2. Iain Baxter&: Interactions and References: North Vancouver

Posted: November 3, 2011 | Author: David Bellman

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Iain Baxter&: Interactions and References: North Vancouver

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Curatorial Outline:

North Vancouver Museum and Archives Exhibition

[Including the City of North Vancouver Library] June – September 2012

“Every want is sovereign in its ideality. Nor can there be any contradiction in the expression of one’s wants, since one is also free to want the impossible. In the realm of the practical, a trend is “opposed to” a counter-trend; but in the realm of ideality, this trend is merely “balanced by” its counter-trend.”

Kenneth Burke (1941)

Iain Baxter (a pre-eminent pioneer from the generation of experimental artists whose work had first come to international attention between 1965 and 1975) changed his name to Iain Baxter& in 2005. The addition of the ampersand to his identity signifies the aesthetic / social orientation of his work towards a field of profound observation – a sphere of influence which he understands to be “an unending collaboration with the viewer.”

From 1965 to the present, Baxter& has developed his art by way of three parallel standpoints: connectivity contingency, and counterpoise. This project will aim to activate and amplify aspects of Iain Baxter&’s cultural / philosophical / educational orientations by way of three key frameworks:

i. a short-term, gallery-transforming installation [North Vancouver Museum];

ii. a temporary exhibition examining orientations of the Iain Baxter / N.E.THING COMPANY
cultural workers’ domain, 1965-1970 [North Vancouver Museum];

iii. a temporary exhibition of archival documents providing a catalyst for future development
of Iain Baxter / Iain Baxter& holdings [North Vancouver Archives].

iv. an ensemble of changeable, short-term (internal / external) interventions aligned
with the North Vancouver City Library building, site, and local environs.

From combined historical perspectives, Interactions and References will aim to foreground North Vancouver as an expanded artists’s medium – a continuous reference point within the unfinished project which Iain Baxter& continues to develop from his current creative practice. The orientation of the exhibition connects a chronological schema to a domain of sustained critical inquiry. Baxter& remarks of this dynamic:

The world is made up of pieces of information of all kinds, visual or sensory. A fork, a car, a
door; a handle or a rock all these things are information; and if you can get beyond the label-
attitude, you are able to see and experience all they contain. The label is what gets in the
way of experience. Because an object is labelled a “glass,” people see simply g-l-a-s-s.
all the intrinsic potentials of “glass-ness….”

The future-bearing theme of the project contains regenerative (revivifying) perspectives that were first formulated, researched and developed with regard to the boundaries and horizon lines of North Vancouver and its adjacent (unoccupied) “wilderness” regions. The project will aim to activate and amplify aspects of Baxter&’s protean and peripatetic work – his counterview in connection with creativity and crisis. As Baxter& notes (in a 2011 interview): “I work in a number of different ways as a visual artist, but one of the underlying premises has been the earth itself; the fact that we are all just one huge organism inside of it trying to function.”

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Seven salient exhibition factors will be juxtaposed so as to demonstrate Baxter&’s continuous use of the aesthetic as an incarnation of potentiality and purpose. In chronological order, these curatorial components can be detailed as follows:

1. First environmental work: Festival of the Contemporary Arts, UBC, 1965 [Feb. 1 – 10]: 2 Tons of Ice Sculpture: Beauty through Destruction, Disintegration and Disappearance.

2. About the same time as 2 Tons of Ice…, Baxter started producing plastic bas-reliefs of molded plastic bottles (of the sort used for bleach, detergent, milk or shampoo). Concurrently, he was making vacuum-formed landscapes – mixed media painting / sculpture studies resulting from the interaction of acrylic paint and butyrate plastic. His materials were obtained from the then-active garbage dumps of North Vancouver.

3. Works from the spring of 1966 on were produced under the rubrics of IT, N.E. Baxter Thing Co., and N.E. THING CO. – “the company” or ‘NETCO”.

Official IT statement:

“An artist with the need to create original and radical works must first get sick and tired of all
the work he sees. Only then is he left with a clear field to look into….”

4. Early in 1966, at the University of British Columbia’s Fine Arts Gallery, Baxter produced Bagged Place for the Festival of Contemporary Arts (February 2 – February 16). An advertisement (used both in the newspapers and as an announcement card) read:

FOR RENT

BAGGED PLACE

4 rm. Self-contained furn. Ste. Double bed, plastic bagged, sterilized, scenic
view, close to U.B.C., no students, non-smoker, non-drinker, no pets or children,
parking in rear, open for insp. Daily except Sunday from Feb. 2. For info.call
228-2758.

[Five students assisted Baxter in the realization of this gallery installation. The work was subsequently illustrated (with commentary by Alvin Balkind) in Artforum (New York), May 1968.]

5. Summer 1966: Baxter joins the faculty of The Centre for Communications and the Arts, Simon Fraser University. Biologist David Suzuki (a ground-breaking UBC genetics researcher who had befriended Baxter, shortly after the artist’s arrival in Vancouver in the summer of 1964) was a regular visitor to the Centre; at SFU Baxter and Suzuki could found incentive and encouragement for then-current inclinations towards simultaneously developed (multidisciplinary) fields of interaction.

6. Portfolio of Piles, 1968. Edition limited to 550 copies. [Collection: North Vancouver Museum.]

A photographic essay, comprising Iain Baxter photographs of urban, suburban and industrial North Vancouver, is produced by N.E. THING CO. in conjunction with an exhibition, Piles, at the Fine Arts Gallery, University of British Columbia.

The work comprises fifty-nine photographs – predominantly documentary images of “piles” found in North Vancouver. Forty-seven photographs were produced by Iain Baxter; additionally, the portfolio contains eleven photographs by Fred Herzog and one photograph by Duane Lunden.

7. N.E. Thing Co. announcement: The Citizen (North Vancouver), Classified Advertisements section, March 13, 1970.

The text, as printed in this local (weekly) journal, reads as follows:

UNLIMITED POTENTIAL
N.E. THING CO. LTD.

Full price $1,200,000.000.00. Please contact head office at
1419 Riverside Dr., N. Van., B.C.

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Ultimately, North Vancouver will be examined through figure / ground relationships of an artist’s place of production within the wider dynamics of continuous curatorial construction. As Baxter& notes: “Over the past 45 years I have been producing and exhibiting (nationally and internationally) art that focuses on and critiques: Art, Media and Information systems, Corporate, Consumer and Popular Culture, The Rural vs. the Urban, Technology vs. Humans and Nature, Global Ecological Concerns, and the Landscape in the broadest of ways, as well as Visual Perception in general.”

David Bellman
Guest Curator
November 2011

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