Strong Show from First Year Art Graduates
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2A Thursday, May 24,1984 Daily Nexus ORCHID BOWL Strong Show from First Year Art Graduates By MATTHIAS • • ROSENTHAL Usually, exhibitions of EVERY OTHER contemporary modem art just bore me out of my mind, BMME FREE and I find myself looking at Moidiy, May 21st tfen Momorlal Dayl pretty women looking at Oror Rowllni «fen Lams avrMrMr ugly artifacts, musing about how much superior nature’s OPEN 24 H O URS products of beauty are to the Take a Bowling Breakl arbitrary attempts at meaning of some modem O R C H ID BO W L - GALLEO N R O O M art. The course of modem art, it seems, has been the 5925 Calle Real - Goleta • • • Ph. 967-0128 elimination of three things: beauty, pleasure and artistic skills. Don’t get me wrong: this exhibition is different. The 1984 WÆ.B. DU BO IS UCSB Art Department’s first year graduate students W8ITKVG aW ftfiBS are now presenting a small but exciting selection from their recent work. Louise Fowler-Smith, Victoria Palrick Bernard gesticulates in front of his piece, L a s t Tango Taylor-Gore, Patrick Deadline is this Friday, 5/25 Bernard, Sharon Coughran, Jerusalem.” MITCH VICINO/Nwus Michael Drury and Joyce Flager feature pre and post- frustrating them, as is so often the case in contemporary apocalyptic issues, which are, as a matter of fact, artistic art. beautifications of imminent and immanent psychological Fowler-Smith’s preoccupation with her Australian origin, Please submit your essays, and historical (or should I say: post-historical?) horror. is obvious. She uses images and forms she has found while short stories, and poetry to: But there is absolutely no tendency towards formal and studying the art of the aboriginals, yet presenting them in E.O.P. Building 434 intellectual compromise, and all artists have managed to such a way that they become allegorical of modem man’s present their work in an aesthetically pleasing and, before alienation from his body and his mind. In a multimedia Awards will be presented at all other things, beautiful way that invited the spectators to object called “ Ode to Walkabout” (an homage to Nicholas E.O.P./Black Graduation Banquet. deal with the issues implied, instead of putting them off and Roeg’s movie from the late ’60s) she employs painting, wooden debris, eerie pre- historical music from an endless tape hidden inside the object and photosen sitized broken mirrors. It’s Art that you can touch, and it has become quite frighteningly alive. Clearly the most striking and most controversial exhibit is Bernard’s “ Last Tango in Jerusalem,” an ironic fusion of Leonardo’s “ Last Supper” and Ber tolucci’s “ Last Tango in Paris.” Bent bottles filled with blood, a bent hour-glass (into which a desert land scape is inscribed) are painted equivalents of motion picture techniques which are combined with primitive apostles grouped around a faceless Lord, and all figures are totally reduced and regressed sub men who look like they are wearing gas-masks. Obvious and telling as all the em ployed symbolism is, Ber nard has managed to read revelation into old and modern symbols and fused them for unabashed political and social comment. I was particularly fascinated by Kenneth Gore’s “ Electric Sheep.” He has fabricated artificial animals (symbols of Jesus that might well be con F O R A Ç O O f sidered subtexts of Ber nard’s painting) equipped with electronic brains and steel-wool, weird science fiction creatures that or thodox Christians might have some difficulty with, recognizing in them the familiar sacrificial Easter Jesus lamb. The “ Electric Sheep” is quite an excellent way of demonstrating how regressive modern technology can be and how % â ;Ê threatening seemingly «"'■ m m ii- familiar and harmless nature can be. All in all this is an exhibition that combines elegant artistic beauty, a good sense of humor, philosophical and in tellectual speculation, serious social concern as well as entertaining material. It’s UCSB art by UCSB artists, and you should not miss it. It does deserve attention. (At the UCen Art Gallery.) C 1983 Adolph Coots Com pany Golden. Cotoiodo 80401 Brewer of Fine Quality Beers Since 1873. Daily Nexus Thursday, May 24,1984 3A vocal skills to create a memorable and very funny .......................... >m Kills 'W oyzeck' character. On the technical end, the production is merited by L. K. Unfortunately, the play is in dire need of another Strasburg’s efficient stage design, including a well-utlized rewriting as it is already yellowing with antiquity. The dialogue works against the play’s credibility with lines that tilt; the lighting by Teresa Petach underscores the ap are either stilted or anachronistic; e.g., one soldier to