Exhibitions: 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).