Glen BAXTER: Beyond the Basalt Obelisk

Glen Baxter

Beyond the Basalt Obelisk

March 9–April 24, 2021 | Modernism Inc. | San Francisco

Glen Baxter Beyond the Basalt Obelisk

March 9–April 24, 2021

Modernism Inc. | 724 Ellis Street | San Francisco, CA 94109

Clearing the prairie of mosquitos..., 2020, crayon and ink on paper, 31 x 22 1/2 inches

Glen Baxter on the Artistic Frontier

By Jonathon Keats

While visiting an Arizona dude ranch in the 1980s, the British artist Glen Baxter met a cowboy who said he’d once “gone through the Tate Gallery in London.” Looking at the cowboy and listening to his phrasing, Baxter imagined a man on a horse galloping past some paintings.

Back home in England, Baxter transformed his fantasy into a line drawing. He outfitted his cowboy in a ten-gallon hat, a blank expression on his face. The horse kicked up clouds of dust. The gallery walls were hung with landscape paintings in ornate frames. “Hank’s tour of the Louvre usually lasted about eighteen minutes,” Baxter wrote as a caption, meticulously accurate in his approximation.

Baxter has been obsessed with the American West since childhood. Growing up in the bleak northern city of Leeds in the 1950s, he was introduced to the frontier by the Westerns screened at his local cinema. In addition to cowboy movies, he saw films by the Marx Brothers, replete with absurdist humor. Baxter enrolled in the Leeds College of Art in 1960, where he encountered another American export. The school taught Abstract Expressionism, which he found to be both pompous and derivative, but which was ultimately as formative as the two more agreeable influences of his adolescence. As Hank’s tour of the Louvre illustrates,

I gave up the world of haute couture..., 2006, crayon and ink on paper, 30 1/2 x 22 inches right: After lights out..., 2018, crayon and ink on paper, 22 1/2 x 31 inches

Baxter’s art triangulates between absurdity, naïveté, and pretense.

Although Baxter has drawn abundant material from all walks of life—and he is as adept at depicting boarding school lads as galley slaves—art history has provided him with ideal territory for his triangulation. The sacrosanct status of high culture invites irreverence, and his playful desecration might just offer the change in perspective needed to see the enshrined art of the past with renewed clarity. Baxter’s cowboys on the range and ordinary blokes in suburbia dutifully perform this role on the artist’s behalf.

Baxter’s artistic approach originated with his deep appreciation of Surrealism. Early in his career, he was especially inspired by the 1930s collages of Max Ernst. Baxter’s interest is

Rumours of my penchant for Marcel Proust..., 2006 crayon and ink on paper, 30 1/2 x 22 inches right: Social distancing had finally allowed Uncle Frank..., 2020 crayon and ink on paper, 14 7/8 x 10 3/4 inches

not surprising, given Ernst’s expert appropriation of Victorian engravings and subversion of their self-conscious propriety through nonsensical reshuffling and juxtaposition. Ernst’s project was to defamiliarize the culture people took for granted, surfacing the latent assumptions of society through a sort of material psychoanalysis. In interviews, Baxter has said that his discovery of Ernst was a revelation, showing him what he wanted to do but also stopping him because it had already been done.

Instead of repeating the past, Baxter took his own history into consideration. In addition to the cowboys and the Marx Brothers, there were the books he’d found in the Leeds public library, especially the children’s adventure stories of W.E. Johns, which recounted the fictive

For two years..., 2008, crayon and ink on paper, 15 1/4 x 10 1/8 inches right: It was only later..., 2020, crayon and ink on paper, 15 1/4 x 10 1/8 inches

adventures of Royal Air Force pilot James Bigglesworth. The classic British sensibility of the Biggles series provided a vernacular well suited to absurdist mischief, as did the over-the-top language ludicrously at odds with the young audience. (“The sky was illuminated by a phosphorescent glow, it was not constant, it waxed and waned like the reflection of a colossal blast furnace,” wrote Johns in a typical passage.)

Although Biggles was not a comic book, the tone translated naturally into a visual style that Baxter enlisted to upend the society he lived in using the leverage of humor. His surrealism was distinct from Ernst’s in terms of both style and technique. His visual deadpan bore closer resemblance to the studied banality practiced by another important influence, the

On the Rietveld Range, 2001, crayon and ink on paper, 30 1/2 x 21 1/4 inches right: Looks like you’re sliding..., 2005, crayon and ink on paper, 30 1/2 x 22 inches

Surrealist painter René Magritte, but Magritte’s main stock in trade was a sort of psychological trompe l’oeil. The foundation of Baxter’s work is the intentional embrace of qualities that made Biggles ludicrous: the awkwardness of pictures and words that are slightly unsuitable for the task he’s given them and don’t quite connect. The frisson (to use a favorite word of Baxter’s) arises from the inappropriateness, which is neither as random as a blunder nor as targeted as satire.

