Avant-Garde: Did You Ever, Ever, Ever

A hundred metronomes went ticktack, ticktack during the 15-minute performance of Györgi Ligeti's composition, Poème Symphonique. A toy gun popped, a yellow umbrella flipped open, while Soloist David Tudor banged directly on the piano strings with a hammer, executing John Cage's Concert for Piano and Orchestra. The movie collage Breathdeath offered a drawn foot coming out of Richard Nixon's mouth. In French Playwright Eugene lonesco's one-acter, Bedlam Galore, for Two or More, "She" and "He" quarreled, and quarreled some more, while a civil war went on outside and the roof and walls caved in to illustrate lonesco's philosophy that life is absurd. Electrically powered kinetic sculpture by Len Lye and Nicolas Schoeffer moved, twisted, roared and thumped at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery. All this and more galore was part of the two-week Buffalo Festival of the Arts Today, perhaps the most all-encompassing, hip, with-it, avant-garde presentation in the U.S. to date.

Photographers in the House? But clearly the sensation of the festival was the dance mercifully called Untitled. To the taped sound of rolling stones, the reading of passages from Da Vinci's Notebooks, an aria from Verdi's Simon Boccanegra, and the choreographer's taped comments (sample: "If you are taking photographs now, let us know later"), Yvonne Rainer, 30, and Robert Morris, 34, in a tight embrace, moved across stage in slow motion for eight minutes—stark naked. "I am a sculptor and like nude bodies," explains Dance Choreographer Morris. The audience took it all with a nervous laugh.

The Festival of the Arts Today was organized by the Buffalo Fine Arts Academy, with the cooperation of the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra, the New York State Council on the Arts, and the State University of New York at Buffalo. Most of the money came from a foundation set up by Investment Banker Seymour Knox, 66, longtime avant-garde art angel. Some conservative-minded Buffalonians were indignant at spending tens of thousands of dollars to stage the "popping of balloons and manipulation of plumbing plungers."

Is it Art? But the festival has served as a catalyst—and this is the essential thing, says Lukas Foss, conductor of the Buffalo Philharmonic. "The entire city is talking about it—there are strong comments, pro and con. It is not important what we like or don't like. The question 'Is it art, or isn't it art?' is not as vital as the fact that it is here and we have to know it—this is informative."

What heartened the sponsors most was the phenomenal public interest in a city of 530,000. About 150,000 people saw the art exhibit, 3,000 attended the U.S. premiere of the four lonesco one-act plays, 6,500 listened to the concerts. Says Albright-Knox Director Gordon Smith: "Buffalo was ready for this sort of avant-garde show."