Showcards
By: General Idea.
Contributors: Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography.
Publisher: Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography
Published: 1994
Place of publication: Ottawa
Language: eng; fre
Number of pages: 38
Subjects: General Idea (Firm) -- Exhibitions.; General Idea (Firm); Art, Modern -- 20th century -- Canada -- Exhibitions.; Installations (Art) -- Canada -- Exhibitions.; Photography, Artistic -- Exhibitions.; Conceptual art -- Canada -- Exhibitions.
Genres: Exhibitions.
Description: A showcard is simply a card containing a tradesman's advertisement of goods -- usually combining text and image. Water-based showcard (or 'poster') paints are often bright and eye-catching. And there are also show biz and showcase, the latter a glass case for exhibiting delicate and valuable articles in a shop or museum. All these references inflect upon General Idea's open-ended series of standardized silkscreened cards with mounted glossy photographs and stamped and handwritten text. Dating from 1975 to 1979, they are a publication prototype of idiosyncratic graphic design; they are also a collection of theses, an intellectual proposition, a diary. Like much of the production of General Idea, they blend art and life, performance and revelation. Formally they seem to be a book's layout sheets, but they remain nevertheless a series of single units; like much of the textual content of the series, their future remains latent.
Notes: "Showcards, an installation to celebrate the donation, by General Idea, of 152 showcards to the Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography in 1993, was shown at CMCP, Ottawa, from Feb. 2 to Apr. 10, 1994." - t.p. verso.

Includes bibliographical references.

Text in English with French Translation at the end.