Transposing this aesthetic to the Wild West only heightens the effect, especially when the Wild West becomes the backdrop to wrangling with the convolutions of modern art. The present exhibition at Modernism shows the multiple ways in which Baxter manipulates these

We’ll have no more talk..., 2019, crayon

n and ink on paper, 22 1/2 x 31 inches

With Uncle Frank..., 2020, crayon and ink on paper, 31 x 22 1/2 inches right: I knew I could rely..., 2014, crayon and ink on paper, 15 1/4 x 10 1/8 inches

improbable circumstances. Baxter is always triangulating, but the territory he triangulates is more varied than the terrain west of the Mississippi.

Like Hank at the Louvre, most of Baxter’s Westerners are on the receiving end of established art, as opposed to his Brits, who are often hapless painters akin to his classmates in Leeds.

In the most straightforward examples, his cowboys are as befuddled as we are by the circumstances Baxter has conjured. Confronting a painting that is manifestly out of place in his world, for instance, Big Jake draws his pistol and shoots to kill, a kneejerk reaction to uncertainty playing off cowboys’ legendary aversion to strangers. In his rawness, he blasts complacent acceptance of high culture, while also revealing the weakness of macho ignorance.

Big Jake’s views..., 2020, crayon and ink on paper, 31 x 22 1/2 inches right: To my mind..., 2014, crayon and ink on paper, 31 x 22 1/2 inches

Other works cast cowboys in the unlikely role of sophisticated art critics, whose body language lends physical menace to the fighting words of academic debate. Aping artworld pretense, Jed and his pistol-packing interlocutor make artistic discourse sound ridiculous while also implicitly questioning the conviction with which cognoscenti express their opinions. The plainspokenness of the frontier might increase clearsightedness about art, but the meagerness of the work that Jed is defending suggests that there might not be much left to talk about after the smoke clears.

A third category of Baxteriana puts art to work in ways that are perfectly logical from the perspective of frontier life, blithely ignoring its cultural value. Using a Rothko as cover against an onslaught of arrows seems barbaric until we consider the cowboy’s precarious position,

Having a spare Rothko..., 2020, crayon and ink on paper, 14 7/8 x 10 3/4 inches right: Tex was definitely..., 1998, crayon and ink on paper, 29 1/8 x 22 1/8 inches

which is a matter of life and death. What at first appears to be artistic nihilism reminiscent of Dada turns out to be more profoundly disturbing. People have killed for culture since the beginning of recorded history. The Manifest Destiny driving white settlement of the American West is an especially egregious example of genocide in the service of cultural hegemony.

The absurdity of a cowboy shielding himself from attack with a painting that belongs in a big-city museum is merely the surface layer. Recognition of the arrows as a synecdoche for Native Americans—victimized by the cowboys who historically were the front line of Western high culture in the American West—is but the first inversion of many.

And yet, the drawing is undeniably funny. For all of Baxter’s triangulations, and the

We don’t hold..., 2007, crayon and ink on paper, 30 1/4 x 22 1/2 inches right: Uncle Frank emerges..., 2020, crayon and ink on paper, 14 7/8 x 10 3/4 inches

complex calculations that may underly them, that is their most remarkable quality. Like the Marx Brothers, who confronted some of the most serious issues of their time through the lens of absurdity, Baxter uses humor to address issues too complicated be fully parsed with straightforward seriousness.

“What I really want the viewer to experience is the exact feeling of not knowing what to make of things,” Baxter told The Comics Journal in a 2016 interview. The disorientation he felt on that Arizona dude ranch, imagining a cowboy riding his horse through the Tate, is the experience his drawings are meant to impart. The subsequent reorientation, however, is up to each of us individually.

Derek was always insisting..., 2018, crayon and ink on paper, 14 7/8 x 10 3/4 inches

We discovered so many ways..., 2020, crayon and ink on paper, 14 7/8 x 10 3/4 inches

How to have fun in Switzerland No. 264..., 2018 crayon and ink on paper, 15 1/4 x 10 1/4 inches

The advanced taxidermy secton..., 2019, crayon and ink on paper, 31 x 22 1/2 inches

During the long weeks of quarantine..., 2020 crayon and ink on paper, 10 3/4 x 14 7/8 inches