Iain Baxter
Photo: Julie Sando

Animal Preserve No. 2 1999. Photo: National Gallery of Canada

Techno-Compost 1996
Photo: Barrie Jones

Bagged Place 1966

Carts of GMOs 2002

Ruins – Vancouver 1968

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Iain Baxter's 1999 work, Animal Preserve No.2, is a set of industrial shelves laden with about 500 preserving jars, large ones on the bottom shelves, smaller on the top. Each jar contains a stuffed animal pickled in distilled water. One's first reaction on seeing it is to laugh aloud with delight at seeing so many sizes and colours in such an incongruous setting. The sheer fun and magnitude of it is endearing. And then, upon reflection, come more serious thoughts: Is the word 'preserve' a double entendre? Is this really an animal 'preserve'? Is this how we 'preserve' our fellow mammals? Is this imposing creation a fantasy, or a parable? Is this art?

Baxter's 1966 work, Bagged Place, contained a complete four-room modern home of plastic sheet walls, ceilings and floors, in which every item was bagged in clear plastic: beds, chairs, toaster, glasses, clothing, light fixtures, appliances, everything. One's first reaction is wonder: What a clever and enchanting thing to do with all the 'things' we live with. Then the questions begin: What is this doing in an art gallery? Is this a commentary on modern life? Is this a message about reality/ artificiality? Is it about sanitation/ hygiene? Is this art?

Baxter's works demonstrate the brilliant but contradictory traits – tradition and iconoclasm, access and mystery, humour and seriousness, the calculated and the serendipitous – that change art and our ideas about seeing art (and indeed everything) at a fundamental level. He is Canada's first conceptual artist and perhaps the first anywhere.

Iain Baxter's education and background could not have predicted the international stature he has achieved as an artist. His initial studies in zoology and biology grounded his thinking in science. His subsequent studies in educational psychology, philo-sophy and then fine arts, followed by a study of Zen in Japan (1961), gave him the basis for a remarkable career as a provocative artist, whose work broke, and continues to break, the conventions of art. His achievements have been recognized by many awards and prizes, by the University of Windsor, where he was made University Professor before his retirement (a rare distinction), and by membership in the Royal Canadian Academy and the Order of Canada.

Baxter's art and his ideas have long been an inspiration for many artists. The relevance and innovative character of his work keep art critics and audiences intrigued and a little off balance. Often one hears that what he was doing 10 years ago is more interesting than his current work, but after hearing this for 30 years or more, one realizes that Baxter is constantly reassessing and recreating, and that his sensibility is of the present. The spectrum of Baxter's expression has been amazingly wide. His canvases of the late 1950s were large and ambitious. More importantly, they were about ideas, and this side of him emerged in the early 1960s when he was one of the first champions of Marshall McLuhan: he organized an international McLuhan symposium and happening at UBC in 1965 (described by Tom Wolfe in The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby).

Under the anonymous name of IT (he was the first to use a corporate name instead of his own — and a serendipitous choice it was, given his growing involvement with Information Technology a few years later through the use of telexes, networks and corporate structures), Baxter had found his distinct and mature voice as an artist: a definition of art that redefined art with each new work, art that challenged assumptions but was still respectful of tradition; art that embraced information and stretched our ideas; art about environmental issues; art that questioned ethics and aesthetics, that posed conundrums, made us laugh, reminisce, remember, ponder, and think. From that point on, Baxter's work poured forth and has never stopped.

After IT, Baxter formed the N.E. Baxter Thing Co., which in 1966 was transformed into the N.E. Thing Company, through which he became widely and perhaps best known. (The N.E. Thing Company was, for a time, an undertaking with Baxter's wife Elaine, later Ingrid, but was dissolved when they separated in 1978.) This corporate persona was a signal and an inspiration for General Idea and Fastwürms, among other later artistic collective initiatives.

The adoption of a corporate persona allowed Baxter not only to organize his artistic output into the various “departments” he worked in (photography, painting, projects, publishing, multimedia, etc.), but also allowed him to reinforce his basic thrust as an artist: what any one (N.E. One?) does has aesthetic value if one is aware of it. Hence Baxter's idea of inviting travellers to 'Start Viewing' a section of landscape by putting up a sign to alert them to an aesthetic experience that they could miss if they were unaware.

