The Buffalo Festival-I

...This fardel of gags and non sequiturs, in which the participants (John Cage, Richard Casey, Gregory Corso, Morton Feldman, Lukas Foss, Larry Rivers, and Harold Rosenberg), between bouts of whining and boasting, managed to remain completely inarticulate on the issue at hand, was a perfect index of the Festival atmosphere...

...Perhaps in the next phase of civilization, man will make only festivals, and leave the making of works of art to science and the accidents of nature...

...The alliance that now obtains between money and social status on the one hand, and the highly publicized gyrations of vanguard art on the other, is fast ruling out the alternative possibilities...

...If so, the Buffalo Festival has shown the way...

...The Festival's principal exhibition, it will be recalled, was entitled "Art Today," and the topic thus reflected an anxiety that must have been deeply felt among many visitors not only to this show but to the concert that had taken place earlier that day...

...This was, in a sense, an exhibition which displaced itself before one's own eyes an exhibition whose most startling features demoted its more benign constituents overnight to the status of an antediluvian sport...

...But the "Optic" side of the Albright-Knox show included many of the same artists, and it was precisely their works which were thoroughly eclipsed by the "Kinetic" constructions whose electronically programmed visual orchestrations made even the most startling hand-painted canvas surface look like something from an other nearly lost civilization...

...What saves Schoeffer's oeuvre from being a mere gimmick or a curiosity is the way he has been able to ally his scientific apparatus with a certain element of Parisian taste...

...as the topic to be discussed was not without meaning for the events at hand...

...It left one thoroughly disconcerted, even as it startled and amused_even more disconcerted, I might add, than did the exhibition of "Found Objects," which, consisting of odds and ends that the vicissitudes of nature had embellished to greater or lesser degrees of visual interest, simply ruled out the possibility of an individual hand making a work of art at all...

...But it was precisely this distance that made Schoeffer's constructions an ideal spectacle for a busy and somewhat dizzying Festival: Where the velocity of change is given priority over every other esthetic factor, only an artist with Schoeffer's scientific resources could hope to run fast enough to hold his own ground...

...Festivals are, by their very nature, the kind of cultural event in which the artistic quotient diminishes in direct ratio to the socioesthetic equations they are meant to rectify...

...To the question, "Tomorrow...

...But if the Philistine apologetics of the President's emissary on the arts were not exactly uplifting, they were no worse, really, than the utterances foisted upon an even larger audience 24 hours later by a panel of cultural celebrities addressing themselves to the topic, "Tomorrow...

...Still, it is its technical inventiveness rather than its Parisian niceties that make Schoeffer's work a harbinger of things to come...

...Despite this refusal of the panelists to take the matter seriously, the selection of "Tomorrow...

...At the heart of this anxiety is a growing conviction that, since received values are being irrevocably shattered in the works currently claiming our attention, their values and assumptions will be, in turn, quickly overtaken by still further changes launched at an ever increasing rate of innovation until the point is reached where what one experiences is not the work of art as such but simply the velocity of change itself...

...A large exhibition, "Art Today: Kinetic and Optic," was installed at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, the city's principal museum, and a smaller exhibition devoted to "Found Objects'' was organized at the State University College...

...Certainly its stupefying banalities, invoking as an augury of our forthcoming cultural revival those millions of eyes that flickered briefly in the direction of the Mona Lisa during its recent American tour, should win a place alongside the mural-size paintings of canned soup as emblems of the '60s...

...Only in America, I think, would an audience of artists, critics, professors, collectors, museum directors, and cultural entrepreneurs of one sort or another withstand, without audible protest, the onslaught of so many homilies unwittingly designed to subvert their own accomplishments...

...One is astonished, in confronting his work, to discover that the raffine estheticism of the School of Paris, now so utterly discredited in conventional easel painting, has insinuated itself into the realm of electronics...

...Alongside Schoeffer, even Mondrian would look like a primitive...

...Hence the odd spectacle, in Buffalo, of assigning to the ineffable Roger L. Stevens, the newly appointed chairman of the National Council on the Arts and President Johnson's advisor on artistic affairs, the task of inaugurating a festival whose main contents clearly escaped his comprehension...

