IAIN BAXTER&: Non-Narrative Simultaneities

Posted: December 20, 2012 | Author: David Bellman

Frameworks for an

Intervention

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IAIN BAXTER&: Non-Narrative
Simultaneities

 

by David Bellman

CAUSA

December 20, 2012

 

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“A narrative makes anything a ghost of itself, placing

it beyond the horizon of here and now.”

− José Ortega y Gasset (1914)

 

“All action revolves around death, and reality

is entirely founded on it.”

− Wyndham Lewis (1914)

 

“The great square has no outside, the great circle

has no inside.”

− Zen Buddhist maxim

 

CONJUNCTION [1]

“Listen.

This statement will leave,

is leaving, has left your

radio set at a forty-five degree

angle − at approximately

1,100 feet per second.

Did you see that?”

[Iain Baxter / N.E. Thing Company,

“Sensitivity Information Announcement.”

Presented as twelve thirty-second spots on

radio station CBX (AM) − Canadian

Broadcasting Corporation, Edmonton −

from January 15 to February 10, 1971.]

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“Whereas the modern artist has used his factive

or creative intelligence to manipulate matter and

experience into a pattern which could arrest the mind

in the presence of a particular aspect of existence,

the modern scientist has sought to merge the functions

of the primitive and civilized magicians. He has

developed formulas for the control of the material

and then applied these to the control of the human

mind and society with his patterned information.

That is the key to the nature of the new “mass media.”

− Marshall McLuhan (1969)

 

“Art is not there to provide perceptions in

direct ways. It produces deepened perception

of experience. More must happen than simply

logically understandable things. Art is not

there to be simply understood, or we would

have no art.”

– Joseph Beuys (1970)

 

CONJUNCTION [2]

IAIN BAXTER&, Information Mural / Information Room (Digital Conversion Code), 2012. [Installation view – (detail) with CAUSA documentary film, North Vancouver Museum.]

point to point, will be toward clarity; toward the

elimination of all obstacles between the idea and the

observer. As examples of such obstacles, I give (among

others) memory, history, or geometry, which are swamps

of generalization from which one might pull out parodies

of ideas (which are ghosts) but never an idea in itself.

To achieve this clarity in itself is, inevitably, to be

understood.”

– Mark Rothko (1949)

 

“Electric speeds create centers everywhere. Margins

cease to exist on this planet.”

– Marshall McLuhan (1969)

 

CONSTRUCTION [3]

IAIN BAXTER&, A World of Information, stencilled canvas (digital code overlaying mass-produced World Map), 2011. [Installation view, North Vancouver Museum, 2012.]

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“The eye is the first circle, the horizon which it forms

is second; and throughout nature this primary figure is
repeated without end. It is the highest emblem in the

cipher of the world. … We are all our lifetime reading

the copious sense of this first of forms.”

– Ralph Waldo Emerson (1841)

 

“Nothing stands alone; each is only a part. A picture

must be a portrayal of relationships.”

– Emily Carr (1933)

 

IAIN BAXTER&, Mirror Image, Loutet Urban Farm, North Vancouver. [Detail of installation: fourteen mirrors (in two rows), 2012.] Photo: M. Cynog Evans.

CONJUNCTION [4]

IAIN BAXTER&, Mirror Image, Loutet Urban Farm, North Vancouver.

[Detail of installation: fourteen mirrors (in two rows), 2012.] Photo: M. Cynog Evans.

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“The question of urban society is to be taken seriously

because we should not take it for granted that we shall

live in a true urban environment in the sense we take it

now. The domestic environment appears to be more

readily the basic unit or individual cell, for it acts as

the direct connection between the individual and urban

environment. It is into this more or less closed individual

environment that the individual is able to introduce

‘News of the World,’ i.e., messages from the immediate

socio-cultural world (and from remote historical worlds)

which cross (independently) time and space, influencing

his ways of thinking, judging and decisions, only to the

extent that he wants to pay attention to them.”

– Abraham Moles (1971)

 

“In the end, we each live our own landscape inside the

Infoscape – Landscape as Lifescape.”

– IAIN BAXTER& (1990)

 

CONJUNCTION [5]

IAIN BAXTER&, Sketch for Point of View Room, 2011.

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20.12.12.

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IAIN BAXTER&: In The Medium Of Motion

Posted: December 11, 2012 | Author: David Bellman

FRAMEWORKS FOR AN INTERVENTION

by David Bellman

CAUSA

 

December 11, 2012

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IAIN BAXTER&:

In The Medium Of Motion

 

“Deadness is the first condition of art.”

– Wyndham Lewis (1914)

 

PROSPECT [1]

ARTIC – WORD MISPELLED IN SNOW 3 MILES NORTH OF INUVIK

Iain Baxter: information, Fraser University to Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, October 3, 1969.

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“Tradition, in a word, is the sense of the total past as now.”

– Marshall McLuhan (1964)

 

PROSPECT [2]

ARTIC – WORD MISPELLED IN SNOW 3 MILES NORTH OF INUVIK

N.E. Thing Co. project, realized November 1969. (Photo: Iain Baxter.)

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“The starting point of any process of thinking is something going on, something which just as it stands is incomplete or unfulfilled. Its point, its meaning lies literally in what it is going to be, in how it is going to turn out.”

– John Dewey (1916)

 

PROSPECT [3]

IAIN BAXTER&, Information Mural (detail) with “scavenged/altered” painting, Idyllic Landscape (detail). Installation at North Vancouver Museum. (Photo: M. Cynog Evans, CAUSA Archives, 2012.)