International critics began to notice his work in the mid-1960s, and have continued to think of him both as a leader in the conceptual art movement and as a clever, stimulating and strong exponent of a kind of art that has no or few imitators. He invented a new way to think and act as an artist in the information age. The consequence was inclusion in many international exhibitions (he represented Canada at the São Paulo Biennial in 1969), exposure in the international art media (he was the first Canadian artist to be on the cover of Art in America), and invitations to speak, teach or execute commissions in other countries. This led to friendships with such artists as Ed Keinholtz, Claes Oldenburg, Joseph Beuys, Ed Ruscha and Robert Smithson. These connections led to his work being acquired by major institutions in Canada and abroad – the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Gemeentemuseum in The Hague, the Los Angeles County Museum and others. Dealers in New York, Paris, San Francisco and London sought his work.

Brilliant, exhilarating, determinative exhibitions/installations like the crucial Bagged Place, and Piles, at UBC's Fine Arts Gallery, set a standard and a direction that Baxter has continued to follow. His work emerged in vacuum-formed still lifes; buttons (Art is All Over, Art Attack, Artoficial, Superficial (the boss of the 'artoficial'), V.I.P. [Visually Illiterate Person]); photographs, often hilarious extensions of other artists' works (a bagged and stuffed Mark Rothko made with coloured cotton batten, a funeral bag for a Harold Town painting or ribbons flying off in all directions from a Kenneth Noland chevron); light-box transparencies; small and large Polaroids – all with drawings, sites or company-like forms with specification information about the subject; ACTs and ARTs (Aesthetically Claimed Things and Aesthetically Rejected Things, like good- and bad-housekeeping seals); his bringing together in a gallery people with names of colours (Brown, White, Black, Pink), nouns (Kettle, House, Apples, Rain, Pipe) and even a preposition (With), and creating phrases by lining them up and photographing them as living still lifes (Kettle With Green Apples); his TransCanada videos; stuffed animals; shelves of plastic containers; aluminum and painted landscapes; the Eyescream Restaurant, with its 'artistic' menu (Group of Seven Snails); huge Cibachromes from the first Cibachrome lab in Canada, which he installed next to the restaurant where he hung his large light boxes (his first ones were done in 1968), and which had an early and lasting influence on such Vancouver artists as Ian Wallace, Stan Douglas, Rodney Graham and Jeff Wall. Baxter's 1976 Olympic poster, his publications like Piles, his inflatable landscapes with real air and water, and so many others, reflect his great productivity and wide-ranging imagination. A trip to the Arctic produced a clutch of images that have become part of Canadian art history. In sum, Baxter's work is inventive, varied, accomplished, resonant, witty, moving, satirical, disturbing, humorous, allusive and, above all, durable.

Despite the wide diversity and originality of his work over 40 years, Baxter's themes have been constant: a steady concern for ideas (how to think about art), for commercial systems and domestic objects that are close to and used by everyone, for the way we inhabit, treat and think about our environment, and for an art that is accessible and free of polish, taste or any arcane reference. His work is at hand: landscapes (urban, suburban and rural), still lifes (household utensils, tools, furniture, food, industrial products) and figures (people, animals, manikins). Little or nothing comes from the bohemian garret, café or studio.

For decades, Baxter has spurred his students to confront the nature of art and find their own forms of expression.He has motivated students to think about things in their own ways, to ask the right questions, to try to find the aesthetic values that surround them. His witty use of language (creating words, names and ideas that are fresh and arresting) is one hallmark of his original contribution. Baxter is a clever punster, a gentle satirist, a sly joker, whose work coaxes viewers to consider knotty issues, often ones about which he is himself very serious, such as his frequent and sometimes blunt references to ecological matters. Often, we are superficially delighted by our first meeting with a Baxter work, and then slowly but inexorably drawn into an awareness that he has given us a perplexing and challenging ethical bone to chew on. He is the Marcel Duchamp and the visual Marshall McLuhan of our times.

David P. Silcox, Managing Director of Sotheby’s Canada, is an art historian, cultural administrator and Senior Fellow at Massey College. He is recognized for his work on the painters David Milne, Christopher Pratt and Jack Bush. His most recent book is The Group of Seven and Tom Thomson.

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