...What also demands to be satisfied on such occasions is, of course, a sense of civic responsibility and public service...

...To anyone who hasn't been to Buffalo, the Modern's exhibition must look like le dernier cri...

...Surely no one who saw the "Kinetic and Optic" exhibition at the Albright-Knox museum could help wondering what tomorrow might bring...

...And that inventiveness, so radically indebted to objective scientific methods, undoubtedly places his work at a certain distance from what most of us continue to regard as authentic art: art that is capable of making some compelling statement about the world of human emotions...

...The effort is intensive rather than explorative...

...This conviction induces a kind of cultural vertigo, leaving the spectator who innocently seeks to establish some relationship between the work of art and his own inner life with the awful suspicion that the artistic impulse may now have allied itself with the very forces that stifle consciousness...

...The outrageous must be sanctioned by the eminently respectable...

...the Buffalo Festival marked his American debut...

...Whether or not this militarycum-missionary procedure is the most felicitous way to bestow the pleasures of contemporary art on an unwary audience, it is an approach likely to be emulated wherever such festivals are held in the future...

...Immediate returns are given priority over long-range objectives...

...The honored guests in their reserved seats, resplendent in their dinner jackets and more than a little pickled by the pre-discussion festivities, greeted every inanity with whoops of laughter they had come to be amused, and were not to be disappointed while the audience in off the street, crowding every available space in the misguided hope of hearing something of consequence, stood by in glum disbelief...

...One felt at times as if the entire history of abstract art had been put on tape and electronically projected at a speed and rhythm that overturned all the assumptions on which that history had taken place...

...And since the rate of obsolescence is nowadays even greater in the arts than in military hardware, the expenditure both financial and creative involved in such undertakings is bound to be disproportionate to the esthetic result...

...A concert series featuring the works of John Cage, Edgar Varese, Morton Feldman, Pierre Boulez, and other votaries of vanguard form was staged by the Buffalo Philharmonic and the "Evenings for New Music" group under the direction of Lukas Foss...

...Schoeffer is well-known in Paris, where his work has received a good deal of critical attention...

...The comfortable but uneasy class that pours its money into such events wants, above all, to be amused and to attract attention, and no artists are better equipped to satisfy these demands than those who were assembled in Buffalo for this Festival...

...The "Buffalo Festival of the Arts Today"_the first such event to take place in that city_has more or less conformed to this pattern...

...The room devoted to his constructions at the Albright-Knox Gallery overwhelmed the visitor with the most vivid and variegated constellations of abstract optical phenomena conceivable...

...An extremely ambitious program of artistic and extra-artistic activities, beginning on February 27 and continuing unabated through March 13, succeeded in bringing together some of the most audacious developments to be found on the current scene, not only in the visual arts but also in music, dance, film, and other realms as well...

...The attempt, obviously, was to blitz the city with a dazzling array of provocative events and striking personalities, and thus awaken an indifferent public to the esthetic revolution through which the arts are now passing with unprecedented speed...

...At the Museum of Modern Art just now there is a show called "The Responsive Eye,'' which consists of paintings and constructions designed to excite, baffle, and agitate one's retinal faculties to an extreme degree...

...The star of the Buffalo show was a Hungarian-born Parisian artist named Nicolas Schoeffer, whose introduction of cybernetics into the making of abstract art has implications almost too staggering to contemplate...

...The dance companies of Merce Cunningham and the Judson Art Theater performed, and four plays by Eugene Ionesco were given their American premiere under the direction of Richard Casey...

...which reduced some of the glibbest expositors of the New York art scene to nervous laughter, he had already constructed an answer...

...Perhaps Stevens' speech, which provided a kind of siesta between the formal, Rotarian-style dinner of cold chicken and peppermint ice cream, and the opening of the eyestunning "Kinetic and Optic" exhibition, had best be regarded as a form of Pop Art...

...Films by Andy Warhol and others, plus various lectures and symposia, completed the program...

...A bizarre fate for the tradition that produced Cezanne and Matisse...