User:Simonewharton/Sandbox5

¼ Mile Landscape is in the collection of the Art Gallery of Ontario located in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.

Description
For ¼ Mile Landscape, N.E. Thing Co. rented a quarter-mile stretch of road from along the Newport Harbour highway, in California. They placed three temporary signs along the road, one warning the driver “You will now pass by an N.E. Thing Co. ¼ mile landscape”, another that said “Start Viewing” and one signalling the end of the ¼ mile that said “Stop Viewing.” The landscape was set up as an art installation for the Newport Harbour Art Museum in 1969. After the exhibition was over the signs were taken down. All that remains of the installation is a set of photo-documentation and a map and sketch of the concept.

Historical information
¼ Mile Landscape (1968) is a conceptual art project by N.E. Thing Co. (NETCO), the registered corporation of Iain Baxter& and his former wife, Ingrid Baxter. ¼ Mile Landscape represents the MucLuhanesque ideologies of NETCO, and the dialogue the Baxters were attempting to create between art, consumerism, and everyday life. The company was a prime example of Marshall McLuhan’s theories on information technology systems and inclusive participation put into practice. Marshall McLuhan, the communications theorist, expressed that capitalist culture’s new technologies for media advertising stretched not only to goods and services, but to all means of information dissemination, and that these advertising technologies required active consumer participation for them to be effective. For NETCO viewer participation was key, as was the idea that art, like its information systems counter-part, is all over. “Art is all over” became synonymous with the company. They put the message onto buttons and distributed them, casting the idea off to reach as many people as possible.

The concept for ¼ Mile Landscape evolved out of the "Art is All Over" theory and is heavily rooted in its ephemerality as a temporary "installation." A part of the "Art is all Over" dialogue was a play on Good Housekeeping's seal of approval for consumer goods. NETCO developed a classification system for aesthetics placing a gold "ACT" (Aesthetically Claimed Thing) seal on "worthy" art and a red "ART" (Aesthetically Rejected Thing) on that, ironically, is not art. could be "claimed" or "rejected" based on a set of aesthetic criteria, just like consumer goods. The ACT seal of approval was generally placed on a wide variety of items such as: places, object, or reproductions of other artist's work from magazines or photographed by Baxter himself. Through its signage, 1/4 Mile Landscape became one of these claimed places.

Acquisition
This piece was purchased by the Art Gallery of Ontario for their permanent collection in 1980.