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« Iain Baxter » MARIE-JOSÉE JEAN « Iain Baxter & », Image & Imagination. Le Mois de la Photo à Montréal, Montreal, McGill Press, 2005, p. 210-218. This exhibition offers a rereading of the practice of Iain Baxter& since the realization of his early Bagged Place in 1965 to his most recent works, dwelling on the aesthetic program of the N.E. Thing Co., a conceptual enterprise founded by Baxter in 1966, officially incorporated in 1969, and co-chaired with Ingrid Baxter from 1970 until 1978. Conceived around the corporate persona and collaborative work of Iain Baxter, the exhibition presents and documents audacious works and ideas that, over forty years of uninterrupted activity, have enabled him to diversify his involvement in the fields of art, environment, technology, commerce (N.E. Thing Co. once operated a restaurant and photo lab in Vancouver, 1974-1978), and marketing (Baxter has been a creative consultant to the President of the Labatt Brewery in Toronto, 1983-1984). The exhibition elaborates on several recurring themes in his practice: the role of the artist and the function of art, the effects of globalization, the consumer society, ways of inhabiting and treating the environment. An information-era artist strongly influenced by the theories of Marshall McLuhan, Baxter pays sustained attention to the image and to technological transformations capable of creating new perceptual habits. This text addresses this issue by examining photographic and conceptual works produced by N.E. Thing Co. which deal with non-visible zones of reality - zones belonging to the realm of imaginative activity. Imagining Since the onset of modern rationalism, imagination has been conceived of as the ability to represent images mentally. This conception assumes that imagination is an essentially visual, reproductive ability, a mimetic double of the visual object. It also suggests a dependence of thought on images, placing excessive importance on sight as an organ of comprehension. Analogously, as Thomas Crow points out, the same mistake is found in the discipline of art history, whose approach since the Renaissance has essentially been determined by a visual relationship to the world. This situation, he adds, is accentuated by the increasingly widespread use of the term “visual culture,” in place of “art history,” as a putatively more inclusive term (encompassing cinematography and advertising, for example). This approach has the advantage of fostering an interdisciplinary openness essential to the study of art, but it nonetheless neglects an important component of the aesthetic experience developed by certain artistic strategies of the 1970s, conceptual art among them, in reaction to the modernist obsession with pure visual experience; for the conceptualist project implies a distancing from the expression of essentially visual realities, as well as a setting aside of the objectizing lines that typify them. Such is the implicit assertion of the principal object of N.E. Thing Co., which is to "produce sensitivity information," whether visual (VSI), sound (SSI), mobile (MSI), or experiential (ESI). Developed by Iain Baxter, the aesthetic program of N.E. Thing Co. recognized as "sensitivity information" not only sensory realities but also judgments, facts, ideas, subjectivity, and the environment. The artist, according to this program, is considered to be a producer of sensitivity information and is responsible for perceiving, organizing, interpreting, and disseminating it. Language is regarded as a privileged mode of expression because it gives access to forms of sensitivity experience that go beyond a mere visual relationship with things. The Idea of a Photograph (1970) is exemplary of this approach. Consisting of an assemblage of Polaroids, the work self-referentially presents four sealed Polaroid prints that are evidently still being developed. Each has a description of what one supposes to be its content (photograph, landscape photograph, nude). The last inscription reveals the mechanism involved in the production of the preceding images: "An Idea of a Photograph." This series of photographs is less concerned with describing the image development process than with making its concept operative at the level of the imagination. The photographs saturate the spectator’s gaze with their presence, form, and repetition, but, by not showing the announced images, they give access to an absence that cleverly projects the mind towards an imaginary space. The textual representation forcefully expresses this movement of the imagination, which, by opening a breach between perception and memory, allows the processes of conceptualization to operate. In the same spirit, 1968 saw the N.E. Thing Co. acting on various Canadian and American landscapes by installing road signs on ordinary highways. The photographic sequence reconstituting each route informs us that we are passing through a Quarter Mile N.E. Thing Co. Landscape. The images, although fixed, ingeniously mimic the cinematographic ellipse, which, by linking spaces and times, suggests the temporality of the trip. A map placed after the sequence of images indicates place, while a sketch traces the path travelled. The N.E. Thing Co. plays with contradictions that command our attention; just as the descriptivity of the text produces an experience of space, the immobility of the image causes the spectator to travel, and imagination causes her or him to have a spatio-temporal experience. For N.E. Thing Co., images cannot be solely a matter of static experience, much less visual perception. As Christophe Domino rightly noted, these works are developed by "going beyond the scopic-static imaginary," which represents a means of investing other sensitivity spaces. Several N.E. Thing Co. works thus suggest that the imagination is also an instrument of thought that is particularly effective in conceptualizing an opinion, an experience, or an image. The aesthetic experiences that it submits to the spectator, particularly those making use of text, show that the imagination activates a set of cognitive processes, not just the imaging activity. In this regard, the definition of the verb "to imagine" undoubtedly does better in capturing the diversity of cognitive activities involved in imagination; the list of meanings includes supposing, fantasizing, seeing, conceiving, hypothesizing, thinking, envisaging, believing, developing, and elaborating. This is the eloquent point made by another photographic series titled Inactive Verbs produced by the N.E. Thing Co. in 1969. Seven photographs show a personengaged in various cognitive activities, such as thought, reasoning, emotion, planning, sensation, and hesitation. Yet the images are all identical, for they capture the subject in an introspective activity that can only be differentiated to the spectator by the caption. Photographic documentation, judiciously used by N.E. Thing Co., thus serves to indicate non-visible zones of reality, not by reproducing the fictions abounding in our mental habitat - a pursuit at which the Surrealists were so adept - but by making us sensitive to the numerous mechanisms involved in the productions of thoughts and ideas. |