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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 multinational 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.
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