IAIN BAXTER&: Non-Narrative Simultaneities

Posted: December 20, 2012 | Author: David Bellman

Frameworks for an

Intervention

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IAIN BAXTER&: Non-Narrative
Simultaneities

 

by David Bellman

CAUSA

December 20, 2012

 

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“A narrative makes anything a ghost of itself, placing

it beyond the horizon of here and now.”

− José Ortega y Gasset (1914)

 

“All action revolves around death, and reality

is entirely founded on it.”

− Wyndham Lewis (1914)

 

“The great square has no outside, the great circle

has no inside.”

− Zen Buddhist maxim

 

CONJUNCTION [1]

“Listen.

This statement will leave,

is leaving, has left your

radio set at a forty-five degree

angle − at approximately

1,100 feet per second.

Did you see that?”

[Iain Baxter / N.E. Thing Company,

“Sensitivity Information Announcement.”

Presented as twelve thirty-second spots on

radio station CBX (AM) − Canadian

Broadcasting Corporation, Edmonton −

from January 15 to February 10, 1971.]

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“Whereas the modern artist has used his factive

or creative intelligence to manipulate matter and

experience into a pattern which could arrest the mind

in the presence of a particular aspect of existence,

the modern scientist has sought to merge the functions

of the primitive and civilized magicians. He has

developed formulas for the control of the material

and then applied these to the control of the human

mind and society with his patterned information.

That is the key to the nature of the new “mass media.”

− Marshall McLuhan (1969)

 

“Art is not there to provide perceptions in

direct ways. It produces deepened perception

of experience. More must happen than simply

logically understandable things. Art is not

there to be simply understood, or we would

have no art.”

– Joseph Beuys (1970)

 

CONJUNCTION [2]

IAIN BAXTER&, Information Mural / Information Room (Digital Conversion Code), 2012. [Installation view – (detail) with CAUSA documentary film, North Vancouver Museum.]

point to point, will be toward clarity; toward the

elimination of all obstacles between the idea and the

observer. As examples of such obstacles, I give (among

others) memory, history, or geometry, which are swamps

of generalization from which one might pull out parodies

of ideas (which are ghosts) but never an idea in itself.

To achieve this clarity in itself is, inevitably, to be

understood.”

– Mark Rothko (1949)

 

“Electric speeds create centers everywhere. Margins

cease to exist on this planet.”

– Marshall McLuhan (1969)

 

CONSTRUCTION [3]

IAIN BAXTER&, A World of Information, stencilled canvas (digital code overlaying mass-produced World Map), 2011. [Installation view, North Vancouver Museum, 2012.]

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“The eye is the first circle, the horizon which it forms

is second; and throughout nature this primary figure is
repeated without end. It is the highest emblem in the

cipher of the world. … We are all our lifetime reading

the copious sense of this first of forms.”

– Ralph Waldo Emerson (1841)

 

“Nothing stands alone; each is only a part. A picture

must be a portrayal of relationships.”

– Emily Carr (1933)

 

IAIN BAXTER&, Mirror Image, Loutet Urban Farm, North Vancouver. [Detail of installation: fourteen mirrors (in two rows), 2012.] Photo: M. Cynog Evans.

CONJUNCTION [4]

IAIN BAXTER&, Mirror Image, Loutet Urban Farm, North Vancouver.

[Detail of installation: fourteen mirrors (in two rows), 2012.] Photo: M. Cynog Evans.

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“The question of urban society is to be taken seriously

because we should not take it for granted that we shall

live in a true urban environment in the sense we take it

now. The domestic environment appears to be more

readily the basic unit or individual cell, for it acts as

the direct connection between the individual and urban

environment. It is into this more or less closed individual

environment that the individual is able to introduce

‘News of the World,’ i.e., messages from the immediate

socio-cultural world (and from remote historical worlds)

which cross (independently) time and space, influencing

his ways of thinking, judging and decisions, only to the

extent that he wants to pay attention to them.”

– Abraham Moles (1971)

 

“In the end, we each live our own landscape inside the

Infoscape – Landscape as Lifescape.”

– IAIN BAXTER& (1990)

 

CONJUNCTION [5]

IAIN BAXTER&, Sketch for Point of View Room, 2011.

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20.12.12.

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