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« N.E. Thing Co. The Ubiquitous Concept »


DEREK KNIGHT


N.E. Thing Co.: The Ubiquitous Concept, Oakville: Oakville Galleries, 1995, p.5-29, 49-51.


N.E. Thing Co. is anything1
Founded in 1966 by Iain and Ingrid Baxter, the Vancouver-based N.E. Thing Co. (NETCO) enjoyed a degree of success rarely matched nationally and internationally among Canadian artists in the late 1960s and early 1970s. By most standards it was a stellar rise to fame underscored by innovations of the kind that helped seal their recognition. Noteworthy among the early works is the wrapped plastic environment of Bagged Place, installed at the U.B.C. Fine Arts Gallery in 1966; A Portfolio of Piles, a photo project based on the concept of piles located at fifty-nine different sites in 1968; and, perhaps their most ambitious project, an unprecedented installation at the National Gallery of Canada in 1969, which transformed the ground floor into a corporate environment. Concerning their later work, A Painting to Match the Couch, 1974-75, capitalizes on Bagged Place by critiquing the commodity fetishism upon which our lives are based; the photographs which constitute the Restaurant Suite series of 1977 have a biting satire demonstrating a refreshing lack of compromise even towards the end of their collaboration. They viewed the art world as a parallel consumer culture — the incorporation of N.E. Thing Co. under the Companies Act in early 1969 is significant for the direction this would encourage in their business lives. Seeming to accommodate both their conceptual and commercial interests, it culminated in 1977-78 with the opening of Eye Scream Restaurant on West Fourth Avenue in Vancouver. By the time they were honoured with a retrospective exhibition focusing on 1965-70 at the Art Gallery of Ontario in 1982, N.E. Thing Co. had disbanded.

Characteristically Iain and Ingrid Baxter's activities remained interdisciplinary in spirit: they made photographs, staged site-specific performance and multimedia projects and established commercial ventures in the name of N.E. Thing Co. Although it is difficult to identify the one connecting thread or single common denominator, their conceptual approach, which blurred the lines between aesthetics and business acumen, cut a broad swath across the face of convention. Influenced by Marshall McLuhan's ideas on media they offered a pragmatic answer to redefining the role of the artist in the 1960s; most assuredly, it was the social, artistic and cultural milieu of Vancouver that bore significantly on the work and conceptual orientation of N.E. Thing Co. However, within the context of a burgeoning vanguard which developed from Vancouver's increased autonomy in the 1960s and 1970s, N.E. Thing Co. functioned as a catalyst for more than just their own interests. Their concern, for example, with the environment and their interest in ecology contrasts with the urban character of their work in the 1960s. Equally, their concern in the 1970s for broadening art's appeal through popular or mass-marketing techniques finds affinity with both public relations and advertising.

Consequently the current exhibition N.E. Thing Co.: The Ubiquitous Concept revisits the period 1966-1978 with a focus on recapturing both the vitality and originality of N.E. Thing Co2. It will also emphasize one of the more successful collaborative enterprises in recent Canadian art history as well as revisit an influential forerunner to the present generation of Vancouver artists. However, some reassessment of this collaborative process between Iain and Ingrid Baxter is necessary to achieve a greater understanding of what Ingrid's role might have been, since it is not well understood outside the perfunctory label of Co-President. Questions about her function and how we should measure her contribution remain unanswered.

Moreover, Iain and Ingrid Baxter, who were joint presidents of N.E. Thing Co., were able to demonstrate both to their contemporaries and younger associates — among whom we must include Jeff Wall, Ian Wallace, Ken Lum, Roy Arden and Rodney Graham — the currency of both cooperative enterprise and the impact of media on our lives. N.E. Thing Co. is pivotal to the discourse on the development of photoconceptualism in Vancouver during the 1970s. For example, their contribution to photoconceptual art in Vancouver, which achieved its primacy in the late 1970s and early to mid 1980s, is implicit in N.E. Thing Co.'s early and often ubiquitous use of photography. However, this relationship is neither well understood nor has it been fully explored within the broader context of the demonstrable affinity which other Vancouver artists developed for mixed media or photo-based work. It is the author's intention broadly to survey the common attributes, thematic parallels and shifting ideologies which both characterize the differences and the similarities between N.E. Thing Co. and the photoconceptual school.

Disbanded when Iain and Ingrid Baxter went their separate ways in early 1978, it is debatable whether N.E. Thing Co. has received its measure of critical recognition in Canada. Believing in a strategy that the artist could function under the guise of the corporate model, Iain and Ingrid Baxter undertook to understand how the codes or symbols of the corporate world could be appropriated to serve both artistic and commercial ends. Initially, the founding of N.E. Thing Co. in 1966 signalled an intent to take their activities beyond the narrowly defined tenets of modernist aesthetics, which hierarchically were born of the New York school and subsumed by artists in Toronto and elsewhere. N.E. Thing Co., a concept which in the mid 1960s advanced the idea of collaboration, grew out of a brief association that produced two shows in quick succession under the anonymous name of IT in 1966: one at the Albert White Gallery in Toronto and the other at the Rolf Nelson Gallery in Los Angeles. This small collaboration comprised Iain and Ingrid Baxter and John Friel, a fellow student whom Iain had met at Washington State University in Pullman. Quick and decisive steps would then follow, first under the guise of N.E. Baxter Thing Co., then by the end of 1966 in the more definitive form of N.E. Thing Co., with exhibitions at the Victoria Art Gallery in Victoria, the University of Western Ontario in London, Ontario, Norman McKenzie Gallery in Regina, and York University in North York.

Although the degree to which either of the two principals, Iain and Ingrid Baxter, were individually responsible for the success of N.E. Thing Co. is today the focus of some speculation3, questions of authorship cannot diminish their sometimes spectacular results. Since much of their work originated through the agency of N.E. Thing Co., the collaborative nature of their projects — the preference for photographic, printed, or appropriated images and electronically relayed data — often overshadows the individual stamp of signature. It is a complex problem since the practice of attributing work to the one and not to the other has often confused the issue, leaving the impression that it was Iain Baxter who dominated most aspects of their collective enterprise4. While Iain is a gregarious personality who exudes great personal charm, Ingrid is his match. He is still given to paraphrasing Marshall McLuhan whom he acknowledges as the primary intellectual influence in his life; his thinking, which travels elliptically around stellar points of interest — invariably with a popular cultural twist — is consistent with the mind of a lateral thinker. The topic of Zen still animates Iain these many years after his 1961 scholarship, which enabled both him and Ingrid to spend a formative year studying in Kyoto, Japan. The experience obviously imprinted on both of them, since Ingrid's reminiscences speak of the unique cultural and philosophical differences between North America and the Orient; she is still possessed by a strong admiration for their non-judgemental acceptance of difference. Both Iain and Ingrid are equally concerned with how history will measure up and interpret N.E. Thing Co. For reasons which partly reflect each of their individual stakes in this history, they have spoken about the need to clarify their per-sonal recollections. Their contribution to Canadian art history is assured, but with the passage of time interpretations change, the status quo evolves and new questions arise. Although the essential document remains unchanged in the case of the artwork, it is the new combinations of ideas and juxtapositions which enable either a fresh critical perspective to evolve or renewed academic commitment to begin.

