IAIN BAXTER&: In The Medium Of Motion

Posted: December 11, 2012 | Author: David Bellman

FRAMEWORKS FOR AN INTERVENTION

by David Bellman

CAUSA

 

December 11, 2012

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IAIN BAXTER&:

In The Medium Of Motion

 

“Deadness is the first condition of art.”

– Wyndham Lewis (1914)

 

PROSPECT [1]

ARTIC – WORD MISPELLED IN SNOW 3 MILES NORTH OF INUVIK

Iain Baxter: information, Fraser University to Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, October 3, 1969.

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“Tradition, in a word, is the sense of the total past as now.”

– Marshall McLuhan (1964)

 

PROSPECT [2]

ARTIC – WORD MISPELLED IN SNOW 3 MILES NORTH OF INUVIK

N.E. Thing Co. project, realized November 1969. (Photo: Iain Baxter.)

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“The starting point of any process of thinking is something going on, something which just as it stands is incomplete or unfulfilled. Its point, its meaning lies literally in what it is going to be, in how it is going to turn out.”

– John Dewey (1916)

 

PROSPECT [3]

IAIN BAXTER&, Information Mural (detail) with “scavenged/altered” painting, Idyllic Landscape (detail). Installation at North Vancouver Museum. (Photo: M. Cynog Evans, CAUSA Archives, 2012.)

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“People can express themselves only through imprint forms using certain materials. This is, of course, also the case of language. But if this model – it need not be large: today everything is much too large – if the imprint quality is there, it is easier to see where it came from and whether the constellation is already, shall we say, optimal, and this can be discussed unendingly. And only this is culture; everything else is not.”

– Joseph Beuys (1979)

 

PROSPECT [4]

IAIN BAXTER&, Information Mural (detail, with video monitor). Installation at North Vancouver Museum. (Photo: M. Cynog Evans, CAUSA Archives, 2012.)

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“The agitator seizes the word. The artist is seized by it.”

– Karl Kraus (1909)

 

PROSPECT [5]

IAIN BAXTER&, Information Mural (detail). Installation at North Vancouver Museum. (Photo: M. Cynog Evans, CAUSA Archives, 2012.)

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“For the time being,

the mind reaches but the word

does not.

For the time being, the

word reaches but the mind

does not.

For the time being, the

mind and word both reach.

For the time being,

neither mind nor word reach.”

– Dōgen (1240)

 

PROSPECT [6]

IAIN BAXTER&, BLUR, twigs [installation variable], 2012. (Photo: M. Cynog Evans, CAUSA Archives.)

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“Even if the [artist’s] 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.”

– Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari (1991)

 

PROJECT [7]

IAIN BAXTER&, Oral Work, 2012.

This work was first presented in an exhibition context at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago – as part of the project “Art by Telephone” (1969). It can be experienced, again, by enquiring at Artspeak, Vancouver. [Telephone: (604) 688-0051.]

Following instructions from the artist, this self-contained, word-based work has never been recorded beyond the archival record of its own continuative presence. It remains the artist’s intention that an exclusively oral tradition should sustain an institutionally intervenient presence, in perpetuity.

Access to IAIN BAXTER&’s Oral Work – in a particular phase of its development – is available at Artspeak until 4:45 pm [Pacific Standard Time], December 15, 2012.

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11.12.12.