Artist Vincent Trasov is sitting on a park bench in Horseshoe Bay, talking about time, place, and creativity. He's talking about the differences between European and North American news media, and the attractions of the cosmopolitan life versus those of the pastoral. And he's talking about his art-world alter ego, Mr. Peanut. Up since daybreak to get from his cabin on the Sunshine Coast to this early-morning interview, the 57-year-old Trasov looks trim and fit. He could be the poster boy for voluntary simplicity, living without car, telephone, electricity, or running water. At least for part of the year.

One of the defining figures in Vancouver's avant-garde art scene of the early 1970s, Trasov has been based in Berlin for the past two decades. Every summer, however, he returns to British Columbia for a few months, spending much of that time in Roberts Creek, where he owns a parcel of wooded land with his career-long collaborator, Michael Morris, and with potter Mick Henry. "I'm back and forth like a migrating bird," he says.

Trasov first travelled to Berlin in 1981 on an artist-exchange fellowship, and stayed. "I like German culture," he says simply. "I like Berlin as a metropolis. I like Europe." Art and art-making, he adds, are a given in Europe, not something you have to explain and defend.

Tourists and locals walk by on the path that runs beside Horseshoe Bay's busy harbour. Some stare at and some are indifferent to the multimedia artist who, 30 years ago, gave us the ultimate art-meets-life performance. In the fall of 1974, Trasov ran for the office of mayor of Vancouver, in the persona of Mr. Peanut. Outfitted as that big, suave, leguminous seed, complete with top hat, monocle, white spats, and cane, he posed questions about the role of art in society.

Well, symbolically that's what he did. While campaigning and attending all-candidates meetings, he didn't speak; he tap-danced, and sculptor John Mitchell--who proposed the Mr. Peanut--for--mayor idea--spoke for him. "I became a symbol of the unknown and unexpected in art," Trasov later wrote in Style , a 1982 exhibition catalogue. Although he won slightly less than four percent of the vote, Mr. Peanut stole the media show, garnering extensive local and national news coverage.

The 30th anniversary of Mr. Peanut's election campaign coincides with Histories, an exhibition of Trasov's recent drawings at the Tracey Lawrence Gallery until next Saturday (July 31). The small ink-and-wash works depict the leggy nut in a variety of settings, past and present. Trasov first appropriated the Planters Peanuts emblem from the world of advertising and corporate branding in 1970, while working on an animation project. "That evolved into actually building a costume, so that I could make a film with me as Mr. Peanut," he explains. "And that's how the performer evolved, too."

After 1974, however, he retired the costume. "I couldn't really beat running for mayor of Vancouver as Mr. Peanut," Trasov says. And he was busy enough with his other alternative and iconoclastic art activities, including working with Image Bank, the artists' network he cofounded with Morris, and collaborating on projects with Toronto's General Idea and Vancouver's Western Front (of which he was also a founding member).

Still, Mr Peanut persists as alter ego and icon. In Trasov's drawings, he is depicted in a range of vocations (doctor, priest, fire-eater), sporting activities (boxing, soccer, cross-country skiing), and art-historical contexts (as the thinker in Auguste Rodin's sculpture of the same name; as a flí¢neur in Georges Seurat's painting La Grande Jatte ).

Most hilarious and most serious, however, are the drawings that interpose Mr. Peanut as a monument at historical sites. From the Northwest Coast of Canada to Nimrud, Iraq, Mr. Peanut is depicted as if carved into the towering architecture and statuary. "It's the absurdity of Mr. Peanut as a monumental figure," Trasov says. It's also a register of the violent flux of contemporary life, all over the planet. In alluding to the recent destruction of Buddhist statues in Afghanistan, the looting of the Iraqi National Museum in Baghdad, and even the removal of monuments to Vladimir Lenin in the former East Berlin, Trasov's drawings remark on the dangers inherent in the erasure of culture and history. "We're undergoing great upheaval in the entire world," he says. Luckily, Mr. Peanut is there to witness it.