IAIN BAXTER&: HERE / THERE

Posted: August 31, 2012 | Author: David Bellman

IAIN BAXTER&:

HERE / THERE

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David Bellman, CAUSA

August 31, 2012

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“A self-sustaining structure, in art as in life, is the only possible basis for a vital ideal.”

– George Santayana (1905)
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Document 1

Service employed to transmit N E Thing Company CB radio communication (between the North Pole and the South Pole) – from Inuvik, Northwest Territories (two degrees within the Arctic Circle), to the Antarctic, September 26, 1969.

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“The whole world, which is not self, has no hidden place; it is a single rail of iron ten thousand miles long which is not anyone.”

– Dogen (circa 1242)

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Document 2

“THIS STATEMENT WILL BE IS BEING HAS BEEN SENT FROM INSIDE TO OUTSIDE THE ARCTIC CIRCLE.”

[Telegram – sent from Iain Baxter to N E Thing Company headquarters, North Vancouver, during a trip to Inuvik, Northwest Territories, Canadian Arctic Circle – September 26, 1969.]

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Document 3

Emily Carr (1872-1945), “Somewhere”, oil and gasoline on paper, mounted on board (signed and on verso signed and titled), circa 1939. [Courtesy The Art Emporium, Est. 1897, Vancouver.]

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Things to be remembered in abstracts:

Symbols & design may be used but design must be all over pattern leading out in all directions as if it were continued limitless but should be unified and a concrete thing in itself.

– Emily Carr (circa 1929)

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“Any environment tends to be imperceptible to its users and occupants except to the degree that counter-environments are created by the artist.”

– Marshall McLuhan

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Document 4

Mud slide, Kobe, Japan, 1961. Photo: IAIN BAXTER&, 1961.

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Document 5

IAIN BAXTER&, “Information Mural [Digital Conversion Code]”, stencilled paint, 2012.

A recurring template pattern of “zeros” and “ones” – displayed on every wall of the North Vancouver Museum’s “West Gallery” – represents (in binary code) the word “information”.

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“I see myself as an explorer of information.”

– IAIN BAXTER& (2012)

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IAIN BAXTER&: Now / Then

Posted: August 17, 2012 | Author: David Bellman

IAIN BAXTER&:

Now / Then

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David Bellman, CAUSA

August 16. 2012

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“Pioneer” kitchen, North VancouverMuseum. Permanent collection display (with ampersand), forming part of the exhibition IAIN BAXTER&: INFORMATION / LOCATION: NORTH VAMCOUVER, June 17 – December 30, 2012.
Photo: M. Cynog Evans.

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MEMO

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From:

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

To

Adam Lauder, YorkUniversity

Re:

CAUSA Research Colloqium:

LANGUAGE & LIBERATION: LOCAL (GLOBAL) PERSPECTIVES, 24 August 2012

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CANCELLED

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[New date/location to be announced.]

15.08.12.

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Iain Baxter sends a 50,000-mile telex transmission (1969).

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“So we have Iain Baxter working not at an easel in a studio but sitting in front of his telex … not to place orders or transmit business but for Trans-S.I., Transmitted Sensitivity Information.”

– Joan Lowndes (1968)

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ICE POND CRACKED IN THE ARCTIC CIRCLE

[Iain Baxter. Trans-S.I., sent from Simon Fraser University to Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, October 3, 1969.]

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“The historical world is always the contradictory identity of space and time. It moves from the created to the creating through its own
self-expressive transformation. As the many individuals comprising the self-expressive historical world, we are created-and-creating transformative elements of the world’s own self-expression.”

– Nishida Kitarō (1945)

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IAIN BAXTER&: Dialectics of Absolute Identity [Part 3]

Posted: August 15, 2012 | Author: David Bellman

IAIN BAXTER&:

Dialectics of Absolute Identity

[Part 3]

 

 

nobody told the flowers to come up nobody

will ask them to leave when spring’s gone

– Ikkyū (1394-1481)

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Iain Baxter Notebook [Notes on Japan, Kyoto, 1961].

