 |
 |
||||||||
|
« Iain Baxter: New Spaces. » LUCY R. LIPPARD "Iain Baxter: New Spaces", Artscanada, vol. 26, no. 132-133, June 1969, p.3-7. "It is the Visual Unknown that challenges the N.E. Thing researchers. Like researchers anywhere, they seek to add to the world's store of knowledge — by exploratory research on the frontiers of basic theory, by product research for results in specific tangible forms, by production research for processes that yield precise end products. These probings of the why and how of visual things and their combinations are efforts to discover distinct properties or effects and the means of putting them into operation." (N.E. Thing Company Operations Statement, 1968) "Ecology as used today is: a science which investigates organisms in relation to their environment; a philosophy in which the world of life is interpreted in terms of natural processes; an art requiring skill and having a plan and a pattern within which many activities may be centered. . . . This involves an open mind which is willing to use sensory observations as a basis for mental explanation." (Angus M. Woodbury, Principles of General Ecology, New York-Toronto, 1954). "Nobody can commit photography alone. It is possible to have at least the illusion of reading and writing in isolation, but photography does not foster such attitudes. If there is any sense in deploring the growth of corporate and collective art forms such as the film and the press, it is surely in relation to the previously individualist technologies that these new forms corrode." (Marshall McLuhan, Un-derstanding Media, New York, 1964.) Vancouver is several cities: a big ugly port, a visually unexceptional residential community, a university town, an up-to-date supermarket suburbia, container of and contained by magnificent natural scenery. Baxter works in and out of the various identities offered by his environment. His endless ideas admit no limitation to an artist's activities. Like artists all over the world today he is replacing the usual art-making and appreciating procedures—image identification with reality through the imitative or decorative object—with a direct and expanded attack on the idea of art. In his role as President of the N.E. Thing Company, he can be as commercial as any businessman, as free as any artist. He has learned from McLuhan that "all meaning alters with acceleration. . . . Control over change would seem to consist in moving not with it but ahead of it." Baxter's obsession with "Visual Sensitivity Information Dynamics" has led him to extend the electronic "nervous system" into broader spaces, primarily landscape, or the rural, urban and suburban outdoors. Such understated, almost non-existent pieces as the rubber line through low bushes, the chain or yellow string in the forest, are light, flexible, unconcerned with gravity. They exist not as objects or volumes to be reckoned with as separate entities, but as devices for the re-definition or refocusing of the setting in which they are placed. In the marker pieces, the nails driven into the ground, or the strewn rubber sections, the explicit graphic quality is interrupted; in the ski pieces it becomes the delineation of distance and the path of action. Dennis Oppenheim says that in his outdoor pieces he is bombarding existing volumes with new information. Despite the differences between his and Baxter's approaches, this is a good basic definition of what generally happens in such work. The new information is patently less than is expected of art; it is not self-contained (though still limited by the actual length and breadth of the project); often it is not static and does not draw attention to itself as a single entity. On the other hand, many of Baxter's most beautiful pieces do not escape the object vein at all; they are isolated forms in nature rather than in a gallery space; they geometricize nature without competing with it or dominating it in any way. Such geometricization represents the vestiges of the pictorialism that painting and sculpture have been subjected to for eons, of the traditional imposition of artificial or man-made order on less visible natural order. It is a matter of degree, however. Much of the new work is very general, an extension of the all-over principle into very low-tension areas. In this sense some of these works have to do with Impressionism far more than the 19th century Picturesque with which Sidney Tillim has unfavorably aligned them (Artforum, December, 1968). Impressionism more than any other modern style dealt with pure perceptual experience and with a complete visual field rather than significant form. It had a non-hierarchical view of nature—the comprehensive broad glance or scan instead of the single focus, sharing the vagueness of natural perception. There is a good deal more to the analogy than that, and to the relationship of Impressionism to the "broken edge" syndrome of recent art, but in Baxter's case it is worth touching upon because of his long standing involvement with nature as a phenomenon rather than as formal source. Baxter is not