Mowry Baden: What's He Building in There?
Interactive art has new critical currency and the Vancouver Island artist is counted among its leaders
When I hear Tom Waits singing "What's he building in there?" I think of Mowry Baden and his sculpture studio amidst the trees of the Saanich Peninsula, near Victoria, B.C. It's really quite pastoral, but Baden's own house is a fine surprise, its displaced Santa Fe-desert look such a spirited refusal to accept the damp marine climate of the Northwest Coast. Architecture is in the family blood, and so it's no surprise to find that the house has been designed by his architect son, Colin. In fact, the house performs a little memory work by maintaining the artist's link to his California days. Colin and Mowry have also sometimes collaborated on public sculpture projects under the name Leisure Monuments.
Surveying the span and depths of Baden's artistic practice, one is left with little choice but to be amazed at the singlemindedness of his commitment to a single idea: incorporating the viewer's participation in the work, one of the most difficult practical challenges in the realm of art-making. He makes work for people to walk on, sit on, pedal or perform with. He once proposed that his starting point is the body in motion, and he has pursued his project with conviction through four decades, in sculptures where ordinary life and art are intermingled.
If the works of Mowry Baden often look like some kind of recreation equipment, do not be fooled by appearances: these sculptures have an intimacy that unfolds in a homeopathic process of modelling. In other words, the sculptures take on an identity as technical devices, albeit with humour and style, in order to better reveal the nature of our relationship with these devices. Looking at even a few of his works gives a sense of his concerns regarding our built spaces, and, more importantly, shows us what happens when built space is exceeded or disrupted, the line where art begins.
Hudson Street Tomato, built in 1984 and first exhibited by Artists Space on the street in New York, is an example. Most of us have leisure equipment: skis, a bicycle, rollerblades, computer games, whatever. Since our other marvellous devices save us from so much labour, keeping fit and entertained has become a bit of a problem, and a whole new industry is ready to serve the need. Strangely, some people actually work on leisure. And so there are parks, weight rooms, yoga classes and skateboarding facilities. Baden seems to think that perhaps art fits here somewhere. Hudson Street Tomato collapses the division of work from leisure; the work consists of an exercycle with a live plant attached inside a plastic bag. Pedal, and the plastic bag inflates, creating a miniature greenhouse. Here is the ancient formula—working for food—spinning off into an elaboration of a world drawn from natural resources. Pedalling keeps the plant alive and growing. Pedalling keeps the artwork going, completes it. This circular wisdom would seem to answer many questions, and to question many answers.
This concern for movement is linked to Baden's quest to subordinate the visual surface to sculptural experience, and leads to such things as reduced lighting, as with Freckled Gyres, a 1999 sculpture first exhibited in Montreal at Galerie Christiane Chassay. Here, Baden darkened the gallery, leaving us to wander in search of the work, which turns out to be a chair-like sculpture that, once occupied, slowly spins, bends and twists. Hundreds of tiny light beams issue from a box attached to the chair, illuminating the gallery walls and defining the room as the chair rotates. Once the viewer is seated in the chair, a relational equation is set. The paradox is that at the centre we can experience being decentred. To ride the chair is to revisit implications of the body in the built environment as "there" becomes "here," and vice versa. The same reversal applies to our common-sense understanding of inside and outside, a condition of flux relative to perception.
Baden has made the wheel and centripetal sorts of movement a recurrent theme. It may be obvious, as in the works based on the standard exercycle, or slightly more oblique, as in The Wall of Death (1993), which is located under an urban freeway in Seattle, Washington. With the freeway overhead, it is an oppressive but complex place, saturated with the look and smell of urban car culture. The sculpture takes the form of an inwardly canted four-metre-diameter steel ring supported a couple of metres above the pavement on a dozen toothlike spikes. It is based on an early carnival entertainment in which a motorcylist would race higher and higher around the interior of a cylinder. The phrase "THE WALL OF DEATH" is cut out in a negative "shadow" text style to function like a banner. Baden's interest is in the motorcylist's interaction with gravity and centrifugal force and how experience of these forces reveals our earthy attachments, up to and including the experience of one's own mortality. Celebrating speed and danger, the carnival spectacle of the piece invokes a spirit carried over from the early Futurist avant-garde and its love of risk, noise and exhaust smoke. One wonders how it ever got through the commissioning process. Works of art for public spaces are usually meant to be inanely benevolent; this piece, with its invocation of death and mortality's permanent proximity, is a constant reminder of the momentariness of existence.
Baden once wrote, "This body (possibly mine) runs into other things, but more importantly, it runs into itself." This suggests a sort of folding process that brings us back from our involvement in equipmental contexts, from a shared world back into the "self" in a process of recollection. What is important in this process is not the recollection of a self that is lost in a world of equipment, but a remembering from a second order of forgetting, the forgetting that we have forgotten. This artistic terrain of Baden's is formed not with objects but in the relational connection of viewer to object.
His works are invitations to participate that bring us into situations that self-reflexively foreground the impact our tools have on modes of experience. That they solicit interaction becomes their praxis, their task-oriented way of working. What we find is a give and take between the viewer and the equipment, a process in which space is built and sometimes unbuilt. The conventional manner of viewing a work has been replaced by one in which the visual is less dominant, and the usual division of artist, viewer and work is transcended. With Baden, the sculpture is not a thing "over there"; it exists in terms of my engagement with it. We form a crossed relation, the sculpture and I—my exertion makes it while it makes me.
Spring 2004
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