The Box, Glue & Nail Set

Invitations to New York openings now must be art works themselves: invisible-ink posters, a kaleidoscope rattling full of the artist's favorite images, plastic ice cubes filled with bolts or ball bearings, a signed shopping bag for a group show of what artists collect. It takes at least that much to entice jaded connoisseurs away from their collections of old Batman comic books and portable ant colonies. Meanwhile, the artists were busy nailing, gluing and boxing together things that are neither pop nor op.

Take Niki de Saint-Phalle, 34, for instance. She was born Agnes, looked demure on a LIFE cover in 1949 while a Park Avenue postdeb, and then, calling herself Niki, turned into one of the nutty art world's most charming cashews. Refining action painting, which was supposed to spread the oils around, she hit the target in 1960 by attaching bags of paint to canvases, then blasting them with her .22-cal. rifle. Now that the quick-draw days are over, she has popped back into fashion with hairy sculptures tattooed with more images, inscriptions and plain gunk than any statue in the park. Her Sappho, lounging beneath a tree fruited with a skull, slouches like an Eve who has waited in vain for Adam a thousand years. Or France's Arman, 37. He accumulates things like a surplus-parts dealer and freezes them in polyester. His transparent collages in Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art's current assemblage show, contain heaps of real oil gauges, fan blades, or teapots. Very cool and a bit Dada, Arman's accumulations deliberately arouse no emotions in their viewers--unless possibly pique. But the Modern acquired one--a blend of matchboxes with pictures of cars and tiny toy vehicles.

. Belgium's Vic Gentils, 46, another assemblagist in the Modern's show, evokes nostalgia by limiting his palette to destroyed pianos. He reassembles them into memento mori. His Berlin-Leipzig could suggest a defunct trans-European express train, or simply what he could do if he had added woodwinds and brass. Not everything new is off key. A newcomer at the Modern, German-born Mary Bauermeister, 30, believes that there is more than one way to look at a painting. She boxes pen and ink scribbles, beasties and the progress notes of her work beneath Plexiglas layers, scatters them with lenses in sizes ranging from contact to Cyclops. As the viewer moves, hocus-focus! Lines magically ripple, images flip. She has indulged herself in pebble collages, but her more recent optometry, such as

Homemade P--APPLEPIE, takes static O art close to the vibrating borderlines of cinema.

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