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« Art is all Over » CHRISTOPHE DOMINO "Iain Baxter. Art is all Over", ArtPress, n°234, April 1998, p. 50-53. Noted for achieving "a degree of success rarely matched nationally and internationally among the Canadian artists in the late 1960s and early 1970s, "1 and chosen alongside the Betty Goldwyns and Michael Snows of this world as one of the figures worthy of in-depth documentation at the Art Gallery of Ontario (Toronto), lain Baxter is the author of an artistic enterprise (quite literally, since in 1969 he founded the N.E. Thing Co. with his wife Ingrid as codirector) that has rarely caught the Euro-pean eye. And yet, from its beginnings in 1966, Baxter's seminal work has been influen-tial well beyond his geographical base. The Baxters' pioneering work with N.E. Thing Co. (NETCO) was right on the button, and there was a great lightness about the way it treated such issues as the nature of artistic gesture and engagement and their rootedness in social, economic reality and communications. Such themes are central to much new work being done in France today. In Canada, they only became clearly political some time after NETCO, within the inappropriately named "scene" in Vancouver, a town where Baxter spent ten years teaching starting in 1966. Since 1978 he has worked under his own name, but today he is stilt extending the ideas expressed by NETCO and is as sharp as ever after three decades of activity. His work is characterized by a singularity of tone which has something to do with humor, in the fullest sense of the word, a very free use of different mediums, and a truly generous inventiveness linked to the artist's everyday life. This is why it is impossible to reduce Baxter's work to any given category or historic moment, even one as vague as conceptual art.2 He has defined himself as an "ideas factory." Above all, he has a rare ability to carry through his prolific ideas, both as projects and as finished pieces. His guiding references are the vitalistic spirit of pragmatism and John Dewey's idea of art as experience.3 With an unfailingly light touch, his oeuvre covers earth works, conceptualism, communication technology (fax and telex pieces, photocopying, printing, publishing), the codes of language and communication, the properties of the medium of photography (Wall and others are indebted to him for the light box),4 painting, installations, actions, activism, charts and inventories (many of them photographic), the production of objects (badges, for example), plus a number of more marginal activities such as teaching, which has long been a part of Baxter's life as an artist, catering (Eye Scream, Vancouver 1977-78) and consultancy (he was adviser to the board of the giant Labatt breweries). In short, almost anything. As said above, this enterprising spirit was summed up and coordinated in the group work done by NETCO, a company operating in the general economic sphere with the aim of generating revenue by legitimate, imaginative and profitable business activities. A statement from 1971 lists the following objectives: i To produce sensitivity information: ii To provide a consultation and evaluation service with respect to things: iii To produce, manufacture, import, export, buy, sell, and otherwise deal in things of all kinds. In practical terms, NETCO ran a restaurant and a photo lab that made cibachromes, handled the artist's personal exhibitions and participation in international shows of conceptual art, dealt with galleries, including Sonnabend in New York, sponsored a junior ice hockey team and synchronized swimming shows, and produced and promoted actions and information ("things" par excellence). Pastiching conceptualist objectification and Minimalist rigor, parodying the customs of the society of communication, NETCO undertook to redefine the objectives and methods of artistic practice, considering the subjective apprehension of any kind of information as the nodal point of art, irrespective of quality. The centrality of language in a number of propositions of the '70s and '80s, such as the People/Language project (1977), recalls the initial link with conceptual art. But Baxter adds a further element of distance via a mockingly literal or displaced use of names. Mixing the theories of McLuhan and an activisim inspired by Dada, Fluxus and the collectivist spirit of the late '60s, NETCO responded to the society of information by offering its own system for describing cultural activities. This was the Sensitivity Information system. Its categories, which can be mixed and matched, were VSI (Visual Sensitivity Information: aka visual art), SSI (Sound Sensitivity Information: music, poetry readings, singing, oratory, etc.), MSI (Moving Sensitivity Information: movies, dance, mountain climbing, track and field), ESI (Experiential Sensitivity Information: theater, performance, etc.). NETCO's eleven departments included those for Aesthetically Claimed Things (ACT) and Aesthetically Rejected Things (ART), which produced, distributed and, above all, labeled soundings and recordings of things of the world, sorting Sl-type phenomena from non-SI ones. This quasi-theoretical foundation allowed Baxter to make an ironic dig at attempts to construct a formal account of culture while producing a discourse on the real that itself constitutes a paradoxical archive which puts its seal on found situations, landscapes and even work by other artists. A plate of 16 transparencies from this series appeared on the cover of Art in America in 1969. Their incessant productivity took the Baxters' taste for photographic record well beyond series such as these. In its original exhibition form, their Portfolio of Piles (1969), which has become relatively well known since featuring in a book by Lucy Lippard, referred to a real topography, by locating on a map these formless ready-mades now paradoxically formalized by the principle of the series. In fact, all their work from the '60s to the present is informed by their sense of landscape. This lies behind such joyous projects of the "Sensitivity information research on [...] the general phenomenon of winter" as the very organic snow sculpture entitled P-line Straight (1968), or the projects for placards which have been installed on several different occasions since 1968, the 1/4 Miles Landscape, which frames 440 yards of attention to the landscape along a highway, or the appropriation and reversal of landscape logic effected by the sign You are in the middle of an N.E. Thing landscape. Or again, in One Canada Video, 100 hours of landscape seen through the windscreen of car. Today, Baxter is as insistent as ever in his literal use of words and things—of everyday objects. The spirit of N.E. Thing is alive and kicking in his continuous photographic sampling. Judging by his last show, it would seem that, alongside his very pictorial use of painting (which tends more towards decor), consumer products are still one of the key mediums for his statements about the state of the planet and its wildlife, statements that hover between portentousness and offhand-edness. Formal economy, even indigence, is still a frequent characteristic, suggesting both the kind of non-artistic quality that Lucy Lippard detected in the works of NETCO and a nonchalant radicalism that seeks no critical justifications or commitments outside the simple fact of action. Thus, in Baxter's literal and joyous system we find Techno Compost, a graveyard of electronic equipment (old computers, radios, domestic appliances) laid out in the avenues of a shopping mall in the name of art. A somewhat nostalgic, subtly deathly experience of sculpture which, as Baxter tells us, is all about watching a sculpture come together piece by piece, in the pathetic, amused expectation of seeing all these things begin to decay. Translation, C. Penwarden 1 Derek Knight, in N.E. Thing Co., the Ubiquitous Concept (Oakville Galleries, 1995). 2 NETCO gets only a passing mention in the catalogue of L'Art conceptuel, une perspective (Paris: ARC, 1989) but gets an alphabetical entry in Reconsidering the Object of Art (Los Angeles, 1995). 3 See Dewey's influential Art as Experience (1933). 4 Derek Knight gives a clear account of the various readings of the exchanges and influences on the Canadian art scene of the '60s. |