Anodyne
Monday, September 27, 2004
 

Sculptor Mowry Baden, longtime UVIC prof, with maquette. Baden's works can be loosely categorized as sculptural, architectural, or environmental "machines" built to decenter viewers' bodily subjectivity (a mouthful, I know). Baden's real contemporaries are people like Bruce Nauman, Michael Asher and Gordon Matta-Clark, though his art has never achieved the same degree of public profile as theirs, probably due to his relative seclusion in Victoria.

All this thanks to some kind soul unloading a long-OP Art Gallery of Greater Victoria catalog, Mowry Baden: Maquettes and Other Preparatory Works, 1967-1980. 48 pages of densely theoretical text by Baden and lots of photographs of site-specific objects, many now destroyed. An early Christmas gift!

I only ever met Baden once. Grant Arnold and I had been at the AGGV on VAG business and were killing time before the evening ferry. Up ahead, a bald, quick-moving man in an incredibly loud untucked Hawaiian shirt was loading building materials into an old rebuilt dairy truck that looked like it had been mated with an armored car. "Hey, that's Mowry," said Grant. "Come on, I'll introduce you."

While Mowry and Grant conducted a twenty minute high volume discussion in the middle of the street, I observed that the pattern on Baden's shirt consisted of small armored dinosaurs marching briskly to and fro. "Nice triceratops," I volunteered, once the principals ran out of breath.

Baden drew himself up. "That's not triceratops," he proudly informed me, "that's protoceratops." Posted by Hello
- posted by cjb @ 8:30 PM


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