University of Texas Austin - Cactus Yearbook (Austin, TX)

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Fireworks light the shores of Town Lake during the Night Lighted Water Parade. here and when in Austin can W you work on your tan, witness ' the best in country, rock and Mexican entertainment and race a raft down the Colorado River all in one week? University students caught up in the perils of summer school found Town Lake was the place and August 5-14, 1983, the time to enjoy the 22nd Austin Aqua Festival, which brought water- sport competitions and musical enter- tainment to the third coast city. Ranked among the top 10 festivals in the nation, Aqua Fest expanded to 70 events, including ski tournaments, a Mexican market, raft races and parades. Organized in 1962, the Festival was sponsored by Austin businesses and run by an all-volunteer staff. Rusty Tally, Aqua Fest president, said, The festival strongly supports local charities not only with events, but with revenues from those events. KHFI-FM 98 and Budweiser cospon- sored the Great River Raft Race, which attracted over 3,000 participants in floating rent-a-cans, rubber rafts and helium-filled castles. UT students Larry Smith, Jim Nicar, and Roger Ludlow entered the race just for fun. We decided to enter because it was something different and we thought it would be fun to do before the summer was over, Smith said. Attracting a crowd of almost 50,000, the Night Lighted Water Parade and Fireworks Display featured floats on 40-foot-long barges. The parade was one I of the few in the nation that displayed j lighted floats on a body of water. Delia de Lafuente ABOVE: Group rowing helped this dragon float down the river to the finish. LEFT: Water EvenU included the Strohs Kawagaki Jet Ski Race July 30-31. Mexico ' s Grand Market became a Fest event. Aquafest 25

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AQUAFEST Down by the River These raft-racers let the car do the racing. 24

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INTERVIEW David Deming stands in front of Mystic Raven located at the corner of Ninth St. and Congress Ave. A Man of Steel Actually I ' m one of the only people I know who will admit they ' re from Cleveland, David Deming said about his hometown. He moved to Texas in 1970 to take a teaching position at the University of Texas at El Paso, but left after one year, explaining, The men- tality of the people in El Paso essential- ly, in terms of buying art, was that they could get it cheaper in Juarez. You couldn ' t make a living there. In 1971 he came to Austin to become an assistant professor of art at The University. Deming is also a profes- sional sculptor. His best-known work is Mystic Raven, the first major public sculpture erected in downtown Austin. The work was placed in front of the First City Centre in the Fall, 1983. The following is condensed from an interview with Deming in February 1984: It seemed that sculpture was the answer to my physical needs. I was always an athlete and always doing something physical. And I tended to dent my paintings because I was always shoving the brush in them and bending the canvases. I eventually got into work- ing steel; steel was very much like wrestling. I loved wrestling; it was like you could push something that ' s going to push you back and then you push a different way and you finally win. Working steel was very much like that. Once you get past the obvious that it ' s an. income, teaching enables me to do a number of things. One, it enables me to continually dialogue about art. School situations are like big magnets; they just pull faculties and students in so that you ' re constantly in a situation to talk about art. It ' s a very positive thing, the dialogue and the critiques and watching people come in at a very undeveloped stage and bloom in a very short period of time. Artists really do bloom quickly. You can see things happen. You can see a spark ignite. You feel good just because you were part of that catalyst that helped it happen. What happens in the discovery pro- cess in art is that you really get closely involved with the students, almost becoming a psychologist, sometimes a guru, sometimes just a friend. People have things they want to communicate, and at an early stage, they don ' t know how to say them, so they spew things out at you constantly. It can become a very close, emotional attachment be- tween faculty and student. The comments I ' ve read and heard (about Mystic Raven) are, I think, very amusing, but some of them hit right on. Somebody said they thought it looked like a series of wrenches, and it does. That ' s because I like tools, and I know those things come out. Somebody said it looked like a grasshopper. That ' s okay. I don ' t take that to be an offensive comment at all. Most great art has a variety of input that goes into it, which the artist often never gets a chance to talk about or ex- plain. So I don ' t feel bad about loading a lot of imagery in my work at all, but yet I think when you approach that piece, it ' s a very simple piece. Structurally, it ' s a simple series of shapes, but it has a complex background. Brian Zabcik 26 Interview