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: Charlotte Moorman } wears gas mask j while playing cello jwith 24” ruler Claes Gidenburg’s Soft Blender, © -— 1965—sculpture | made of vinyl, wood, kapok and cord _ THE DISINTEGRATION OF FORM IN THE ARTS. By : Erich Kahler. Braziller. 133 pp. $5; paperback, $2.95. . By John Simon dack =ich oft abe arts. Meacer haface ie mau he +L the a ane ane y mic Gara nigat i aM i i has so much unequivocal trash passed for art, and been —— 7 extolled as such both by experts who should know ; better and by a large public that, before, knew at least that it didn’t know and stayed out of it. But we have _ reached the stage where the new is good because it is “new, not because it is good, and where art delights the masses with much the same thrille as drac races, put- Physical Things, a plastic wind tunnel by artist Steve Paxton : performs his “Circus = - Mutilation” act «Use APA at is some at least half-conscious effort toward perfection of form, which means closed form, that makes them artistic.” But things have changed: “In all previous transformations of humanity, the breaking up of old forms was immediately linked with the creation of new form ms, it was, in fact, partly at least, produced by the creative process. Today, however, the processes of dis- ruption by far outstrip those of new consolidation, indeed the creative processes themselves cannot help producing disjunction.” He “who speaks of wholeness, coherence, form, is ¢o ipso considered a romantic Te. actionary.” In the second lecture, the disintegrative process is Composer Jahn Cage presents his “Variations Vii,” in the so-called i mixed electronic Robert Morris - \. f : a and letters in arbitrary arrangements. Quite rightly, Kahler associates this with the rise of science and tech- nology, and the longing for the safety of mathematical formulas. There are other reasons, too, which Kahler does not examine — economic, social, political. But at least he -does sharply analyre the technological shift of com- munication away from the center of human beings to the periphery, to areas of specialization. And he points out how, both by trying to mimic this process and by attempting ineptly to escape it, art becomes a new, art- legs, scientifically tinged art for art’s sake. There is a destruction of coherence, a conscious expunging of