IAIN BAXTER / IAIN BAXTER&: A Relative Pluralism

Posted: October 11, 2012 | Author: David Bellman

IAIN BAXTER / IAIN BAXTER&:

A Relative Pluralism

__________

David Bellman, CAUSA

October 10, 2012

__________

 

“In unity there is the visible and the invisible. The invisible is a vibration of perpetual motion and can make itself visible to our mind through a point, a line, a volume, which are the image or the trace of infinity.”

– Georges Vontongerloo (1919)

 

“Through Zen we annihilate Time and see the Universe not split up into myriad fragments, but in its primary unity. Unless, says the Zen aesthetician, the artist’s work is imbued with his vision of the subjective, non-phenomenal aspect of life, his productions will be mere toys.”

– Arthur Waley (1923)

 

Transmitted Visual Sensitivity Information [TRANSVSI]:

Telegram – from Iain Baxter, Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, British Columbia – to Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, Halifax (September 18, 1969):

DARK VANCOUVER 230 AM PST [Pacific Standard Time] AND SAME TIME 630 AM AST [Atlantic Standard Time] HALIFAX LIGHT

 

CONTINUATIVE

TRANSVSI:

LIGHT VANCOUVER 400 PM PST AND SAME TIME 800 AM JST [Japan Standard Time] CHIBA LIGHT

 

Photo: Nitobe Memorial Garden, University of British Columbia, Vancouver. October 7, 2012. [M. Cynog Evans.]

__________

 

“Even as the Romantics began to deal with the old pastoral, agrarian world as an art form when machinery was new, so we will now begin to deal with the planet itself as a work of art.”

– Marshall McLuhan (1967)

 

“At the end of the century, there will not be much left of the expanse of a planet that is not only polluted but also shrunk, reduced to nothing by the technologies of general interactivity.”

– Paul Virilio (1997)

 

Transmitted Visual Sensitivity Information [TRANSVSI]:

Telegram – from Iain Baxter, Simon Fraser University – to Nova Scotia College of Art and Design (September 18, 1969):

LIGHT VANCOUVER 1030 AM PST AND SAME TIME 230 PM AST HALIFAX LIGHT

 

CONTINUATIVE

TRANSVSI:

LIGHT NORTH VANCOUVER 600 PM PST AND SAME TIME 900 PM EST TORONTO DARK

 

Photo: Chiba Garden, North Vancouver. October 9, 2012. [M. Cynog Evans,]

__________

 

“Art is not there to provide perceptions in direct ways. It produces deepened perception of experience. … Art is not there to be simply understood, or we would have no art.”

– Joseph Beuys (1970)

 

“Becoming is certainly not imitating, or identifying with something; neither is it regressing-progressing; neither is it corresponding, establishing corresponding relations; neither is it producing, producing a filiation or producing through filiation. Becoming is a verb with a consistency all its own; it does not reduce to, or lead back to, ‘appearing,’ ‘being.,’ ‘equalling,’ or ‘producing.’”

– Gilles Deleuze and Félis Guattari (1980)

 

Transmitted Visual Sensitivity Information [TRANSVSI]:

Telegram – from Iain Baxter, Simon Fraser University – to Nova Scotia College of Art and Design (September 19,1969):

DARK VANCOUVER 1030 PM PST AND SAME TIME 230 AM AST HALIFAX DARK

 

CONTINUATIVE

TRANSVSI:

DARK NORTH VANCOUVER 856 PM PST AND SAME TIME 1156 EST TORONTO DARK

 

Photo: IAIN BAXTER&, until the & of time, 2012. North Vancouver City Library, October 9, 2012. [M. Cynog Evans.]

__________

 

The purposeful gesture of changing his name (in 2005), from Iain Baxter to IAIN BAXTER&, expands this artist’s self-sufficient conceptual standpoint – a belief in the interconnectedness of all things. Since first publicly presenting his work (Kyoto, 1961), Baxter (BAXTER&) has unceasingly illuminated a precisely historical/contemporary function of visual communication: its capacity to sustain, momentarily, configurations of both present (presented) connectivity and pending (perpetual) motion.

__________