General Idea, Test Patterns, Trinitron

three white guys in dark suits sit in three steel and black chairs, backs to the camera, and facing a large, 12 by 12 grid of rectangular porcelain plates painted with the ebu color bars test pattern for calibrating video signal. a row of spotlights along the top edge of the image identifies the space as a gallery or exhibition. a photo by tohru kogure of general idea, 1988
General Idea in front of Test Pattern: T.V. Dinner Plates from the Miss General Idea Pavilion, 1988, installed at Spiral (Wacoal Art Space), Tokyo, 1988, photo Tohru Kogure via ACI-IAC

General Idea made hundreds of handpainted porcelain sushi plates with the TV test pattern on them for their 1988 show at Spiral in Tokyo. They made 432 plates, in three grids of 144. [The work turned up at Miami Basel in 2019.] They also made an edition [MoMA says ed. 238; this guy explains it started as 300, but there was a lot of breakage.] which came in a cardboard box. The Stedelijk image is the best for getting a sense of what gorgeous objects these are, though it does make it easier to not read them as paintings.

a shallow rectangular porcelain plate that looks more like a tray has the vertical solid colors of a tv test pattern painted on it, and a glazed silver edge. it sits on a very blonde wood tabletop, an image of general idea's test pattern tv dinner plate, 1988, from the stedelijk museum
General Idea, Test Pattern: T.V. Dinner Plate, 1988, collection: Stedelijk

Which is all useful context, I think, for this thick little painting, Black Trinitron #5, being sold next week at Doyle in New York. Sony had just introduced a Trinitron color TV where the screen was actually black, not grey, when it was turned off.

a general idea painting of a tv test pattern in seurat-like pointillist style includes a line or two of each of the seven vertical columns of color interwoven with its adjacent color. the border of the painting is black and traces the slight convex rectangle of a crt monitor
General Idea: Black Trinitron #5, 1987-89, 9 x 12 x 3 in., acrylic on canvas, at Doyle, 1 Nov 2023

But that may not be important now, or then, for that matter. In 2020, another test pattern painting, Trinitron #15 (1987), turned up at Sotheby’s in Milan, that was not black.

a general idea painting of a tv test pattern in pointillist style, perhaps a reference to the pixels of the image, or the tiny red green and blue points that make up the tv image. the convex edge of the painting echoes the curved rectangle of a tv screen, and the canvas is stretched on thick bars, and it is standing upright, as if it is a tv itself. though in 1987, there was no tv this thin, can you imagine? anyway this one sold at sothebys in milan in 2020
General Idea, Trinitron #15, 1987, oil and acrylic on canvas, 9 x 12 x 3 in., sold at Sotheby’s Milano in 2020

These Trinitron paintings really get the collapse of painting and screen, the slight convexity of the cathode ray tube on the surface of the canvas, and the objectness of both painting and TV (though TVs were much deeper obv). But what they give is sushi plate edition, and the box the sushi plate edition comes in.

the cardboard box for general idea's test pattern tv dinner plate has a test pattern sticker label on the top half. the lower half has the plate itself nested right inside, extremely tightly fit. which might be why so many were reportedly broken in shipment, that the edition size dropped from 300 to 238. this one is intact, though, and it is at moma
General Idea, Test Pattern: T.V. Dinner Plate, 1988, porcelain in original box, 9 x 12 x 3 in., collection: MoMA

[a few minutes later update: If it hadn’t been prompted by seeing the Trinitron paintings, I could have titled this post, “General Idea Dishes?”]