New Art Examiner

Arts & Visual Culture From the Greater Midwest

May-June 2001

 

 

Iain Baxter

 

Had he lived in quattrocento Florence rather than in Canada at the turn of the second millennium, Iain Baxter probably would have belonged to the guild of physicians and pharmacists, which is to say the guild of painters, under patron Saint Luke.  Yet to suggest that Baxter is a painter may seem mistaken at first, given an outstanding body of work that has long made use of pre-fabricated, pre-packaged, and plastic commercial goods in addition to countless non-material and performative forms.  Once on the cover of art magazines but not largely forgotten, Baxter’s work (as well as that of the N.E. Thing Company or NETCO, the art collaborative Baxter cofounded in 1969) may well be instrumental in helping to chart the formation of such movements as Pop, Minimalism, Process, and Conceptualism, as well as in understanding painting since World War II.

            For almost four decades, Baxter has dealt in raw, synthetic materials often extracted from supermarket shelving.  In the 1960’s, critic Clement Greenberg’s aesthetic dicta arguably laid the groundwork for Baxter’s lifelong investigation of “plastics” a full two years before Benjamin Braddock received the era’s catchword as foolproof career advice in The Graduate.  Still Life: Spray Cleaners from 1993, for example, features 15 household commodities like Windex, Pine-Sol, and Lime-A-Way, evenly distributed along a shallow formica shelf.  This work joins other recent pieces, such as Killer Still Life and Breadscape, that supplant the color palettes of grocery products. 

            Some work in the show recalls NETCO projects like Language-Color Research-Food from 1974 in which products like red and yellow beans were mixed to create a third color.  Baxter’s appreciation of the formulae, particularly in terms of color, that comprise each substance he depicts comes across best in work like Primaries, Primaries and Green, and Primaries plus Black and White.  Each of these works is a carefully selected series of items representing the culmination of Baxter’s years of systematic “color research,” not unlike that of his would-be quattrocento guild fellows who expertly ground and mixed their own ingredients (one explanation for why painters held membership alongside doctors and apothecaries).

            Baxter’s recent work seems to comment on the toxicity of common grocery products—for example, Killer Still Life depicts pesticides, while the “Primaries” works are studies involving such chemically engineered and color-rich commodities as Windex, French’s mustard, and Maraschino cherries.  These pieces convey a new urgency, as if the artist now belongs to a guild of environmental activists addressing global economics and warning of impending catastrophe.