IAIN BAXTER&: Figure / Ground (Part V)

Posted: November 9, 2012 | Author: David Bellman

IAIN BAXTER&:

Figure / Ground (Part V)

November 9, 2012

 

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

“Then down came the lid – the day was lost at Sarajevo. World-politics stepped in, and war was started which has not ended yet; a ‘war to end war.’ But it merely ended art, it did not end war.”

– Wyndham Lewis (1927)

“Yes, we must substitute an interest in the media for the previous interest in subjects. This is the logical answer to the fact that the media have substituted themselves for the older world. Even if we should wish to recover that older world we can do it only by an intensive study of the ways in which the media have swallowed it. And no matter how many walls have fallen, the citadel of individual consciousness has not fallen nor is it likely to fall. For it is not accessible to the mass media.”

– Marshall McLuhan (1969)

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IAIN BAXTER&, BLUR (architectural installation – bronze letters), 2004. [Photo: Adam Lauder]

IAIN BAXTER&, BLUR (binary code), 2012:

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N. E. THING COMPANY LIMITED, NOTHING PROJECT, 1969.

Specifications [sent from Iain Baxter to the “Place and Process” exhibition, Edmonton Art Gallery, September 4 – 28, 1969]:

 

Nothing is impossible

Nothing is something

 

“If a fleeting thought conjures the whole,

how can I describe Reality in figures?

While empty moonlight on the water shows everything,

the mirror of No Mind reflects Nothingness.”

– Baekoon Kyunghan, Koen [Korean Zen] poet (1299 – 1375)

“Human reality is a perpetual surpassing toward a coincidence with itself which is never given.”

– Jean-Paul Sartre (1943)

“We know there is only one value for art, and even for truth; the ‘first hand,’ the authentic newness of something said, and the ‘unheard music’ with which it is said.”

– Gilles Deleuze (1964)

CAUSA project, realized in co-operation with the City of North Vancouver: Chiba Garden lantern, lit, for the first time, on November 6, 2012. [Photo: M. Cynog Evans]

IAIN BAXTER&, CONTINUATIVE TRANSVSI:

 

IAIN BAXTER&, Until the & of time, window signage, City of North Vancouver Library, 2012. [Photo: M. Cynog Evans.]

“Consider for a moment what our planet is and what it might be. At present, for most, there is toil and hunger, constant danger, more hatred than love. There could be a happy world, where co-operation was more in evidence than competition, where what is lovely in nature is not destroyed to make room for hideous machines whose sole business is to kill, and where to promote joy is more respected than to produce mountains of corpses. Do not say this is impossible: it is not. It waits only for men to desire it more than the infliction of torture. There is an artist imprisoned in each one of us. Let him loose to spread joy everywhere.”