IAIN BAXTER&: An Assemblage (Assembled)

Posted: February 25, 2013 | Author: David Bellman

IAIN BAXTER&: An Assemblage (Assembled)

David Bellman
Research Curator
CAUSA

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CONCEPT

“The future is &.”

– IAIN BAXTER&

[Communication to CAUSA / Collective for Advanced and Unified Studies in the Visual Arts, 24 February 2013.]

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CONTEXT

IAIN BAXTER& exhibition
(intervention) – North Vancouver Museum, Presentation House, June-December 2012. Guest Curators: CAUSA.

[Prior to its planned expansion/change of location, this museum of social history discontinued its programme of exhibitions on 30 December 2012.]

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PROBE

Photographs by M. Cynog Evans [CAUSA Archives, 2012.]

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“Only art is capable of dismantling the repressive effects of a social system that continues to totter along the deathline: to dismantle in order to build A SOCIAL ORGANISM AS A WORK OF ART.”

– Joseph Beuys (1973)

Photographs by M. Cynog Evans [CAUSA Archives, 2012.]

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“We must develop a methodical intervention based on the complex factors of two components in perpetual interaction: the material environment of life and the comportments which it gives rise to and which radically transform it.”

– Guy Debord (1957)

Photographs by M. Cynog Evans [CAUSA Archives, 2012.]

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“I was looking at a plant with a spread of leaves; and it seemed suddenly plain that the flower itself was a part of the earth; that a ring enclosed what was the flower; and that was the real flower; part earth; part flower.”

– Virginia Woolf (1938)

Photographs by M. Cynog Evans [CAUSA Archives, 2012.]

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“Regarding the broadened concept of art, I’m searching for the dumbest person. And when I’ve found the dumbest person on the lowest possible level, then I’ve surely found the most intelligent one, the one potentially most endowed. And that person is the bearer of creativity.”

– Joseph Beuys (1986)

Photographs by M. Cynog Evans [CAUSA Archives, 2012.]

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25.02.13

MARSHALL McLUHAN/HARLEY PARKER + IAIN BAXTER/BAXTER&: Diction, Contradiction, and Agreement

Posted: February 20, 2013 | Author: David Bellman

 

MARSHALL McLUHAN/

HARLEY PARKER + IAIN

BAXTER/BAXTER&: Diction,

Contradiction, and Agreement

(Part 2)

David Bellman

CAUSA

 

20.02.13.

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“The artist provides us with environments that enable us to

see the environment. Such anti-environmental means of

perception must constantly be renewed in order to be

efficacious.”

– Marshall McLuhan and Harley Parker (1969)

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Iain Baxter/N.E. Thing Co., ACT [Aesthetically Claimed Thing]

certificate, 1968.

 

Iain Baxter/N.E. Thing Co., ART [Aesthetically Rejected Thing],

certificate, 1968.

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“I used the corporation [N.E. Thing Company Ltd.] as a form.

I recognized that our lives were increasingly controlled by

these entities, so I wanted to use one to see what I could do

with it in the context of art.”

– IAIN BAXTER& (2011)

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Iain Baxter/N.E. Thing Co. Ltd., ACT No. 19: Marcel Duchamp’s Total Art Production Except his Total Ready-Made Production (1968) / ART No. 19: Marcel Duchamp’s Total Ready-Made Production Except his Total Art Production (1968), 1969. Collection: National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa.

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“Environment used as probe or art object is satirical because

it draws attention to itself.”

– Marshall McLuhan and Harley Parker (1968)

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Iain Baxter, 12’ x 12’ Green Sculpture, 1968. (Exhibited: “Inflatable Wearables

Collection” – Burnaby Art Gallery, British Columbia, 1968.)

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“All things are there in order that they may, in some sense, become pictures for us.”

– Rainer Maria Rilke (1899)

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Iain Baxter, 16’ Triangular Orange, 1968. (Exhibited: “Inflatable Wearables Collection – Burnaby Art Gallery, British Columbia, 1968.)

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“As to my own actualization these days, it is truly creative and

destructive. I play about with miraculous transformations,

entering all circumstances, and whatever I am, I have nothing

further to seek.”