For Iain, whose greatest concern is that he be duly recognized among his peers, it is the originality and persistence of his vision that ensures his place. The more problematic question arises when looking to compare Iain and Ingrid Baxter with Jeff Wall, Ian Wallace and the younger artists who today constitute the so-called Vancouver school, or photoconceptual movement. They include Ken Lum, Roy Arden and Rodney Graham among others. What role did N.E. Thing Co. have in shaping the popular if not the intellectual ground, or what traits do Wall, Wallace, and their younger associates share in common with N.E. Thing Co.? For Ingrid the lingering concern is the perception that she played a secondary role in company matters. Only thinking to ask this question, she contends, is to fall into that vexatious trap of stereotyping women; she must avoid the risk of being relegated by history to a role more inferior than the one in fact she inhabited5. She cites appropriately in her defence the example of the British pair Gilbert and George, noting that people pay little if any attention to the division of labour between them. Why? "Because they are men," she states emphatically. In fact, she defends Iain profoundly on his openness since it was always his intention to include, rather than exclude, her. He involved her from the beginning in discussions about his work even as a student enrolled in an M.F.A. programme at Washington State University at Pullman, from which he graduated in 1964. It was a short period before Ingrid could contribute in any substantial way to N.E. Thing Co's programme, which complemented Iain's teaching activities in the Centre for Communications and the Arts at Simon Fraser University, a programme he established between 1966 and 1971. It was a formative period, a time when N.E. Thing Co. was to formulate its ubiquitous concept of art and life.

* * *

Was it the fact that they were able to define their shared interests within the framework of N.E. Thing Co. that makes their collaboration so unique? Probably so, since theirs was one of the more productive associations in post-war Canadian and International art — which anticipated among others Image Bank, Western Front and the notable Toronto-based group, General Idea. It is no coincidence that General Idea was drawn to Vancouver sometime in 1968 when they initiated a close working relationship with Michael Morris and Vincent Trasov of Image Bank, another west coast collective of consequence6. Almost twenty-five years later AA Bronson introduced the catalogue to Media Works with the acknowledgement that N.E. Thing Co.'s history comprises “one of the great creative sagas of this country.”7 This multimedia presentation of company memorabilia, consisting principally of non-art media such as buttons, telexes, letterhead, invitations, chinaware, printed matter and company artifacts, personified N.E. Thing Co.'s spirit. Bronson alludes to Iain's personality and the impact of his ideas, specifically praising the U.B.C. Fine Arts Gallery project A Portfolio of Piles from 1968. Bronson also instinctively brings to light the importance we attach to the artist's “image”, whether fabricated in the media or decoyed under the guise of a public persona or performance ethos. What remains engaging about Iain and Ingrid Baxter is that in their roles as Company Presidents they were frequently the subject of the camera's scrutiny. Perhaps it is because they were able to define their roles symbolically that they could eschew the conventional image of Company President, preferring instead to live both within, and - depending on circumstances - outside the myth. They produced several photographic projects on the subject of the company presidency which, at the most extreme, show theirs to be a satirical image, without compromise pulling faces at the camera, idling the time away, blowing bubbles, lost in thought, prone on a bed of lettuce, or lost under a pile of bodies topped with whipped cream and cherries.

Typical of this early phase are their facial studies from 1969, which set out to erode the assumptions we might harbour about the corporate image - what are we to make of Iain blowing bubbles in President of a Company Blowing Bubbles, 1969, and Ingrid's gallery of faces in President of a Company Face Screwing, 1969, or A President of a Company in Ways of Viewing, 1969?8 Obviously these works and those which constitute the later series called the Restaurant Suite, 1977, which show the Baxters with their business partners and employees in various parodic poses, are a transgression of what we may hold to be the norm, perhaps even its subversion9. Satirically, one is left to wonder whether the job of Company President is all that it is made out to be; could this be a bucolic plot, or even worse, the trifling of a disaffected employee? Somehow these images, you say, have escaped their grip, that they are the result of the privately confected or deluded moments of one of the company's minions in the basement of the department of obsessive behaviour. And yet these images have the company seal of approval stamped on the corner, which of course affirms their authenticity. We have stumbled here upon an elaborate game, one which Linda Hutcheon has described at length in her book A Theory of Parody. “Parody,” she writes, “is one of the major forms of self-reflexivity; it is a form of inter-art discourse10.” It would seem that this practice is in keeping with the questioning of the monolithic forms in society: N.E. Thing Co.'s parody is in the best of avant-garde traditions on which to cite the Futurists, Dadaists and Surrealists. As a practice it allows for a mask behind which the artist may shield while provoking questions about the inherent fallacies within society's established democratic or liberal tradi-tions. As a result art is open to redefinition by its practitioners and to a constant process of re-evaluation by those who mediate both its critical reception and its public consumption; it is a game, in other words, with high stakes for those directly involved, but for others it is a recreation or spectator sport. “In games we devise means of non-specialized participation in the larger drama of our time,” writes Marshall McLuhan, whose insights on this particular aspect of human behaviour helped Iain Baxter foster his own understanding of the role games might play in his teaching, or indeed in generating audience response to N.E. Thing Co11. McLuhan also emphasized the protean function of art, likening its powerful cultural influence to the pervasiveness of today's communications media: “...[it] has the power to impose its own assumptions by setting the human community into new relationships and postures.”12

In a relatively short period between 1966 and 1969 N.E. Thing Co. achieved the notoriety and critical interest which many artists of their generation sought, but rarely received. How should we account for their quick and rapid success? Two factors: their high rate of production and the visibility which resulted from their inherent talent to promote and disseminate their ideas. Recently David Silcox has written, “Baxter's centrality in all of this...hinged on his constant preoccupation with two things; what art was and how it affected society.”13 Iain Baxter was particularly taken by the kinds of paradigm shifts at the level of society which McLuhan had predicted in the area of communications. The idea, for example, that media could bring about new perceptual habits was as applicable to the visual arts in Baxter's mind as it was to technology or science14. Bronson has suggested insightfully, “If there is a great Canadian anything, it is the prototypically Canadian infrastructure, carried to a fine obsession, an encyclopaedic approach to media, communications and business deftly cross-pollinated with everyday life.”15 In the case of N.E. Thing Co. the instruments of corporate legitimacy were appropriated in the form of letterhead, business cards, company logo and the telex and telecopier machines - these then, were the practical tools for operating within the competitive worlds of both art and business. This obsession, for it surely was that, for networking from a distance was imposed upon the Baxters by their geographical remove from the cultural centres. But, in reality, no matter where they found themselves, the ciphering of information and the currency in the portability of ideas it engendered were the embodiment of the Information Age.

