The Happening

First they assassinated the Renault, brutally sacrificing it with ax and pitchfork. Then a girl in a white brassiere and red bikini climbed onto the car's crushed roof, where a scrawny youth massaged her with wads of spaghetti. The girl plucked pasta from her shining body and flipped it at the audience; the audience ate it up.

After all, it was a "happening," and it was happening to them in Paris--just as it had earlier that night when two girls dressed in cabbage leaves whacked onlookers' heads with bad minton rackets, or when the motorcycle charged through the hall like a bull at Pamplona, or when they watched the crucified chicken flopping on the stage until it ran dry of blood.

Past Flings. "They're supposed to be opening the curtain on the horrors of our modern world," explained David Davis, 50, director of the American Students and Artists Center in Mont parnasse, where the happening was happening. Wearily adjusting his spectacles, he added: "I don't get it." Davis' quandary was the price he paid last week for permitting "the Second Festival of Free Expression" to hold forth in his tidy Montparnasse youth center. During eight days of happenings, readings, screenings and "total theater," the quandary quotient rose steadily.

Organized by a bearded Franco-American collagist, Jean-Jacques Lebel, 28, the festival drew the violent participation of some 60 Montparnasse artists and their friends. Among the 2,000 onlookers were many of the old surrealists, Dadaists and other proponents of artistic anarchy, (as well as Painter Marcel Duchamp and Philosopher Jean Wahl, who introduced Heidegger to Sartre). To them, the whole show must have seemed a remembrance of flings past.

New Revolution. At the penultimate performance, an outfit called Le Groupe Panique smashed a huge plaster reproduction of Rodin's Thinker into smithereens, spilling torrents of black ink out of plastic bags. Then, while a girl twisted the arms, legs and heads from plastic dolls, another girl stood by beatifically as a grave-faced artist shaved her groin. Later, Beat Poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti intoned his latest work while a naked couple made love vertically in a burlap bag, black light playing on their shoulders. "I should stop it," moaned Director Davis, "but if I do, there will be 28 times the scandal there already is."

Scandal? Not in the eyes of Organizer Lebel, who pronounced the festival a smashing success. "Everybody dreams of doing all the things we've done," he explained as the festival closed. "Our generation is inventing a new meaning for revolution, a new state of mind based on an enlarged understanding of what freedom means. We're in debt now--$600 at least for all the things we broke--and it may sound naive and crazy, but we're proud as hell of having this debt to pay. If we could get $1,000 together, we could rent a garage next year and really have a happening that could say things. A real happening without all these restrictions."

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