"They were brought together in the latter part of the 1960's, in Toronto, three men all equally possessed by the same sentiment, all of them endowed with sufficient ambition to remain constant to General Idea, sufficiently obsessed to remain faithful to their dominant vision, sufficiently politic to always advance in art the sacred ties which united them, sufficiently strong to maintain themselves above all the fickle tendencies in the circuitous movements of art, enterprising enough to have undertaken works in a variety of media including sculpture, video, performance, photography, and painting, and fortunate enough to have almost always succeeded in their designs. From the beginning theirs has been an art of paradox, of inversion, and of irony; an art of conflict, crisis, and open contradiction; an art of exploitation, exaggeration, and excess; of puzzles, enigmas, and teasing complexities; all ambiguous, suggestive, and seductive. And since the beginning General Idea's oeuvre has existed on a grand scale, distinguished by the largesse and scope of their vision as much as by their proliferation and variety of works." extract from the essay by Tim Guest