Up-Beats

Skirts are short, and always up.

We are just a little tired of four sides and a flat face.

The day to come is the day we can operate without resistance . . . turn ourselves at will from heroes to loonies.

Plastered over the walls of an obscure basement gallery in Manhattan's Greenwich Village last week, these slogans counterpointed a new kind of art show that was half picture and half theater. The exhibitors were determined to be offbeat, off-Broadway and off their rockers. Viewers trooped from room to room artfully littered with nets and old bottles, the walls splashed with weird designs and slogans ("Dirt is indeed deep and very beautiful--I love soot and scorching"). Somewhere, a voice was counting in German.

One leader of the new movement is Allan Kaprow, 32, an assistant professor of art at Rutgers University. Kaprow's "painting in the shape of a theater" got started by way of giant paste-ups of indiscriminate materials. To bring back the idea of a picture, he hung canvas tatters in front of his paste-ups. Then he moved the tatters forward and installed lights behind them. Suddenly he had a stage, and so he brought on "happenings," something like the incidents children contrive for an improvised circus. The idea took hold, and happenings have been put on around the world in the past year.

Last week's Manhattan happenings were ignored by the serious critics, but thoroughly enjoyed by uncritical crowds. Among the more surprising:

P: Claes Oldenburg's Snapshots from the City featured a garbage-strewn set of charred paper, a cardboard automobile and retching noises. "Now I'm in the Age of Paper," muses Oldenburg. "Next it may be the Age of Wood."

P: Jim Dine's The Magic Room is a shocking-pink and green affair with bedsprings hanging from the ceiling and an umbrella protruding from the wall, with cardboard signs reading, "Breakfast Is Ready," "Go to Work," and "Why Can't We Be Friends?" Dine calls these "phrases you hear around any household. I wanted to show the violence of a home."

P: Dine's The Smiling Workman featured the artist himself lettering "I love what" in blue paint, "I'm doing" in orange paint, and then emptying the paint buckets over his head. This was meant to show "the feeling of being a happy compulsive painter, which is what I am."

P: Bob Whitman's Duet for a Small Smell was introduced by the burning of sulphur, which put the audience into paroxysms of coughing. That made them "part of the act," Whitman figured. At the climax, a girl stabbed a dummy, but not violently. "A violent stabbing would be much too literary."

It was beat, man, though upbeat, and it was, like, existential. Real children might do it better.

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