The Iain Baxter fonds, held by the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto, stands as an exception to what one might consider a typology of artists’ archive. On a familiar level, it includes documents on Baxter’s works of art and his teaching activities. But the fonds also incorporates records from the N.E. Thing Co. of North Vancouver, created in 1966, incorporated in 1969, and led by co-presidents Iain and Ingrid Baxter. This segment of the fonds contains a wide range of documentary materials. The company’s transactions with municipal authorities generated offcial documents, deeds, minutes, legal correspondence, and the like. N.E. Thing Co. produced graphic templates to advertise the services offered through its various departments. These seals, leaflets, information sheets and business cards were above all created for artists and art critics in the know, but they also served to legitimise the company among representatives of the business world.

The records held by public museums often offer unique residual documentary material not generally found in artists’ archives. In 1969, under the curatorship of Pierre Théberge, N.E. Thing Co. installed the company’s “head once” on the ground floor of the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa. For a time, this space reclaimed its original purpose, as the museum building was first conceived to house government offices. In keeping with this newly revived function, the remnants of the administrative tasks performed by gallery employees and the documents generated through the artists’ parallel business activities were placed side by side in the exhibition file. As a follow-up to this event, N.E. Thing Co. and Théberge published a corporate operations report.

As part of the 1971 Joyce Wieland retrospective entitled True Patriot Love = Véritable amour patriotique, Théberge once again shunned the bureaucratic veneer of the museum and his role as offcial propaganda organ. Instead of a traditional catalogue, the artist and curator produced a hybrid publication that appropriated the content of the 1964 Museum of Nature Bulletin No.146, Illustrated Flora of the Canadian Arctic Archipelago. In a close simulation of the cover of her model, Wieland juxtaposed Canada’s coat of arms with the bilingual title of the exhibition. She then subverted the document into a subjective tome of handwritten notes, photos, snippets of a film script, and dried flowers (with each of these interpolations subtly evoking the works in the retrospective).

The ironic use of public relations tools and offcial documentary protocols heralded the emergence of the parallel centres of the mid 1970s. Other projects conducted prior to this trans-canadian phenomenon had already begun to redefine the function of the artist as cultural worker. Between 1969 and 1977, Vincent Trasov and Michael Morris (with the brief participation of Gary Lee-Nova) operated the Image Bank network in Vancouver, skirting the conventional art circuit. Envisioned during the project’s infancy, the Morris/Trasov Archive (on deposit at the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, Vancouver) brings together the personal archives of the two artists and the documents gathered in the context of their Image Bank activities.

During its fledgling years, the organisation compiled the addresses of hundreds of visual artists, film-makers and art critics as well as their request correspondence (for images, letters, collages, etc.). Data was gathered using a form that included spaces to enter one’s contact information and the details of the request. A series of similar index cards later served to catalogue the documents Image Bank kept in its archives. In 1972, the organisation published its first alphabetical directory of the individuals on file. The distribution of this tool had a snowball effect that saw the entire network expand, and this in turn increased the volume of documents in the fonds exponentially.

Beyond the pragmatics involved, the strategies deployed to administer this influx of correspondence were both a parody and a utopian reversal of existing bureaucratic structures. Morris and Trasov viewed their accumulating wealth of documents as symbolic capital to be reinvested. To accompany the publication of its mailing list, Image Bank published an account of its activities since its creation in the format of an annual report. And, like so many of its collaborators (Dana Atchley, General Idea, Ant Farm, etc.), the organisation also produced logos, currency, letterhead, and rubber stamps.

The Image Bank concept and ideas were widely circulated by its participants, breeding a range of personal and collective myths. A 1972 request for images of the year 1984 led to an iconography of the future reflected in the art of many of the network’s participants. Within this same spirit, information management models were freely distributed with no artists claiming the rights to their offerings. In 1973, Glenn Lewis requisitioned everyday objects and assorted collections of items. These were then arranged in transparent boxes (each attributed a year between 1620 and 1984 by the participants) and collectively comprised the mural entitled The Great Wall of 1984, housed in the library of the National Research Council of Canada (Ottawa). Beginning in 1972, General Idea offered the pages of its FILE magazine to update the mailing lists compiled by Trasov and Morris. In 1974, the collective publicized the existence of archives, which contained among other documents, linked to the network activities, correspondence with Image Bank. This fonds is now housed at the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa.

Allan, Ken. “Business Interests, 1969-1971: N.E. Thing Co. Ltd., Les Levine, Bernar Venet and John Latham,” Parachute 106, (spring 2002): 106-123.

Buchloh, Benjamin H.D. “Conceptual Art 1962-1969: From the Aesthetic of Administration to the Critique of Institutions.” In October: the Second Decade, 1986-1996. Cambridge, Mass. : MIT Press, 1997. 117-156.

Crane, Michael & Stofflet, Mary, eds. Correspondence Art: Source Book for the Network of International Postal Art Activity. San Francisco: Contemporary Arts Press, 1984.

Lippard, Lucy R. Six years: the dematerialization of the art object from 1966 to 1972. Berkeley : University of California Press, 1997.

McLuhan, Marshall and Fiore, Quentin. The Medium is the Message. New York & Toronto : Random House, 1967.

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