Vancouver, however, was a city with a distinctive identity and its own particular creative stream to draw from. “The artistic fecundity of Vancouver at that time seemed as limitless as the sea that surrounded it,” writes David Silcox.16 As Canada's third largest city, with two universities, community colleges and an art school, several public and emerging private galleries and long-founded cultural traditions, it had been in the practice of engendering its own intellectual and cultural life since the earlier part of the century. If in the 1950s and 1960s it reflected the broader social and economic changes in North American culture, it was able to develop and harness the kind of natural resources from which it has derived much of its present-day mythological status. With the life of the city so dramatically oriented towards its natural setting and a geography so richly endowed in natural resources, one is left with the impression that its inhabitants could not help but be marked by the forces of nature. Certainly, among artists of this century, it has been the culture/nature dialectic which has proven central to any hypothesis involving the development of a west coast iconography, from Emily Carr onwards.17

One is also left with the impression from those who have chronicled these early years that the city's cultural activities were sustained by such key intellectual events as the annual Festival of the Contemporary Arts, which was initiated for the first time in 1961. Its objective was to introduce Vancouver to the work of important contemporary artists, musicians, writers and performers. For example, in 1965 Iain Baxter helped organize a festival at U.B.C. with Arthur Erickson, Helen Goodwin, Takao Tanabe and Abraham Rogatnik on the ideas of Marshall McLuhan under the title “The Medium is the Message.” As influential as these occasions conceivably must have been, the impetus for change rested with those who could remain directly involved - in other words, the artists and art professionals who lived and worked in Vancouver. Amongst curators, for example, Doris Shadbolt's term as director of the Vancouver Art Gallery was instrumental in helping revitalize the gallery's role within the community by reinvigorating its programming. Tony Emery, who followed as director, similarly was a catalyst for what some criticized as his radical efforts to incorporate Vancouver's younger artists into the life of the gallery's daily operation. Among his important initiatives was his overture to the interdisciplinary group Intermedia, making available the gallery's facilities for their periodic use and experimentation18. These initiatives, however, both complemented and paralleled the steps already taken by Alvin Balkind, curator at the U.B.C. Fine Arts Gallery, who since 1962, had proven as influential as any other figure in Vancouver. For some, such as N.E. Thing Co., he was to be instrumental in helping to define some of the key moments in the formative years of their career. Two shows by N.E. Thing Co. may well have contributed to the re-examination of art's function within the context of Vancouver's emergent vanguard movements. Bagged Place, N.E. Thing Co.'s plastic-shrouded environment shown in 1966, was described by one social critic as the first public celebration of McLuhanism19. Two years later, A Portfolio of Piles, a combination of photo-documentation and installation, was on the cusp of the conceptual wave which was consuming key Vancouver artists at the time. One important residue of the period was the interest generated among young artists in the uses of photography and its application to the conceptual practices which were evolving.20

Bagged Place, 1966, which was reconstituted in 1987 as part of the exhibition From Sea to Shining Sea at the Power Plant in Toronto, is still a potent reminder of how advanced N.E. Thing Co.'s ideas were relative to the developing notion of installation art. While it appears that the concept for this environment evolved in general isolation, parallels between Claes Oldenberg and Christo, among others, afford Bagged Place credible company. Iain Baxter was clear to differentiate between Bagged Place and the work of Christo, however, arguing, “Bagging, as opposed to wrapping, is a North American habit that puts things into their own space.”21 He sanitizes the consumer world by meticulously bagging everything from the coffee grains in the pot to the refrigerator that he imports into the gallery environment. Bagged Place borrowed characteristics from the warehouse, department showroom and museum; on loan from Wosk's, a downtown store, furniture and appliances were transported from one environment into another, bagged and assembled to represent a living space. What was most interesting about the project was that it asked the gallery goer to contemplate the world of correspondences - in effect, to ponder on the contents of the four furnished rooms of the gallery and reflect about the consumer traits of a society in which all nature of commodities, be they household, food products, or otherwise, are tied immeasurably to the global economies of scale. Bagged Place salvaged the idea that archaeology was also of the present - less about a vision of the future than a sundry accounting of the current state of consumerism. The fact that the premises were advertised as being available to a potential renter for the duration of the installation underscores the concern with further eroding the distinctions between the museum, the gallery and society at large.

As it proved, Bagged Place was a prototype for N.E. Thing Co.'s installation at the National Gallery of Canada in 1969. If in 1966 the conceptual moorings of N.E. Thing Co. were in early development, by the time Pierre Théberge invited Iain and Ingrid Baxter to exhibit at the National Gallery in Ottawa the company had incorporated under the Companies Act on January 16, 1969. “The objects,” reads the document, “for which the Company is established are:

(i) To produce sensitivity information;
(ii) To provide a consultation and evaluation service with respect to things;
(iii) To produce, manufacture, import, export, sell, and otherwise deal in things of all kinds,”

By transforming the Lorne Building's ground floor into a reception area, with executive offices, a secretarial pool and telex machines, as well as display areas for its various departments, the exhibition salvaged the fact that the gallery originally was an office building. It also played to the idea that their installation could revive the spirit of the structural organization that once characterized the building's original role: this conflation of the building's historical function, and their own future aims to build a corporate entity, was not without its irony22. There was always the distinct possibility of subversion: that the exterior utilitarian appearance of the Lorne Building in conjunction with N.E. Thing Co.'s installation could temporarily relieve the gallery visitor either of expectations typically associated with this environment, or heighten the intensity of displacement some might feel as a result.

By 1969, N.E. Thing Co. had achieved what many might describe as the pinnacle of its unorthodox career with its exhibition at the National Gallery. Broadly speaking, N.E. Thing Co. conceived of an installation, a total environment, which was also designed to subsume aspects of the gallery's daily operation. For example, the gallery's hours of operation became company hours and gallery guards became company security. By first transforming the space, and second, by re-orchestrating the public's perceptions, they were able to suspend “reality” - ironically the result of blurring the line between the gallery and the world beyond its doors. Under the banner of its corporate mandala - N.E. Thing Company - it presented a survey of its twelve departments with a mind to obviating the familiar gallery context. If, for example, its early products such as its vacuum moulded, bagged, or inflated objects were inherently commercial, the general eclecticism of the presentation belonged either to commercial showrooms or the trade fairs of industry. It was an eclectic grouping with many diverse idioms of commercial or aesthetic expression: from works which mimicked the New York vanguard to vacuum formed artifacts; from inflatable sculpture to “wearables”; from flow charts to maps; from freezer chests containing mirrors to cibachrome light boxes.

