First Impressions / Terminal Boundaries
Posted: May 9, 2012First Impressions / Terminal Boundaries
“After you’ve learned to look at things, and how to think about
them, clear up the problem of what you personally represent.”
Ad Reinhardt (1946)
“The basis of an aesthetic act is the pure idea. But the pure idea
is of necessity an aesthetic act.”
Barnett Newman (1947)
1.
For the June-July 1967 issue of artscanada (Toronto), the editor of Artforum (New York) was commissioned to examine and report upon the then-current contemporary art community in Vancouver. Having encountered Iain Baxter’s Bagged Place installation – a project made possible with the support of Alvin Balkind, Director of the Fine Art Gallery at the University of British Columbia – Leider would note:
In February, 1966, Balkind mailed an announcement which arrived in a plastic
bag, like a head of lettuce:
FOR RENT
BAGGED PLACE
4 rm. self-contained furn. ste.
double bed, plastic bagged, steri-
lized, scenic view, close to U.B.C.,
no students, non-smoker, non-
drinker, no pets or children, park-
ing in rear. Open for insp. daily
except Sunday from Feb. 2. For
info. Call 226-2759.
The announcement heralded the exhibition of Baxter’s extraordinary four room
apartment, in which not only the rooms themselves, but every object in them –
mops, brooms, towels, cans, compacts, clocks, pictures, vegetables, chairs, tables,
beds – were bagged in plastic. (The phrase in the announcement, “close to U.B.C.”,
is especially piquant: the Fine Art Gallery is located in the basement of the library building.
Further to this appreciative summary, Leider’s report impartially records his observation that public reception of Bagged Place had failed to generate any semblance of “meaningful dialogue” on the occasion of Baxter’s provocative and clearly unprecedented accomplishment – his advance beyond local traditions of visual communication. This critic comments, accordingly:
What is tragic – and might be hopelessly discouraging to one with something less
than Balkind’s temperament – is that the exhibition of the Bagged Place went, for
all practical purposes, utterly unnoticed in the world of art. To my knowledge not
a single publication reviewed it, nor has a single reproduction of it been seen
except for those which accompany this article.
By expanding the material basis of sculpture to include the integral presence of a particularized (occasional) viewing site, Baxter’s work at that conceptive level of realization presented to the engaged viewer a transparent (self-reflexive) interrogation of both indescribable immanence and fleeting observation. According to this artist’s sustaining experiment in visual / non-visual abstraction (a circumstantial presence within a generalized place of production), the work of art (by his own assessment) “becomes a mood in itself … a reality instead of a verbal concept.” Gilles Deleuze locates the margins of such envisagement when he observes: “Even if the 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.”
2.
Connecting a forward-looking (non-aligned / inventive) attitude to the steadfast (conformist / emulous) tradition of the 1988 Winter Olympic Games, Iain Baxter projected into the public domain (in Calgary, Alberta) a performance that served to encapsulate the allegorical potentiality of an ephemeral anti-environment.
As the introduction to a precisely conceived (concisely articulated) interventionist scheme (intended to guarantee sufficient snow for pending Olympic events), the artist sent a form letter to those four hundred and forty individuals whose surnames, listed in the Calgary telephone directory, corresponded to one of three words: White, Winter and Snow. His invitation to this group was compelling in its unreserved spontaneity; it linked unfamiliar company with the unforeseen prospect of being asked to participate (immediately before the official opening of the athletic programme itself) in a unique (not to be repeated) incantation at Calgary’s Olympic Plaza.
In addition to a final group of more than five hundred “named” participants, Michal Janofsky, a reporter for the New York Times, became – by way of his disinterested documentary summary of a work in progress – a central participant in Baxter’s project. His enduring evidence, published shortly after the actions described, appeared in the sports section of his newspaper, as follows:
Upon arrival, each [participant] received a helium-filled balloon with the word
White, Winter or Snow on it. Then, at Baxter’s direction, they moved into three
configurations – first forming the letters of their names to make the phrase, “White
winter snow”; then into a bull’s eye, with the Snows in the middle, surrounded by
the Winters and the Whites; and finally into a jumbled group from which they
cheered: “White winter snow. White winter snow. Let it go.” With that, they
unleashed their balloons.
Becoming the embodiment of a socialized aesthetic purpose, the transformative nature of Baxter’s intervenient event was extended to an outer limit of cultural relativism through its momentary contact with a specific interest group whose fixed, unwavering preoccupations were distinctly remote from the unforeseen aims of this artist’s persistently provisional resolve.
3.
The June-July 1971 issue of artscanada contains an invaluable documentary synopsis of an important (if seldom discussed) work – Iain Baxter’s Videotape Displayed (The Centre for Communication and the Arts, Simon Fraser University, March 1971). Dating from the end of the first decade of Baxter’s development as a professional (exhibiting) artist, this transient project has been documented from the standpoint of an open-minded, empathetic beholder – Joan Lowndes – whose respectful attention confirms the social integrity of an artist’s engaged / engaging experimental praxis. Lowndes observes:
The West Coast is in ferment about video, but it is the President of the N.E.
Thing Co. Ltd. who has actually performed the radical gesture: he has
put an exhibition on videotape.
It happened at the new Simon Fraser University Gallery. Those attending the
opening were met by bare walls. Baxter and co-President-wife Elaine then
began to install the show. …
Meanwhile Brian Dyson, Director of Information for the N.E. Thing Col Ltd.,
was behind the camera, documenting the installation as process. President
Baxter, mike in hand, commented on each piece to provide a guided sound
track. As soon as the show was up and filmed it was taken down again. For
its three weeks’ run it was visible only between 12:30 and 1:30 p.m. on a TV
monitor. Uninformed people, arriving to find the gallery empty, were angry.
Their anger, Baxter said, was good because it forced them to face the issues
he had posed: how valid are openings? How valid are galleries?
In its exhibition-documentation, Videotape Displayed excoriates the pervasive, contradictory formula of intermingled liberality and profitability that continues to demarcate an academized, global provision of simultaneously entrenched kunstkammer / wunderkammer culture. In support of Baxter’s conspicuous (non-compliant) articulation of an imposingly constructive anti-aesthetic, Marshall McLuhan observes: “A work of art has no existence or function apart from its effect on human observers.”
David Bellman
May 5, 2012