Archive Freckled Gyres: Sculpture by Mowry Baden

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Mowry Baden's Interview

Mowry Baden's artistic terrain is formed not with objects, but with the relationality of viewer to object. Invitations to participate, his works bring us into situations which self-reflexively foreground the impact of our tools on modes of experience. Interaction is solicited by the work's praxical or "task" orientation. A participant is confronted not with a work to contemplate, but with an invitation to engage in a task or an experiment, the goal of which is not immediately apparent. It may be that "task" is too Protestant a term, but neither "play" nor "experiment" seems quite right either, the first suggesting some vague Platonism and the second implying something free of consequence. Perhaps, here in the interview we can reflect on these concerns.

Horne: How about beginnings? You grew up in Southern California, father an architect, mother in real estate, and you studied at Stanford and Pomona. Your early studies in art were in painting, I think. So what took you from the optical realm of painting to the tactile space of sculpture?

Baden: I turned to sculpture to clarify painting problems. Then I added sculptural elements to the paintings, and finally gave up painting altogether.

Horne: It seems to me that teaching has always been an important dimension of your artistic practice, that there is something essential about the integration of your studio practice with teaching, something that has to do with the participatory/pedagogical aspect of your sculpture, and with its "populist" stance. Do you agree?

Baden: At first the interactive work was anything but "populist." I used my own body to test the works. Later, I looked for ways to make the work accessible to people who were bigger or smaller than me. That seemed to open things up a lot. For one thing, a dialogue could ensue between people. After trying the work yourself, you could watch your friend deal with it, but you couldn't get into her body to know what the experience there was really like. You could talk with her about it, hear and offer testimony about it. Maybe narrow the gap. Maybe broaden it. For me, that's what teaching is, the simple act of listening carefully, speaking clearly, and savoring disagreements.

Horne: What does it mean to call your works sculpture?

Baden: They may not look like most sculpture, but that's not the important thing. Beckett's plays, for example, barely qualified as theatre, and there were many who saw the Blin production of Waiting for Godot who said it couldn't be thought of as theatre. There are plenty of people who'll say that Gordon Matta Clark was not an architect, but it turns out he was one of the century's best.

Bob Perlman would say:

"As long as there's even one category there's room for improvement and nothing else, all the way to the top, everybody has that right. If one pyramid gets too crowded, start your own." (from "The View from the Dollar Bill," in Face Value, p. 23)

Is cinema or painting or theatre or dance a better category? Architecture may come closest. Truly great buildings give precision to the visitor's movements-enough precision to make anyone who might enter feel the emergence of an unfamiliar and destabilizing body within themselves.

Of course this is all hindsight, but in retrospect, sculpture is the only cultural norm that would come close to a fit, given my peculiar needs and skills and the habits of the time.

Horne: I guess there is a more obvious question here, and that is: Why did you adopt an object-oriented practice, rather than taking on ephemerality, either in the direction of the social context, as Michael Asher did, or through an explicit integration into the architectural space, like Robert Irwin, for example?

Baden: I've been less puritanical of late and have allowed greater material particularity in the work. An odd turn for a practice dedicated to decentering vision.

It's not that the object and the gallery go away, but rather that their allure and particularity deteriorate as the viewer enters the object and rides her body into and through an experience that is visceral, internal, and sensorially cross-circuited. Call it a crisis that dislodges the object's anchor. Maybe it's not ephemeral in the true sense of the term, but it's certainly elusive and brief.

When the crisis is over, we take up where we left off; we rediscover the gallery and find it and the object alien or familiar, substantiated or rendered suspect.

Horne: What about the sciences and architecture, which show up frequently in your work?

Baden: My father was an architect, and so the business was in the home, and I got a long look at the hard side of it. Maybe my father's life was one that I was unwilling to repeat; though of course we do repeat our parents' lives in many other ways. Frank Baden was hugely generous with his time where his children were concerned. It seemed that the most interesting thing in his life was some project we were doing with his help. He taught me most of what I know about making things. He showed me how to model in clay, how to draw and make watercolors, how to use all of the tools in his large shop, how to lay out information in plan and elevation. He knew a lot about conceptualizing and building things and wanted to share it all. When it was clear that he'd taught me all he knew, say about portraiture, he hired an artist-friend to carry on where he left off. My mother wanted me to be a doctor, like her father. I was sorry to disappoint her, but she took some consolation in the fact that I spent so much of my time teaching, and she saw an affinity there with the healing arts.