As a sign of its “business” acumen N.E. Thing Co. produced its own bilingual progress report titled Look/Voyez whose photographic content was conceived by Iain Baxter as a vehicle to promote the diversity of the company's activities. The report opens with the president's message: “As a company vitally involved with sensitivity information, the N.E. Thing Co. offers this display to the many millions of people who see. It is the visual unknown that challenges the N.E. Thing researchers.” Further on, it professes: “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.” As statements they are intended to appeal to the practical truths of perception, rather than to the visionary soul of people's lives: its purpose, it could be said, was one of curiosity and simple elucidation. For Iain and Ingrid Baxter the artist was not a privileged member of society, but one who was more sensitized to perceiving the world in terms of its visual relationships, an idea they promoted as the formula VSI or Visual Sensitivity Information23.

Although N.E. Thing Co. conformed to its articles of incorporation its purpose or function was not always easy to define in the wake of the National Gallery exhibition. Sometimes they were the instigators who set into motion a series of events, but whose significance they could not or would not claim, since intrinsically N.E. Thing Co. was the intellectual or cultural property of everyone. At other times they were determined to reveal the intrinsic value of ordinariness; boredom was a state of oblivion which could be overcome by subtle shifts in personal behaviour or of perception. That life is a double-edged sword they could not deny, but their ability to communicate its ambiguities, to flaunt its absurdities and embrace its fate, was almost redemptive.

At odds with the relative ease of acceptance Iain and Ingrid Baxter enjoyed among the bureaucratic or curatorial circles of the Canadian artworld was the public perception of their activities. N.E. Thing Co., like their contemporaries, had to win acceptance, but not before the issues had been amply aired and their role understood within the popular cultural perception of the artist's place in society. The incredulity which was often expressed in newspaper columns was frequently the result of N.E. Thing Co.'s ability to blur traditionally what for some was the familiar distinction between art and life. Ian Wallace, for example, writing on Bagged Place for The Ubyssey, could opine knowingly: “Iain Baxter (Bagster), currently having a love affair with plastic, has pulled off a ‘thing’ that will have skeptics wondering what has happened to art.” It is fair to say, as with most issues concerning the state of art, that the ironies engendered by the coupling of the artist's fertile imagination either to technology or to non-art media found resistance at first, but with time it too changed. If the public was inclined to resist it was because of its disdain or suspicion, fuelled by the skepticism it often felt towards the alienating intellectual systems of advanced art. Time Magazine, for example, embodied this criticism in its brief homily to the artist in 1969, writing: “To Baxter, snobbishness and pretension often hinder the public from enjoying art...”24 To clarify their position, it is necessary to emphasize that N.E. Thing Co. believed in what can be described as an open, flexible approach to the production of art, one which was conceptually broad and rooted in the pragmatist's sensibility. Their objective was to embrace the mundane, sometimes spontaneous, aspects of our lives. Fixed academic ideas about art had little appeal or relevance, for in their minds art was both a process and an empirical tool which could be used to test the broad range of human behaviour and associated cultural practice.25

Endorsement came from an unusual, but critically powerful, place in 1969. The influential American critic Lucy Lippard embraced N.E. Thing Co., but not before it had generated its own support among Canadian critics. Recognized for her insightful interpretation of conceptual art Lippard was to bring the same openness to Iain Baxter and N.E. Thing Co., writing intelligently and enthusiastically about their originality for artscanada.26 Impressed by the rigour of their ideas, she invited N.E. Thing Co. (along with Duane Lundun, Iain's student, and Jeff Wall) to participate in the group show 577,087, which she curated for the Seattle Art Museum in September of 1969 on the subject of conceptual art. The exhibition was dominated by American artists who were associated with minimalism, earthworks, or the conceptual art movement. Notwithstanding the parallels she observed between N.E. Thing Co.'s site-specific projects utilizing mirrors and other protocols rooted in the earthworks movement, she could see the originality of this work. “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.”27 Her contention that the world was a place of coincidences was apt in this case, fuelling her conviction that originality could exist outside the mediating authority of New York city. It was essentially the same show, with minor adjustments which travelled to the Vancouver Art Gallery the next year in January under the title 950,000.28 Later, during the fall of 1969, Lippard helped chronicle Art Inside the Arctic Circle, a site-specific project sponsored by the Edmonton Art Gallery in Inuvik, N.W.T. with Lawrence Weiner, Harry Savage, Iain and Ingrid Baxter.

Although Lippard emphasizes N.E. Thing Co.'s environmental and ecological sen-sibilities, their own concept of art, or VSI (Visual Sensitivity Information), as an extension of their own perceptual and technological capability, was fundamentally McLuhanesque.29 It is revealing that N.E. Thing Co. was the only “company” listed under the heading communications consultants in the Canadian Telex Directory in 1970, a category newly devised for N.E. Thing Co. If this is an indication of their “posturing” it also draws attention to their desire to integrate the codes and the practices of art and business into their thinking. Their manifesto was couched in the paralegal instruments of incorporation - a legal business entity which paradoxically, if one thinks about it, could also lay claim to vanguard status within the visual arts. Obviously within the context of the broader debate on media and communications McLuhan's influence must again be acknowledged, since the concept of casting themselves in the role of media consultants was consistent with the concern that art could play a defining role within the concept of the “global village.” The influence of McLuhan is felt in at least two ways: in their constant emphasis on developing their basic tools of communication and their belief in art as an instrument of amplification.

* * *

Most assuredly, it is the social, artistic and cultural milieu of Vancouver that bears significantly on the work and conceptual orientation of N.E. Thing Co. in the 1960s and 1970s. Although there has been more than adequate discussion about the parallels between N.E. Thing Co. and the influential trends in conceptual art during the 1960s, there has been little or no discussion on what constitutes N.E. Thing Co.'s legacy of influence on those who followed. How it may coincide with some of the important concerns that rise more profusely with photoconceptual art in Vancouver is an important question. While emphasis has been placed on the international success of Jeff Wall, and increasingly on the significance of the individual contributions of Ian Wallace, Ken Lum, Rodney Graham and Roy Arden among others, we must ask what are some of the common attributes, thematic parallels, or ideologies which either characterize the differences or the similarities between N.E. Thing Co. and the photoconceptual element in recent Vancouver art?

Although their influence over photoconceptual art in Vancouver, which achieved its primacy in the late 1970s and early to mid 1980s is difficult to assess, the contribution of N.E. Thing Co. within the context of Canadian art is better understood. The list is long, but some, like Jeff Wall, have simply left the task to others, preferring to leave the issue of N.E. Thing Co. either dormant or willfully uninterpreted.30 William Wood and Nancy Shaw, for example, have each authored insightful essays on N.E. Thing Co. in support of an exhibition at the U.B.C. Fine Arts Gallery in 1993. Although the focus of their research was intended first to revive N.E. Thing Co.'s position vis-à-vis the canon of conceptual art and second, to discuss the broader trends in their landscape subjects, neither Wood nor Shaw discussed in their respective essays the broader impact of N.E. Thing Co.'s role in the development of Vancouver art.31 It may prove that N.E. Thing Co.'s contribution was important for other reasons, namely in pioneering the realm of corporate or company-type projects, but finds acknowledgement within the paradigm that Ian Wallace constructs of Vancouver photoconceptual art, for example. The link Wallace implies between Iain Baxter's A Portfolio of Piles, 1968, and Jeff Wall's Landscape Manual, 1969-70, is a paradigmatic one, mediated principally by the factual photographs Ed Ruscha produced on gas stations (1963), parking lots (1967) and the urban environment, his most notorious the chronicling of every building on Sunset Strip in Los Angeles (1966).32 We must also look either to Charlotte Townsend-Gault or Scott Watson for a fuller accounting.

