Arizona Daily Wildcat
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Justyn Dillingham Arts Editor 520•621•3106 arts@wildcat.arizona.edu
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A Chicano history lesson INSIDE McCartney won’t ‘let it be’ Anderson’s ‘Fantastic’ voyage
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DWWILDLIFE
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UA Symphony ends semester with rhythm By Amanda Seely Arizona Daily Wildcat The UA Symphonic Band and Wind Symphony will join forces to present their end-of-the-semester concert. The wind symphony will perform a program filled with music by Leonard Bernstein, including the“Overture to Candide,”“Symphonic Dances,”from“West Side Story”and“Suite from Mass”featuring the faculty brass quintet. Bernstein’s music is filled with rhythmic complexity. “Bernstein is a master of rhythm,”said Robert Bayless, assistant music professor. “He was a master at doing intricate rhythms which were not used too much until his time. He’s got different rhythms going throughout the ensemble all the time, which makes it interesting and very challenging. Not only was he a formal composer, but he also knew the idiom of jazz inside and out, and that really adds a lot to his compositions. I enjoy doing Bernstein’s music because it is so
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SYMPHONY, page B2
UA artists meld with off-campus community
Photo courtesy of the UA School of Music
culture
SHOCK
Why old novels are still relevant COMMENTARY BY Justyn Dillingham
B “Epoch”
Exhibition: Dec. 5-19 Reception: Saturday, Dec. 5, 6 p.m. Location: Flow and 5th & 6th Galleries 439 N. Sixth Ave. Gallery hours: by appointment Contact: 730 • 0482
Ashlee Salamon/Arizona Daily Wildcat
These discarded tires, wires, chairs and wheels make up ‘Molting,’ a collaborative work of art by studio art seniors Jacob Biggerstaff and Jessica Leftault. The piece is part of the ‘Epoch’ exhibition, which features a select group of UA art students and opens at Flow and 5th & 6th Galleries Dec. 5.
Tires, wires, wheelchairs make journey from scrapheap to installation By Marisa D. Fisher Arizona Daily Wildcat This weekend, one building will showcase student artists who produce work with more substance than merely gradeearning results. Flow Gallery, in conjunction with 5th and 6th Gallery, will open a multi-space exhibition in the heart of the downtown Tucson arts district. “It’s becoming a better and better location because Congress is experiencing a renovation,” said sudio arts senior Tina Notaro . All of the typical gallery opening accoutrements will be present: wine and cheese, cryptic artistic conversation and spectators murmuring “I think I get it” over the work on display. The subtle difference that will make “Epoch” stand out from the rest lies with the twelve sculptors included in the exhibition; each is an Advanced Sculpture student in the UA art department. Notaro, who is co-curating the show with fine arts graduate student Chika Matsuda , began renting a space in the
building this past June. “At first it was sort of a space for me to exhibit my sculpture that was getting bigger and bigger, to experiment with installation and to work with other friends and community artists to do that sort of thing,” she said. That circle of friends and community artists now includes students from Notaro’s sculpture class. Each artist created an installation piece for “Epoch” that examines the concept of time as a construct of society and how we perceive its passage. For Jacob Biggerstaff, a studio art senior, this show represents new experiences on many levels. Most of the work he has done is two-dimensional, and getting used to the actual space in the gallery has been a challenge. “This is definitely the first large-scale installation piece,” he said. The single-shot nature of installation sculpture means that the work makes a tangible impact without a sense of permanence. “Personally, I approach it as more of a performance,” Biggerstaff said. His contribution to the show, entitled
“Molting,” represents his first foray into the exercise of collaboration. He and Jessica Leftault, a studio art senior and Daily Wildcat staff member, teamed up to create the piece together. “You have to get used to someone else’s work process, which is different for every artist,” he said of the cooperative effort. “I’m pretty OCD and anal-retentive when it comes to my art. I obsess about it until it’s done. (Leftault) is much more gowith-the-flow and laid back. We definitely met somewhere middle-of-the-road.” Middle-of-the-road is a fitting description here, as Biggerstaff and Leftault began their creative process with a journey to gather items that had been discarded along Arizona’s service roads. A burnedout, abandoned house provided an old wheelchair and yards upon yards of antiquated plumbing. The two artists chose to complete and install the entire project in the gallery space within 24 hours. Rachel Martin, a studio arts senior and GALLERY, page B4
arts editor
eing an English minor has its pluses. You get to read great books, sit around thinking about them, and finally sit around discussing them with other people. What more could a student ask for? (Well, I suppose a student could ask for “no homework, no assignments and no tuition.” But he probably wouldn’t get it.) In one class this semester, I read the English literature classics, from “Robinson Crusoe” to “Pride and Prejudice.” In another, I read the angst-ridden classics of the twentieth century, like Andre Gide’s “The Immoralist.” Looking back on the semester, I’m struck by how relevant most of these books still seem. Reading all these books didn’t feel like delving into an arcane and dusty realm; it was more like glimpsing a weirdly distorted version of our own world. One of the first books I had to read happened to be the first official novel in the English language: Samuel Richardson’s “Pamela.”This bulky work consists entirely of letters and diary entries from a young servant girl chronicling her employer’s incessant attempts to sleep with her. A disturbingly large part of the book consists largely of chatter like this: “O, wretched, wretched Pamela! Poor, poor me! What, at last, will become of me?”Well, you get the idea. Eventually, Pamela gives in and marries her boss and proceeds to do nothing for the book’s remaining 200 pages. My first reaction to the book — and, in truth, my only reaction to it, and one that I repeated on every one of its 592 pages — was to scoff, and scoff loudly. But is the appeal of “Pamela” really that far from, say,“Twilight”? Is fantasizing about being involved in a weird affair with your creepy aristocratic boss any stranger than being involved in a weird affair with a vampire? The same goes for those classics of satirical adventure,“Gulliver’s Travels” and “Robinson Crusoe.” If “Gulliver” anticipates the sardonic humor of our age, from Mad magazine to “South Park,” “Crusoe,” with its shipwrecks and cannibals and pirates, has its descendant in the breathless action romps that rush through theaters every summer. The difference is that the artists behind these works couldn’t rely on rivers of money or armies of technicians to paint their masterworks. Instead, they had to work from their imaginations, filling in each detail with DILLINGHAM, page B5