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Q+A: Iain Baxter&, Impossibly Canadian
Forty-two years ago in Art in America, critics Thomas M. Messer and David L. Shirey struggled to define an artistic phenomenon marked by characteristics resistant to categorization: aesthetic inconsistency, indiscriminate choice of subject matter, a disdain for typical structures of commerce and publicity. Messer and Shirey titled their article, and the movement now known as Conceptual Art, the art of the "impossible."
For the issue's cover, the editors chose a work by The N.E. Thing Co., an artists collective from Vancouver, and contemporaneous to the conceptual art scenes of New York and Los Angeles in the late 1960s. Operating as a real-life company with multiple "divisons" (including a restaurant called "Eye-Scream"), the N.E. Thing Co. used its commercial status to pose prescient questions about the relationship between art and commerce. Founded by Iain Baxter& in 1966, N.E. Thing Co. was legally incorporated in 1969 (with then-wife Ingrid Baxter becoming co-president in 1971. The company is one of many aliases assumed by the Windsor, Ontario-based Baxter& over the course of his career.
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Record Heat for CANADA
For four sweltering evenings in July, New York artist and musician Sadie Laska hot-boxed the Lower East Side's CANADA Gallery. The sessions she curated, called "Slummer Nights," were music and visual art performances that seemed impartial to polish and were all the better for it. The night Art in America visited, a selection of short films chosen by Brooklyn project space Cleopatra's were buttressed by two dark comedy performances.
Frankie Martin, an artist who works in both comedy clubs and art venues, was on first, pitching a routine of carefully botched stand-up. "Who here wants me to give them a tattoo? I don't have my license yet!" Was her opener. A nervous laugh was her audience's response. Martin's performances are usually a trial of endurance: for a recent project at the NADA Callicoon Art Fair—a "one-on-one" stand-up show taking place in a tiny teepee—she offered free admission, but only allowed those paying an exit fee to escape before the show ended.
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Stuart Hawkins says she was never any good at drawing. Upon deciding she to be an artist in the first grade, she arranged toys and stuffed animals, ev
