General Idea
«Shut the Fuck Up»

«Shut The Fuck Up» was conceived for a television broadcast. As a commissioned work of the Galerie de Appel and video distribution Time Based Arts in Amsterdam, it was created in the framework of a series of works which used as their motto «Talking Back To The Media,» and which effectively tested the adaptation of television-related forms. Although as varied as «Hot Property» regarding a bundling together of combinations of diverse materials, visual documents on one’s private history, self-quotes, and found film footage (whose role assumes enormous proportions here), its conception reveals far more stringency than their other video work [«Test Tube»]. Its disparate, individual parts allow themselves to be sublimated to a single theme: the cliché of the artist as conveyed through the media. Regarding content, «Shut The Fuck Up» forms, in effect, a counter-piece to «Test Tube,» where General Idea let their ideas regarding the life of the artist in present-day society run their course in the most diverse scenarios.

(Source: Stephan Trescher, General Idea. Die Kanadische Künstlergruppe General Idea, Institut für Moderne Kunst (eds.), Verlag für moderne Kunst: Nürnberg, 1996, p. 160, also diss. Berlin, 1994.)