Archive Freckled Gyres: Sculpture by Mowry Baden

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Steven C. Young's Essay

Mowry and I go back a long way, so it feels a bit belated that we should only now be collaborating on a combined theater and fine arts project. I first met Mowry when I came to Pomona College over thirty years ago. The details are a little hazy now, but I think Mowry had already been with the College for a little while when I arrived. Through him I met some interesting people, both students and teachers, over at the Art Department and began to run around with them. It was, you might say, an eye-opener. I remember one Saturday when Mowry asked if I'd join a work party at his house up on Eleventh Street in Claremont. He had a pokey little detached garage, the kind that often came along with those early tract houses, and he wanted to convert it into a studio. In particular, he needed more height, because he was making fairly large-scale sculptures back then. So he took a chain saw to the walls just above the door and sawed the roof free. He had rented some timber to build cribbing inside on the slab at each corner, and with a man on the jack at each crib, cranking away on command, we raised his roof. How high? Four feet, six feet, I don't remember now, but it seemed to be going way up in the air, and it swayed ever so slightly as it rose. I was amazed at the wide band of air (outside!) that was right there, between the walls and the roof, going all the way around the building. It seemed a shame that it had to be closed in again.

In those days I had been spending a lot of time in libraries reading books, and books about books, and while I wasn't a complete novice at pounding nails, this was a revelation to me. That someone would not only imagine doing that to a garage, but actually do it, seemed astounding to me, and deeply instructive. As it happened, this was but an early lesson, for since then Mowry and I have worked together many times, and each time has been as deep a pleasure as the roof raising. Our friends are our teachers—it’s as simple, and as complicated, as that.

What I learned from Mowry over the years was complementary to all the great stuff I had been getting out of the books. It had to do with a kind of physical and visual engagement with the world—how the body moves through an environment, what happens, what we can notice about this movement if we pay close attention to it. Two things are important to me about this—first, that this engagement is a possible and rewarding experience in any situation. Yes, I have it when I experience Mowry’s work in the formal and set-apart space of the gallery, but I had it also when I was stretching fence with him out in a field up on my place in Washington State—drawing a long line on the curved earth, seeing what that line did and what side of it I was on. The second important thing about this great lesson was its instrumentality in the work I went on to do, as I began to see what might be done in the way of performing the plays I had been reading. I began to understand that theater is just a fancy word for the body speaking and moving in a special place, and that there were wonderful experiences to be had if I could practice the kind of close physical and visual attention I had so often seen Mowry give to his sculptures.

This project, though far from complete as I write this, has already been rewarding to me, thanks to Mowry, and I have no doubt there is more pleasure to come. Still, what we have in prospect here is some risky business out along the border where art, theater, and music meet. Mowry has altered two of his recent sculptures, turning them into set properties for Tongues and Savage/Love, two plays written by Sam Shepard and Joseph Chaiken. I will be performing the plays, in Mowry's exhibition space, with electronic music by Pomona Professor Tom Flaherty (and a percussionist to be named later). In short, we are for the first time working in each other's bailiwick, and so anticipate unforeseen pleasures and problem-solving opportunities. What has kept me going so far is a peculiar sense of the fit between the texts I'm working with and the experience of Mowry's sculpture, a feeling that the two speak to each other in an implicit way. For me, the sculpture involves physical movement that begins in the utterly pedestrian and everyday—looking, walking, sitting, lying down—physical experiences normally taken for granted, which the sculpture turns into something strange and important. Shepard and Chaiken, by the same token, offer remarkably pedestrian language—ordinary, cliché-ridden American talk that becomes strange and falls through a kind of linguistic trapdoor into a place of heightened consciousness where a great deal is at stake. Thus, both works do the same thing in their own terms. I'm betting that they can accommodate each other, and I look forward to finding out if I can trust my intuition this time around. These days, I’m feeling lucky most of the time.

January 2000

Steven C. Young is Professor of English, Pomona College.