Showcards

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.