Artists Barbara Bloom, General Idea
Date 15.10—12.12.2026
Curator Aaron Amar Bhamra and Monika Georgieva in collaboration with de Appel, Amsterdam
Venue LAURENZ, Vienna
Images courtesy of the artists and LAURENZ, Vienna
The context matters. Wies Smals founded de Appel in 1975 because there were too few places for new, non-object-based art, and she gave artists free rein to realise their projects. Around 1980 she changed direction and began organising media projects on location, so that de Appel worked more and more like an agency or project office. Both works shown here belong to that shift.
Barbara Bloom, The Diamond Lane (1981)
Bloom wrote and directed this five-minute 35mm film. Tom Burghard of Largo Films produced it, Theo van de Sande was the cinematographer and Peter Gordon composed the music. It stars Susan Davis, Eric Fischl, Marianne de Graaf and Cees van Hoorn. The film is a trailer for a feature film that was never made. Scenes of a highway car-pool lane, a meeting room and a game of twenty questions are tied together by recurring actors and Gordon’s score. They only become a story in the viewer’s mind. The trailer was screened in cinemas, alongside posters, advertisements and interviews promoting the non-existent film. In 1982 de Appel arranged screenings of The Diamond Lane together with Lawrence Weiner’s Plowmans Lunch, and a performance by Peter Gordon, at Paradiso.
General Idea, Test Tube (1979)
The Stedelijk Museum and de Appel worked together to bring the Canadian collective to Amsterdam: the Stedelijk hosted a residency, and de Appel commissioned a video to be broadcast on Dutch television. The result was the first in a planned series of artist-made television programmes. General Idea wrote and directed it, with Joes Odufré as consultant, and it was recorded at Cinevideo Groep Holland in Amsterdam in October 1979. AA Bronson, Felix Partz and Jorge Zontal host the show from the Colour Bar Lounge, a bar whose walls and floor have become electronic colour. From there they watch a soap opera they wrote themselves, about a woman artist facing the dilemmas of modern life. The soap is interrupted by news segments and by commercials for the bar’s own “cocktails of meaning.” Marianne van Kersen plays the artist. The cast also includes Marina Abramović, Bob de Buy, Robert Handforth, Raul Marroquin, Tom Puckey, Louwrien Wijers, Bill and Wies Smals herself. The video belongs to the larger fiction of The 1984 Miss General Idea Pavillion, and it represented Canada at the 1980 Venice Biennale.
