IAIN BAXTER&: Figure / Ground (III)

Posted: October 30, 2012 | Author: David Bellman

IAIN BAXTER&:

Figure / Ground

David Bellman, CAUSA

October 30, 2012

 

“The life of Zen begins with the opening of Satori … the unfolding of a new world hither-to unperceived.”

– IAIN BAXTER (1982)

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“Outside the mind there are no phenomena, and outside phenomena there is no mind. Essence and functions are completely fused.”

Houng Pou (1510? – 66)

Telex transmission: from Iain Baxter (President, N.E. Thing Co.) to Garry Kennedy, President, Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 1970:

 

TO THE PRESIDENT

 

DON’T LOOK AT THIS UNLESS YOU ARE READY FOR ANYTHING

 

OK SIT DOWN AND WITH A PAIR OF SISSORS CUT 4 INCHES OFF

YOUR TIE AND PLEASE MAIL IT IMMEDIATELY TO IAIN BAXTER

PRES N E THING CO

 

NOW YOU ARE READY FOR ANYTHING

 

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“A fo ben bid bont.” / “To be a leader become a bridge.”

– Welsh maxim.

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Iain Baxter / N.E. Thing Co., Art is All Over, circa 1970, metal pin, Collection of the VancouverArtGallery, Acquisition Fund. [Photo: Rachel Topham, VancouverArtGallery.]

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“The social life of man is a center, as it were, whence radiate numerous intellectual tendencies, crossing and zigzagging, receding and approaching in interminable succession. The points of convergence create new centers, exerting varying influences upon the larger center, the general life of humanity. Thus new intellectual and ethical atmospheres are established, the degree of their influence depending, primarily, on the active enthusiasm of the adherents; ultimately, on the kinship between the new ideal and the requirements of human nature. Striking this true chord, the new ideal will affect ever more intellectual centers, which gradually begin interpreting themselves into life and transvaluing the values of the great general center, the social life of man.”

– Alexander Berkman (1910)

 

IAIN BAXTER&: Figure / Ground (II)

Posted: October 24, 2012 | Author: David Bellman

IAIN BAXTER&:

Figure / Ground

David Bellman, CAUSA

October 23, 2012

 

[Falstaff Sans Ultra Bold – typeface selected by Robert R. Reid – forming part of an ongoing IAIN BAXTER& / CAUSA Research Scheme, 2012.]

 

“Art is the imposing of a pattern on experience, and our aesthetic enjoyment is recognition of the pattern.”

– Alfred North Whitehead (1954)

 

IAIN BAXTER&, Information Mural [Digital Conversion Code], stencilled paint, dimensions variable, 2012.

Photo: M. Cynog Evans [installation view, North Vancouver Museum].

 

“The basic changes of our time lead us towards confronting the environment as artefact.”

– Marshall McLuhan (1969)

 

IAIN BAXTER&, Information Mural [Digital Conversion Code], stencilled paint, dimensions variable, 2012.

Photo: M. Cynog Evans [installation view, North Vancouver Museum].

 

“Dada is the world soul, dada is the pawnshop.”

– Hugo Ball (1916)

 

IAIN BAXTER&, IdyllicLandscape [stencilled paint on “charity shop” artefact – purchased by the artist in North Vancouver, 14 June 2012].

Photo: M. Cynog Evans [installation view, North Vancouver Museum].

 

IAIN BAXTER&, AND/DNA, three-colour neon, 2012.

Photo: M. Cynog Evans [installation view, North Vancouver Museum].

 

“There is but one indefinitely certain truth, and that is the truth that pyrrhonistic scepticism itself leaves standing, – the truth that the present phenomenon of consciousness exists.”

– William James (1884)

 

IAIN BAXTER&, AND/DNA, three-clour neon, 2012.

Photo: M. Cynog Evans [installation (side view), North Vancouver Museum].

 

“I see my work very much in the spirit of Dada.”

– IAIN BAXTER& (2011)

 

IAIN BAXTER&, &, documentary photograph (displayed in lightbox), 2011.

Photo: M. Cynog Evans [North Vancouver Museum exhibition component, IAIN

BAXTER&: Information/Location, North Vancouver, 2012].

 

“Teaching is not difficult, listening is not difficult either, but what is truly difficult is to become conscious of what you have in yourself and be able to use it as your own. This self-realization is known as ‘seeing into one’s own being,’ which is satori. Satori is an awakening from a dream. Awakening and self-realization and seeing into one’s own being – these are synonymous.”