and never has been a formalist. Unlike most of his American colleagues he comes into photography not from a minimal-serial background, and into the new landscape not from single structures that out-grew their formats or collapsed and disintegrated into their spaces, but from science into art, from a fundamental interest in the physical make-up of his surroundings, which led to a fusion of surroundings and information about them. In college he had courses in ecology, the study of organisms in relation to their environment. Ecology is sometimes called external physiology, and physiology, internal ecology. The eco-system approach, in which animal and vegetable organisms (humans too) are considered as an interacting unit, is just being explored by artists. The Pulsa group at Yale (see Arts/canada, December, 1968) is involved with a subliminal or physiological reaction to the ways in which it can rhythmically focus the energy latent in the environment. Richard Serra had an exhibition in Rome in 1966 that consisted of real animals making their own environments; Charles Ross reflects the environment in prisms and calls his work ecologies. The various earthworks artists (or geomorphologists) are also more or less concerned with ecology, though in practice they can be poles apart. Baxter's optimistic embracing of the dynamics of rapid change is directly opposed to Robert Smithson's entropy or energy drain approach to earth, history and time; in between the two are infinite differences of degree and sensibility. (Smithson is from industrial New Jersey; Baxter from the rural West. There are two schools or approaches to ecology, the first, associated with Europe, is called "static," and is attributed to Europe's restricted areas of study, the long-accomplished destruction or modification natural communities; the second, associated with America, is called "dynamic" and is attributed to our remaining vast areas where natural variation can be observed on a large scale and under a variety of circumstances. A basic difference between Smithson and Baxter is found in their reactions to space. Smithson contemplates finity; Baxter welcomes infinity; Smithson's "primal ooze" is deathlike but time defying; it traps but preserves; Baxter's art is fertile but ephemeral.) When a sheet of glass is inserted into a clean snowbank, its transparency is exploited in several different ways; in the equally sensual and visual implications of the ice-like glass slicing invisibly through the white snow, and in the top section showing over the surface making visible but somehow less sensuously direct the same experience. A double-sided mirror, slightly tilted so as to reflect nothing but the grass in which it rests, becomes a part of the lawn except for the fact that it provides a specific point in which to focus the general experience. These rectangular impositions on the landscape (like Smithson's mirror paths and his use of enlarged photographs set in the landscape they depict and then rephotographed, and like Jim Rosenquist's inset panels of sky on sky, grass on grass, grisaille grass on coloured grass) are unintentional reprisals of Magritte's original statement of the ambiguity between reality and depicted reality. Once this paradox has been taken off canvas and placed in the subject itself, however, the ramifications change. For that matter, Baxter's poured paint project and grease pieces deal with materials in or on a receptacle or surface, as do many paintings. But the point of view is no longer fixed, and change, rather than the Magrittean dreamlike state or the gestural painter's "still" of previous action, is re-instated. (At the same time, the documentary photograph reinstates the fixed viewpoint.) From a formal point of view, Baxter's elemental pieces are less interesting than those of some of his colleagues. He is less concerned with immense scale, with a work's "presence," for instance, than with rapid comment on a situation, location, or idea. His interest in the aerial view, or flat floor work, does not come out of the gradual removal of abstract sculpture from the vertical (totemic) to the horizontal (landscape) plane, but from his own preoccupation with all varieties of visual information and ways of recording it. His approach is usually fragmentary. He is a cheerful eclectic, and as such seriously offends the sensibility geared to the singlemindedness of esthetic pursuit, confounds those devoted to categories. His equally active mind and eye are unencumbered by consistency or specialization. Along with his art-as-art (the inflated landscapes etc.), he makes art-about-art (the "extensions," ranging from the extended Noland continuing stripes as ribbons and the extended Flavin that incorporates all the lights in Vancouver, to the extended Larry Weiner in which the original reads "An object tossed from one country to another"; Baxter's Canadian extension reads: ", and back again." He makes non-Art: ACTS or Aesthetically Claimed Things, which are photographs from anything—real landscape or industrial objects, pages of books, works of art, Indian