general idea

FILE MAGAZINE

Magazines and the press function as machines of glamour aestheticizing every aspect of life, from sex and politics to art. With Interview, Andy Warhol deliberately entered the media battlefield, creating his own magazine to reshape celebrity and pop culture according to his own obsessions. At the same time, the Canadian trio General Idea — Felix Partz, Jorge Zontal, and AA Bronson — turned this strategy into parody, elevating the magazine itself into an art form: the “megazine.”

Launched in 1972 as a quarterly and published until 1989, FILE borrowed the visual identity of LIFE magazine. General Idea created all the pages, images, and texts themselves, transforming the magazine into a détournement of pop culture and the image-obsessed media landscape of the time. The cult publication featured ironic, self-reflexive statements such as: “All myth and no content. Or is it vice versa?”

The 1975 Glamour Issue recounted General Idea’s…