OCCASIONAL DOCUMENTS – AN ANNIVERSARY

Posted: November 16, 2012 | Author: David Bellman

Frameworks for an

Intervention

by David Bellman, CAUSA

OCCASIONAL DOCUMENTS – AN ANNIVERSARY

GROUPING FOR IAIN BAXTER / IAIN BAXTER&

 

November 16, 2012

“Imagination is not an empirical or super-added power of consciousness, it is the whole of consciousness as it realizes its freedom.”

– Jean-Paul Sartre (1936)

IAIN BAXTER&, Until the & of time, window signage, North Vancouver City Library, 2012. [Photo: M. Cynog Evans.]

“Japanese art of the past is based on the typical Japanese attitude of perceiving the outer world not in opposition to the self, but regarding the self as part of the universe. To maintain the self was to the Japanese mind nothing else than immersion in the universe.”

– Chisaburoh F. Yamada (1952)

IAIN BAXTER, Reflected San Francisco Beauty Spots (Buddha in Golden Gate Park), 1979. [Photo-etching with colour aquatint. Publisher: Crown Point Press.]

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“Creation – whether it be a painting, sculpture, symphony or novel – involves not merely talent, intuition, powers of imagination and application, but also the ability to shape material that could be expanded to other socially relevant spaces.”

– Joseph Beuys (1972)

Chiba Garden, North Vancouver – Autumn, 2012. [Photo: M. Cynog Evans.]

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“What you want to acquire, you should dare to acquire by any means. What you want to see, even though it is with difficulty, you should see. You should not let it pass by, thinking there will be another chance to see it or to acquire it. It is quite unusual to have a second chance to materialize your desire.”

– Yosa Buson, Haiku Master (1716 – 1783)

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16.11.12.

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IAIN BAXTER&: Figure / Ground (Part V)

Posted: November 9, 2012 | Author: David Bellman

IAIN BAXTER&:

Figure / Ground (Part V)

November 9, 2012

 

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

“Then down came the lid – the day was lost at Sarajevo. World-politics stepped in, and war was started which has not ended yet; a ‘war to end war.’ But it merely ended art, it did not end war.”

– Wyndham Lewis (1927)

“Yes, we must substitute an interest in the media for the previous interest in subjects. This is the logical answer to the fact that the media have substituted themselves for the older world. Even if we should wish to recover that older world we can do it only by an intensive study of the ways in which the media have swallowed it. And no matter how many walls have fallen, the citadel of individual consciousness has not fallen nor is it likely to fall. For it is not accessible to the mass media.”

– Marshall McLuhan (1969)

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IAIN BAXTER&, BLUR (architectural installation – bronze letters), 2004. [Photo: Adam Lauder]

IAIN BAXTER&, BLUR (binary code), 2012:

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N. E. THING COMPANY LIMITED, NOTHING PROJECT, 1969.

Specifications [sent from Iain Baxter to the “Place and Process” exhibition, Edmonton Art Gallery, September 4 – 28, 1969]:

 

Nothing is impossible

Nothing is something

 

“If a fleeting thought conjures the whole,

how can I describe Reality in figures?

While empty moonlight on the water shows everything,

the mirror of No Mind reflects Nothingness.”

– Baekoon Kyunghan, Koen [Korean Zen] poet (1299 – 1375)

“Human reality is a perpetual surpassing toward a coincidence with itself which is never given.”

– Jean-Paul Sartre (1943)

“We know there is only one value for art, and even for truth; the ‘first hand,’ the authentic newness of something said, and the ‘unheard music’ with which it is said.”

– Gilles Deleuze (1964)

CAUSA project, realized in co-operation with the City of North Vancouver: Chiba Garden lantern, lit, for the first time, on November 6, 2012. [Photo: M. Cynog Evans]

IAIN BAXTER&, CONTINUATIVE TRANSVSI:

 

IAIN BAXTER&, Until the & of time, window signage, City of North Vancouver Library, 2012. [Photo: M. Cynog Evans.]

“Consider for a moment what our planet is and what it might be. At present, for most, there is toil and hunger, constant danger, more hatred than love. There could be a happy world, where co-operation was more in evidence than competition, where what is lovely in nature is not destroyed to make room for hideous machines whose sole business is to kill, and where to promote joy is more respected than to produce mountains of corpses. Do not say this is impossible: it is not. It waits only for men to desire it more than the infliction of torture. There is an artist imprisoned in each one of us. Let him loose to spread joy everywhere.”

IAIN BAXTER&: Figure / Ground (Part IV)

Posted: November 6, 2012 | Author: David Bellman

FRAMEWORKS for an

INTERVENTION

by David Bellman, CAUSA

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IAIN BAXTER&:

Figure / Ground (Part IV)

November 6, 2012

 

– Marshal McLuhan (1969)

“The form of each thing is distinguished by the thing’s function or purpose. Some things produce laughter, others terror; these are there forms.”

– Gian Pietro Bellori (1672)

Iain Baxter, Three Bottles, painted, vacuum-formed plastic, 1965. Collection of the artist. Installation view: North VancouverCityMuseum, 2012. [Photo: M. Cynog Evans.]

In an interview with Marie Fleming (1981), Iain Baxter noted that his plastic (vacuum-formed) bas-relief works (1965) had developed from a heartening realization that the bottle form (initially an artefact scavenged from one of two publicly maintained “garbage dump” sites in North Vancouver) could be reincarnated – dialectically, “…like a polished apple…with a happy feeling about it…a fun thing in a sad world.”

Iain Baxter examining vacuum-formed bas-relief work, 1965.

“Occult notions of ‘concept’ are in retreat from the physical world. Heaps of private information reduce art to hermeticism and fatuous meta-physics. Language should find itself in the physical world, and not end up locked in an idea in somebody’s head. Language should be an ever developing procedure and not an isolated occurrence.”

– Robert Smithson (1972)

IAIN BAXTER&, Mirrors at Loutet Urban Farm, 2012. [Photo: M. Cynog Evans.]

Loutet Urban Farm – situated in the southern portion of Loutet Park, Rufus Avenue and East 14^th Street, North Vancouver – integrates organic farming with innovative and sustainable practices (including alternative energy). This not-for-profit enterprise, inaugurated in 2011, provides a year-round harvest of locally grown produce from a transformed landfill site (a “garbage dump” formerly utilized by Iain Baxter in his Visual Sensitivity Information research of 1965).

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BAXTER&, Mirrors at Loutet Urban Farm, North Vancouver, 2012. [Photo: M. Cynog Evans.]

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“At the bottom of great doubt lies great awakening. If you doubt fully, you will fully awaken.”

– Hakuin (1686 – 1768)

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