Art’s shorts
EVAN JOHNSON STAFF/ILLUSTRATIONS TED BARKER
Black hole theatre presents Autobahn
The first of the five plays takes place in the parking lot of a Zellers, where a husband is apologizing to his wife for having referred to her using a naughty, four-letter c-word. “LaBute has been criticized for being a misogynist,” said Neill, “so I guess I’m going to live right up to that.”
The second takes places in a Ford pickup truck with a couple of guys who are planning on breaking into an ex-girlfriend’s house to steal a Nintendo 64 because, according to Neill, “they really want to play some Goldeneye and Mario Kart. And maybe even Starfox. I changed the games — it was Mortal Kombat in the script, but I know that when it comes to N-64, it’s all about the Mario Kart and Goldeneye. I think it shows LaBute’s age and out-of-touchness that he used Mortal Kombat.”
The third play involves a teenage couple parked, making out. “The girl slowly flips out,” said Neill, “and threatens her boyfriend that if he ever breaks up with her, she’s going to stalk and murder him and send him graphic German pornography. That’s what she did to her last boyfriend. Again with the misogyny.” In part four, a teenage daughter is being driven home from rehab by her mother, telling her, according to Neill, “that she really enjoyed her two-month stay in rehab but now that she’s out she can’t wait to start doing heroin again.”
The fifth and final play involves another couple. “The wife is just sort of ranting,” said Neill, “while the husband confesses that he’s a pedophile that’s been sexually abusing their foster child for the past couple of years.” So bring your lunch, and enjoy what the Black Hole has to offer. In Neill’s words: “Pedophilia and abuse and misogyny and homophobia . . . yeah.”
Artist James Turrell appears on campus
On Nov. 20, in the JRI Auditorium in the Agriculture Building on the U of M campus, renowned “light and space” artist James Turrell lectured and slide-showed a room full of admiring (and some drooling) students, professors, and so-called “industry types.”
In terms of initial impressions, Turrell’s mighty beard and, it should be noted, his equally excellent moustache (often overshadowed, I’d imagine, by the beard), promised a night of wisdom and, perhaps, austerity. Wise he certainly was, but he was also surprisingly warm and casual for an artist that can, if you ask me, comfortably count himself amongst the world’s greatest. He’s a certified genius (literally: in 1984 he won a “genius” award) and his art is informed not so much by wish-washy hippy-dippy notions of personal expression as by a rigorous (yet hugely creative) understanding of optics and perceptual psychology.
Titled “Plato’s Cave and the light inside,” and presented as part of the faculty of architecture’s excellent 2006-07 lecture series, Turrell’s lecture traced the trajectory of his artistic career, from his early installations involving simple, projected light, through his later, more complex perceptual manipulations, and finally, to his famous Roden Crater — a volcanic crater that Turrell is converting into an enormous and superawesome observatory-ish something-or-other. Even with numerous pictures and explanations by the project’s mastermind, Roden Crater defies description, so I won’t bother further.
Lest the dim-witted of the world think that this sort of endeavour is a waste of money, Turrell pointed out that its cost is less than that of your average strip-mall. “I thought we were building a culture,” he lamented at one point, and I almost burst into tears. The point is, you ought to track down this man’s work and experience it for yourself.
Oh, and he’s also a pilot.
