EXHIBITIONS / Fear of yodelling: Reality is a world of crocheting cowboys and tulip gangsters. Iain Gale finds more to Glen Baxter than meets the eye

On the riverbank of a tropical jungle a man sits hunched in despair over the wheel of his small boat. Beneath the image a simple caption explains his anguish: 'How he hated Saturday morning shopping.' Welcome to the world of Glen Baxter, where cowboys meet at crochet seminars and men live in constant fear of an outbreak of yodelling.

For 25 years Baxter has been feeding a loyal following with a visual version of the theatre of the absurd. His most recent works, now on show in London, are more than the simple cartoons for which they are often taken. Although he might use the cartoon format of a line drawing above a caption, Baxter does so only to achieve greater immediacy. His works are not intended merely to amuse. The artist wants to unsettle his viewers. 'It's got to jolt you out of your mundane way of seeing,' he says. 'That's the job of the poet and the artist.' And you might say Baxter is both.

Although the effectiveness of Baxter's works depends upon the juxtaposition of text and image, each element exists in its own right. Using pastel, watercolour and ink, he creates every picture with a skill that permits it to stand alone. Ned the cowboy, exiting with a typical 'So long old pardner, I'm heading out where the visceral and cerebral become one,' rides into a red-gold sunset which on its own would make a passable school-of- Rothko abstract. And here lies a clue to Baxter's roots. Trained at Leeds College of Art in the early 1960s, he found himself surrounded by contemporaries resolutely pursuing just such conformist abstraction. With equal resolve he refused to participate. 'When everyone's doing the same thing you should do the

other,' he proclaims. The 'other' for Baxter meant looking to an earlier tradition of Dada and figurative Surrealism. 'It was when I was at school that I became interested in Dada and Surrealism,' he explains. 'I had a terrible stammer when I was a child and sometimes, when I wanted to say one word, it was much easier to say something else. So when I first discovered Surrealism I thought 'I've been here already'.'

Like the early Surrealists, Baxter is aware that real life is more absurd than fiction. But in order to convey this understanding it is, paradoxically, to fictional sources that he turns for his imagery, plundering the collective memory of generations brought up on a cultural diet of Humphrey Bogart, John Wayne,

Doris Day, Roy of the Rovers and Boys' Own. Baxter's inspiration is based on genres of popular fiction that have today become parodies in themselves. But by addressing us through the iconography of a lost age of innocence, Baxter is instantly able to command our attention.

Baxter's visuals fall into two broad types. The first, the simpler, marries scenes straight from pulp fiction to obviously humorous captions. In the second Baxter uses the basic comic-book drawing style to create his own bizarre images in which a gangster shoots the heads off tulips or a boy plays table-tennis with a hand grenade. To such unlikely mises-en-scene Baxter then adds more deadpan captions. In both types though, it is the text which transforms the amusing into the wholly surreal.

Baxter's words read like the poetry of Aragon or Breton, or, at times like an existentialist one-liner from Beckett: 'Vance lived in constant fear of losing his wristwatch'; 'Big Al's tulip threshold was notoriously low', and 'Wearers of corduroy received preferential treatment.' With pictures such as the latter, in which a neat, besuited young man catapults a corduroy wearer through a trap-door, Baxter's work enters a long- standing tradition of serious English humour. This is the black comedy and self-parody which pervades the novels of Evelyn Waugh and the sketches of Monty Python, and which in its most recent form is typified by the pseudo-intellectual knowingness of Stephen Fry. Like Fry, Baxter seduces his audience with the comfortably familiar before delivering the below-the-belt body-blow. No one is safe from his savage wit; not even, it seems, the artist himself. We see a man wearing a kilt stuck in a tree, and looking at the caption below, realise with unease, that the speaker is out here, among us, in the audience: ' 'I'm of the opinion he's in this picture solely to inject a jarring note of incongruity into the otherwise mundane proceedings,' roared the brigadier.'

'Tuscan Rapture' is at the Eagle Gallery, London EC1 (071-833 2674)

(Photographs omitted)