In an essay that ranges selectively over the subject of contemporary photography, Townsend-Gault promotes Iain Baxter's A Portfolio of Piles as a collection of perceptual readymades. By singling out this work she also places it within the strategic canon of contemporary photography, an appropriate and acceptable choice since it is part of that urban lexicon which Ed Ruscha, Dan Graham, Jeff Wall and Ian Wallace among others, were so curious about interpreting. In essence, she has argued that “...Baxter's work was a critique of perceptual boundaries using only per-ceptual strategies.” Townsend-Gault continues: “He was not concerned with the politics of agriculture, land use, the dumping of waste, resource management or other endeavours that lead to the piling up of stuff.”33 For me this implies too narrow a definition. There is an inherent risk in negating important considerations of the thematic content of these images, which, in spite of their alleged formal syncretism, are a mapping of the city nonetheless. Lippard in her artscanada article of June 1969 stresses emphatically that Baxter had come out of science into art, that his fundamental interest lay in the physical make-up of his surroundings. Watson in an essay focused principally on the characteristics of what he terms “the defeatured landscape” in the work of selected Vancouver artists - N.E. Thing Co., Jeff Wall, Ian Wallace, Christos Dikeakos - treats the topic as thoroughly as his exegesis allows. Although A Portfolio of Piles is not addressed, Watson discusses a cibachrome from 1968 by N.E. Thing Co. called Ruins which he acknowledges precedes by several years works by Wall and others to which it bears, he says, “a material, but perhaps superficial, resemblance.”34 It is this focus on both suburban and urban content which lends credence to the argument Watson advances, that the Baxters “can legit-imately be said to have defined the strategy for an urban semiotic, although it was left to others to theorize this strategy.”35

Within the cadre of the west coast visual lexicon there may be no more compelling a statement than the one implicit in Iain Baxter's Ruins, an image of tiered suburban homes. Does it foretell the future in some diabolical fashion, or is the ruin upon us now, insipid and soul-destroying?” The inherent paradox of titling the image of an east-end suburb in this way is to provoke us into thought. How this will happen is not so clear, but within the framework of the ecological and geological debate it was Robert Smithson who, among artists, had defined this process of natural downturn as the result of entropy. In his essay “A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey” Smithson entertained the idea that the modern industrial landscapes typified by eastern seaboard communities such as Passaic were nothing if not predisposed to the industrial revolution's overt principle of planned obsolescence. Consequently, he envisions before him a landscape littered with the monuments of progress - bridges, derricks, pipes and the rusting paraphernalia of heavy industry. Discussing the importance of this essay Robert Hobbs has emphasized Smithson's fascination with the idea of planned obsolescence, which he characterizes appro-priately either as “progress in reverse” or “cities rising to ruin.”36 Describing before him the stark reality of a landscape on the brink of development, Smithson writes:

That zero panorama seemed to contain ruins in reverse, that is -all the new construction that would eventually be built. This is the opposite of the “romantic ruin” because the buildings don't fall into ruin after they are built but rather rise into ruin before they are buil37.

Jeff Wall, for example, has attributed similar, if not antithetical, readings of suburbia to Dan Graham, citing “Homes for America”, which appeared in the format of a photo-text in Artforum in December-January 1966/6738. This preponderance of a dystopian view signals the end of the American dream; the loss registered emphatically in the suburban clapboard homes in uniform after uniform row. If one cannot attribute such pessimism to Baxter, however, Ruins gives us pause for thought. For contained in the idea of the ruin for Baxter is the conflicted notion of devastation and beauty in one; a dialectical dilemma to be sure, but one which remains characteristically ambiguous in an era defined by increasing pessimism.39


The early thread that binds N.E. Thing Co., Wall, Wallace and Dikeakos, for example, is the congruity between the subject of the urban semiology and the mobility of the car. Ultimately, it is the informational function of photography as a documentary tool which first appeals, only later to be particularized and given the stamp of either a distinct technical signature, or thematic development in the case of these individual artists. While it is important to suggest that none of them had exclusive hold over what amounts to be a broadening trend in developing the lexicon of popular cultural myth in North America, from Walker Evans to Dan Graham, the fact that these concerns were germane to a conceptual remapping of the city of Vancouver and its environs must be regarded with some significance. Correlations, for example, between Iain Baxter's A Portfolio of Piles, 1968, and Jeff Wall's Landscape Manual, 1969-70, as already pointed out, prove this where the emphasis on a partic-ular environment is weighed against the broader traits that define a social context. The industrial suburbs of Vancouver have their distinction, yet, as Wallace himself writes with Wall's Landscape Manual in mind: “Like Baxter's Piles, it examined the ‘defeatured’ zones of the regional suburbs specific to Vancouver yet also typical of any other North American suburb.”40 However, the “situationist” aesthetic which Wall exploits from the vantage of a car recording his experience by snapping images as he drives the extent of the suburbs is one which Wallace himself fastens onto in an early work, Untitled, 1969-7041. Here, the camera fixes spontaneously on the Westcoast Transmission Building located on West Georgia St., the lapsed time between the two photographs he mounts one above the other in the gallery – only a matter of seconds. The perspective is from the front seat, the photographer's impulsiveness evident in the lack of framing and the immediacy of the experience he conveys. The viewer should also realize that these represent photographs within photographs, original documents which in some sense of the word have been archivally treated by the artist.

Baxter had also photographed the landscape from a travelling car. It was, as it turned out, to be a rite of passage for this generation of artists who associated the city, its suburbs and the vast spaces beyond with the vectors of highway travel. Predating both Wall and Wallace is N.E. Thing Co's 1/4 Mile Landscape, 1968, three hand-tinted photographs and a map combined as a document in support of a site-specific intervention along a stretch of highway in Southern California near Newport Harbour. In this process N.E. Thing Co. stakes claim to the temporal experience of the highway by erecting signs which announce in quick succession – “You Will Soon Pass by a 1/4 Mile N.E. Thing Co. Landscape” – “Start Viewing” – “Stop Viewing.” The idea comments not only on the authority of the sign, but on the authority of the words as well. The highway for all intents and purposes is a regulated system and in the sense that it is patrolled by the police or service authorities, it signifies the watchful eye of authority. As a culture defined by its use of the automobile this work challenges the alertness of the driver and passengers who may be inured to the randomness of the information since it does not appear to conform to the codified convention of traffic signs, nor the compelling visual spectacle of roadside advertising. Signage plays a significant role in informing the driver about the conditions of the highway, when to slow down, when to speed up, even when to stop. What is so compelling about the concept behind 1/4 Mile Landscape is its ready application to any landscape, anytime and anyplace - similar claims were staked at Cape Spear, Newfoundland, Inuvik in the Northwest Territories, a country pasture on Prince Edward Island and in the Sea of Tranquility on the moon.