 

raining or not

walk lifting your heavy wet sleeves

– Ikkyū (1393-1481)

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mirror facing a mirror

nowhere else

– Ikkyū (1393-1481)

The artist was born Iain Baxter in 1936. He legally changed his name to IAIN BAXTER& in 2005. Concerning the current form of his name BAXTER& advises:

“It is very important to both my identity as an artist and the integrity of my creative project that all pre-2005 references to me (except citations/quotations connected with historical documents) be to the current form of my name: IAIN BAXTER&”. [Communication from the artist, August 2012.]

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IAIN BAXTER&: Dialectics of Absolute Identity [Part 2]

Posted: August 9, 2012 | Author: David Bellman

IAIN BAXTER&:

Dialectics of Absolute Identity

[Part 2]

David Bellman

CAUSA

On 6 August 1945, C. D. Howe,

Department of Munitions and

Supply, Government of Canada,

introduced the Anglo-Canadian-

American Atomic Bomb Project

in the following statement:

 

“It is a distinct pleasure for me to announce that

Canadian scientists have played an intimate part,

and have been associated in an effective

way with this great scientific development.”

 

Fifteen years after the Hiroshima

announcement, Iain Baxter wrote

an application for a Japanese

Government scholarship, observing:

 

“What with materialism becoming the forerunner

of our every action, the people of Canada need to

understand and appreciate forms of nature and their

tremendous impact upon our lives.”

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“What we have to find … is some touchstone outside of the individual peculiarities of human beings, and the only touchstone which exists is nature. And by nature we mean the whole organic process of life and movement which goes on in the universe, a process which includes man, but is indifferent to his generic idiosyncracies.”

– Herbert Read (1945)

 

“Slumbering in the dream land,

talking about the dream,

why not float our dream

on the stream of eternity.”

Ryokan (1758-1831)

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Iain Baxter Notebook [Notes on Japan, Kyoto, 1961]

 

“…looking closely at things is something

which has to be learned.”

Marguerite Duras, script excerpt from Alain

Resnais’s film Hiroshima mon amour (1959)

 

world where the triptych, the cyclorama (not to

mention Cinerama) and the mobile established

themselves. Perhaps it was only natural for him

to have found such a format with his highly flexible

and fluent style of art. But from the Japanese point

of view, from within the tradition, it is startling and

refreshing, showing us possibilities that we hadn’t

imagined, heretofore, existed. In any event, the

folding screen has at once become a new painting

ground, a ground that can metamorphose before

our eyes and transform our view of what a painting

may be in terms of that view.”

Teruo Ueno (Tokyo, 1962)

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YES, BUT ON THE OTHER HAND, NO.

NO, BUT ON THE OTHER HAND, YES.

[Posted: 4:25 GMT, 9 August 2012]

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“The mind and the word are equally being-time. Their reaching and not-reaching alike are being-time. Even when the time of their reaching is not yet over, the time of their not-reaching is come.”

Dogen (1240)

IAIN BAXTER&: Dialectics of Absolute Identity

Posted: August 6, 2012 | Author: David Bellman

IAIN BAXTER&:
Dialectics of Absolute Identity

David Bellman
CAUSA

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“I feel there is a strong need today for people to become more aware of nature and of her complexities.”

– Iain Baxter, excerpt from application for Japanese Government Scholarship (1960)

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Chiba Garden Redux, Digital colour photograph © IAIN BAXTER&, 2012.

This traditional Japanese garden (opened in 1986), links the City of North Vancouver to its “Sister City”, Chiba.

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“August 6, the anniversary of Hiroshima, should be a day of somber reflection, not only on the terrible events of that day in 1945, but also on what they revealed: that humans, in their dedicated quest to extend their capacities for destruction, had finally found a way to approach the ultimate limit.”

Noam Chomsky (2012)

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“An old buddha said:
For the time being I stand
astride the highest
mountain peaks.
I move on the deepest
depths of the ocean floor.”

