Where the Militants Roam

Most people think of Buffalo, when they think of it at all, as a sooty industrial port on a blustery bluff overlooking Lake Erie. They ought to try shuffling off to Buffalo some time.

Ask any contemporary-art lover and he will tell you that Buffalo is the home of the Albright-Knox Gallery, one of the nation's finest and most up-to-date art collections.

Ask any experimental-music lover and he will tell you that since 1963 Lukas Foss, 45, one of the nation's most venturesome young composers, has been leading the Buffalo Philharmonic through the amelodic intricacies of Krzysztof Penderecki, Luigi Nono and other 20th century composers. Ask an educator and you will learn that Buffalo's 21,000-student private university, taken over by New York State in 1962, is now the largest single unit of the new state university system. A new $600 million educational plant, designed by the architectural firm of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, is on the drawing boards, and an impressive and often highly unconventional faculty has been assembled. In-group theatrical circles now know Buffalo equally well: it has a two-year-old, better-than-average repertory theater group.

Sign & Symbol. Buffalo, in the six years since the Albright-Knox added its glass-walled new wing, has taken giant strides toward becoming a vociferously militant acropolis of the avant-garde arts. Though the latter term is out of vogue in Manhattan's rarefied critical circles, it is used with force and conviction in Buffalo, where the cab drivers lecture their fares on the horror of the Albright-Knox's modern art, and where Foss reminds his listeners that the word avant-garde is military in origin. The artist, in his view, is meant to act as a sort of spiritual shock-trooper for society, forcing it to become aware of new conflicts and realities whether it wants to or not.

Sign and symbol of Buffalo's new militancy is its Second Festival of the Arts Today, a 16-day program of cultural events that include premieres of two plays by Edward Albee and an opera by Belgium's Henri Pousseur, the first U.S. performances of new works by Penderecki and Greek-born lannis Xenakis, a new movie by Underground Mogul Jonas Mekas, John Barth reading his new novella aloud, and lectures by City Planner Constantinos Doxiadis and Designer Buckminster Fuller. The whole shebang got under way last week with a display of 300 constructivist paintings and sculptures called "Plus by Minus: Today's Half-Century" at the Albright-Knox Gallery (see color opposite).

Squares for Imagery. The theme of the festival, in Foss's words, is "perhaps revolution, not in the Communist sense but in the Bucky Fuller sense, meaning that if we don't learn to adapt ourselves to the modern situation now, it's the end--and the artist must show us the way." The star and theme setter of the art exhibit, appropriately enough, is that grand old Russian revolutionary and pioneer sculptor of the 1920s, Naum Gabo, 77, with 28 constructions on display. Though the original idea for the festival was Foss's, the planning and expenses are being borne by a dozen different local and state institutions (even Buffalo's bantam-sized 7,800-student state college got in the act by inviting Merce Cunningham and his dance company to perform two new works during a four-week stay). The festival committee is chaired by the Albright-Knox's director, Gordon Smith, 61, and the residual deficit will doubtless be met by the gallery's longtime Medici, former seven-goal polo player and investment banker Seymour ("Shorty") Knox, 69, who paid $100,000 to underwrite the first festival, an S.R.O. attraction that in 1965 drew 187,000 visitors.

Most festivalgoers begin their tour of events with a visit to the Albright-Knox's "Plus by Minus," a title that the show's organizer, Douglas MacAgy, amplifies on by citing Sherlock Holmes: "When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth." For the first 20th century abstract artists, the impossible was "the accreted imagery that has been a characteristic of visual art ever since the Renaissance." First to jettison traditional images altogether, as MacAgy shows, was the Russian suprematist Kasimir Malevich, with his revolutionary 1913 drawings of two squares and a circle.

Refound Ancestors. The art that followed--nonobjective, nonemotional and nonutilitarian--was, and for the most part still is, anathema to the common man. To the suprematists, it was an epochal breakthrough, even though Malevich later recalled that he felt "a kind of timidity bordering on fear when I was called upon to leave the world of will and idea in which I had lived and worked; but the blissful feeling of liberating nonobjectivity drew me into the desert, where nothing is real but feeling."

Through Gabo and his fellow constructivists, who took over leadership in the 1920s, the movement expanded to influence Germany's Bauhaus and the Dutch exponents of De Stijl. For art historians, the show is endlessly fascinating; no exhibit has attempted to interrelate these different schools since Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art's "Cubism and Abstract Art" in 1936. What makes the Buffalo survey particularly relevant to 1968 is the demonstration that the lineal descendants of constructivism are none other than the kinetic, op and minimal artists of today.

Maid to Marry. Thesis for the Buffalo show is that "what is happening in art today is not part of a fad or temporary school, but part of a historical moment that happens to have lasted 50 years." To prove it, MacAgy dramatically contrasts the delicate, spiky constructions of Moholy-Nagy and the small, primary-colored canvases of Mondrian with today's huge, brilliantly impastoed canvases by Alfred Jensen and the eerie lights and shadows of the plastic, metal or kinetic constructions of artists in the U.S. and abroad. Super-king-size constructivist sculptures by Tony Smith and Mark di Suvero are imposingly arrayed on the snow-covered grounds outside the museum, while inside, gallerygoers are invited to stroll around the staircase environment of France's Groupe de Recherche d'Art Visuel.

Indeed, the tendency of constructivists to move from freestanding sculpture toward creation of a whole environment is clear in the stage sets that the movement inspired. A prime example is the set originally designed by Liubov Popova for Meyerhold's 1922 production of Fernand Crommelynck's play The Magnificent Cuckold. Reconstructed from a contemporary drawing, it was used on opening night in the gallery as the setting for an Ionesco playlet, Maid to Marry; as actors clambered up, slid down and crawled in and out of the set's slides and chutes or ducked around the revolving wheels, even Ionesco's dense thicket of non sequiturs became a veritable marvel of wit and perspicacity.

Nor is constructivist principle dead today. For Edward Albee's two new one-acters, Box and Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung, are performed at the Studio Arena Theater within an austere, boxlike stage set outlined with wooden bars. Unfortunately the plays within are as empty as the frame. For the first and last 15 minutes, the stage remains bare, and the audience listens to the meandering, tape-recorded reverie of an unseen woman. In between, the stage becomes the deck of an ocean liner on which Mao and two other char acters conduct contrapuntal monologues ranging from Communist agit-propwash to pretentious aphorisms on art, life and love.

Though constructivist works have a common root, two different principles of organization are clearly at work throughout the festival as a whole. The pure, rational, almost classical is represented by the works of the ever-youthful Naum Gabo. Among the most impressive is the cobwebby Linear Construction in Space #2 (1949-53). But even his historic works, like his famed 1916 Head, have gained an altogether different impact by finally being blown up to full scale in recent years.

At the other end of the spectrum are the passionate advocates of clutter, the fertile chroniclers of chance. At one recital, Composer John Cage wandered through the audience gunning down musicians on the stage with the ack-ack-ack of a toy tommy gun. At another concert, members of Jazz Pianist Cecil Taylor's combo roamed off and on stage at random. And leaving Taylor's concert, the audience was confronted by the same dedication to happenstance in a collection of devil-may-care props and costumes by Robert Rauschenberg, composed for Merce Cunningham's ballets. Rauschenberg assembled his props in the same spirit as his famous "combine" of goat and tire --out of whatever happened to be at hand when inspiration hit.

Whether the principle of organizing art is a dispassionate, cool or reckless chance, Gabo urges festivalgoers to linger before the works, no matter how abstract or outlandish. "Lines, shapes, forms, color and movement have a language of their own, but reading takes time," he says. "It is not enough to look. You must see, and see means read."

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