Since Ian Wallace was Baxter's student at U.B.C. in 1964/65 one might also ask what hold, if any, did he exert over the younger artist? Are there parallels to be found between Wallace's earlier themes and the culture/nature dialectic which characterizes the work of Iain Baxter and N.E. Thing Co. in the mid to late 1960s? Certainly there is an affinity between Ruins and Wallace's 1973 work La Mélancolie de la rue, as suggested in the contrast between the central panel's utopian vision of suburbia embodied in the new homes and the coastal shanty community in the right panel42. The more didactic exercises in which Wallace presents himself as the subject of his own photographic study in the mid 1970s and early 1980s bear some affinity to the related practice by Iain and Ingrid Baxter. Although the satirical content in N.E. Thing Co.'s photographs from 1969 contrasts with the restraint of the contemplative thinker in Wallace's photographic piece At Work, 1983, the frozen theatrical gestures of earlier work such as An Attack on Literature, 1975, bear at least superficial comparison. However, in N.E. Thing Co.'s Inactive Verbs series of 1969, Ingrid, who is the subject of these seven hand-coloured black and white photographs is shown motionless on a chair, lost in thought, looking beyond the right frame. Although her demeanour apparently does not change from photograph to photograph, she was instructed to “enact” the inactive verb for each of the seven poses, her different states of mind projected by the subtitle: “Thinking,” “Sensing,” “Reflecting,” “Feeling,” “Planning,” “Pondering,” “Wondering.” This is much closer to the philosophie of Wallace's contemplator in At Work.

It was also about this time that N.E. Thing Co. came to international prominence through their participation in thirty or more exhibitions centred in New York and throughout Europe. This success owes something both to the inherent desire for self-promotion and the instant access that technologies such as the telex allowed by dissolving or surmounting the bureaucratic barriers. The cover to the May-June 1969 issue of Art in America reproduced sixteen slide transparencies by N.E. Thing Co. - if it is an example of how successful Iain and Ingrid Baxter had become in their efforts to gain attention by publicizing their ideas, their embrace by one of America's more widely circulated and popular art magazines ensured their fifteen minutes of fame.43 It was also an example of how the slide transparency had come to attain an influential currency as information, easily duplicated and readily injected into the broader economy of the art world. As examples of N.E. Thing Co.'s critical interest in the practical application of slide documentation, they belonged to their on-going project set on classifying the perceived or subjectively nominal world in the palpa-ble terms of photographic documentation, or Visual Sensitivity Information (VSI). Accordingly, photography was also used to document or reproduce, appropriate or denigrate a number of previously acclaimed cultural artifacts which were designated ironically as ART (Aesthetically Rejected Things). Conversely, they drew from the greater resource as yet of the unclaimed world of found aesthetics or chance sit-uations; these they called ACTs (Aesthetically Claimed Things).

The idea of penetrating the boardrooms of either corporations or museums was at hand in N.E. Thing Co.'s networking skills, which utilized the telecopier and telex machine to some strategic advantage from their North Vancouver residence. The notion of the “wired” or “global village” obviously went hand in hand with the multi
national corporations who had both the resources and the capability to develop the world's information vectors. Iain and Ingrid Baxter were among the first artists in Canada seriously to contemplate integrating mass communications into the central nervous system of its own activities. Obviously as artists they were still dependant upon the print media for the discursive value of criticism in the form of articles and reviews, but for the purposes of broad dissemination the telex machine, the forerunner to the fax, was a means to explore. At the promotional level their ideas or proposals could be telegraphed between their North Vancouver residence and galleries in Toronto, New York or Amsterdam. At other times the telex was used to penetrate the bastions of the corporate world (one telex communication with Marshall McLuhan instructed him to: “...sit down and with a pair of scissors cut 4 inches off your tie and please mail it immediately to Iain Baxter...”) The symbols of the corporate world which reinforced the illusion of power were at the same time acquired in the form of letterhead and statements about company philosophy issued as press releases, usually accompanied by a glossary of terminology: SI Sensitivity Information, VSI Visual Sensitivity Information, ACT Aesthetically Claimed Things, ART Aesthetically Rejected Things. As either a tool for instruction, or as a technology with the potential to influence broadly, if not radicalize, business communications, the telex in the hands of N.E. Thing Co. became a cipher for art. Perhaps the most successful application of the technology occurred during a three-week period in 1969 when N.E. Thing Co. remained in communication with students as part of a pilot project called Trans VSI Connection at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in Halifax.

[...]

But what of Ingrid's role specifically? Press clippings suggest that they were both equally articulate about their objectives. Although the perception remains that Iain was the principal spokesperson for N.E. Thing Co., Ingrid was a frequent contributor at press conferences, as when she participated with Lucy Lippard, Seth Siegelaub and Pierre Théberge on the subject of “Visual Sensitivity Information, Communications and Ramifications” at the National Gallery in 1969. The fact is that, while she is listed as Vice-President at the time of the National Gallery exhibition it was only later, after N.E. Thing Co. incorporated in 1969, that both could legally assume the shared title of Co-President. Her inherent ability to engage and at times direct the proceedings is felt in the shrewdness and rigour of her views. Ingrid, who had excelled in the competitive world of synchronized swimming at the University of Idaho had put her efforts first into coaching and second, into teaching. A gifted pianist she completed her honours degree in Music with a mind to continuing her studies, but not before a year in Kyoto, Japan, and the challenge of raising two chil-dren. It was only later, after their return, that she was able to take up her studies again and certify as a teacher. In the late 1970s she completed a Master of Physical Education at U.B.C. which enabled her to capitalize on her interest in physical edu-cation, allowing her to develop swim programmes for the physically challenged in the City of Vancouver.

