Kansan Summer Weekly
Wednesday, July 15, 1987
Arts and Entertainment
7
KU professor works with hands and heart to sculpt limestone bronze statues for KU buildings
In an airy, high-ceilled room with sunlight streaming through open doors, the sculptor scooped up a handful of warm wax and, almost reverently, smoothed some on a woman's figure.
The figure, titled Prairie Spirit or Kansas Spirit, is the creation of Elden Tefft, professor of art and a renowned sculptor.
Prairie Spirit was commissioned by the Alpha Chi Omega sorority in honor of their centennial, Tefft said. It will be completed next year and installed on the north side of the Adams Alumni Center on the site of the original Alpha Chi Omega house.
"This represents the spirit that's come from Kansas all these years." Tefft said. "We're talking about the people of the prairies and maybe even back around the time of the Indians."
The Jayhawk in front of Strong Hall, the 10-foot Moses in front of Smith Hall, the portrait bust of William Allen White in Stauffer-Fitt Hall, and the University seal, medal, and plaque were created by Tefft also.
Tefft said he began sculpting while attending Lawrence Memorial High School in the late 1930s. His mentor
was Bernard Frazier, a University of Kansas professor who had been the first male graduate in the KU department of design. They worked in a small studio in the basement of Spooner-Thayer Art Museum.
"I was always interested in making things and in all kinds of art," Tefft said. "I tried everything until I had earned I had to go back to sculpture."
Gesturing around the large, equipment-filled foundry that he works in now, Tefft said, "This is quite a ways up from those days."
The foundry contains the special furnaces that are needed for bronze casting, the process Tefft usually uses.
"I did most of my foundry learning around the world," Tefft said. "Actually, when I started working, there were no foundries, no bronzes, in a university like this."
Teft said he traveled to Mexico, Europe, South and Central America and the Orient to study bronze casting systems and techniques. In the middle 1950s, he convinced Franklin Murphy, then the chancellor of KU, that the University needed to build a foundry.
"He said, 'Build one,' and we had it
functioning by 1960," Tefft said. "So we invited sculptors from all over the country and held the first National Bronze Casting Conference here."
About 100 sculptors attended the conference the first year, he said. The conference, which was held every two years, soon became known as the International Sculptors Conference. It was held at KU until 1976, when organizers decided to change locations for each conference. Last year it was held in Oakland, Calif., and several thousand sculptors from around the world attended, Teftt said.
Besides Prairie Spirit, Tefft also working on a small sculpture for the Buddy Award, which will be presented for the first time this fall. Copies of the work will be presented to annual recipients of the award.
Bobby Patton, chairman of the theater department, said that the award honored Buddy Rogers, a former KU student and famous actor in the 1920s. Rogers will be the first recipient of the award at the 1987 KU homecoming.
"We were just so excited when Tefft agreed to do this because he's such a fine artist. He has a beautiful vision of the world." Patton said.
Story by CAROLINE REDDICK Photos by DARCY CHANG
Left, Elden Tefft, professor of art, lays balls of petroleum oil on Prairie Spirit, a sculpture commissioned by the Alpha Chi Omega sorority. In the background is the model for Moses, which stands in front of Smith Hall. Below left, Tefft carves from a wax figure that will be the model for the Buddy Award, which was created to honor distinguished KU alumni in theater or communication studies who have been friends to the University of Kansas. Below right, Tefft was inspired to carve this cat after a two-month stay in China last summer. The sculpture, Gate Guardian, is made from limestone.
Film gives audience a taste of Vietnam veterans' bitter pill
By DEBRA A. PETERSON
Special to the Kansan
Some people say the United States became indifferent to the Vietnam conflict because it went on for so long that it became a supper-time war. Families could sit down for a meal and, between bites of peas and carrots, watch TV films of helicopters landing and people running, always running, and listen to Walter Cronkite talking about how many guys got killed that day.
When the war was over, a generation of U.S. citizens who'd ingested it along with their dinners began asking what it was all about. The media couldn't explain it. The military wouldn't.
Recently, Oliver Stone's *Platoon* tried to show us what Vietnam was about. A convention in Canada this spring featured speakers and writers who'd been there, and they tried to tell us.