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“People can express themselves only through imprint forms using certain materials. This is, of course, also the case of language. But if this model – it need not be large: today everything is much too large – if the imprint quality is there, it is easier to see where it came from and whether the constellation is already, shall we say, optimal, and this can be discussed unendingly. And only this is culture; everything else is not.”

– Joseph Beuys (1979)

 

PROSPECT [4]

IAIN BAXTER&, Information Mural (detail, with video monitor). Installation at North Vancouver Museum. (Photo: M. Cynog Evans, CAUSA Archives, 2012.)

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“The agitator seizes the word. The artist is seized by it.”

– Karl Kraus (1909)

 

PROSPECT [5]

IAIN BAXTER&, Information Mural (detail). Installation at North Vancouver Museum. (Photo: M. Cynog Evans, CAUSA Archives, 2012.)

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“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.”

– Dōgen (1240)

 

PROSPECT [6]

IAIN BAXTER&, BLUR, twigs [installation variable], 2012. (Photo: M. Cynog Evans, CAUSA Archives.)

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“Even if the [artist’s] material lasts for only a few seconds it will give sensation the power to exist and be preserved in itself in the eternity that coexists with this small duration. So long as the material lasts, the sensation enjoys an eternity in those very moments.”

– Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari (1991)

 

PROJECT [7]

IAIN BAXTER&, Oral Work, 2012.

This work was first presented in an exhibition context at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago – as part of the project “Art by Telephone” (1969). It can be experienced, again, by enquiring at Artspeak, Vancouver. [Telephone: (604) 688-0051.]

Following instructions from the artist, this self-contained, word-based work has never been recorded beyond the archival record of its own continuative presence. It remains the artist’s intention that an exclusively oral tradition should sustain an institutionally intervenient presence, in perpetuity.

Access to IAIN BAXTER&’s Oral Work – in a particular phase of its development – is available at Artspeak until 4:45 pm [Pacific Standard Time], December 15, 2012.

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11.12.12.

 

IAIN BAXTER &: MAGNITUDE + DIRECTION

Posted: November 20, 2012 | Author: David Bellman

IAIN BAXTER &:

MAGNITUDE + DIRECTION

 

November 20, 2012

“The new world will not need little pictures. If it needs a mirror, it has the photograph and the cinema. In the new world the creator called ‘artist’ will create the world itself, and not describe it.”

– El Lissitzky (1922)

 

“Modern Art always projects itself into a twilight zone where no values are fixed. It is always born in anxiety, at least since Cézanne.”

– Leo Steinberg (1962)

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• BELOW •

 

[A.Y. Jackson, Radium Mine, 1938, oil on canvas, 71.1 x 91.4 cm. Photo: heffel.com]

 

On May 16, 1930, a vein containing silver and pitchblende [a primary source of uranium] was discovered by French-Canadian prospector Gilbert Labine (a friend of the artist A. Y. Jackson). His discovery led to the development of his company, Eldorado Mine, and its related town-site, Port Radium (the subject of this painting). Commencing operations in 1933, this mine was the only source of radium outside the Belgian Congo.

 

“A tiny, ugly collection of frame bunk-houses and mills squats forlornly on the shore of remote Great Bear Lake, in Canada’s Northwest Territories. It is 1,400 miles north of the nearest railhead (at Waterways, Alberta), and 26 miles south of the Arctic Circle, in a part of the continent bleak with long, cold winter nights. The village has no official name, but it is sometimes called Radium City. Last week it suddenly found itself part of an all but incredible world drama, for under its fir-bearded slopes lies the stuff of which atomic bombs are made.”

– TIME (August 20, 1945)

 

[On August 6, 1945, an American B-29 bomber, the Enola Gay, had dropped an atomic bomb on the city of Hiroshima, Japan.]

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“There is gaiety sometimes in Jackson, but it is rationed. His vision is as austere as his subject-matter, which is precisely the hard puritanic land in which he always has lived: with no frills, with all its dismal solitary grandeur and bleak beauty, its bad side deliberately selected rather than its chilly relentings.”

– Wyndham Lewis (1946)

 

“In the organization of total war it is logical that artists should be a part of it, whether to provide inspiration, information or comment ….”

– A. Y. Jackson (1946)

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• ABOVE •

 

[Emily Carr, Above the Trees, circa 1939, oil on paper, 91.2 x 61.0 cm, Collection of the Vancouver Art Gallery, Emily Carr Trust. Photo: Trevor Mills, Vancouver Art Gallery]

 

“We want exhilaration. We want incentive to push further on, we want to make thoughts and longings that will set us wondering, that will make us desirous to explore higher and deeper and wider, to see more, to understand more.”

– Emily Carr (1936)

 

“When she left the native theme behind around 1930, she was already on a path that was taking her into nature in a kind of identification, not as an onlooker but a participant in its ongoing energy. … In the late paintings the energy finally comes to belong not to a particular place but to her mind, an imaginative construct she applied to all nature.”

– Doris Shadbolt (2002)

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“Before we ask WHAT CAN WE DO? we have to first consider the question HOW MUST WE THINK?”

– Joseph Beuys (1982)

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• TOWARDS •

 

IAIN BAXTER&, ARCTIC-VSI, 2012

 

[Iain Baxter (N. E. Thing Company Projects Department) first presented this “Visual Sensitivity Information” via telex transmission – from Simon Fraser University (Library) to Nova Scotia College of Art and Design – on October 3, 1969.]

 

“We perceive in the social domain as well as in the physical that what is correct at one level of importance becomes incorrect at another. In probing one level of analysis, it becomes apparent that the global facts observed at a different level dissolve and do not correspond to reality.”

– Jacques Ellul (1962)

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20.11.12.

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