– Zen master Rinzai (d. 866 CE)

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Iain Baxter/N.E. Thing Co. Ltd., Information: Yves Klein, Leap Into The Void, 1962 [sic.]. [Project: 1976 exhibition, Celebration Of The Body, Agnes Etherington Art Centre, Kingston, Ontario.]

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“Vacuum is all potent because all containing. In vacuum

alone motion becomes possible.”

– Okakura-Kakuzō (1906)

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Yamada Gallery Announcement for Iain Baxter’s first solo exhibition, Kyoto, Japan, 1961.

“Almost every work of art is an analogy.”

– Gerhard Richter (1970)

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IAIN BAXTER&, Rocky Mountain Landscape, 60” television [with “snow/electronic noise”] and acrylic paint, 2012.

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“Today the environment itself becomes the artefact. The consequences

for learning are quite extraordinary. The prepared environment separates

the old curriculum.”

– Marshall McLuhan (1964)

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20.02.13.

 

IAIN BAXTER/IAIN BAXTER&: TRANSMITTING NOT COMPOSING

Posted: February 14, 2013 | Author: David Bellman

 

IAIN BAXTER/IAIN BAXTER&: TRANSMITTING NOT COMPOSING

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A WORD IS WORTH 1/1000TH OF A PICTURE

[Visual Sensitivity Information (VSI) – Baxter, Simon Fraser University, to the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, September 18, 1969.]

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Photo: M. Cynog Evans, “Pile of Sulphur – North Vancouver, 11.02.13.”

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“Intangible and abstruse
the bright silk of the sunlight
Pours down in manifest
splendour,
You can neither stroke
the precise word with your
hand
Nor shut it down under a
box-lid.”

– Confucius (551-479 BCE), translated by Ezra Pound (1947)

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IAIN BAXTER/IAIN BAXTER&: One-Word Transilience

Posted: February 11, 2013 | Author: David Bellman

 

IAIN BAXTER/IAIN BAXTER&:
One-Word Transilience

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“One may formulate, as follows, a law confirmed by palaeontology and biogeography: human life has arisen and prospered only when the resources it could count on were balanced by the problems it met with. This is true, as much in the spiritual as in the physical.”

– Ortega y Gasset (1930)

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VSI FORMULA NO. 8 – TRANSPLANTATION

[Visual Sensitivity Information – sent via telex from Iain Baxter, Simon Fraser University, to the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, October 3, 1969.]

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“I’m a pattern thinker. I see lots of different things all at once and I reflect on them – and I think about the ways they could be social, political or artistic. But spirituality is also a part of my life.”

– IAIN BAXTER& (2011)

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MARSHALL McLUHAN/HARLEY PARKER + IAIN BAXTER/BAXTER&: Diction, Contradiction, and Agreement

Posted: February 8, 2013 | Author: David Bellman

 

MARSHALL McLUHAN/HARLEY PARKER +

IAIN BAXTER/BAXTER&:

Diction, Contradiction, and Agreement

 

David Bellman

CAUSA

 

08.02. 13.

 

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“The world in which we live is an old world, yet we have not exhausted its contents, not only in larger things but in smaller things, too. In fact, we can never reach the end of our researches as long as we limit ourselves to the fields of sense and intellect. This is the very nature of the human constitution. But, strangely enough, as soon as we quit this realm known as objectivity and turn inward and go on in this direction with resolution and persistency we finally come to a gate known as ‘the gate of all wonders.’ We enter through it and find ourselves in the field of Emptiness where we have our being firmly attached.”

– D. T. Suzuki (1958)

 

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“If the three-dimensional illusion of depth has proved to be a cul-de-sac of one time and one space, the two-dimensional features many spaces in multileveled time.”

– Harley Parker and Marshall McLuhan (1968)

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Harley Parker, Two Heads Merged – Third Eye. Monoprint (undated). Collection: Burnaby Art Gallery, Burnaby, British Columbia.

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“If I have a point of view about the human condition as a result of investigating the effects of media, it is simply that people are somnambulist. They seem to be happily hypnotized by their own extensions of themselves. I suppose the traditional word for this is idolatry. ‘They became what they beheld and bowed the knee to themselves.’”