Ingrid Baxter was by her own account and to Iain's credit, an equal partner in N.E. Thing Co. at a time when equality between the sexes and opportunity was even rarer than it is in North American society today. Society may have viewed their working relationship differently, given the pressures she took on in raising their two children, but in her view the supporting role of mother was as significant as the role of artist. She could be fulfilled by either role. By the late 1960s her activities within N.E. Thing Co. were more apparent. Although it is surprising she is not credited in the report N.E. Thing Co. generated on the occasion of their National Gallery show in 1969, her involvement was clear enough. She modelled some of the “wearables” which N.E. Thing Co. had devised for the public. She conducted interviews and could be found in the executive suite offices. Importantly, she is acknowledged later in the same year as having participated in the project which took them to the Arctic Circle in the Northwest Territories, when she is credited with having documented a 3 1/4 mile walk around the town of Inuvik.44 Lucy Lippard recalls one of the works executed on the afternoon of September 26 as by Ingrid, who was busy exchanging water between the Seymour river and the Mackenzie, “adding the first, subtracting the second.” She also painted a tree white to simulate the fall of early snow. If many of these activities were executed in the vein of spontaneous interaction, their approach was informed by sound ecological practices. There is much evidence to suggest that they were pioneers in the types of activities which researched the intricate balances between living organisms and the natural environment.45 If Iain generated many of their concepts, Ingrid assisted in bringing the larger project to fruition and participated in its execution or completion. There is every evidence to suggest that their collaboration flourished once the pressures of raising children had lessened, after all this was the responsibility which society had handed to her. It was not unusual for the whole family, the children too, to be included in either the process or the production of works. They also travelled as a family unit. Perhaps no project states their view about the symbolic value of family more clearly than And They Had Issue, an installation in which they exhibited their son Tor and daughter Erian on pedestals as part of an N.E. Thing Co. exhibition at the Art Gallery of York University in 1973. With a renewed mandate the Co-Presidency evolved to the point where they could take on different challenges, including the pursuit of genuine commercial interests such as N.E. Professional Photographic Display Labs Ltd., the Vancouver Magazine, and Eye Scream Restaurant. By 1976-77 they were devoting much of their energy to the devel-opment of their business project at the Eye Scream Restaurant. This strengthens the author's conviction that Ingrid's role intensified with time, and likely benefitted from a general shift in attitude which brought about the greater acceptance that the collaboration was genuine, that she was regarded as an equal partner. Their company model evolved with time as no doubt did their collective and individual roles within the course of its varied events. If its transformation away from a conceptually-driven entity motivated by success in the art world demanded her fuller participation, then the added responsibilities of handling such a diverse career would have been met. A letter dated October 4, 1977, to members of the public who were chosen at random from the Vancouver telephone book begins: “On December 11, 1977, we (Iain and Ingrid Baxter of the N.E. Thing Co.) will be opening an important exhibition at the Vancouver Art Gallery, which will be concerned with the subject of ‘people and language.’”46 In many respects this shift back to working with individual people in a group dynamic could be attributed to her influence, since that aspect of N.E. Thing Co. appealed to her warmth, her humanity and her genuine appreciation of interact-ing with people on their own level. These are some of the attributes which remain as a legacy from her interest in general human nature, or the schooled equivalent of knowledge gained in areas such as sports psychology or human motivation as part of her formal education.

In fact, their enterprising ways were most often anchored in the routine of their daily lives, and the entrepreneurial vision which later found them motivated to develop businesses under the aegis of N.E. Thing Co. came out of a strong instinct for survival. The adroit nature of their approach to communications was a reflection of its universal appeal, accepting as they were of their daily lives and an undying commitment to eliminating the codified distinctions between high and low culture. It exerted a profound influence on the subsequent generation of Vancouver artists, both in spirit and in practice. N.E. Thing Co. challenged the status quo with its modes of cultural or commercial exchange, it also showed the advantages of embracing art and technology. The confusion may well have been about how to read or interpret the activities of N.E. Thing Co. - the self-effacing public persona of the artist and the private entrepreneur have, over time, become fused in the case of the Baxters.