– Dogen (1240)

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August 6, 2012

IAIN BAXTER&: THINKING ABOUT THE PRESENT

Posted: August 2, 2012 | Author: David Bellman

IAIN BAXTER&:

THINKING ABOUT THE PRESENT

A CAUSA Research Project:

North Vancouver City Library

(June 18 – December 30, 2012)

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Artist’s Statement

Over the past fifty years I have been producing & exhibiting (nationally and internationally) art that focuses on & critiques: Art, Media & Information Systems, Corporate, Consumer & Popular Culture, The Rural vs. The Urban, Technology vs. Humans & Nature, Global Ecology & Sustainability Concerns, & Landscape in the broadest of ways (as well as Perception in general).

The ideas and theories of Marshall McLuhan were early sources of inspiration for me; by profoundly affecting my way of looking at the world, his influence has been incorporated into much of my art. We live in a natural landscape and a landscape of information, & it is the fusion vs. the confusion between these landscapes that excites me & informs my practice.

Another source of inspiration for me has been the Eastern Philosophy of Zen Buddhism, which I studied in Japan, while on a Japanese Government Foreign Scholarship (1961-62). Zen teaches the importance of living in the moment (of the interconnectedness of all living things) – the urgency of being aware of your own & the world’s present state.

– IAIN BAXTER& (June, 2012)

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… & North Vancouver …

“When all cultures of the world are simultaneously present, the work of the artist in the elucidation of form takes on new scope and new urgency. Most men are pushed into the artist’s role. The artist cannot dispense with the principle of ‘doubleness’ or ‘interplay’ because this type of hendiadys dialogue is essential to the very structure of consciousness, awareness, and autonomy.”

– Marshall McLuhan (1970)

 

“Whereas it is generally industry that betrays and distorts scientific invention in the course of its exploitation, it is usually in the distorting medium of social life that artistic invention is falsified.”

– Wyndham Lewis (1927)

 

“EVERY HUMAN BEING IS AN ARTIST who – from his state of freedom – the position of freedom that he experiences at first-hand – learns to determine the other positions of the TOTAL ART WORK OF THE FUTURE SOCIAL ORDER.”

– Joseph Beuys (1974)

 

Born in Middlesbrough, Born in Middlesborough, England, Iain Baxter came to Canada in 1937. Prior to accepting a position in the Fine Arts Department, University of British Columbia (1964), he had studied Zoology at the University of Idaho (B.Sc., 1959); he pursued post-graduate studies in both Education and Visual Art (receiving M.Ed. and Master of Fine Arts degrees from the University of Idaho, and the University of Washington, respectively.)

From 1966 until 1978, Baxter resided in North Vancouver. There, as an emerging professional artist, he established the N.E. BAXTER THING CO. (1966) and its affiliated enterprise, the N.E. THING CO. (1967). Expanding beyond the formal limits of his particular educational background, Baxter was confidently forward-looking in his ability to recognize North Vancouver as a potential laboratory for experimental work in a new (previously undefined) field of research − “VSI / Visual Sensitivity Information”. In support of the artist’s idealistic, non-conformist outlook, one especially supportive critic/commentator would observe, contemporaneously: “A rose by any other name would smell as sweet, but contemporary art would be acceptable to far more people if it were called visual sensitivity information − or VSI.” [Joan Lowndes, 1967.] Coinciding with this artist’s choice of North Vancouver as a place of residence was his constantly expanding connection to current prospects of creative production within the visual culture of an emerging (post-industrial) “global village”. Once distanced from the obvious limitations of isolated (isolating) regionalism, Baxter (during the period 1966-1978) linked his North Vancouver centred worldview far beyond the traditional confines of an artist’s studio-based practice.

