Cutout Cutups

WASHINGTON : General Cornwallis, you cannot stay here in the trails of Alpine, NJ. The American army will drive you away and away! Americans shall be masters of the American Continent.

CORNWALLIS: What tomfoolery is that you speak, George Washington?

With this bit of dialogue, Poet Kenneth Koch begins a beatnik playlet, which was produced off Broadway last March, on how the American Revolution was won. Last week, posted in large letters on one wall of Manhattan's Martha Jackson Gallery, the script served to accompany one of the nuttier art exhibitions of the season. Throughout the gallery stand nearly life-size wooden cutouts of Washington and his horse, Washington and the cherry tree, Washington crossing the Delaware.

They are the work of Alex Katz, a young man who in the last three years has achieved quite a reputation as a figure painter. These cutouts, which were the stage sets for Koch's play, are a side line for Katz--huge toy soldiers, a kind of instant folk art, that would be fine if everyone concerned did not insist on taking them seriously. "I like to mix what people and experts say can't be mixed," says Katz. "I like to take a vulgar social thing or idea like these cutouts and give them something else, make them less boring." Katz's Washington is much like what any normally talented youngster might produce if asked to paint the father of his country. To set the stage for the Washington-Cornwallis dialogue, Katz made two cutout cups and saucers to sit alongside a real china coffee pot. When the dialogue is over, Washington returns to his own camp, organizes a raid on the enemy, then takes a nap and dreams of the time his father gave him an uprooted cherry tree for his birthday. The action here is illustrated by a cherry tree, a birthday cake, a shovel, an ax, and a sign saying, THE DREAM OF GEORGE WASHINGTON. In the Koch-Katz version, Father Washington persuades his son to accept the dirty old tree. He plants it for the boy only to have little George chop it down and run away. But how does George make his escape? By swimming a river, of course. And that gives the grown-up general the idea for crossing the Delaware.

The Koch play, in its crazy way, is a good deal of fun; and so are the cutouts. Unhappily, the Manhattan avant-garde has a tedious tendency to flip over this sort of thing. The gallery press release solemnly says: "There is a directness about these works that goes straight to the heart of its subjects. The statement is at once simple and sophisticated, playful and elegant." And that just makes the release funnier than the show.

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