N.E. Thing got dirty with conceptual art
On its cross-Canada tour in 1969, N.E. Thing Co. played around with visual conventions about landscape and art. From B.C., for example, the company took a bag of local dirt east and added it to some dirt in Alberta. The art provocateurs also took some Alberta dirt and mixed it in with dirt in Saskatchewan, to make it even dirtier.
Iain and Ingrid Baxter, the husband-and-wife team who made up the group, picked up a bag of dirt from every province they travelled to — including Newfoundland.
When N.E. Thing stopped at the most easterly point in the country on the Avalon Peninsula, it put up a sign that read: “You are now in the middle of an N.E. Thing Co. Landscape.”
One of the highlights of N.E. Thing’s tour was an exhibition at the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa. They set up an installation in the gallery that looked exactly like the office of a successful company. Two of its official departments were ACT and ART, which stood for Aesthetically Claimed Things and Aesthetically Rejected Things.
Although company president Iain was usually the one in the media, visual arts columnist Charlotte Townsend quoted vice-president Ingrid in The Vancouver Sun on Friday, Sept. 5.
“There’s no real answer to the question: What does the public think about N.E. Thing Company,” Ingrid said. “The public that actually gets into an art gallery must be a filtered one.”
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, N.E. Thing was one of the most prominent names in visual art in Vancouver. By framing their art practice as a corporation, they were part of a new wave of artists who put Vancouver on the art world map.
Iain Baxter first came to the attention of the Vancouver media in a big way in 1966. He was awarded $500 for Bagged Landscape, one of his unique inflatable landscapes with water. It was one of three winners of the Vancouver Art Gallery’s $1,500 Centennial Award.
It so happened that a few days earlier, a new record of $18,000 had been paid at an auction for Emily Carr’s painting Trees in the Sky.
The proximity of the two events led The Vancouver Sun to write an editorial praising Carr’s auction results and criticizing Baxter’s selection under the headline “Fun’s Fun, But Not at $500.” The newspaper said public money shouldn’t be spent “to reward such frivolity.”
The controversy went on for several months in the pages of the newspaper. It not only publicized the Baxters and N.E. Thing Co., it also helped spread the word in Vancouver about a new way to make art that foregrounded the idea or concept as more important than the finished work. It’s an approach known as conceptual art.
Baxter’s series of bagged landscapes led to an article in Time magazine that called the artist the Jolly Bagman.
By 1970, N.E. Thing was invited to be part of a major conceptual art exhibition in New York called One Month with Robert Morris and Lawrence Weiner. He was also part of the influential 955,000 exhibition curated by Lucy Lippard at the Vancouver Art Gallery.
At the end of her column in The Vancouver Sun, Townsend said that N.E. Thing wanted to “subvert the visual status quo” with its art.
“By playing at being part of the Establishment, total subversion is in sight.”