Art
Comical
John McEwen
Glen Baxter is an English artist with a bigger reputation abroad, particularly in New York, than here. The understated humour of his captioned drawings now has an almost cult following, his admirers headed by several very distinguished American poets. John Ashbery sees him in the 'tradition of Lewis Carroll, Sax Rohmer. Marquis de Sade. Raymond Roussel, Luther Burbank and the Comte 'de Lainreamont'. Ron Padgett finds his 'refreshing. eccentric, intelligent, funny and charming' art formed from a recipe of `Ernie Bushmiller, Raymond Roussel, Herge, Bonzo Dog, The Marx Brothers. Georges Seurat. and Lady Dalhousie-Bogwrinaple'; as for Peter Nijmeijer of de Volkskrant he even detects `een halfgekookt exemplaar van Wuthering Heights'. All these tributes that accompany Baxter's second English one-man show, containing drawings, prints, watercolours and his first paintings on canvas (Anthony Stokes till 18 January), are equally applicable to the exhibition of the first ten years of his work (1970-80) at the Institute of Contemporary Art (till 25 January). Many of those mentioned by Ashbery and Padgett are indeed interesting to Baxter, who first visited New York precisely because their likes were more appreciated there than here, but it is the entirely conscious Englishness of his work that is most striking.
Baxter's reputation largely derives from his books of humorous drawings. but increasingly this represents the faster and non-contemplative side of his activity. The drawings are traced from the picture-story images in late Forties and early Fifties comics like Hotspur and the Wizard. Baxter then takes the mickey out of them by artful alterations and heavily understated captions. The presentation is the essence of clarity and precision, the message invariably ambiguous. It is rather like Baxter the name. Why should it be so stuffed with hilarious possibilities when something like Forrest is not? In an ironically archaeological glass-cabinet presentation of his effects at the ICA retrospective, Baxter includes two books 'by other Baxters' to drive home the point: Horses in the Glen by Gillian Baxter and The Unseen Enemy by Betsy Baxter. To be called Baxter is to be half, even the whole,way there. Accordingly, in Atlas, Glen Baxter's eighth publication in ten years, 'Colonel Baxter' heads into 'the foothills'. Scenes of colonial strife abotuid: 'Sybil gasped. There on N'Boto's palm was tattooed a perfect street map of' Dundee . . In his early efforts Baxter can be over-pawky. even student ish, hut nowadays, in Atlas, once again, he has the absolute courage of his convictions. Great Culinary Disasters of our Time culminates in the splendid, well-nigh fatal, explosion resulting from 'Chicken Fried Rice, Merthyr Tydfil, 26 September 1971'.
Baxter's painting shares the clarity, the ambiguity of his humorous drawings, but increasingly the intention is different. The drawings are deliberately traced to be stylistically neutral, but with painting, colour has to be chosen and it is impossible to disguise certain idiosyncracies of handling. The most recent liquitex on canvas pictures at Anthony Stokes's are unquestionably his most ambitious to date. The sensual possibilities of the medium are fully exploited and scenes of implicit Heath-Robinson jokiness are succeeded by clear, but unpeopled, studies of the imagined interiors of buildings. . These tightly structured compositions remain unspecifiable in terms of the observed world, but powerfully convey Baxter's declared interest in mystery and silence. They extend the range, without losing the essential ambiguity. of his drawings; and generally bode very w,cll for his artistic future.
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