General Idea: Imagevirus

In the mid‑1980s, General Idea launched Imagevirus, a series of paintings, posters, exhibitions and ephemera that investigated AIDS as both word and image. In this book, artist and writer Gregg Bordowitz analyses Imagevirus from the perspective of his own involvement with activist art initiatives in New York during the 1980s and 90s. Considering the battles fought over sexuality and representation in those years, and through the lens of modernist literature (Gertrude Stein and William S. Burroughs), the author approaches the virus as idea, as tactic and as identity. Bordowitz explores how Imagevirus infected urban spaces across the world, offering a new model for artistic production, one strongly suited to ideological struggle.