propriate ambience — somber to dark to depressing; and another while admiring a lovely village girl, “ Look at that Claremarie Verheyen’s costumes and makeup are nicely piece.” This is 1910? Or, in reference to that same girl, complementary to actor and action. “ everyone is a chasm.” In short, the dialogue is hardly As a play, however, Woyzeck is, simply, unengaging naturalistic. drama. Saturday’s audience was not moved, and the less Another aggravating aspect is the two assistants to the than warm applause proved it. Woyzeck “ sinks like a stone Doctor who do little more than stomp (everyone, in fact, in those dark waters” of the theater, to quote one of its own seems to stomp and drop things as loudly as possible) bad but ironically appropriate lines. across the stage like a bad stand-up duo. Is this a presen tation of the senselessness of medical science exploitation? Comic relief? What? Meanwhile, poor Woyzeck is punched in the kidneys, jabbed in the chest, prodded, kicked in the groin, and slapped in the face, in addition to being misunderstood and brushed off into the alienation of Man’s Potential Moral Abyss. These actions occur so often that you would have to have fallen asleep to not get the point within the first five minutes. The gory motions of the play’s climactic stabbing are We're Celebrating our well-choreographed but the act is neither shocking nor cathartic; it only leaves one red with annoyance. I suppose 2nd Anniversary the number of stabs is significant? The sound effects un with a special lunch deal... derscore the overall lack of cohesion in Woyzeck. While much attention is paid to footsteps, grunts and groans, why ANY LUNCH is it that during an intense emotional scene, a dagger falling COMBINATION PLATE rnoto oy unristopner uiennon into a pond sounds like a tire iron getting chucked into a car Douglas Kaback and Cecelia Kouma are trunk? The audience’s disbelief is never suspended. There FOR ONLY is no Brechtian tooling here, only some shortcomings that Woyzeck and Marie in the drama depart (reg. $2.95) ment’s production of Buchner’s Woyzeck. distance the audience into alienation of the seat-squirming kind. M -F11 AM - 2 PM • NOT VALID FOR TAKE-OUT By JONATHAN ALBURGER As a production of quasi-expressionistic vignettes, WITH THIS AD Woyzeck is an ambitious play that tries to compress a lot Homan gets tried hard but gets stuck in the mire. Douglas of pain and suffering into two hours of theater; UCSB Kaback as Woyzeck and James McCarthy as Captain do Mexican Department of Dramatic Art’s production of Woyzeck tries their best, especially during a Sweeney Todd-like shaving too hard to bring author Georg Buchner’s thoughts to life. scene. Cecelia Kouma is nice to watch as the village wench Lupitds Restaurant In so doing, the play comes across as forced, disjointed, who bears Woyzeck their bastard son. Sean Heyman is a pretentious intellectualism that collapses despite director good mime, but his role elicits a lot of head-scratching. 6547 Trigo Road, I.V. 968-1916 Richard Homan’s energetic interpretation. Only Mark Miller as Doctor rises high enough above the Woyzeck is feverish pitch without punch. Woyzeck play’s numerous faults; Miller manages to utilize his fine resembles one of those Saturday Night Live-Dan Ackroyd “ Bad Theater” skits — full of puffy pedagogy and choppy, art-for-arts-sake detail. Most of the problem lies in the script, which invites a torrent of nit-picking. Woyzeck is a play to be intellectualized in Drama of Oppression class. It is so loaded with symbolism and allusion that its messages fall on our heads like stone tablets of Truth and Insight. There’s a little existentialism here, a little absurdism there, a marbling of satire, and a WE LEND STUDENTS sprinkling of humor. Buchner is big on irony and torment; we see a lot of torment in the title character, and we ex perience a lot of torment seeing the play. Buchner — perhaps due to the muddy translation by Henry J. Schmidt A HELPING HAND. — is neither subtle nor very original. Set in pre World War I Germany, Woyzeck paints a bleak, A lack of funds used to keep many promising tense picture of Franz Woyzeck’s social and personal students out of college. That's not the case disintegration in the face of oppressive totalitarianism and anymore. cultural depravity. Franz is always frantic, always worrying; Franz is always philosophizing, the Captain tells Government-backed student loans now enable him. There are rumblings of discontent and a stirring of the most kids to get the education they need. murderous impulse beneath Woyzeck’s stony exterior. And Imperial Savings wants to help. We have the money to lend, and getting it is easy and convenient. Just Because To apply, just drop by any of our branch offices.