Now, Stanley Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket, based on The Short-Timers by Gustav Hasford, makes us swallow slices of several Marines' Vietnam experiences. We're served raw chunks of terror, humiliation and intimidation, carved with a serrated knife in flickering firelight with explosions and gunfire for dinner music.
In Vietnam, the villager who served rice to an U.S. soldier in the morning might cut that soldier's throat at night. The enemy was everywhere, and nowhere, in a guerrilla war where the number one rule was, Trust Nobody.
There are two distinct halves in Full Metal Jacket. The first half follows a group of recruits through Marine boot camp at Parris Island, S.C., in the mid-60s. The intellectual Everyman of the film, Joker, played by Matthew Modine, is our eyes and ears. Through Joker's transformation from raw recruit to mean, green killing machine, we experience war as an exercise in the absurd.
Joker is always ready with a quip, delivered in a dead-pan manner that's almost too practiced.
His drill sergeant is cut from the same cloth as the sergeant in An Officer and a Gentleman. The classic put-downs, racial slurs, name-calling and questions about a recruit's sexual preference are all there.
But the screenplays of Kubrick, Hasford and Michael Herr do not show the human side of the sergeant. We never see him one-on-one with a recruit. He yells to communicate and resorts to physical abuse if the men don't understand. Despite this harassment, his goal is always clear: to root out any trace of weakness that could get a man killed.
But, one of the recruits, Leonard Lawrence, played by Vincent D'Ontrofi, cannot take the abuse. Fat, stupid and inept, Leonard is dubbed Gomer Pyle by the sergeant because of his slack-jawed facial expression and puppy-dog innocence. Leonard's stupid mistakes force the sergeant to punish the entire squad by making them exercise whenever Leonard goofs.
Eventually, the men retaliate one
night in a brutal scene paced by music that combined the sound of deep breathing with sharply-struck piano notes. This scene marks the turning point in Leonard's Marine experience. Now, he begins to excel at playing piano training. He becomes very good at cleaning and firing his rifle.
The tight shots on Leonard's face as he steadily improves his marksmanship reveal what Joker has begun to suspect, that Leonard is not playing with a full deck. The boot camp brainwashing strategy of tearing a man to pieces and rebuilding him into a soldier hasn't worked with Leonard. He can't be put together again.
The climactic and bloody end to the first half of the movie drew cheers from some audience members and shocked gums from others. Watch
A long, slow fade to a tepia wash on the screen followed by Nancy Sinatra's hit, These Boots Are Made for Walkin', provides the transition into
the second half of the film.
The camera fades up on a wide pan of a Da Nang street. Seated at a café table is Joker, his hair grown back since basic, and another inept man with whom Joker works. Both are correspondents for Stars and Stripes, the military's official newspaper.
Joker has begun wearing a peace symbol by this time. That, coupled with his irreverence toward the military, gets him sent to Hue.
But, one scene doesn't match the tone of the rest of the film. In it, when the squad discovers two dead U.S. soldiers, the camera zooms down so that the audience looks up at the living men from ground level.
From the struggle to capture Hue to the end of the film, the camera works keep us close to, and at eye level with, the Marines. When they crouch to move in, we stay low to the ground too. When a man is shot and even if we are there to help him, we are there at his feet because we made to feel like one of the guys.
In a ponderous, solemn, almost
preachy fashion, the camera moves to each squad member so he can eulogize over the dead men. Their statements are stiff and out of character, creating a jarring, heavy bit of unreality in an otherwise fairly realistic film.
Kubrick also seems to have kept us in the dark about the inner workings of his characters deliberately. We see the surface and think we have inside the man, but every man we meet eventually acquires a distinct, cold stare that says, "You can never come in."
Full Metal Jacket doesn't achieve Platoon's carefully orchestrated climax, and it doesn't give us that movie's fully-rounded characters. But Full Metal Jacket's episodic nature and frank, almost casual presentation of atrocities help us comprehend the complexity behind Joker's simple comment at the end, "I'm alive and I'm glad." We begin to taste, finally, the very bitter pill that Vietnam veterans have had to swallow.