– (Unknown) Zen Master, Ittōryū school (seventeenth century)

 

IAIN BAXTER&, Until the & of Time, chalk on chalkboard, 2012. [Collection of the North Vancouver Museum – gift of IAIN BAXTER&.]

Photo: M. Cynog Evans [installation view, North Vancouver Museum].

 

“Articulation, which is constitutive of a stratum, is always a double articulation (double pincer). What is articulated is a content and an expression. Whereas form and substance are not really distinct, content and expression are.”

– Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (1987)

 

IAIN BAXTER&: Figure / Ground

Posted: October 19, 2012 | Author: David Bellman

IAIN BAXTER&:

Figure / Ground

 

David Bellman, CAUSA

October 17, 2012

 

[Gill Sans Ultra Bold – typeface selected by Robert R. Reid – forming part of an ongoing IAIN BAXTER& / CAUSA Research Scheme, 2012.]

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“We often speak of identification in our Zen discipline, but this word is not exact. Identification presupposes original opposition of two terms, subject and object, but the truth is that from the very first there are no two opposing terms whose identification is to be achieved by Zen. It is better to say that there has never been any separation between subject and object, and that all the discrimination and separation we have or, rather, make is a later creation, though the concept of time is not to be interposed here. The aim of Zen is thus to restore the experience of original inseparability, which means, in other words, to return to the original state of purity and transparency. This is the reason conceptual discrimination is discredited in Zen. Followers of identity and tranquility are to be given the warning: they are ridden by concepts; let them rise to facts and live in and with them.”

– Daisetz T. Suzuki (1938)

 

“The fact is that any ambitious and sustained intellectual work soon overstrains the capacities of common sense. As soon as one thinks at all seriously and strenuously about nature, society, mind, truth or any other big and complex subject, the traditional ways of conceiving it prove to be too muddled to allow any distinctions and definitions that might reveal hidden relations, or make obvious ones intelligible. The thinker, therefore, is confronted by the task of criticizing and correcting, perhaps even rejecting, the accepted images and tacit assumptions and of building up a new, more abstract, more negotiable set of concepts.”

– Suzanne K. Langer (1956)

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AN OBJECT TOSSED FROM ONE COUTRY TO ANOTHER

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Lawrence Weiner

1968

 

Iain Baxter [N. E. Thing Company] / IAIN BAXTER&:

 

An Object

Tossed From

One Country To

Another And

Back Again

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Iain Baxter / N.E. Thing Company (1968)

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Iain Baxter, Thrown Camera Photograph, 1979.

 

Iain Baxter, Thrown Camera Photograph, 1979.

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“Art is in essence DE-CREATION.”

– José Ortega y Gasset (1914)

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IAIN BAXTER / IAIN BAXTER&: A Relative Pluralism

Posted: October 11, 2012 | Author: David Bellman

IAIN BAXTER / IAIN BAXTER&:

A Relative Pluralism

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David Bellman, CAUSA

October 10, 2012

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“In unity there is the visible and the invisible. The invisible is a vibration of perpetual motion and can make itself visible to our mind through a point, a line, a volume, which are the image or the trace of infinity.”

– Georges Vontongerloo (1919)

 

“Through Zen we annihilate Time and see the Universe not split up into myriad fragments, but in its primary unity. Unless, says the Zen aesthetician, the artist’s work is imbued with his vision of the subjective, non-phenomenal aspect of life, his productions will be mere toys.”

– Arthur Waley (1923)

 

Transmitted Visual Sensitivity Information [TRANSVSI]:

Telegram – from Iain Baxter, Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, British Columbia – to Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, Halifax (September 18, 1969):

DARK VANCOUVER 230 AM PST [Pacific Standard Time] AND SAME TIME 630 AM AST [Atlantic Standard Time] HALIFAX LIGHT

 

CONTINUATIVE

TRANSVSI:

LIGHT VANCOUVER 400 PM PST AND SAME TIME 800 AM JST [Japan Standard Time] CHIBA LIGHT

 

Photo: Nitobe Memorial Garden, University of British Columbia, Vancouver. October 7, 2012. [M. Cynog Evans.]

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“Even as the Romantics began to deal with the old pastoral, agrarian world as an art form when machinery was new, so we will now begin to deal with the planet itself as a work of art.”

