The San Francisco Examiner from San Francisco, California • 25

4- r- j' SCENE SAN FRANCISCO EXAMINER -Pagt 25 ft Mar. 19,1975 Fashion Food Health Ka sub a 11 'til' $www3t N2 Ss caught up iii space IB AN INFLUENCE on Kasuba's family before she was born Leo Tolstoy, who was related by marriage to the 1 artist's mother. 0 'I ARTIST Aleksandra Kasuba at ''window" into her "spectral passage." By Caroline'Drewes "I will give you a little essay," says Aleksandra Kasuba, a woman in her early 50's whose charismatic charm transcends her shapeless sweatsuit and the kind of unstylish haircut one associates with a pair of sewing shears. i "I ARRANGE situations for the shapes to happen, the tension in the fabric creates the curves which actually are the shortest distance between two points" Kasuba and her de Young Museum environment. ill be 'i will take you through spacesand they sort of like a story." cannot imagine her comfortable with any little conceits.

"Three things I remember from my youth," she begins, going back to the she had mentioned before. "The living room of our house was closed off for winter, it was so enormous it was impossible to heat. We four children could ride our bicycles in that room. "The second thing. We had a two acre English garden and in the center was a circle of linden trees, each 18 feet in diameter, a dark wall of enormous, rubbing against each other.

Inside there was nothing. I had an obsession with that place. It was like a deep, dark well, looking up I could see a burst of green leaves moving in the sunlight." You interrupt to ask if there are any family stories about Tolstoy. "My mother remembered eating cucumbers on his lap," she says. "I have read the diaries, the good part about Tolstoy was his feeling for democracy.

We had a governess at home but we were sent to school with the workers' children because of the Tolstoyan influence, which was strongly felt. For instance, my mother studied medicine so she could take care of emergencies on theestate." Aleksandra continues. "I studied art in the beauti- fill medieval city of Vilnius: The dormitories were overflowing and another girl and I were asked to stay in a 16th century convent part of the school, the only ones in the complex of old buildings, which were closed at the end of the day. We would climb in through a window corridors away and walk through the dark to our cell. It became another environment.

We found a skull, we found attics, we found a door and one day we found ourselves way up in the nave of the church where beggars lived. They were startled and they pursued us." Aleksandra speaks briefly of the war years, of existing between armies, the Germans and the Russians when "we had to steal food to live." And then she is talking about the early years in America. "I was living on three levels, one was writing, one was art and the third was living, which I took very seriously. Now I am not concerned with living, I've had all, my experiences I wish to have. -Now my concern is the unloading or forming of ideas that living and work have generated.

They come together in environments. "I gave myself months to find out what does this word environment mean to me. The end product is a little booklet called 'Utility for the about the four elements in relation to man, and man in relation to his environment. You see it is not what we can do to the elements in the environment, but what they do to us. And I have come to see color as pure energy, the only actually visible energy." 4 i Examiner photo by Gordon Stone She is attempting to explain herselt, as an artist, as 'a human being.

It is difficulty She resolves the problem by looking at her past in terms of and out of these picture-like recollections emerges the story a dramatic life. She was born in Lithuania, the road between East and West. Napoleon and the-Huns everybody, came strutting through Lithuania, and paganism and pantheism stayed late," says Aleksandra. Her mother was a member of the Russian nobility, related by 'marriage to Leo Tolstoy, and the artist grew up on an estate. But of all this she is, reluctant to speak; it is almost as though she feels it is irrelevant.

Nor does she speak easily of the year in a displaced persons camp in Germany, waiting to come to America after World War II, when her husband was hospitalized ith jaundice. "It was the worst experience of my life, so bad I stopped speaking for three months. I think I survived because I found a hiding place the children had made in a pile of firewood, where I could reaffirm my identity, where I could cry freely. But everybody ent through the same She lives in New York now with her sculptor husband; and she has been jn San Francisco (where one of their sons is an aspiring artist) to supervise And Aleksandra herself, what does she have to say? "In 1947 my husband and I came to the United States with nothing. My husband's brother-in-law put us on one of his chicken farms, helping out! I had studied 1 art.