mounds, supermarkets, signs, etc. The ACTS resolve the frustration artists feel in the face of an industrial landscape or even art of the past which is financially impossible to rival; the photographs are stamped ACT and an accompanying certificate declares these things have "met the stringent requirements of sensitivity information as set forth by the N.E. Thing Co." He also makes anti-Art, or Aesthetically Rejected Things (ART) which do not meet those stringent requirements. The idea of claiming non-art objects as art and relegating art objects to non-art status, is of course Duchamp's and has been expanded by Warhol; and the claim of non-portable objects from life has occurred to several artists in the past few years. (Ed Ruscha's books, like 26 Gasoline Stations and Various Small Fires and Milk, which attack the idea from an especially deadpan angle, were particularly original and influential.) Baxter, however, carries the conception further than most people would care to; I suspect the ACT department will continue forever, and be contagious, because there is something highly satisfying about keeping an alert eye open to every aspect of the environment. Everyone interested in looking has played the parlor car game in which sights and similarities to art in the environment are pointed out; when these "things" are conscientiously recorded, the experience is retained. Baxter's approach to photography, his recognition of its special importance to an isolated, reproduction-oriented art culture, and the degree of extension and intension (to use the names of two NETCo. departments) to which he has taken it, is unique. Because the photograph does reinstate the fixed viewpoint, flux is only re-admitted through multiplicity. (Everyone in the Baxter family, including the five and eight year olds, takes movies and photos.) By commenting on all art and all things, by having no one style except openness, Baxter defies several of the limitations that plague the art world and artist today. His approach defies the ownership syndrome and may encourage a reformed collector, or a patron (usually young and mobile), who does not need or even want to amass bulky precious objects that have to be stored or resold when they accumulate, but is willing to set into motion an artist's idea about his environment and thereby participate in the kind of rapid aesthetic change that makes art and life in the 60s both exciting and frustrating. The photograph satisfies the vestiges of the acquisitory urge. The anonymous collector who wants no record whatsoever of his purchase is as rare as the anonymous artist who takes no credit for his work (Baxter tried this for a while too, masquerading with a friend as "IT" and having two anonymous exhibitions in 1966). Ideas that are rapidly transmissible and photographic cross-references and information about objects or sites are more stimulating to the isolated artist than the reproductions of objects that are fundamentally un-reproducible, objects intended primarily as physical presences. These actually arrive in the provinces very late and in the meantime are reproduced with a low level of comprehensibility. Baxter has independently had a lot of the same ideas as New York artists, at the same time, without knowing theirs; the reverse is also true. Such ideas are in the air as the result of general conditions of prevailing style and thought pattern, but the provincial artist cannot get his information to others fast enough for its impact to be felt, partly due to lack of critics sophisticated enough to be published on a national scale. Consequently, the original artist in isolated areas often comes out looking derivative. If at least one art magazine were given over to visual and verbal information with a minimum of opinion and transitions, and no reviews or judgements, and that magazine were cheap and frequent, covering all areas of the continent (and, with a certain still unavoidable lag, the rest of the world), then the power grip of the art "centres" could be considerably diminished and the chances for the artist outside those centres to participate in general aesthetic decisions would be far greater. Baxter is not overly worried about his image, since it is fragmented to begin with, but he is excited about ideas and about ways of participating more closely in the idea network that forms current art thought. The corporate set-up, NETCo., (officially registered as a company) enables him to work partially outside the usual art channels. The profusion of non-formal, often corny projects that he conceives at the same time as those projects which have a real significance, repel purists in any area — formalist, conceptualist, or Dada-pop. Baxter is, however, probably the prototype of the new artist, a product of the McLubricated era but also of the vast natural landscape in which he lives. Like the archetypal artist, however, he is concerned with ways of seeing, and seeing the natural and the artificial environment, and he is concerned with communicating these ways so that others see more clearly the world about them. |