– Marshall McLuhan (1971)

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“Scarcely five hundred years ago, during the Renaissance, an unmistakable reorganization of our consciousness occurred: the discovery of perspective which opened up the three-dimensionality of space. This discovery is so closely linked with the entire intellectual attitude of the modern epoch that we have felt obliged to call this age the age of perspectivity and characterize the age immediately preceding it as the ‘unperspectival’ age. These definitions, by recognizing a fundamental characteristic of these eras, lead to the further appropriate definition of the age of the dawning new consciousness as the ‘a-perspectival’ age, a definition supported by developments in the visual arts and literature, where the incorporation of time as a fourth dimension into previously spatial conceptions has formed the initial basis for manifesting the ‘new’.

– Jean Gebser (1949)

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Iain Baxter, Reflected San Francisco Beauty Spots (Pyramid Building), 1979. Photoetching with colour aquatint.

Publisher: Crown Point Press, San Francisco.

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“Every work of art has its own specific character and style, and its uniqueness can never be penetrated by a generic term.”

– Rudolph Wittkower (1965)

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In a recent CAUSA interview (2013), IAIN BAXTER& locates his work (past, present, and pending) as a perpetually regenerative force within an aperspectival field of observation and reflection. He remarks: “Five words are especially important to me: Information/Wonder/Love/Play/And.”

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08.02.13.

IAIN BAXTER/BAXTER&: UNLIMITEDNESS, ENLARGED

Posted: February 5, 2013 | Author: David Bellman

 

IAIN BAXTER/BAXTER&:

UNLIMITEDNESS, ENLARGED

David Bellman

CAUSA

 

February 5, 2012

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Assemblage

The following documents have been assembled as a curatorial connection to both the IAIN BAXTER& electronic catalogue raisonné and the IAIN BAXTER/BAXTER& bibliography (a compilation continually synchronized by Adam Lauder and Isabelle Hermann).

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“Value judgments create smog in our culture and distract from process. My personal bias is actively pro-print and all of its effects.”

– Marshall McLuhan (1970)

 

N.E. Thing Co. Ltd: announcement in the Citizen (North Vancouver), “Classified Advertisements” section, March 13, 1970. (Photo: M. Cynog Evans, CAUSA Archives.)

 

“The N.E. Thing Page,” Vancouver Magazine, July 1975.

 

“If the figurative, or let’s say the imaginal, meaning in the earliest words was really ‘given’, and was not something added to them by an individual speaker (which is what happens when a metaphor is invented), then there must have been going on, not only a different kind of thinking but a different kind of perceiving. The picture quality, the given meanings must have been present not only in the perceiver but also in what he perceived; it must have been present in fact in world about him. There must have been a kind of participation between perceiver and perceived, between man and nature. That is something we no longer experience, only get an occasional glimpse of its quality through the creative imagination of a modern painter or poet.

If you can grant this you see language as originating in that participation, so that in the earliest stages of all it would have to be described as nature speaking through man, rather than man speaking about nature; and you see the subsequent development of language as evincing the gradual diminution of that participation as time went on.”

– Owen Barfield (1965)

 

Iain Baxter, Color/Language Participatory Etching, 1979.

Color soft ground etching.

Publisher: Crown Point Press, San Francisco.

Printer: Nancy Anello.

 

“The deepest irony allows for more than one possibility; the situation remains open to doubt and scrutiny.”

– Wylie Sypher (1968)

 

Iain Baxter, “Color/Language Studies:1973-82,” in Art Journal (College Art Association, New York), Summer 1982. (Photo: M. Cynog Evans, CAUSA Archives.)

 

Iain Baxter, “Color/Language Studies: 1973-82,” in Art Journal (College Art Association, New York), Summer 1982. (Photo: M. Cynog Evans, CAUSA Archives.)

 

The artist’s title for his Art Journal contribution refers to an exhibition presented at York University, Toronto (1973): N.E. Thing Co. Ltd.: Project Department (VSI/MSI/SSI/ESI)=SI. Although these rarely published terms of reference are not immediately self-evident, they can function, presently, as engaging/differentiating definitions.

Glossary

 

Iain Baxter/N.E. Thing Co. Ltd.: information published by the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, Halifax (1969), as part of its continuing studies in “Art Now.”

05.02.13.