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green and a moving neon sign of soccer players at the entrance. In the "Cosmonauts' Garden", space-suited dummies float along the ceiling and a loveable monkey in white vinyl equipment spastically jumps up and down as though on a stick. Not such a long shot after all, El Batacazo was fun and well enough conceived and constructed to be fairly memorable, though I can't say it provided any new sensations. Now if I had had a chance to watch some of my dignified colleagues whizzing down that slide....

Anastasi's "Sound Objects" at Dwan could be called an environment but it is more properly an idea show. Incongruously framed by luxuriant slices of clear lucite and nylon thread, common objects are suspended from the ceiling, each one representing an act. Meanwhile, a tape intermittently transmits the sound of that act being accomplished, through speakers inelegantly attached to each piece. The sounds come one at a time and rather randomly, so that there is quite a bit osilence too. The acts are mostly simple, aggressive, industrial by nature: an electric saw is heard sawing a chunk of wood and the resultant two pieces hang with it; a pick-axe is accompanied by the stone it is heard hacking, a cinderblock by the broken glass jug it smashes. Others are more self-contained: an inner tube that inflates, an inner tube that deflates, a winch, a fan, a radiator hissing, a pneumatic drill. In a separate, darkened room a more nostalgic environment is set up, reproducing a tenement window looking out onto an airshaft from which comes all the clamour of the melting pot: radios, Spanish voices, American voices, street sounds, quarrels, songs, babies yowling. Genuinely affective for anyone who has lived in a tenement, it lacked the detached precision of the single objects. The isolate sounds, ranging as they do from the whisper of escaping air to the clamorous smashing of a barrel, represent more than accompaniment, and verge on a musical experience. They are, in essence, ready-mades with congruent Cageian sound effects. Anastasi plays a factually intellectual game, the fascination lying in the strong literal quality rather than in any associative impedimenta. Instead of exploiting the appearance of the common object or our opinions on the urban scenes evoked, he presents the pieces as events, and their singular clarity thus takes on the purity of experience - not dreamed, nor in any way distorted, but kept in context by the sound and merely heightened by the visual exactitude.

No rookie at the king's gambit himself, Marcel Duchamp, recently organized an exhibition for the benefit of the National Chess Foundation at Cordier & Ekstrom that drew its share of stalemates, and checks. The invited contributors received a new etching by the grand master (after a drawing for his 1911 Chess Players) in return for a motley board of pawns; some had nothing to do with the theme and others made it only by title; Knight's Move was a favorite. There were more or less erotic chess sets by Max Ernst, Man Ray, Jim Love, Bill Epton, and a highly unworkable one by Dali with white plaster fingers at various come-higher angles, a pepper and a salt shaker as protagonists. Gerstner provided an elaborate optical game in which checkerboard chess men spin against a stepped ground and Duchamp's profile appears; David Hare's game ended by popping a balloon; Arman's Battlefield presented sliced chessmen erect or fallen on a plaster cube. President Johnson would have been warmed by Saul Steinberg's King's Troubles, while Meret Oppenheim proved her reign was not over by furnishing a mate for all the stray kings: a bread queen split open to show fishbone vertebrae and laid on a plate, knife and fork waiting, titled bon appetit, Marcel. The most ascetic answer to such goings on was a score sheet from the Paris International Tournament of 1928 embalmed in plexiglass; the match described was between one Tartakowas and one Duchamp, and it was a draw.

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Robert Schoelkopf held a poignant little show last month consisting of collages and drawings by Joseph Cornell and his brother Robert, in memory of the latter, who died recently. There were three sections - drawings by Robert, drawings by Robert retouched or re-created by his brother, and collages by Joseph. The untouched crayon drawings were childlike but often startling fantasies (although there was no indication that this was not an aware and sensitive mind). The isolated and other-worldly life lived on Utopia Boulevard evidently had two denizens. Mice and rabbits and an occasional bird played the major roles, especially a "mouse king" who rides in a balloon over houses and tosses gifts down the chimney, or plays the cello. Neither illustrations nor cartoons, these fragile and disturbing scenes share Joseph Cornell's mysterious innocence while naturally lacking his evolved formal sense. Their potential was realized when Joseph retouched, heightened, juxtaposed them against stronger color, texture or another image. His own collages - crystalline evocations of silence - were much more impressive than the ones shown some time ago at Allan Stone or at the Museum of Modern Art last spring. They were a series centered around the them of the train, memorially intended since Robert Cornell was a model railroader. One was a pasted reproduction of Magritte's familiar train emerging from the wall, to which an angel from the Ghent altarpiece had been added.

Jason Schoener spent last year teaching in Greece. The resulting oils, at the Midtown Gallery, glow with pleasure in the light and colors found there. His landscapes and seascapes are rendered in a scumbled, slightly textural but never Expressionist manner. Serene and hedonist, unclouded by any interest in current modes, they are restricted to intense combinations of similar hues - blues and greens, reds and oranges. Because of these limitations, Schoener risks a kind of illustrational shallowness, but when he allows himself the full scale of his rich and accomplished color sense, he moves within the range of genuine lyricism. Grecian Summer, in which the whole spectrum is subtly controlled to convey the sparkling freshness of a sea and coastline, was my favorite. Its sensitive depiction of nature was universal, and could have been Maine as well as Greece.

Duane Hatchett had an odd exhibition at Royal Marks - odd in that all the sculpture but one showed a definite preoccupation with monolithic volumes and metal patina, while that one was a yellow painted sheet steel "silhouette" in the David Smith-Anthony Caro-Robert Murray tradition, although somewhat more baroque.

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Anastasi. Untitled construction, 1966. Height 23 3/4 inches. Dwan Gallery.