I have always been fascinated by scale, after doing many things, I got finally to environments. Each work is a totally new experience, I arrange situations for the' shapes to happen and the whole thing is beyond my understanding, I have not been trained or prepared for all of this." And then our meeting at the museum is cut short. The second time I see Aleksandra, again wearing the baggy pants and top in which she works, she has prepared some notes, a sort of guide for herself. Kasuba is a woman with big bones, a purity and simplicity of face which could be mistaken for plain- ness, and the flawless white skin of a child. No makeup.

No vanity. She is blunt, forthright, intense, warm; you completion of her extraordinary "spectral passage," a series of seven nylon color chambers constructed in a gallery of the de Young Museum as part of the Bay Area's Rainbow Show, Friday through June 22. "I would appreciate it," Aleksandra Kasuba told a member of the Museum staff in my presence, her voice friendly and very firm," if you would. please not call me nationally known. I am either known or.

I am not known." 1 She is known. An architecture magazine describes her as having brought the technique of using nylon stretch fabric to a "unique, level of sophistication." People within her environments experience "otherworldly sensuousness." For most of them it is exciting; for some unsure of their emotions, it' has been "a disturbing and disorienting shock." Belly button psychology' seedp And Saffola contains no cholesterol. It's higher in beneficial Imagine, picking fresh vegetables right from your garden Get started with ten vegetable seed packets for just polyunsaturates than most other margarines. Lower in saturated fats too. Sattola actually helps 5l when you send in the back panel lrom specially marked packages of Saffola cube margarine.

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"If it's true, what's a better way to start than at the beginning. To me, that's prevention starting at the beginning of something." Foremost in communication with others is having an identity and understanding the self, Elkin said. "Everything starts with the self." I call it belly button psychology. The belly button can mean the symbol of the beginning of identity, because when you're born, the umbilical cord is cut and the most important search for self begins." In this search, he said, one must find one's "Uniqueness." "That's the key word uniqueness because nobody is like anybody else, and that's the beautiful thing about being human. In each of us, there's some uniqueness.

"But to find yourself means you have to first communicate with yourself, because without that communication, other communication becomes difficult. He said if persons can not know themselves, they can not develop sound, effective relationships with other people. "Once you find out who you are, you become secure enough to be yourself," he said. A main obstacle for the prevention program is for school administrators to accept it into the curriculum. "I don't kmow.

whether we will ever succeed in my time to sell the idea, but we're sure as hell going to try," he said. "Just the fact that the idea is now in the air is progress. "Education isn't just the three Rs Reading, 'Riting and 'Rithmetic," he said. "I want to add a fourth Relating." He said he was taught that education prepares a person for life, "but what are schools doing (now) to prepare you for life? Very little, as far as I can see. The most important thing in life is not being taught, and that is to communicate and to relate." By Maxme Yee United Press International LOS ANGELES The inability to communicate and the lack of self understanding are the root causes of marital breakup, says a leading Los Angeles County marriage counselor.

To help cut down on the number of family dissolutions, Meyer Elkin, director of the Conciliation Court of the Superior Court, is attempting to introduce a program into public schools that would prevent broken relationships Elkin's program, would introduce a fourth into the school curriculum and teach students how to understand their emotions and themselves. He calls it belly button psychology. "I've been aware of the need for prevention for many years," Elkin said, "and as a marriage counselor, I see firsthand all the misery people can create for their relationship that starts out like heaven and ends up as hell." The American society is based on philanthropy, he said, but he feels that there is too much emphasis placed on what he calls "patchup service." "They're not preventive services," he complained. "We seem to be geared as a society to repair people. We've become a society of repair shops." Elkin said he would like to see society redirect some of its money and energy toward programs that would "stop people from getting bent out of shape." To do this, Elkin and a group of his counselors are setting up a committee that would set up a program for educational systems in the that would concentrate on preparing people to be effective as persons.

"You're not born effective," he said. "It's a learned thing. There's nothing in the genes or chromosomes that say you're going to be effective as a husband or wife or as a person. It's a learning process." He said this can best take place at school beginning at the age of 5 and continuing through high school. He said PV02 tG 3 STORE COUPON This of fer good on either cube or soft Saffola.

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