And science. So much art betrays a casual dalliance with science. My soft spot is for perceptual psychology-the gestalt version (American branch). It's now pretty much in the dustbin, having been replaced by neurophysiology and cognitive science. Nonetheless, I remain convinced that the perceptual lode still bears ore and will be mined for generations to come, particularly by artists who never need to explain how the brain works anyway.

Horne: Your sculptures are usually free-standing objects that suggest mundane pieces of equipment, from the early seat belts pieces up to Freckled Gyres, 1999, which incorporates an ordinary domestic chair. And although there is the possibility of bodily interaction with the work, it is also possible to walk up to one of your sculptures and look at it in the conventional way, finding it interesting or not. How would you describe the connection between the visual/formal aspect of your works and their relationship to the conceptual tradition?

Baden: In its early stages, some people saw my practice as part of the conceptualist agenda. The seat belts, for example, have almost no allure as objects. They lie in a pathetic pile on the floor without a trace of the heroic. They can only gain scale, size, significance, and psychological "mass" when worn and tested. By ordinary people. Is that a conceptualist preoccupation? That a proposition belonging ordinarily in one context loses its customary authority when it is introduced into another?

Horne: Your work could be considered along with the work of other artists such as Lygia Clark, Michael Asher, or Robert Irwin, who also moved away from the building of "interesting objects" into the social dynamics of place and visibility, into ephemerality, yet with some ambitions similar to yours and rejecting, as you do, the "stand back and look at it" principle. I wonder if this is where your works belong within the great trajectory of "conceptual" art or "dematerialized" art?

Baden: I have a lot of empathy for Asher's work and am plain amazed at the richness and complexity of many of his early pieces. The one I know best is the work he made at Pomona College, which I helped build. In 1970, he made two interconnected triangular gallery spaces. He removed the gallery doors, thereby opening the piece to 24-hour access. Walls, ceiling, and floor were painted white. The illumination came principally from daylight or, at night, from nearby streetlights. The visual experience was not unlike "whiteout" in dense fog. Acoustically, the inner triangular room resonated with existing sounds coming through the open gallery doors from points up to half a mile away. Curious, isn't it? This practice with so much and, at the same time, so little materiality.

As for Lygia Clark, it seems to me that removing herself from the art arena liberated her. Her practice could then focus on individuals, her unusual openness allowing her to see how an interaction with an object could reach deep into a troubled mind and make revelations possible. From what little I've seen of her work, the material consequences were slight. As inconsequential as a plastic bag filled with water and held in the hand.

Horne: There is a real tangle here, between different understandings of illusion, permanence, and the "autonomy of art." There are many defenses of "illusion" in art, and generally, they tend to argue for the isolation of art and against its integration into the realms of technics, commerce, and entertainment. Defenders of minimalism construe autonomy in other ways, but perhaps you have another take?

Baden: This question set me to thinking about early modernism. And I thought about Mallarmé. Charles Rosen said about him that "His poems may be said to detach themselves partially from the literary tradition that made them possible-at least they appeal over the head of that tradition to manifest themselves as part of the language itself, but a language purified of the ordinary slipshod meanings it has in life, cleansed of the daily need simply to communicate. 'To give a purer sense to the words of the tribe' is perhaps the most often quoted line of Mallarmé." Apparently, what Mallarmé said in an earlier version of this poem was, "To give too pure a sense" (we are indebted to some indefatigable scholar for this gem). My take is that Mallarmé, yes, wants to outrun instrumental language, and at the same time, yes, wants to say that the task is too great and even a little ridiculous.

Horne: The status of your works as "equipment" is interestingly ambiguous because of their simultaneous allegiance to the autonomous status of art. The real is the permanent, the illusory is the temporal. You intervene into this proposition with your devices, sculptures that can self-reflexively help us untangle this mess. Isn't it paradoxical that you use "machines" to deconstruct our cultural appetite for illusion, this appetite understood as a consequence of our technology's drive to put the flux of life on permanent hold?

Baden: First a note about my material fabrications. Everything I do in the studio, I do in the simplest and most uncomplicated way; it's all at a pygmy level (no Boeing 747 is being assembled in the studio, and no DNA-mapping apparatus is being applied there to a single cell). We are artists, after all, and work best at our lofty ambitions with modest means

For the other part of the question, about technology writ large: To know what our neighbor knows takes some doing. Reading the same newspapers and fitting our bodies to the same machines gives some comfort, but the isolation persists. Freckled Gyres is a machine and it does produce a spectacle. See, however, that people try to explain to one another what happens inside the spectacle and inside their own bodies. This is more than a distraction. On a good day, the machine's authority dwindles. Only the impulse to tell the way through a crisis remains.