Last year, the Art Gallery of Hamilton showed a two-city touring exhibition of recent work by Iain Baxter. The exhibition, first shown at the Art Gallery of Windsor in 1996, was called Products, Place, Phenomenon. Baxter was for me a familiar name as a figure in Canadian history. In the Sixties and Seventies he was co-president, with his first wife Ingrid, of the N. E. Thing Co. (NETCO) - an incorporated artist collaboration that exploited the protocols of a corporation to manufacture and disseminate their art. Rubber stamps, telexes, and letterhead were a big part of their end products. In fact, NETCO "products" were, more often than not, simply documentation. A NETCO landscape, as an example, was represented by a photograph of a sign posted along a roadside that read "Start Viewing" (1/4 Mile Landscape-Prince Edward Island, 1969). This was typical of NETCO: to make ideas, more than made objects, the art. Tagging the landscape shifted a roadtrip into an art experience - a kind of Holodeck landscape, actually, since you "experienced" it only as a mental image. The landscape was in the idea of it.

I had a few fleeting impressions of their work. That quarter-mile landscape photo, and pictures of NETCO's headquarters, with rows of office desks, telephones, and chairs, installed at the old National Gallery (Environment, 1969), and a room of furniture wrapped entirely in plastic (Bagged Place, 1966, reconstructed at The Power Plant in 1987). But the expansiveness of their activities and international relevance was pretty much a blur. NETCO was integral to much of the work that was coming out of Vancouver during its time - Ian Wallace, Ken Lum, Jeff Wall - and NETCO art projects and theories circulated well beyond Canada. But as for its influence on art trends now, I hadn't even considered its weight as a forerunner of much of the art I now see around me in Toronto.

My mistake, and so for many of us. I wasn't alone in drawing only a vague sense of N. E. Thing Co.'s importance. I asked artists whose works deal with art's subversiveness (or non-subversiveness) in the context of commodification, manufacturing, and advertising - the basis of most of NETCO's ideas. They too could only recall one or two works. (This is Toronto and not Vancouver where NETCO was born and grew, or Windsor where Iain now teaches, so the collected ignorance is partially due to geography, though still no excuse.) Nevertheless, the questions remain why N. E. Thing Co. isn't dropped into conversation the same way as Warhol or General Idea, and why Iain's work is so rarely seen in Toronto.

Products, Place, Phenomenon was all recent stuff and not part of N. E. Thing Co. (the corporation folded in 1978). But there was still a connection to the former co-president's aim of applying the systems of business to the manufacturing of art. The themes have shifted more towards Baxter's life-time interest in zoology and the environment (also present during his NETCO days). But it is his proliferation of ideas and his ability to make art that is about anything, and that anything - no matter how redundant, mundane or rehashed - can still be flipped over, time and again, for reconsideration. Looking at Baxter's work now is a reminder of how encompassing NETCO's theorical base was and how timeless its practices still remain.

Techno Compost (1996), for instance, was a chain-link bin of discarded and redundant technologies and appliances, an archival loot site for people to throw away their curling irons, toaster ovens, and vintage monitors. At the Windsor exhibition, Iain moved Techno Compost into the mall so shoppers could toss their old products away while shopping for new ones. Another installation, One Canada Video (1992, in collaboration with Louise Chance Baxter), was a 100-hour video taping of a roadtrip across Canada projected onto the inside windshield of a family van. The row of shelved tapes, which in effect contained a landscape of the entire country, was not unlike the "Start Viewing" landscape; the impact of the work resting on the idea rather than the actual viewing.

Baxter makes the communication channels between his art and viewers about as transparent as a string between two Dixie cups. Hamilton's art gallery was an ultimate joke room that besides Techno Compost and One Canada Video contained dozens of assemblages, paintings, cibachromes, objects, and still-lifes, each transmitting ideas like so many thought bubbles floating in space. A series of landscape paintings, for instance, were metal rectangular frames with their surfaces covered in a couple of primary-coloured shapes that distinguished hillsides from lakes and skies. On the side of some of the landscape-boxes were little LED clocks, as if these compressed vistas were timed to explode.

It would be hard to miss the eco-messages, especially with Trophies, a huge round blue painting of the globe. Stuck to it, like safari trophies, were the heads of stuffed toys. In one section of the globe was a mirror with text that read "We are here." (The mirror was there "to get the idea of what it would feel like to be a trophy," said Baxter about the work.) And, of course, Animal Preserve, the industrial shelving unit filled with stuffed toys pickled in mason jars of distilled water, was about extinction (Lola's cover is a detail of that work).

Animal Preserve, and the entire show, was also about the museology of contemporary culture, its disposability, and equally so, its collectability. This is where Baxter's work and ideas start to match up with themes found in work by artists in Toronto - a shared sense that overabundance coexists with extinction, and that value (a relative term) is measurable either by rarity or by popularity. Works like Sally McKay's Ernie and Bert collections, or Mitch Robertson's Cabbage Patch doll heads point out that worth can be manufactured. Michael Davey's Floaters, a series of oddball totem-sculptures built out of plastic flotsam (frisbees, tugboats for the bathtub, undefinable spongey things) all scavenged from the shores of Lake Ontario by Davey and his pet dog, make the value of these worthless discards, once collected and reassembled, altogether new and valuable.

The happy quotient and the direct communication in Baxter's work, designed to attract everyone to it, is not unlike John Marriott's Art that says Hello projects, with T-shirts, murals, postcards, and street performances making up much of Marriott's work, and all based, like NETCO was, on the premise that marketing, manufacturing, and disseminating is the art in itself. Friendly art as a concept was partially what brought NETCO its fame and glory.

It would be easy to dismiss Baxter's recent work as stemming too much from his earlier successes, and that there is a dated quality to Products, Place, Phenomenon - that is, if you were to read the ecological signposts in the work as being the end point. Oddly, NETCO also developed its conceptual ideas outside of similar themes and styles coming out of the U.S. at around the same time. Derek Knight suggested in his catalogue essay, N. E. Thing Co.: The Ubiquitous Concept (Oakville Galleries, 1996), the tandemness of NETCO's developments and conceptual art of New York were a parallel evolution. NETCO existed alongside, not as a byproduct but as an influence. A retrospective of Iain and Ingrid Baxter's NETCO and Iain's recent work seems due right about now.

Iain Baxter: Products, Place, Phenomenon was shown at Art Gallery of Windsor (March 30 to June 9, 1996) and at Art Gallery of Hamilton (September 16, 1997 to February 22, 1998).

"It is debatable whether N. E. Thing Co. has received its measure of critical recognition in Canada." Derek Knight, N. E. Thing Co.: The Ubiquitous Concept (Oakville Galleries, 1995). (ed. note: a great read)

"People say to me that what Baxter was doing five years ago was pretty good, but that they don't like what he has done recently. They've been saying it for twenty-five years now." David P. Silcox, N. E. Thing Co. (UBC Fine Arts Gallery, 1993).

"It is debatable whether N. E. Thing Co. has received its measure of critical recognition in Canada." Derek Knight, N. E. Thing Co.: The Ubiquitous Concept (Oakville Galleries, 1995). (ed. note: a great read)