Iain Baxter&

At the launch of “Iain Baxter&: Works 1958–2011,” Baxter&, who officially appended the ampersand to his name in 2005 as a tribute to the open-endedness of life, was decked out in a black T-shirt with “I masturbate on life” on its front, a cap emblazoned with his signature “&” (he also has one tattooed on each hand), a tuxedo jacket and a pair of bright red sneakers. He doesn’t exactly cut the figure of a 21st century conceptual art heavy; he seems more like an eccentric prankster and backyard tinkerer. As it turns out, Iain Baxter is a little of both.

Co-curated by David Moos, former Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Art Gallery of Ontario, and Michael Darling, Chief Curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago where the show originated, “Iain Baxter&: Works 1958–2011” is the first comprehensive survey of the 76-year-old artist’s work. Over the course of his 50-plus year career, Baxter& has made art under the guise of Iain Baxter, N.E. Baxter Thing Co., N.E. Thing Co., IT and now Iain Baxter&, and it is all here in carefully selected abundance. The earliest works in the show predate Baxter&’s decision to abandon a budding career as a field zoologist for art. Though hardly a work of great originality, the 1958 watercolour Moscow, Idaho, Landscape, with its wispy green foreground and waiving trees, has an authentic loveliness and ease of execution, and the photograph Camp, Southern Idaho, 1958, a picture shot from a slight elevation, of a tent and a campground amidst scrub pines and barren hills, has a centered directness of composition familiar from Vancouver school conceptual photography two decades later.

Baxter&’s apprenticeship was as eclectic as the career that followed it: a degree in Zoology at the University of Idaho, an MA in science education at the University of Idaho, a year in Japan doing pretty much whatever he wanted, an MFA in painting at the University of Washington and a lot of reading and looking and searching in between. Though not self-taught, he has the can-do spirit and energy of the autodidact, and his career didn’t really get going until the mid-1960s. After taking up the first of many teaching positions at the University of British Columbia, he began experimenting with vacuum-formed plastic because he intuitively recognized that it was becoming the signature material of the consumerist age, much as steel was the signature material of the industrial age. Still Life: Rope and Four Crushed Bottles, 1965, for instance, has the casts of crumpled gallon bottles and a tangled rope in a deep, dark blue, and in Landscape with Cirrus Cloud, 1965, the protruding shape of a painted white cloud crosses a shiny blue sky, with bright green hills descending on either side. Both of these works are by turns funny and disarmingly beautiful, but, like his still-life photographs of the same period, which were influenced by the great Italian painter Giorgio Morandi, they suggest something darker. Plastic, in all its non-biodegradable ugliness, is omnipresent and irrepressible, littering landscapes, accumulating in the sea, inexor-ably washing up on shore.

Baxter&, along with his then wife Ingrid, created N.E. Baxter Thing Co., which became simply N.E. Thing Co. in 1966, as a way of investigating corporations as a kind of found object. Characteristically ahead of the curve, Baxter& seems to have grasped the imminent rise of the corporation as the dominant political, economic, and cultural force of our time. One of the defining features of the corporate mentality Baxter& was investigating was its propensity to absorb virtually everything into the logic of consumer capitalism, and he pushed this to the limits of its absurdity. For the “1/4 Mile Landscape” series, 1968, he put a sign on an otherwise empty, dun-coloured stretch of road in Prince Edward Island reading, “You will soon pass by a 1/4 mile landscape by N.E. Thing Co.”, and in two other photographs, shot from the front seat of a moving car, you find signs reading “Start viewing” and “Stop viewing.” And in the “ACT” series he applied gold stamps of approval and red stamps of disapproval to a wide array of images—steel pilings, a storage tank, one of Andy Warhol’s Elvis paintings, the back of a drive-in theatre.

Baxter& has been taking photographs since his days as a zoology student, and it constitutes one of his most enduring and influential achievements. He was working with slides and light boxes decades before Jeff Well. In Still Life With Jungle Gym, Maplewood School, 1968, for example, an old, rusted, white jungle gym sits on the edge of a playground. Behind it is a stand of stripped, brown winter trees, and in Highway 1, Eastern Saskatchewan, 1968, the sun bursts up over treeless hills that are foggy purple in the reflected light. In both photographs, the light box creates an eerie, archaic, sepia-toned luminescence in the otherwise darkened room. In the stunning Reflected Landscape, 1968, he returns to his preoccupation with landscape, this time not with its degradation but with its sublimity: a mirror is propped up in the middle of a stream, perfectly reflecting tall pines. For the “Paris Beauty Spots” series of 1980, on the other hand, Baxter& took Polaroids of classic Paris tourist locales in a round, handheld mirror, and then in Reflected Beauty Spots he pasted them over the “beauty spots” on the body of a beautiful young woman. Reflected Beauty Spots (Arc de Triomphe), 1980, for instance, has a Polaroid of the Arc de Triomphe affixed to the woman’s side as she lies on her stomach.

Conceptual art has falsely been associated with a kind of theoretical discourse, but in its vital period in the 1960s and 1970s conceptual art was, at its best, an open-ended and experimental mode of inquiry. In that sense, Baxter& is a true conceptualist, opening up possibilities rather than prescribing meanings. Ever since his early exposure to the writings of Marshall McLuhan when he was a young art teacher at the University of British Columbia, Baxter& has been attuned to the importance of information. With that in mind, he is working with Adam Lauder at York University on an exhaustive online catalogue of his work, and “Iain Baxter&: Works 1958–2011” has been set up so that viewers can access commentary by Baxter& on their smart phones. At the end of the show, there is an ampersand-shaped station where you can post comments on Twitter. Baxter& is sure to respond, too. As the ampersand in his name and on his wrists suggests, he does not think there is a final word on his work, or on anything else. ❚

“Iain Baxter&: Works 1958–2011” is being exhibited at the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, from March 3 to August 12, 2012.

Daniel Baird is a Toronto-based writer on art, culture and ideas.