MARSHALL McLUHAN/HARLEY PARKER + IAIN BAXTER/BAXTER&: Diction, Contradiction, and Agreement
Posted: February 8, 2013
MARSHALL McLUHAN/HARLEY PARKER +
IAIN BAXTER/BAXTER&:
Diction, Contradiction, and Agreement
David Bellman
CAUSA
08.02. 13.
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“The world in which we live is an old world, yet we have not exhausted its contents, not only in larger things but in smaller things, too. In fact, we can never reach the end of our researches as long as we limit ourselves to the fields of sense and intellect. This is the very nature of the human constitution. But, strangely enough, as soon as we quit this realm known as objectivity and turn inward and go on in this direction with resolution and persistency we finally come to a gate known as ‘the gate of all wonders.’ We enter through it and find ourselves in the field of Emptiness where we have our being firmly attached.”
– D. T. Suzuki (1958)
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“If the three-dimensional illusion of depth has proved to be a cul-de-sac of one time and one space, the two-dimensional features many spaces in multileveled time.”
– Harley Parker and Marshall McLuhan (1968)
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Harley Parker, Two Heads Merged – Third Eye. Monoprint (undated). Collection: Burnaby Art Gallery, Burnaby, British Columbia.
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“If I have a point of view about the human condition as a result of investigating the effects of media, it is simply that people are somnambulist. They seem to be happily hypnotized by their own extensions of themselves. I suppose the traditional word for this is idolatry. ‘They became what they beheld and bowed the knee to themselves.’”
– Marshall McLuhan (1971)
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“Scarcely five hundred years ago, during the Renaissance, an unmistakable reorganization of our consciousness occurred: the discovery of perspective which opened up the three-dimensionality of space. This discovery is so closely linked with the entire intellectual attitude of the modern epoch that we have felt obliged to call this age the age of perspectivity and characterize the age immediately preceding it as the ‘unperspectival’ age. These definitions, by recognizing a fundamental characteristic of these eras, lead to the further appropriate definition of the age of the dawning new consciousness as the ‘a-perspectival’ age, a definition supported by developments in the visual arts and literature, where the incorporation of time as a fourth dimension into previously spatial conceptions has formed the initial basis for manifesting the ‘new’.
– Jean Gebser (1949)
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Iain Baxter, Reflected San Francisco Beauty Spots (Pyramid Building), 1979. Photoetching with colour aquatint.
Publisher: Crown Point Press, San Francisco.
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“Every work of art has its own specific character and style, and its uniqueness can never be penetrated by a generic term.”
– Rudolph Wittkower (1965)
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In a recent CAUSA interview (2013), IAIN BAXTER& locates his work (past, present, and pending) as a perpetually regenerative force within an aperspectival field of observation and reflection. He remarks: “Five words are especially important to me: Information/Wonder/Love/Play/And.”
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08.02.13.