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he Antony Tudor Ballet Trust and the National Endowment for the Arts have teamed up with Duke to bring a new and remarkable production to campus. No, it isn't a miniature statue of James Duke submerged in a jar of urine, but a reproduction of a very special, nearly forgotten contemporary ballet.
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>The structure which develops in the DUMA's newest exhibit, "Final Form: Rafael Vi-oly's Nasher Museum of Art," is a great gamble. It is less a building of divine inspiration than a tribute to constraint and compromise. The five separate structures that comprise the soon-to-be museum will be aesthetically unremarkable, the concrete children of budgetary constraints. They relate to each other only through a glass and steel atrium whose own crystalline structure could unify or destroy the entire complex, depending on how it is viewed. The exhibit shows the atrium's possibilities with digital renderings from different elevations and angles. In one frame, the atrium appears as a frozen glacier slicing through the hubris and arrogance of the gray box exhibition spaces, seemingly on loan from Edens Quad. There is no unity, no constructive action. But from the top down, the atrium is a great catalyst, which binds and controls the buildings as much as the people who will move about within them--and this is what will have to occur. "The building will succeed or fail based on that space," said David Roselli, the assistant director of the museum. He is right, and in its presentation of this fascinating point the exhibit becomes most deserving of our time and its space. Architect Rafael Vi-oly is testing the limits and virtues of the Duke student body as much he is those of glass and steel. Nine thousand square feet of space--the largest open area in the entire museum--will be set aside for a vibrant community of students. Like Pygmalion, they can give life to the cold clay with flights of passion and conception. A few dilettantes with lattZs won't do. The building will literally breathe or suffocate based on what occurs within this atrium--the ducts and vents have been built into the steel beams that support the glass. This icy structure of crystals and boxes will count on a very human pulsing to find its most complete, living form. Perhaps most important, by linking architectural success to human success in such an immediate way, the exhibit demands that the viewer go beyond simply evaluating a structure, and moves us to ask greater questions about the Duke student body itself. --Bodkin Vachon
t can be taken as a refreshing proof of the existence of some sort of natural justice in the universe that Giorgio de Chirico, a genius most mortally in touch with his own unique muse, was plagued by forgers and allegations of deceit throughout his career and after his death. Most hold that de Chirico himself forged many of his own paintings, backdating others to skew the chronological record of the most notable thing he ever possessed, a unique vision of exactly how a remarkable painting is executed.
I recently toured the small, sophisticated and ecumenical collection of ancient Greek and Roman art that is the Classics gallery at the DUMA. The exhibit opened last week and is curated by senior Bobby Jones. Ranging from the early Iron age (1000-700 B.C.) to third-century Roman art, most of the pieces on display in the Classics collection are pottery in the form of drinking cups, amphorae and religious oil containers (lekythoi). A good portion of the gallery, as well, has bits of statuary and terra cotta figures from all over the ancient world--a great one in particular is a drunken Bacchus helped along by one of his followers, no doubt crapulent himself. Smack dab in the middle of the gallery sits the showpiece of the collection, a giant crater (a vessel used to mix water and wine--the Greeks never drank their wine pure) painted by Polygnotos, a famous and successful pottery painter--this pot is worth well over a million dollars. From the fifth century B.C., the crater depicts Triptolemus, Persephone and her mother Demeter preparing to grant the knowledge of agriculture to humanity. The opposite side of the pot, no less interesting, shows three Athenian youths, epitomizing the Athenian cultural ideals of the period: music and athletics. In addition to these, there is a charming collection of little trinkets and odd figures, such as a little bronze vignette of Odysseus returning to his wife, Penelope--neither of whom look like they've been entirely faithful.
Rodolfo Abularach's new exhibition at the Duke Museum of Art is a highly repetitive visual feast, infused with a thin layer of meaning and thought only at is conclusion. Abularach chose as his subjects "Apocalyptic Landscapes," scenes of chiefly volcanic destruction which he captures in bright oranges, brilliant whites and morose shades of grey and black. This topic matter represents Abularach's first failure--documenting the wonders of nature is no longer the job of the painte. Whose brush could compare with the lense of the Hubble space telescope in conveying to man the natural foundings of his world? Art must go beyond just documentation, and expand into the world of thought, relation and commentary. Abularach's efforts at this are weak. We sense his contention that there exist shades of the divine and mystical in the earth's great forces with his treatment of the smoke which eminates so freely and organically, billowing with intent as it moves across his canvas. Equally notable is his treatment of heat, which he expresses with sparing touches of powerful white--as if he were painting with some holy oil. The idea that the forces of nature are thus imbued with the mystical and intentional is thus conveyed, culminating in the last work of the exhibit, in which the faces of spirits and sprites, which Abularach has been hinting at all along, are plainly visible in the smoke of a night sky.