1 Iain Baxter, Sept. 7, 1967. Quoted in Statements: 18 Canadian Artists, Regina: Norman Mackenzie Art Gallery, 1967, p, 14.
2 Eric Cameron refers to N.E. Thing Co.'s information sheets as “ubiquitous” in an unpublished english version of an article which in french is translated as “des omnipresents feuillets informatifs,” see Vie des Arts, XXVI, no. 105 (Winter 1981-82), p. 91.
3 Nancy Shaw, “Expanded Consciousness and Company Types: Collaboration Since Intermedia and the N.E. Thing Company,” in Vancouver Anthology: The Institutional Potitics of Art, ed. Stan Douglas, Vancouver: Talonbooks, 1991, p. 96.
4 Marie L. Fleming, for example, in her catalogue Baxter2 Any Choice Works, 1965-1970, Toronto: Art Gallery of Ontario, 1982, attributes works from the year 1965 to Iain Baxter; from 1966 to IT (Iain Baxter, Ingrid Baxter and John Friel); from 1966-67 to N.E. Baxter Thing Co. (Iain Baxter and Ingrid Baxter); from 1967-1978 to N.E. Thing Co. (Iain Baxter and Ingrid Baxter).
5 In conversation with the author, June 11, 1995.
6 See Scott Watson, “Hand of the Spirit: Documents of the Seventies from the Morris/Trasov Archive,” Hand of the Spirit: Documents of the Seventies fom the Morris/Trasov Archive, Vancouver: U.B.C. Fine Arts Gallery, 1992, passim.
7 AA Bronson, “Introduction,” in Iain Baxter, Media Works, N.E. Thing Co. Ltd, Toronto: Art Metropole, 1992, unpaginated.
8 The parallels with Andy Warhol's multiple self-portraits are instructive, especially Self-Portrait, 1964, where he feigns or just plays dumb for the price of a dollar in the photo kiosk. See Andy Warhol. A Retrospective, ed. Kynaston McShine, New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1989, plate 3. Bruce Nauman explores the arbitrariness of physiognomy in his Studies for Hologram (a-e), 1970, see Bruce Nauman. Prints 1970-89, New York:Castelli Graphics/Monk Galleries and Chicago: Donald Young Gallery, 1989, plates 1-5.
9 Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Parody. The Teachings of Twentieth-Century Art Forms. New York: Methuen, 1985, pp. 106-107.
10 Ibid., p. 2.
11 Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, 2nd ed. New York: New American Library, 1964, pp. 210-211. The relationship between art and games has been entertained else-where, not only by Iain Baxter in conver-sation with the author, but by Alvin Balkind in his introduction to Another 2 Projects: People/Language and Eye Scream Restaurant, Vancouver: Vancouver Art Gallery, 1978, unpaginated.
12 McLuhan, p, 214.
13 David Silcox, “Remembering the N.E. Thing Company,” in You Are Now in the Middle of a N.E. Thing Co. Landscape, Vancouver: U.B.C. Fine Arts Gallery, 1993. p. 61.
14 McLuhan, “Introduction,” Ibid., unpaginated.
15 AA Bronson, “Introduction,” in Iain Baxter, Media Works, unpaginated.
16 Silcox, Ibid., p. 61.
17 Robert Linsley, “Landscape and Literature in the Art of British Columbia,” in Vancouver: Representing the Postmodern City, ed. Paul Delany, Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 1994, pp. 200-204.
18 For personal recollections of the period, see Marguerite Pinney, “Voices,” Vancouver: Art and Artists, 1931- 1983, Vancouver: Vancouver Art Gallery, 1983, pp. 174-187, and “Persoral Perspectives,” pp. 256-273. See also Joan Lowndes, “The Spirit of the Sixties, by a Witness,” Ibid., pp. 142-151.
19 The statement is attributed to Thomas Wolfe, see Charlotte Townsend, “N.E. Thing Co. and Les Levine,” in Canadian Art Today, ed. William Townsend, Greenwich: New York Graphic Society, 1970, p. 78.
20 Claudia Beck, “Through the Looking Glass: Vancouver Photography in the Seventies,” in Vancouver: Art and Artists, 1931-1983, p. 275.
21 Quoted in Marie L. Fleming, Ibid., p. 94, f.n. 22.
22 Linda Hutcheon, Splitting Images. Contemporary Canadian Ironies, Toronto: Toronto University Press, 1991, p. 126.
23 Following the project's conclusion it was the curator's intention to publish a report cataloguing the exhibition. This he did, producing a chronology of events, photo-documentation and a biography, with the notable absence of an interpretive essay. See Pierre Théberge, Report on the Activities of the N.E Thing Co. of North Vancouver, British Columbia, at the National Gallery of Canada, and Other Locations, June 4-July 6 1969, Ottawa: National Gallery of Canada, 1971. For his recol-lections about the project, see Pierre Théberge, “N.E. Thing Company in Ottawa,” You Are Now in the Middle of a N.E. Thing Co. Landscape, p. 63.
24 Reprinted in Iain Baxter, Media Works, p. 49.
25 In addition to the constant flow of projects as part of the company rationale policy statements were issued periodically which defined their objectives. The following statement accompanies North American Time Zone Photo-VSI Simultaneity, Oct. 18, 1970, 1970: “The photography department was brought into being to perform qualitative analyses focusing on the influence of the physical environ-ment on human behaviour at individual and global levels.”
26 Lucy Lippard, “Iain Baxter: New Spaces,” artscanada, no. 132/133 (June 1969), pp. 3-7.
27 Lippard, Ibid., p. 6.
28 The catalogue's format, which was printed on white index cards measuring 5 x 3 inches, was in keeping with the informational character as well as with the epistemological premise of many of the works. N.E. Thing Co's contribution took the form of VSI Formula #5, 1968.
29 Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media, p. 208.
30 Wall's revised article on Roy Arden, which originated as a catalogue essay for the Contemporary Art Gallery in Vancouver in 1993, describes among other canonical correspondences cer-tain affinities between Arden and Dan Graham. Given Arden's images of con-struction sites and urban development in Vancouver and environs it is surprising that Wall does not speak at least in passing of Iain Baxter's A Portfolio of Piles, a precedent which is more than implied in several of these works, but especially with Plywood Stacks, Vancouver B.C., 1991. See Jeff Wall, “An Artist and his Models: Roy Arden,” Parachute, no. 74 (April/May/June 1994), p. 9. See also Roy Arden, Vancouver: Contemporary Gallery, 1993.
31 See William Wood, “Capital and Subsidiary. The N.E. Thing Co. and the Revision of Conceptual Art,” and Nancy Shaw, “Siting the Banal. The Expanded Landscapes of the N.E. Thing Co.,” in You Are Now in the Middle of a N.E. Thing Co. Landscape, pp. 11-23 and pp. 25-35.
32 See Ian Wallace, “Photoconceptual Art in Vancouver,” in Thirteen Essays on Photography, Ottawa: Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography, 1990, pp. 96-97. In a far-reaching essay Germane Celant had made this point earlier, placing A Portfolio of Piles among a short but illustrious list of artist's books with references to such seminal projects as Ed Ruscha's Twenty Seven Gasoline Stations and Every Building on Sunset Boulevard. Germano Celant, “Books as Artwork, 1960-72,” in Books by Artists, ed. Tim Guest, Toronto: Art Metropole, 1981, p. 95.
33 Charlotte Townsend-Gault, “Wavelength to Patternity: Epistemology with a Camera,” in Frame of Mind. Viewpoints on Photography in Contemporary Canadian Art, ed. Daina Augaitis, Banff, Walter Phillips Gallery, 1993, p.14.
34 Scott Watson, “Discovering the Defeatured Landscape,” in Vancouver Anthology: The institutional Politics of Art, p. 254.
35 Watson, Ibid.
36 Robert Hobbs, Robert Smithson: Sculpture, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981, p. 186.
37 Smithson in Hobbs, p. 92.
38 Jeff Wall, Dan Graham's Kammerspiel, Toronto: Art Metropole, 1991, p. 29. Distinguishing between Smithson and Graham further on, he writes: “When Smithson leads the incensed Romantics into the desert, Graham remains in the city and the suburbs.”
39 In conversation with Iain Baxter, June 26, 1995.
40 Wallace, Ibid., p. 97.
41 Christos Dikeakos, “Ian Wallace: Selected Works 1970-1987,” in Ian Wallace: Selected Works 1970-1987, Vancouver: Vancouver Art Gallery, 1988, p. 7. Untitled, which is illustrated as a single image on p. 8, was recently exhibited as a double panel in Ian Wallace at S.L. Simpson Gallery, June 1-July 4, 1995; its overall measurements are 157,5 x 99.1 cm.
42 For a discussion, see Jeff Wall “La Mélancolie de la Rue: Idyll and Monochrome in the Work of Ian Wallace 1967-82,” Ian Wallace Selected Works 1970-1987, Vancouver: Vancouver Art Gallery, 1988, p. 67, plate 22.
43 In fact the top register of four slides was eliminated from the cover to give the mast head “Art in America” its prominence. In this issue N.E. Thing Co. is discussed by David L. Shirley, “Impossible Art—What it is,” Art in America, v. 57, no. 3 (May-June 1969), pp. 35-36, p. 42. The following year, the Art in America cover was appropriated by N.E. Thing Co. which treated it as a source of Visual Sensitivity Information by producing a limited edition lithograph, a slide, and a title sheet, which it titled P+L+P+L+P=VSI, VSI Formula No. 10, 1970. The explanation of the formula is as follows: “The cover began as a series of slides (P=Photograph) and became an offset lithograph cover for Art in America (L=Lithograph) which in turn was photographed (P=Photograph) by the Lithography Workshop for printing on metal plate lithographically (L=Lithograph). After the edition was printed, in a gesture of complete consciousness of the medium, it was crumpled and placed in a pile on the floor. This pile of crumpled lithographs became a work of the N.E, Thing Co.'s Projects Department and was accordingly photographed (P=Photograph). This series of transformations (P+L+P+L+P) equals the total Visual Sensitivity Information (VSI) available,” See Iain Baxter, N.E. Thing Co. (“Blue Book”), unpaginated, 1970; Lithograph.
44 Iain Baxter, N.E. Thing Co. Ltd (“Blue Book”), unpaginated, see 1969: Circular Walk Inside Artic Circle Around Inuvik, N.W.T.
45 Lucy R. Lippard, “Art Within the Artic Circle,” The Hudson Review, no. 22 (Winter, 1969-70), p. 668.
46 See N.E.Thing Co. Another 2 Projects, unpaginated.