IAIN BAXTER&

IAIN BAXTER& capitalized and added an ampersand to his name in 2005, in order, according to the press materials for this show, “to underscore his belief that art is about connectivity, contingency, and collaboration with a viewer.” This is something of an understatement. The work of BAXTER&, who formed the N. E. Thing Company in the mid-1960s as a sort of Conceptual art licensing group, was predicated on the increasingly corporate nature of both the art world and daily life. The proclamation “art is all over,” which simultaneously heralded the mass proliferation of the art world and the dissolution of artistic copyright, was part and parcel of BAXTER&’s five-decade-long attempt to throw a spanner in the art world’s works.

Standards 24, 1962, an Asger Jorn–derived Expressionist painting diagrammed to show its interchangeable stylistic parts, provides early evidence here of BAXTER&’s analogy between the art world and the world of factory production. In the mid-’60s, BAXTER& took up this theme again, focusing this time not on the product but the packaging. Where his New York Pop contemporaries were imitating the visual languages of industrial and commercial design, BAXTER& was doing them one better by offering bagged and vacuum-formed landscapes and miscellaneous masterpieces such as Inflated Blue Sky, 1970, Bagged Rothko, 1965, and Pneumatic Judd, 1965, some of the most interesting pieces in the current exhibition.

The central portion of the show is devoted to the N. E. Thing Co.’s series of “ACTs” (Aesthetically Claimed Things) and “ARTs” (Aesthetically Rejected Things); and although many of the former are artful found objects while the latter mostly reject reigning art-world deities, ACT # 74, 1968, is a stack of Warhol’s Brillo Boxes. The exhibition closes with BAXTER&’s most recent photographs and installations, including a kitschy series of taxidermy-topped exhaust pipes and vintage TV sets painted with landscape scenes, which are switched on to reveal glimpses of static snow underneath. The manufacturing process has reached its final phase, it seems: recycling.