The Pranksters

It has been a chilly non-spring in Manhattan, but the silly season has nevertheless arrived at the art galleries and dealers' showrooms. At the Kornblee, an Italian named Michelangelo Pistoletto, 33, is displaying shiny sheets of steel, on which he has pasted blown-up, painted photographs of men and women. Visitors are reflected in the steel mirrors so that, just for an instant, they are fooled into thinking they are part of a parade, or trying to read someone else's paper--and that the painted figures are really real.

At the Waddell Gallery, Fifth Avenue's puckish furrier, Jacques Kaplan, is parading an entire "art" show done in fur. Zebra skins are expanded into compositions of svelte veldt op. Big Brother Is Watching You (price $950) is the name of a jaguar hide with two peering glass eyes. One eye winks.

But by far the most frabjous funnyman in town is Claes Oldenburg, a prematurely balding troll of 38. Among his what's-its on display at the Sidney Janis Gallery are: 1) a 6-ft.-long stuffed-and-sewn canvas loaf of raisin bread, with six detachable slices and 42 removable raisins; 2) a 12-ft.-tall, droopy white canvas "ghost fan" (its mate, a 12-ft.-tall black fan, wilts in mid-air beneath the space capsules at the top of Expo 67's U.S. pavilion); 3) platters bearing real Jell-O and real marzipan molds of the artist's face, cast thrice weekly by Manhattan's Tower Suite restaurant; 4) a collage made out of old cigarette butts; 5) sketches and models for "proposed colossal monuments," including a 75-ft.-high wing nut for engineering-happy Stockholm, and a brobdingnagian girl's thigh for hem-hoisting London.

Such pranks are by now Oldenburg's trademock. Stockholm-born and Yale-educated, he set up shop in lower Manhattan in 1961, in a store stocked with his own enameled-plaster foodstuffs and clothing, and became one of the progenitors of pop. That humorists such as Kaplan and Pistoletto can find galleries in Manhattan nowadays is largely because Oldenburg's monster hamburgers and soft vinyl Dormeyer mixers made comic contemporary art acceptable, indeed sometimes all but inescapable. "Jokes," says Oldenburg, with all the Nordic intensity of a Bergman, "are one way to reach people. Perhaps humor is the only useful tool in a dissolving world."

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