subsumed, or consumed, in a new identity, as an entity, part of a collective group with a corporate name: General Idea. By becoming part of General Idea, even while performing a new role, he was depersonalized, in the way that the death mask operates rather than we think creates an exact impression of the just expired individual. Instead of capturing features in its indexical embrace, the death mask begins the process of letting go, of witnessing details disappear—first the eyes, but really any twitch or twinkle of individuality, evidence of life itself, are erased by its smoothing hand, its smothering embrace, its embalming artifice. Embalm. The image, or rather the icon, embalms—soothes the jagged edges of the violence of death into the surface sheen of seduction.

To embalm means:

1. To “preserve (a corpse) from decay by means of material injection of a preservative”

2. To “keep (a place) unchanged”

To run ahead of myself, because one always runs ahead of death, and then finds death already there, where one arrives, also where one departed, moreover all along the way. To run ahead of myself, isn’t Glamour this material injection of a preservative—that is, maintaining Miss General Idea embalmed perpetually, even though the incumbents always, theoretically, changed? And isn’t the Pavillion itself, The 1984 Miss General Idea Pavillion, even set off in distant 1984 as it then was in that mythical year, isn’t the Pavillion a place kept unchanged, itself indeed embalmed and embalming? Embalmed but also embalming. Container and contained, like Lenin’s mausoleum in Red Square? Maintenance was what the Pavillion was all about. Image maintenance. Keeping it all erect and elevated for all to see—basically to witness and worship, to witness and worship what was only an image that we ourselves maintain.

And “balm,” it too, “a pleasant perfume or fragrance,” my dictionary says, isn’t balm this rising up, like censered incense, of our seduction, our complicity, the encapsulating, embalming approval of our submission to Miss General Idea?

All along, death introduced us to the system, to the other world of General Idea, to the mythic other world, to its otherworldliness: an underworld and an overworld as well, that is, a world above, separated from us, but also a world that lords it over us—like William Burroughs’s Mayan priests. General Idea as priestly triumvirate?

It was a mythic world and, as such, was complete. It always was. Mythic worlds are complete even if they are still being elaborated. There is no history here, no access through history. We require a leap into the void. The end is as good as a beginning.

The deaths of Felix Partz and Jorge Zontal in 1994 meant the end of General Idea as an enterprise. Without them, without the threesome, without its tripartite stability, General Idea could not carry on. AA Bronson, lone survivor, witness to the catastrophe, he, too, is structurally excluded, living on only in his borrowed name. Death was a calamity, a catastrophe, the final crisis of this collective career. But this crisis was different. After all, there were many crises before. The Pavillion was already destroyed; it had been consumed in a catastrophic fire. But the three, the stable, heroic three persisted. They tempted fate; they played with fire. Yet this crisis was different: it was not stage-managed by the artists. It came from out of frame, from outside their system, but not to demolish it since the artists had already done that (in 1977 already, well before General Idea ended). The crisis was visited from outside. Death came calling in 1994. But was death figured—moreover death and destruction pre-figured—within General Idea’s work all along, as a constituent part of it, constituting it actually?

Death introduces us to their system, opens it up and closes it off, before dismantling it. Witness: the End. Maybe the system is death itself. General Idea’s was a closed system, and any closed system is homeostatic. One criterion for any structure is that it is reversible: decomposition follows composition; destruction follows construction. Yet the secret of General Idea’s system is that it was a system in motion. Is there life still?

Or is life only an illusion Miss General Idea put into play? That she manipulated as a mirror operation, flipping the image in and out of context, snapping meaning in and out of focus? Now you see it, now you don’t—like the anamorphic skull of Holbein’s The Ambassadors. Miss General Idea was both revealed and revealing. The intermittent flash of the mirror cut was exposing. It was a memento mori that showed the skull beneath the skin.

The angel of death: Her name was Miss General Idea. Destroy, she said.