Is It Art or Is It Refuse? Nowadays It’s Such a Fine Line

Sculptor Mowry Baden probably doesn’t realize the titanic reverberations that are bound to emanate from his $2.75-million lawsuit against UC Irvine, filed last month after excavation crews dug up one of his outdoor sculptures and hauled it away, thinking it was scrap metal, not art.

It happened when a ravine was being cleared to make way for faculty housing. Baden’s piece, entitled “Wild Celery for Stephen Davis” after a New York artist who had influenced Baden, was made up of four red steel ramps, three 60 feet long and one 40 feet long, partially embedded in that selfsame ditch. Wild plants had, as intended, grown in and around the work to become part of the artistic whole.

A university official sheepishly explained that the hapless workers, not knowing their art from a steel ramp in the ground, “would have looked at (the sculpture) as discarded steel. . . . You couldn’t even find them (the ramps), the location was so overgrown.” So they loaded up the pieces and trucked them off to a warehouse, though just where that warehouse is no one seems to remember.

Baden, who now lives in Victoria, British Columbia,said his sculpture was meant “to bring people closer to themselves as they move through a natural setting, to tune the viewer’s internal perceptual habits . . . . That’s done by adjusting the gradient and the camber of ramp surface, so you’re getting a strong signal kinesthetically. It’s coming through your motor nervous system.”

So maybe the hard hats weren’t feeling well. Their internal perceptual habits might have needed an alignment. Maybe they left their kinesthetics at home that day. Maybe their motor nervous systems were on the fritz.

Baden is understandably hurt and wants compensation for emotional distress and damage to his reputation. Imagine how embarrassing it must be for an artist to explain that his works can be found in places like the Guggenheim, the Museum of Modern Art and Santa Ana U-Haul Mini-Storage.

Life is already hard enough for today’s struggling artist who, more times than not, has to spend hour after frustrating hour explaining which end of a painting is up. Now they have to worry about fishing their irreverently piquant glass-and-metal constructions out of the recycling bin.

So I suspect that Baden is trying to set a precedent to protect his art-world comrades from suffering such indignities. After all, he’s not alone. Last year, janitors at the Duesseldorf Art Academy tossed out a sculpture of wood, butter and animal fat by avant-garde artist Joseph Beuys because they thought it was garbage.

But it’s such a fine line.

At least Beuys’ work was in a museum, where you’d think janitors would have learned long ago not to touch any tin cans or Twinkies wrappers lying around, especially if there’s a Warhol retrospective on.

If Baden should win his suit, I can only imagine what impact it will have on sanitation crews around Orange County--nay, the world.

Beach patrols could be barred from sweeping the sand each morning lest they disrupt some artist’s plastic-and-aluminum installation, “Six-Pack for Brian Wilson.”

And what about shopping malls? Will cleanup workers become gun-shy about spearing squashed popcorn boxes?

Already the action has had a profound effect on my life. I cringe when I think how many art works I may have inadvertently kicked, stepped on, bent, folded or otherwise mutilated in the empty field I played in as a kid.

Just the other day, I had to restrain myself from picking up a wadded-up piece of paper and a couple of paper clips on the floor next to my desk.

The more I looked at it, the more it stirred the kinesthetics of my internal perceptual habits, persuading my motor nervous system that it might actually be an ambitious, provocative and deeply moving “Elegy To Perry White.” In a word, art.

Hey, how was I to know?