IAIN BAXTER/BAXTER&: UNLIMITEDNESS, ENLARGED
Posted: February 5, 2013
IAIN BAXTER/BAXTER&:
UNLIMITEDNESS, ENLARGED
David Bellman
CAUSA
February 5, 2012
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Assemblage
The following documents have been assembled as a curatorial connection to both the IAIN BAXTER& electronic catalogue raisonné and the IAIN BAXTER/BAXTER& bibliography (a compilation continually synchronized by Adam Lauder and Isabelle Hermann).
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“Value judgments create smog in our culture and distract from process. My personal bias is actively pro-print and all of its effects.”
– Marshall McLuhan (1970)
N.E. Thing Co. Ltd: announcement in the Citizen (North Vancouver), “Classified Advertisements” section, March 13, 1970. (Photo: M. Cynog Evans, CAUSA Archives.)
“The N.E. Thing Page,” Vancouver Magazine, July 1975.
“If the figurative, or let’s say the imaginal, meaning in the earliest words was really ‘given’, and was not something added to them by an individual speaker (which is what happens when a metaphor is invented), then there must have been going on, not only a different kind of thinking but a different kind of perceiving. The picture quality, the given meanings must have been present not only in the perceiver but also in what he perceived; it must have been present in fact in world about him. There must have been a kind of participation between perceiver and perceived, between man and nature. That is something we no longer experience, only get an occasional glimpse of its quality through the creative imagination of a modern painter or poet.
If you can grant this you see language as originating in that participation, so that in the earliest stages of all it would have to be described as nature speaking through man, rather than man speaking about nature; and you see the subsequent development of language as evincing the gradual diminution of that participation as time went on.”
– Owen Barfield (1965)
Iain Baxter, Color/Language Participatory Etching, 1979.
Color soft ground etching.
Publisher: Crown Point Press, San Francisco.
Printer: Nancy Anello.
“The deepest irony allows for more than one possibility; the situation remains open to doubt and scrutiny.”
– Wylie Sypher (1968)
Iain Baxter, “Color/Language Studies:1973-82,” in Art Journal (College Art Association, New York), Summer 1982. (Photo: M. Cynog Evans, CAUSA Archives.)
Iain Baxter, “Color/Language Studies: 1973-82,” in Art Journal (College Art Association, New York), Summer 1982. (Photo: M. Cynog Evans, CAUSA Archives.)
The artist’s title for his Art Journal contribution refers to an exhibition presented at York University, Toronto (1973): N.E. Thing Co. Ltd.: Project Department (VSI/MSI/SSI/ESI)=SI. Although these rarely published terms of reference are not immediately self-evident, they can function, presently, as engaging/differentiating definitions.
Glossary
Iain Baxter/N.E. Thing Co. Ltd.: information published by the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, Halifax (1969), as part of its continuing studies in “Art Now.”
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05.02.13.