Page 53 - Studio International - October1968

alignment, because of the Rockies, is with San Francisco and Los affects conditions in Vancouver. There are no cultural roots, and
Angeles a thousand miles to the south, making for that 'West Coast therefore virtually nothing to mediate between 'advanced' intellec-
culture' which strongly affects artistic affiliations in Vancouver it- tual or aesthetic positions and social/civic attitudes of the most pro-
self. Vancouver has the largest hippie population in Canada, and a vincial conservatism. Wealth in Vancouver is neither particularly
good deal of intellectual stimulus finds its way north from California, conspicuous nor particularly philanthropic (though like everything
along with the draft-dodgers. else, even that is beginning to change). There is one collector of note,
What one has, therefore, in Vancouver is a tightly-knit intellectual- young and learning as he goes. Two commercial galleries maintain
cultural scene, characterized by an alert and sophisticated awareness a precarious existence, promoting Vancouver artists in the face of
of being 'in touch' with metropolitan attitudes, grafted on—nothing. massive local indifference. It is an embattled position for art, which
This again is a typical Canadian situation, only more so. Harold is what gives the present Vancouver scene its peculiarly close-knit
Rosenberg's 'tradition of the new' is even more pertinent to Canada intimacy and militant stance (Toronto and Montreal have also been
than it is to the United States, and though the subject is one I shall through this phase, only a few years ago, but have already lost the
return to in my next article, it is relevant to mention here how it elan that goes with it. It is what New York experienced in the early
'50s, London in the early '60s. Vancouver's period of innocence will
almost certainly have passed too within the next couple of years).
At the centre of the battle is the Vancouver Art Gallery, which has
as its Senior Curator one of the most alert and energetic figures in
Canadian art today, Doris Shadbolt. She has watched over the Art
Gallery's transformation since 1963 from small-town exhibition
centre and depository for largely valueless bequests, to major status
on the national exhibition circuit and something like a creative force
in Vancouver's own artistic life. Characteristic of its enterprise, and
of its awareness of what Vancouver artists can themselves profit from,
was its promotion in April this year of the exhibition 6 Los Angeles.
New works by Robert Irwin, Larry Bell, Craig Kauffman, John
McCracken and Ron Davis, together with Keinholtz's Barney's
Beanery, were displayed as they had not been displayed before even
in Los Angeles. The show would have been important wherever it
was held, but perhaps its over-riding importance where it was lay
in its mint-fresh topicality as much as in its quality. No need for
Mahomet to go to the mountain when the mountain can be brought
to Mahomet, as far as Vancouver artists are concerned.
Four of these artists in particular typify the mixed, individualistic
`flavour' of the current Vancouver scene (which totally lacks any-
thing resembling a Vancouver `school'), and have leapt into national
prominence within the last two years. The youngest of them, lain
Baxter, is in fact virtually a scene in himself; which he acknowledges
by labelling his work in catalogue entries as products of the N. E.
Thing Co. (President, Iain Baxter). A compulsive ideas-man, whose
speed and occasional outrageousness of invention tend to provoke
suspicion as well as applause, he exhibits a curious two-sidedness
which is exactly the two-sidedness of Vancouver itself. A graduate
from scientific studies to art, he is overtly a technological experi-
menter to whom art is a particularly stimulating field for intellectual
play. He is best known for his obsession with plastics, which ranges
from the making of vacuum-formed reliefs to inflatables (including
deflatables) and bagged, wrapped and encased images of every kind.
One of his exhibitions consisted of a plastic-wrapped domestic suite:
another was folded into a suitcase and inflated on arrival. The
stimulus is evidently that of a restless, mock-satiric, intellectual-
aesthetic running commentary on a packaged-image society. Yet in
all his multiform activities, Baxter shows no sense of irony. He never
comments from the stand-point of an older tradition, and there is no
hint of that protest against contemporary values which can be felt,
for example, in Los Angeles art—both in the outraged bitterness of a
Keinholtz and in the withdrawal into contemplative formal perfec-
tion of a Robert Irwin or a Larry Bell. The mid-twentieth century
is still bright with promise in Canada, not dark with menace. In this
above left Michael Morris Untitled (Triptych) 1968 sense the other side of Baxter's art is revealingly, surprisingly, tradi-
acrylic on canvas 604 x 156 in. tionally Canadian. He remains romantically attached to the idea of
landscape in a way which most of his generation repudiate as the
above Michael Morris Captain January 1967
acrylic on canvas 80 x 56 in. last infirmity of an ignoble provincialism.
Nothing is more firmly out of favour at the moment than Canada's
left N. E. Thing Co. (lain Baxter, President)
one internationally-known 'school', the forest-and-lake landscapists
Bagged landscape with four boats 1966
vinyl, air, water and plastic boats 48 x 40 x 8 in. of the Group of Seven, in spite of the fact that several were quite