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Arizona Daily Wildcat February 26, 1998
Shaping Artistic Experience
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Charles C. Labenz
Mat Bevel, otherwise known as Ned Schaper, stands in front of some of his creations at his downtown museum on Stone Avenue.
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Imagine the Wizard of Oz, a small, bald man cowering behind his monstrous creation - a creation used to scare, to intimidate, to oppress. Now imagine that the Wizard undergoes a major attitude adjustment. He starts using his tools to teach, to inform and to liberate. This is Mat Bevel. But Mat Bevel is a fantasy, a persona if you will, conjured in the brain of a self-professed visionary, modern-day Renaissance man, who goes by the name Ned Schaper. But I now wonder if Ned is in fact a reality.
After a nearly two-hour interview and tour of the Mat Bevel Institute, my roommate (who accompanied me on my journey) forced me to vow never to try to explain what we had seen or heard to anyone. Any description of such a remarkable experience would inevitably leave much unsaid. Instead, it would be all we could do to encourage people to see the Institute for themselves at one of the performances taking place there each month.
The Institute is located in what was, for years, Tucson's hot spot for local and non-mainstream music acts, the Downtown Performance Center, or the DPC. Those who remember the dingy, gutter-punk atmosphere would be shocked to behold the transformation that has taken place. Inside are beautiful relics of a hopelessly technologically-dependent age, the dinosaurs of a consumerist culture.
These contraptions are what Ned describes as kinetic sculpture, sculpture that effects a life of its own through pulleys and cables, electric motors, and pistons - everything salvaged from the waste of a city. Schaper identified a number of objects that have significance far beyond the creature they have created.
"They take years to create ... I just wait for the right objects to surface," he said.
In the process, Schaper develops an intimate relationship with each of his sculptures. Each contraption represents a character, many of which are worn by Ned (or is it Mat?), facilitating his theatrical presentation. Add to this original poetry and music from the Mat Bevel orchestra, and you have what could only insufficiently be described as the Mat Bevel Experience.
Speaking of his life as a New York artist, Schaper exclaimed, "At the gallery, people didn't pay attention." By creating his own universe, where creation is the fundamental force, Schaper can redefine his conception of art and its role in society.
"I'm totally separate from the art world," Schaper explains, noting that for most, art involves one person, one canvas, one idea.
Schaper insists that "we [as artists] have a role in society," this role being the creation of the "new rituals and stories for the future."
Combining his strengths as an artist, a mechanic, a performer and a philosopher, Schaper intends to take his "road on the show" utilizing a series of kinetic sculpture masks and homemade instruments. He can be found this Friday after sundown at the Way Cafe (256 E. Congress), enacting a theatrical production that has become a personal mission.
"What people come away with is an alternative to the mega-experience of consumerist America."
What is truly unique about Schaper's message is not merely his critique of art and society, but his progressive and active attitude toward change. Like his sculpture, he does not lament that which he does not have, he simply works with the material at hand.
The Mat Bevel Institute, located at 530 N. Stone Ave., can be reached at 622-0192.
