This book documenting an open call mail art project from the collective General Idea, staged roughly a year after their incorporation. The group asked people to send photos of themselves with their arms wrapped around their heads and yanking on their faces. The little book reproduces portraits of people performing the gesture including Ray Johnson and Vincent Trasov. A humorously deadpan opening statement from General Idea reads: ' The head is separate; the hand is separate. Body and mind are separate. The hand is a mirror for the mind - wrap your arm over your head, lodging your elbow behind and grabbing your chin with your hand. The act is now complete. Held, your are holding. You are object and subject, viewed and voyeur.'

General Idea is the collective project of artists Jorge Zontal, AA Bronson, and Felix Partz. Between 1969 and 1994, the trio transformed their life together into a “living work of art,” which they presented in performances, objects, videos, and publications. In doing so, they forged a complicated theory about how visual forms operate in society, best summarized in their motto “image is virus.” The group came together in Toronto in the late 1960s, galvanized by the decade’s psychedelic counterculture and experimental art practices, and its politics of protest and communal living. General Idea took aim at the myths of consumer affluence, patriarchal power, and technological progress that shaped life in North America after World War II—myths they argued were sustained by cultural forms and images that spread through society like a virus. The group’s strategy, drawing from Susan Sontag’s idea of camp and from the queer science fiction of William S. Burroughs, was to appropriate these cultural forms and images, exposing their power and using their viral nature to spread alternative, more subversive, messages.