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About The daily Nebraskan. ([Lincoln, Neb.) 1901-current | View Entire Issue (Feb. 9, 1978)
page 8 daily ncbraskan thursday, february 9, 1978 o orts and Kitty litter, eye-busters abstracted from Sheldon display By Jim Williams American Abstractionism: 1950s 1960s. Selected works from the Oklahoma A rt Center. . Some Nebraskans dislike all abstract art without thinking about it, and others like all abstract art without thinking about it. I don't know which is worse. 9art review Because of their backgrounds, most people probably have some trouble adjusting to the paintings in the Ameri can Abstractionism exhibit at Sheldon. The only exposure most of us get to making art is in junior high art classes, where you draw bowls of fruit. (In college art you draw naked people, which must prove something.) The more your drawing looks like a bowl of fruit, the better your grade. But most works in this exhibit not only don't look like anything, they're not supposed to look like anything. This makes it hard to form judgments, especially since the pseudo-intellectuals have made such a self-serving hash of art criticism that it no longer is respectable to judge simply by whether you like the piece. But the defenseless paintings hang on the second floor south gallery walls, and you can think what you like. If you want to look at Robert Loberg's untitled, restful green and black composition and think it reminds you of light shining through the leaves of exotic plants, nobody will stop you. Tliat gambit will not work with Robert Goodnough's 'The Flood. ' It has nothing to -do with floods'. It simply is a nervous mesh of brown lines and red, a design charged with energy. Nor can you judge Theodoras Stames' "A Walk in the Poppies" by how much it looks like poppies since it doesn'.t look like them at all. It's probably not supposed to. You're supposed to see it for itself-black and red and smoky and indistinct. Alexander Liberman's "Great Mysteries I" also is dark and indistinct a huge and ponderous composition of simple forms in blue, purple and brown. You can look - . jWMBMMPJUt. J' '' I'm 'in mi iiiiidii : 0 g!Mmfr 'X'"'1' ' ' J t '' -" JriW '""" w ' ,C. FOUR ROSES Photo by Bob Pearson A young woman contemplates a collage at Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery's American Abstractionism exhibit. Sheer laziness threatens great art form; apathy takes punch out of practical joke As you probably have heard, the Russians carelessly dropped a nuclear-powered satellite over Canada a few weeks ago. I can only assume this was meant to be funny. In fact, I thought of a similar stunt a few years ago. Some friends and I were going to buy a big ball of styrofoam, paint "CCCP" on it, scorch and blacken it a little, equip it with antenna doodads, widgets and a thing to make it beep, and lodge it in some visible but unaccessible spot around campus in the dead of night. jim HlQfil Sj After setting off a firecracker to provide sound effects, we would retire to watch the action when the "Russian satellite" was found. It was sheer laziness and cheapness that kept us from pulling this off, and I think it illustrates the problem with college kids today. It's apathy -plain, who-gives-a-hoot un concern. Apathy is destroying our culture's great concep tual art form, the practical joke . Things were easier in the old days. Colleges then were not regulated by electric clocks and bells without souls, but by a campus dock and bell tower. The bell chimes told students when to get up and go to class. Of course, if some determined individual abstracted the beD dapper, everyone took an unscheduled extra hour of sleep. It's a lot tougher to attempt a campus-wide feat today. And one of the hallmarks of a great practical joke is scope. If you want to becone a practical joker, you must learn to view yourself as a public entertainer. You're the director of free-form street theater-comedy for the passer-by . A true artist in this field can entertain people of all education levels and walks of life. Taking your practical joking seriously does make it more difficult. For instance, throwing buckets of water at passing cars may seem hysterical to you, but it's pro bably not much of a giggle to the people in the cars. You are restricting the size of your appreciative aud ience, (demonstrating your amateurishness as a practical joker) and depriving yourself of a great satisfaction having your ego inflated to near bursting point by massive public acclaim. Another hallmark of the pure joker is anonymity. You are not seeking personal admiration, remember, but admiration of your artistic expression. This requires self-discipline. When you pull off a great coup that has everyone dazzled, mystified and amazed, there is powerful tempta tion to step forward for recognition. Resist. You're seek ing conceptual beauty, not vulgar self-aggrandizement. You have to content yourself with sitting quietly at home and snickering, I did it, I did it, hee-hee." I hope you will think seriously about what Tve said. I would hate to see the reputation of this great American waste-time sullied by the crude and destructive pranks that take its name in vain today. The jerks who start fires in the middle of 16th Street are quickly and deservedly forgotten. But I'd still like to meet the guy who buried the fake corpse in the Love Library construction site a few years ago. Maybe I can meet him yet. Ill just look for the per son reading this column and snickering, "f did it, I did it, hee-hee." at it and get a sense of enormous, suspended masses. But you cannot say it is a cow or a flower or a veeblefletzer. It is a painting, and that's that. After this theorizing, I admit I get enjoyment from reading things into James Twitty's untitled work. It is red and tan and has little globs like kitty litter in the tan part, arranged to give a sensation of depth. I like to think of it as an eerie extraterrestial landscape, and you can't stop me. These paintings all are interesting to look at, but there is another group that is much more fun-the What the Hell?" group. An example is Robert Indiana's "The Triumph of Tira.' What is Indiana getting at -with harsh red, black, yellow and blue stars in circles in squares in circles and the words law, cat, men and sex stenciled in the centers? What was Tom Wesselmann thinking when he took huge billboard portraits of a steak and a bottle of Four Roses and mixed them with an apple, a lemon, a portrait of George Washington, a postcard farm scene and a scrap of wallpaper? You can stare at these and wonder until your brain falls out, but they are good-natured and fun. Claes Oldenburg's "Pizza" is fun, too. It even looks like a pizza. It is the sort of thing that would look nice on a placemat or a kitchen wall, and I'm glad Oldenburg doesn't think such things are beneath him. Speaking of your brain falling out, there's Roy Licht enstein's diabolical "Seascape." From a distance it looks straightforward -a "sea" of small blue dots, a "horizon" of solid blue and a "sky" of white ovals. But if you get close enough, you find that your eyes cannot focus the white ovals in the same plane as the rest. You barely can focus them at all. They look far away and at the same time close. I kept squinting into the frame from the side, trying to figure out where they were in the frame. Sneaky licht enstein has used a kind of embossed plastic that creates a lens effect to distort vision. It is an insane eye-buster. There are other nice things and a good selection of pallid paint -smears and dull daubings, if. you insist on reinforcing your negative attitude toward abstract art But why bother? Just relax and look at the paintings without trying to relate them to something else. You might discover you kind of like the awful stuff. 0 Photo courtesy of EUPC Lincoln to hear Abe If UNL students are short on ideas about how to celebrate Abe Lincoln's birthday, they might want to see and hear the great man himself. The 16th president of the United States, in the person of actor Jim Mitchell, will present a dramatic monologue 8 p.m. Sunday in the East Union Great Plains Room. The performance, sponsored by the academic relations committee of the East Union Program Council, has toured throughout the midwest, including Lincoln's home in New Salem, ID. Mitchell reportedly looks like Lincoln. He wears no makeup during his performance. The performance is free and open to the public
