IAIN BAXTER&: Figure / Ground (Part IV)

Posted: November 6, 2012 | Author: David Bellman

FRAMEWORKS for an

INTERVENTION

by David Bellman, CAUSA

__________

 

IAIN BAXTER&:

Figure / Ground (Part IV)

November 6, 2012

 

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

 

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

__________

“To transform ourselves into probes and to abandon the traditional visual obsession with fixed point of view are the necessary prelude to extending not just our nerves but the symmetrical ratios of consciousness into the environment.”

– 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 Vancouver City Museum, 2012. [Photo: M. Cynog Evans.]

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.

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.]

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 14th 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).

__________

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

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

__________

“Experience is less an aim of art than the subject of art; art is not experience, but something added to experience.”

– Kenneth Burke (1931)

__________

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

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

__________

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

– Hakuin (1686 – 1768)

__________