2A
Thursday, January 18, 1990 / University Daily Kansan
On campus
The University Dance Company will hold auditions at 7 p.m. tonight, tomorrow and Monday at 242 Robinson Center. No solo material is required.
Art exhibits now as close as home video
The Associated Press
NEW YORK — You meant to see that art show at the museum but it closed before you got there. Or you didn't want to stand in line. Or the exhibit never came to your city. Could it be you're a couch potato?
Don't reft. Art museums are entering the video business, making tapes of exhibitions for those who want something a little more "Batman" or the latest installment of "Friday the 13th."
On Tuesday, the Museum of Modern Art became the latest institution to enter the video stores with a 60-minute tape tied to its "Picasso and Braque: Pioneering Cubism" exhibit.
The unprecedented exhibit, with nearly 400 art works from 14 countries, including the Soviet Union, closed Tuesday and cannot travel because of lenders' concerns, said Richard Oldenburg, the museum's director.
So, for art lovers who could not see the show in New York, "This is the best substitute we can provide," Oldenburg said. "It certainly comes alive a lot better than any catalog can, no matter how good the catalog is."
The tape will be distributed by a Chicago-based company, Public Media Inc., under its fine arts label, Home Vision. Edward Ruehle, a company spokesman, said Home Vision's more than 300-title catalog includes about a dozen videos tied to museum exhibitions.
Economics key in buffalo resurgence
The Associated Press
DENVER — There's more capitalism than altruism these days behind the resurgence of the once nearly extinct buffalo. The shaggy animals are easier to raise, fetch more a pound and are lower in fat and cholesterol than beef.
The buffalo, which once roamed the Great Plains like a moving black robe, was hunted for meat and hiders in such great numbers that historians say by 1889 fewer than 60 remained.
Since 1970, the number of buffalos bounded by the American Bison Association reported.
About 400 stockmen, ranchers like Brian Ward of Center, Colo., have gone into raising buffalo because of a beef market made unstable by U.S. eating habits. Wards run 1,700 buffalo on his 100,000-acre ranch in southern Colorado's San Luis Valley and sells about 100,000 pounds of boneless meat a year.
"We get long winters in this valley," he said.
"The buffalo hide's thicker than (the cattle), they have a lot more hair and they and tend to be more like wild animals — store fat in the fall and their metabolism slows down in the winter, so they require less feed.
"There are some exciting times. We drive them about 35 miles to pasture and back every
year cross country. We used to use horses, but we use motorcycles now. The buffalo don't charge the cycles as bad as they do horses."
The price of good buffalo breeding stock has doubled in the past five years to about $1,500 for a young brood cow, twice what a comparable beef cow brings, according to the Denver-based American Bison Association. But buffalo meat also brings twice the price of beef, and it's lean meat.
A 3-ounce serving of buffalo meat has 93 calories, compared to 183 for beef; 43 milligrams of cholesterol, compared to beef's 55; and 1.8 grams of fat, compared to 8.7 grams in beef, the association reported.
A buffalo cow can bear calves for 30 years or more, while a cow sually is sent to slaughter after about 10. Stockmen also can sell skulls for $100, uncured robes for $6 to $12 a square foot, and mountable heads for $400 on up.
The symbol of the American West is an imposing animal. It has a black-brown, shaggy head and cape and short curved black horns. A mature bull stands more than 6 feet tall at its hump and weighs 2,000 pounds.
A century ago, the buffalo was nearly exterminated as the railroads pushed westward. The slaughter was triggered by demand for meat to feed the rail crews and the crowded East.
Artists in Vermont sculpt niche with chain saws
Menageries stop tourists
The Associated Press
WATERBURY, Vt. — Chain saws aren't just used for massacres anymore. They're used for art, too.
Along Route 100, between Waterbury and Stowe, roadside menageries have spruited, featuring life-size bears, buffaloes, eagles, moose, skunks and giraffes carved with chain saws.
In Vermont, as in some other rural areas of the country, the power tool best known for felling trees — or as a prop in horror movies — is used to sculpt figures out of wood.
At one shop, hidden behind layers of sawdust, ear plugs and a pair of welding goggles, Max Osorio bobs and jabs like a boxer — except he's armed with a chain saw and his opponent is a block of wood.
Wood chips fly. Curious tourists stop and watch. But Osorio does not stop. It takes him eight hours to make a 6-foot bear or an Indian, the
two pieces that sell the most.
Osorio starts with a tree trunk and envisions the figure. Then, he hacks at it with unawhered attention, and recognizable headpiece, for President Palmer to pass the beak, then a wing, the talons, and slowly, an eagle is born.
"It is still very rough, but when you consider I am working with a chain machine."
"I try to make the most detailed, realistic sculptures as possible with the tool," said Osorio, who placed second last summer in the fourth annual World Championship Chain
Saw Contest in Hill City, Minn. "It just takes practice."
Osorio, a naturalized U.S. citizen who was born in Mexico, began carving after working as a dishwasher in Stowe.
"One day I drove by a place and saw the wooden bears. They were selling them for $800 and I thought to myself, 'I could do that,'." Osorio said.
Carving wasn't as easy as it looked, he said, but he started with a 12-inch bear and worked his way up to life-size animals and human figures.
"Once I learned how, I wanted to do more than just the static bear sitting, doing nothing. I try to get detail and action," he said.
Plenty of action can be found in Osorio's latest creation, an old man on skis chasing a buxom skier in a bikini.
Osorio, like other Vermont carvers, learned the craft at the Spinning Wheel, a Route 100 gift shop.
Owner Milo Marshall said he learned the skill six years ago from an Arizona man who was traveling through Vermont.
Willner
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use its own machines to make four more copies for the remaining committee members. With the consent of the court reporting firm, this saved the University more than $11,000. At 5 cents a page, the pages were $693. At the firm's price, they would have cost $11,738.20.
that was temporarily installed. Other costs included copies and a $183 parking bill.
In all, the incomplete cost of the hearing has been $15,782.
The University also paid for various long-distance and overseas telephone calls. These were made from the $350 telecommunications system
During closing arguments in December, Marino told the committee that Willner had denied none of the assertions against her.
Marino said that through the years, Willner had rejected conciliation attempts by anthropology chairmen
and other administrators.
"So many administrators over a period of time of over 10 years tried to satisfy Professor Willner's demands," she said. "Professor Willner spurned the attempts by her chairmen, by her dean and by the vice chancellor."
Marino said that Willner's pattern of conduct, which had included lawsuits against colleagues, had amounted to a "tyranny of one."
"Together, these incidences constitute adequate cause for dismissal," she said.
Koster began closing arguments for Willner by comparing the dismissal proceedings to a bad production.
The chancellor's case has been a theatrical performance of dubious merit," he said, concluding that "the show was a flop."
In a more sober vein, Koster said that assertions against Willner, even
if true, would not justify dismissal.
"Is this University of Kansas department of anthropology so thinskinned that it cannot tolerate dissent or what it may term 'erratic behavior'?" he said.
Koster spent much of his allotted 30 minutes claiming that Williner's salary had not kept paired with her colleagues', and that she had been discriminated against after protesting for equal rights.