"Beautiful, Jean-Jacques"

Scene: a junk-filled empty lot near London's seedy Portobello Road. Rain clouds. Children swinging from a rope tied to a tree. A crowd of corduroy jackets and miniskirts respectfully watches a German painter named Wer ner Schreib tack a huge picture of Ludwig Erhard to an easel, then set it afire.

"It's a spiral of crisis," he explains.

France's Jean-Jacques Lebel strolls through the crowd, inviting each spectator to close one eye. He holds up a pornographic picture to the other eye, strokes the closed eye with a feather, then invites the spectator to change eyes, holds up a postcard of Queen Elizabeth, and strokes the closed eye with a carrot. "Beautiful, Jean-Jacques," murmur the spectators.

With such anti-Establishmentarian overtones, it could almost have been an international congress of anarchists. It was merely part of the week-long "Destruction in Art Symposium," a festival of happenings being staged across Lon don by 40-odd (some very odd) artists from ten countries. The symposium was dedicated to the sobering proposition that "society will ignore the manifestation of destruction in art at its peril."

London took it more or less in stride.

The only public outcry was raised when it was learned that Spain's Juan Hidalgo was invited. His specialty is cutting the heads off chickens and flinging them at the audience. YOU CAN'T KILL A CHICKEN IN THE NAME OF ART, screamed a headline in the Sun. Hidalgo settled for eating an apple "in homage to William Tell."

Egg & Beer. Not to be outdone by the foreign competition, Britain's Ivor Davies staged a complex, explosive demonstration that involved a picture of Robert Mitchum and a male anatomical model with a heart that bled and realistic genitalia. Japan's Yoko Ono had a fey Zen variant on the dominant theme: she spread out a cloth on which she drew the outlines of people's shadows, then folded it up to take their shadows prisoner.

Nonetheless, top honors of the show undeniably went to four Viennese men from something called the Institute for Direct Art. Black-shirted Hermann Nitsch gave a demonstration of his popular Blutorgie (blood orgy), in which he tore apart the cadaver of a freshly slain lamb, also gave a learned lecture on the "liberation of violent urges through catharsis." His colleagues, Otto Miihl and Gunter Brus, held an audience of 100 spellbound in St. Bride Foundation Institute when they smeared Susan Kahn, a visiting New York schoolteacher clad only in a black strapless bra and black panties, from head to toe with flour, crushed ripe tomatoes, beer, raw egg, brightly colored powdered paints, cornflakes, half-chewed raw carrot, bits of melon and melon seed, milk, and tufts of moss and grass. Concluded the critic for the London Times, trying very hard to be broad-minded about it all: "The visual arts today are a kind of brothel of the intellect, and nobody can write a report on a brothel while primly standing outside the door. The idea that he knows precisely what art is, and what it is not, is, it seems to me, the only one which the conscientious art critic cannot afford to give a hearing to."

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