Here Today ...

Manhattan's lively Martha Jackson Gallery could think of no satisfactory title for its new show, and so in its press release on the event last week, it tactfully announced: "We invite the press to name this new art form for us." The press was at a loss too, for much of the "new art form" is a bewildering jumble of horrors: tortured junk and bric-a-brac, flattened tin cans and old clothes, or simply an old chair with its innards ripped out.

According to the more uninhibited of the new media boys, there is not much future any more to using only such oldfashioned tools as brush, chisel or paint. They find their tradition in the burlap-bag "paintings" of Italy's Alberto Burri, the childlike deformations of France's Jean Dubuffet, and the once shocking collages of Germany's late Kurt Schwitters. Last week these Old Masters were duly represented by Martha Jackson in a special "historical section." The rest of the gallery was given over to the new.

The Traditionalist. At the entrance stands a creation by Robert Rauschen-berg--an old crate that rests on a post embedded in a sofa pillow and covered with bits of photographs and newspapers, crowned with a stuffed rooster and wired to light up like a juke box every few seconds. But at 34, Rauschenberg already finds that "I now run the risk of being an extremely traditional painter compared to the young people." Just as Rauschenberg lets his "paintings" grow into environment, the newcomers seem to be trying to suck the environment in.

George Brecht, 30, of Greenwich Village has produced a Medicine Chest which is just what the title says it is--a medicine chest whose contents the viewer can rearrange and sniff at will, thus in theory entering into the artist's special world. Irving Kriesberg's Lovers XI 1957 is a double frame of moving panels that the viewer can change and thereby create "paintings" of his own. To make Grand-maw's Boy, Allan Kaprow, 32, produced a collage of worn pieces of cloth that were glued next to the fading photograph of a boy. The old cloth and the dated colors that a grandmother might well have picked for a slipcover or dress evoke the proper mood, even though they may puzzle the mind.

The Materialists. The new wave scours the nation's rubbish heaps, junk piles and beaches to find its materials, for the ingredients of art are supposed to lie anywhere, if only the eye is gifted enough to see. One artist found himself well supplied with old beams when his house was torn down. A favorite smock that has become too worn to wear can be dipped in glue and hurled against a door, and a generous helping of red paint mixed with bucket, cans and surgical gauze produces a grizzly montage called Capt Canaveral. But the show also has surprises of another sort. A 24-year-old Englishman named Anthony Magar has used burned and stained wood, stitched canvas and pounded metal to create a big picture that is as pleasing as an autumn landscape seen from the sky.

Will all this last? Critics can for once be definite. Whatever their artistic merits, "paintings" made out of coffee grounds, torn nylons and bits of paper are automatically stamped--PERISHABLE.

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