From a North Vancouver vantage point, Baxter laid the groundwork for his own independent projection towards maturity − as an artist of widespread (North American/European) prominence. His enduring commitment to the complex, thought-provoking theme of identity and environment has been (from the outset) a reflection of certain deeply affecting prompts towards resourcefulness − as experienced in a specific, local landscape. A small (but self-contained) urban zone (resiliently demarcated by an adjacent “wilderness” region of unpopulated forest, and an active, international seaport), North Vancouver has functioned as an expanding point of reference in both early and recent development of the artist’s unconstrained (on-going) project. The region has served (demonstrably) as an abiding source of inspiration; it functions as a glimmering towards an artist’s ever-evolving engagement with the multifaceted (closely connected), ecologies of natural and built environments. In this regard, the early influence of North Vancouver is comparable in importance to the widespread creative complexities of post-WW11 Japanese culture (urban and rural) that had been first encountered by Baxter (a visiting scholarship recipient) in 1961 − only three years before his arrival on British Columbia’s “Pacific Rim” shoreline.

In 2005, Iain Baxter changed his name to IAIN BAXTER& [pronounced BAXTERAND] − in a gesture aligned to his previous creation of an equally unconventional manifestation of conceptive identity, N.E. THING CO. Concerning the artist’s conjoined professional practice and self-image, TIME Magazine (1967) notes, with precision: “N.E. Thing Co. is another name for Iain Baxter … an artist for whom anything goes.” By extension from this unambiguous identification, the significance of BAXTER&’s changed name develops in relation to his own ever-changing discernment of an essential “interconnectedness of all living things” − his own anticipatory aspiration towards “unending collaboration with the viewer and the means to question the artist’s role.”

Aligned with BAXTER&’s sustained (sustaining) momentum, the North Vancouver City Library presents itself (on the occasion of the artist’s exhibition/installation, temporarily dispersed throughout its institutional setting), as an openly expansive source for the simultaneous presentation of compelling information, constructively explored.

Schema

“By space the universe encompasses and swallows

me as an atom; by thought, I encompass it.”

– Blaise Pascal (1670)

 

Component 1

until the & of time

Window signage, 2012

[Third Floor, North VancouverCity Library.

Orientation: East. Photo: M. Cynog Evans.]

Component 2

AND/DNA

Window signage, 2012

[Ground floor, North Vancouver City Library (Children’s Section).

Orientation: North/South, recto/verso.Photo: M. Cynog Evans]

 

Component 3

Our World Needs A Green Sweep

Whisk brush and vacuum-formed plastic

(20” x 20” overall), 2009

[Third floor display case, adjacent to Information Desk,

North VancouverCity Library. Photo: M. Cynog Evans.]

 

Component 4

ORAL WORK

The occasional presence of this work can be experienced

with the intermediary assistance of a Librarian (third floor

Information Desk, North VancouverCity Library), until

December 30, 2012.

[Photo: M. Cynog Evans.]

 

Component 5

L&SCAPE

Window signage, 2012

[Third floor, North Vancouver City Library.

Orientation: West. Photo: M. Cynog Evans.]

“Actuality, as specific, is not merely an index of

the empirical world, but also of the Infinite world.”

– Nishida Kitaro (1923)

 

1.

Piles of Styrofoam, North Vancouver

Photograph, ca. 1967

[Copyright © by IAIN BAXTER&, 2012]

 

“Art is what reveals to us a state of perfection.”

– Kobo Daishi / Kukai (774-835)

 

2.

IAIN BAXTER&. Seven mirrors among the garlic plants (3),

Loutet Urban Farm, North Vancouver, July 1, 2012.

[Photo: M. Cynog Evans.]

 

3.

IAIN BAXTER&, Seven mirrors among the brassicas (3),

Loutet Urban Farm, North Vancouver, July 1, 2012.

[Photo: M. Cynog Evans.]

 

“For the time being, the mind reaches but the word does not.

For the time being, the word reaches but the mind does not.

For the time being, the mind and word both reach.

For the time being, neither mind nor word reach.”

– Dogen (1240)

 

4.

Chiba Garden Redux, 2012

[Chiba Garden, North Vancouver.

Digital colour photograph © IAIN BAXTER&, 2012.]

 

BAXTER&’s first visit to this traditional Japanese garden marked

the fiftieth anniversary of his departure from Japan, where

he resided until the beginning of 1962.

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David Bellman
August 1, 2012