IAIN BAXTER&: And [But, Yet]

Posted: June 27, 2012 | Author: David Bellman

IAIN BAXTER&: And [But, Yet]

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“New media are new environments. That is why the media are the message. One related consideration is that anti-environments, or counter-environments created by the artist, are indispensable means of becoming aware of the environment in which we live and the environment we create for ourselves technically”

–Marshal McLuhan (1967)

 

“At the end of our life there is just an &.”

–Iain Baxter& (2012)

 

A statement by Vancouver Art Gallery Librarian Cheryl Siegel (excerpted from her insightful introduction to a multi-site exhibition, “IAIN BAXTER&: Information/Location, North Vancouver”) now functions as an intervenient probe applicable to a second, far larger programme of “contemporary” art —Germany’s Documenta 13, Kassel. [See http://archives.library.yorku.ca/iain_baxterand_raisonne/archive/files/siegel-june182012-3_339929dc84.pdf] With precision, Siegel has observed: “IAIN BAXTER& has always been one step ahead.”

The individuated evidence of how BAXTER&’s work both locates and expands upon itself is particularized in the perpetual contradiction of a viewer’s self contained surroundings and the consistently conspicuous measure of distance which this artist maintains from the status quo constraints of any circumambient, technical environment. These dialectical relationships contrast sharply with the ambiguously designated Documenta 13 “retreat” (as planned for the month of August, 2012) at Banff, Alberta. In extension of an international showcase for currently fashionable art works, the organizing committee responsible for this “satellite” project have presented the critical, outside observer with a subtle aesthetic/curatorial distinction. Whereas a small, “think tank” nucleus of professional artists, academics and assorted student followers will gather, in brief isolation, at the mixed-use (commercial/educational) Banff Centre, the intellectually demanding and openly accessible BAXTER&/NorthVancouver project(s) will contemporaneously present a purposeful, expansive refutation of the diminuitive Kassel/Canada scheme.

In this regard, the curatorial endeavour “Information/Location” (June 17 –December 30, 2012), becomes a simultaneously local/global advance on the self-defining catastrophe of market-led, contemporary “art world” conceits. An embodiment of both social radicalism and institutional engagement, the CAUSA/BAXTER& (North Vancouver) initiative is connected to communities of interest outside/beyond the illusion of merely localized presence.

 

David Bellman

June 26, 2012

IAIN BAXTER&: Information / Location, North Vancouver

Posted: June 8, 2012 | Author: David Bellman

IAIN BAXTER&:

Information / Location,

North Vancouver

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Fieldwork and Observations

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Real Art is real Art. There is no ancient and modern. The difference

between the two is not in art itself, but lies in environment, in our

point of view, and in the angle from which we see life.

• Emily Carr (1935)

The sentence, “Everyone is an Artist,” simply means to point out

that the human being is a creative being, that he is a creator, and

what’s more, that he can be productive in a great many ways.

To me, it’s irrelevant whether a product comes from a painter,

from a sculptor or from a physicist.

• Joseph Beuys (1970)

We live in a natural landscape and a landscape of information, and it is the fusion vs. the confusion of these landscapes that excites and informs my practice.

• IAIN BAXTER& (2012)

By simultaneously addressing an artist’s early and current work, IAIN BAXTER&: Information/Location, North Vancouver (a multi-site exhibition) locates itself as an immanent source of projection and reception — an open (intermediary) channel of communication between creativity and crisis. Accordingly, this curatorial project entails four sites and four dimensions:

 

1) a temporary,

research-oriented exhibition gallery;

1.1) a semi-permanent,

collections-based display facility

(jointly located within a museum of social history);

2) a regional archive, forming part of a

localized “community history” centre;

3) a broadly planted “edible garden”

devoted to practical/educational

(not-for-profit) production and local

marketing of organically raised vegetables;

4.) a public library that defines itself as

both “community meeting place and

gateway to knowledge” while emphasizing

a programme of “life-long learning, literacy

and cultural diversity.”

 

Connecting these sites – new places of production for an artist – is the future-bearing perspective of the exhibition itself. [See poster, below.]. Specifically, as BAXTER& notes of his career over the past forty-seven 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.”

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CURATORIAL COMMENTARY

(1.) “A World of Information” (Digital Code Conversion Series), world map and acrylic paint, 58 in. X 82 in., 2012.

“A map, as defined by cartographers, is a representation of the surface of the earth, or any part of it, drawn on a flat surface, and the positions of countries, kingdoms, states, mountains, rivers.We use road maps to find our way about and atlases to locate faraway places we read about in the news. In short, they serve the rather limited andgenerally benign purpose of helping us orient ourselves geographically. Yet maps, to indigenous peoples around the world, resonate with a dark ferocity and foreboding. For five centuries, maps were used to codify, to justify and to sanction an often bloody – and always cruel – colonization of the New World. Maps almost were used as instruments of empire, human constructs imposed as a means of converting chunks of the earth’s surface into real estate, bought and sold by non-aboriginal people.”

• Thomas R. Berger

 

(2.) Cultural Coordinates:

| mu’ta7 [Lil’wat7u’l] | and (again) | i’kwi [Squamish] | and |

(since time immemorial).

[ Salishan Linguistic Territories (Coastal / Interior).]

“At the beginning of humanity’s time on Earth, there were not so many people, and nature seemed vast and endlessly self-renewing. But today, as we clear the forests, eliminate species, and dump our waste and toxic material into the air, water and soil, we are undermining the productivity of nature itself. For the first time we have to ask, “What is the collective impact of 6.7 billion human beings living on the planet?”

• Tara Cullis and David Suzuki

(3.) Exhibition poster. [Design: Robert R. Reid. Photography: M. Cynog Evans.]

Image: small-scale replica of Charles Marega sculpture (1936) for south approach to Lions Gate Bridge (1938, Vancouver), accompanied by a version of IAIN BAXTER&’s “Animal Preserve” (2011).

CAUSA / Collective for Advanced and Unified Studies in the Visual Art

June 7, 2012