IAIN BAXTER&: A Deinstallation And Its Documents

Posted: January 28, 2013 | Author: David Bellman

 

IAIN BAXTER&: A Deinstallation And Its Documents

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“In spite of the oft asserted impersonality of culture, a humble truth remains that vast reaches of culture, far from being “carried” by a community or group … are discoverable only as the peculiar property of certain individuals, who cannot but give these cultural goods the impress of their own personality.”

– Edward Sapir (1934)

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IAIN BAXTER&, “Information Mural [Digital Conversion Code]”, stencilled paint (detail) – North VancouverMuseum, 2012. (Photo: M. Cynog Evans, CAUSA Archives.)

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“The special modern form of fatality is the total programming attempted in our technological society.”

– Wylie Sypher (1968)

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IAIN BAXTER&, “Information Mural” (detail), 2012. View of deinstallation in progress (printed matter withdrawn), 23 January 2013. (Photo: M. Cynog Evans, CAUSA Archives.)

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“Today any form of the concrete world, of human life, any transformation of the technical and natural environment is a possibility and the locus of this possibility is historical. Today we have the capacity to turn the world into hell, and we are well on our way to doing so. We also have the capacity to turn it into the opposite of hell. This would mean the end of utopia, that is, the refutation of those ideas and theories that use the concept of utopia to denounce certain socio-historical possibilities. It can also be understood as the “end of history” in the very precise sense that the new possibilities for a human society and its environment can no longer be thought of as a continuation of the old, nor even as existing in the same historical continuum with them.”

– Herbert Marcuse (1967)

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IAIN BAXTER&, “Information Mural” (detail), 2012. View of deinstallation in progress, 23 January, 2013. (Photo: M. Cynog Evans, CAUSA Archives.)

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“In most ordinary activities we rely heavily on habit and system, ours and other people’s, and properly so. The world would come apart without those braces. But the experience of art is in part defined by the fact that it asks to be an exception to this practice. Ideally, as the human embryo recapitulates all the stages of evolution before becoming human, each encounter with a work of art can recapitulate the stages of wonder, exploration, and discovery by which we have come to value that realm.”

– Roger Shattuck (1984)

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IAIN BAXTER&, “Information Mural” (detail), 2012. View of deinstallation in progress, 23 January 2013. (Photo: M. Cynog Evans.)

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View video (exhibited, North Vancouver Museum, 2012):

http://vimeo.com/m/53916840

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28.01.13.

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