– Marshall McLuhan (1967)

 

“At the end of the century, there will not be much left of the expanse of a planet that is not only polluted but also shrunk, reduced to nothing by the technologies of general interactivity.”

– Paul Virilio (1997)

 

Transmitted Visual Sensitivity Information [TRANSVSI]:

Telegram – from Iain Baxter, Simon Fraser University – to Nova Scotia College of Art and Design (September 18, 1969):

LIGHT VANCOUVER 1030 AM PST AND SAME TIME 230 PM AST HALIFAX LIGHT

 

CONTINUATIVE

TRANSVSI:

LIGHT NORTH VANCOUVER 600 PM PST AND SAME TIME 900 PM EST TORONTO DARK

 

Photo: Chiba Garden, North Vancouver. October 9, 2012. [M. Cynog Evans,]

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“Art is not there to provide perceptions in direct ways. It produces deepened perception of experience. … Art is not there to be simply understood, or we would have no art.”

– Joseph Beuys (1970)

 

“Becoming is certainly not imitating, or identifying with something; neither is it regressing-progressing; neither is it corresponding, establishing corresponding relations; neither is it producing, producing a filiation or producing through filiation. Becoming is a verb with a consistency all its own; it does not reduce to, or lead back to, ‘appearing,’ ‘being.,’ ‘equalling,’ or ‘producing.’”

– Gilles Deleuze and Félis Guattari (1980)

 

Transmitted Visual Sensitivity Information [TRANSVSI]:

Telegram – from Iain Baxter, Simon Fraser University – to Nova Scotia College of Art and Design (September 19,1969):

DARK VANCOUVER 1030 PM PST AND SAME TIME 230 AM AST HALIFAX DARK

 

CONTINUATIVE

TRANSVSI:

DARK NORTH VANCOUVER 856 PM PST AND SAME TIME 1156 EST TORONTO DARK

 

Photo: IAIN BAXTER&, until the & of time, 2012. North Vancouver City Library, October 9, 2012. [M. Cynog Evans.]

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The purposeful gesture of changing his name (in 2005), from Iain Baxter to IAIN BAXTER&, expands this artist’s self-sufficient conceptual standpoint – a belief in the interconnectedness of all things. Since first publicly presenting his work (Kyoto, 1961), Baxter (BAXTER&) has unceasingly illuminated a precisely historical/contemporary function of visual communication: its capacity to sustain, momentarily, configurations of both present (presented) connectivity and pending (perpetual) motion.

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IAIN BAXTER&: Origination / Generation

Posted: October 4, 2012 | Author: David Bellman

IAIN BAXTER&:

Origination / Generation

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David Bellman, CAUSA

October 3, 2012

– Lao Tse (sixth century B.C.E.)

 

Site 1.

 

IAIN BAXTER&, Mirrors Amongst the Salad Greens,

Loutet Urban Farm, City ofNorth Vancouver, October 2012.

 

Photography: M. Cynog Evans.

 

 

“Observation and perception are two separate things; the observing

eye is stronger, the perceiving eyes is weaker.”

– Miyamato Musashi (1643)

Site 2.

IAIN BAXTER&, L&SCAPE [temporary installation,

City of North Vancouver Library], 2012.

 

 

“Environment is process, not container.”

– Marshall McLuhan (1969)

 

Site 3.

IAIN BAXTER&, Transmitted Visual Sensitivity Information [TRANSVSI], 1969/2012.

 

Artist’s instructions: “Take 1000 sheets of paper. Crumple and spread on the floor in an amorphous shape, with edges touching.” [Telex communication – from Iain Baxter, SimonFraserUniversity, Burnaby, British Columbia – to Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, Halifax. September 15, 1969.]

 

Photography: M. Cynog Evans. [Installation: Dorothy Somerset Studio, University of British Columbia, Vancouver. Technical assistance: Ksenia Cheinman and Kevin Day.]

 

“While information is necessary for self-awareness, propaganda

is necessary to prevent self-awareness from turning into despair.”

 

Site 4.

IAIN BAXTER&, Transmitted Sensitivity Information [TRANSVSI], 1969/2012.

[Previously transmitted as telex – from Iain Baxter, SimonFraserUniversity, Burnaby, British Columbia – to Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, Halifax.]

 

DON’T LOOK HERE.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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