IAIN BAXTER &: MAGNITUDE + DIRECTION

Posted: November 20, 2012 | Author: David Bellman

IAIN BAXTER &:

MAGNITUDE + DIRECTION

 

November 20, 2012

“The new world will not need little pictures. If it needs a mirror, it has the photograph and the cinema. In the new world the creator called ‘artist’ will create the world itself, and not describe it.”

– El Lissitzky (1922)

 

“Modern Art always projects itself into a twilight zone where no values are fixed. It is always born in anxiety, at least since Cézanne.”

– Leo Steinberg (1962)

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• BELOW •

 

[A.Y. Jackson, Radium Mine, 1938, oil on canvas, 71.1 x 91.4 cm. Photo: heffel.com]

 

On May 16, 1930, a vein containing silver and pitchblende [a primary source of uranium] was discovered by French-Canadian prospector Gilbert Labine (a friend of the artist A. Y. Jackson). His discovery led to the development of his company, Eldorado Mine, and its related town-site, Port Radium (the subject of this painting). Commencing operations in 1933, this mine was the only source of radium outside the Belgian Congo.

 

“A tiny, ugly collection of frame bunk-houses and mills squats forlornly on the shore of remote Great Bear Lake, in Canada’s Northwest Territories. It is 1,400 miles north of the nearest railhead (at Waterways, Alberta), and 26 miles south of the Arctic Circle, in a part of the continent bleak with long, cold winter nights. The village has no official name, but it is sometimes called Radium City. Last week it suddenly found itself part of an all but incredible world drama, for under its fir-bearded slopes lies the stuff of which atomic bombs are made.”

– TIME (August 20, 1945)

 

[On August 6, 1945, an American B-29 bomber, the Enola Gay, had dropped an atomic bomb on the city of Hiroshima, Japan.]

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“There is gaiety sometimes in Jackson, but it is rationed. His vision is as austere as his subject-matter, which is precisely the hard puritanic land in which he always has lived: with no frills, with all its dismal solitary grandeur and bleak beauty, its bad side deliberately selected rather than its chilly relentings.”

– Wyndham Lewis (1946)

 

“In the organization of total war it is logical that artists should be a part of it, whether to provide inspiration, information or comment ….”

– A. Y. Jackson (1946)

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• ABOVE •

 

[Emily Carr, Above the Trees, circa 1939, oil on paper, 91.2 x 61.0 cm, Collection of the Vancouver Art Gallery, Emily Carr Trust. Photo: Trevor Mills, Vancouver Art Gallery]

 

“We want exhilaration. We want incentive to push further on, we want to make thoughts and longings that will set us wondering, that will make us desirous to explore higher and deeper and wider, to see more, to understand more.”

– Emily Carr (1936)

 

“When she left the native theme behind around 1930, she was already on a path that was taking her into nature in a kind of identification, not as an onlooker but a participant in its ongoing energy. … In the late paintings the energy finally comes to belong not to a particular place but to her mind, an imaginative construct she applied to all nature.”

– Doris Shadbolt (2002)

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“Before we ask WHAT CAN WE DO? we have to first consider the question HOW MUST WE THINK?”

– Joseph Beuys (1982)

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• TOWARDS •

 

IAIN BAXTER&, ARCTIC-VSI, 2012

 

[Iain Baxter (N. E. Thing Company Projects Department) first presented this “Visual Sensitivity Information” via telex transmission – from Simon Fraser University (Library) to Nova Scotia College of Art and Design – on October 3, 1969.]

 

“We perceive in the social domain as well as in the physical that what is correct at one level of importance becomes incorrect at another. In probing one level of analysis, it becomes apparent that the global facts observed at a different level dissolve and do not correspond to reality.”

– Jacques Ellul (1962)

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20.11.12.

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