TABLE OF CONTENTS

Table of Images ………………………………………..ii

Introduction ……………………………………….iii-iv

Chapter One ………………………………………..5–20

Chapter Two ……………………………………….21–35

Chapter Three …………………………………….....36–75

Chapter Four ……………………………………….76–84

Chapter Five ………………………………………..85–105

Chapter Six …………………………………..........106-116

Conclusion ………………………………………..117-18

Bibliography ……………………………………….119–123

ii

TABLE OF IMAGES

Figures 1–3 ……………………………………………………..7

Figures 4–7 ……………………………………………………..12

Figures 8–9 ……………………………………………………..17

Figures 10–13 …………………………………………………..42–43

Figures 14–15 …………………………………………………..52

Figures 16–17 …………………………………………………..60

Figures 18–23 …………………………………………………..78–80

Figures 24–25 …………………………………………………..110

Figures 26–27 …………………………………………………..112

iii

INTRODUCTION

Scholarly techniques applied to an artist’s sources are valuable aids to knowing what he is all about. It is quite helpful, for instance, to investigate Jackson Pollock’s roots in Impressionism, Cubism, Dadaism, Surrealism, and Navajo sand painting; possibly even Expressionism, certainly in Benton and the modern Mexicans: Orozco, Rivera and Siqueiros. The critical task thereafter is to emphasize the most relevant of these derivations, for him, for his milieu, and for us. [italics mine]. Relevance clearly is a shifty affair, but it is necessary to account for what Pollock seemed to be involved in, whether we care for it or not.

- Allan Kaprow, “Jackson Pollock: An Artists’ Symposium.”

As Kaprow hoped to discern the influences - both overt and hidden - of the great Jackson Pollock,

so too is my goal of explicating the development of Kaprow’s most famous and catalyzing works,

his Happenings. Happenings are best known as a nebulous cultural catchall for all things

“groovy” and event-based, whether in the context of a politically tinged performance art piece or

a drug-fueled music festival. The first Happenings, however, bear only a superficial relationship

to these later manifestations.

The most important practitioner and father of Happenings was undoubtedly Kaprow, as he staged

the first, must well-articulated versions and did much to expand knowledge about them

throughout his lifetime of publishing, teaching, and lecturing.

Much of the writing on Kaprow concerns itself with Happenings and the later, pared-down

Events that Kaprow produced from 1959 until his death in 2006. There is no Kaprow biography,

and information on his youth and development pre-1959 is scattered and contradictory.

iv

This paper attempts to develop a more complete picture of Kaprow’s artistic development up

through the creation of his most well-known groundbreaking work, 18 Happenings in 6 Parts,

staged at the Reuben Gallery in New York in 1959. I also argue for the inclusion of marginalized

artists and art movements when considering this development.

By understanding the genesis of Happenings, we may better understand the relationship of

Happenings of other art movements and better appreciate the originality of Kaprow, a well-

known figure in specialized art circles but not in the general public; a figure who has too often

been taken for granted and whose role in subsequent art movements - Body Art, Land Art, and

Conceptual art especially - has been downplayed if not totally disregard.

5

CHAPTER ONE: AN AMERICAN LIFE

Allan Kaprow was born August 23rd, 1927 to middle-class Jewish-American1 parents in Atlantic

City, New Jersey, during the city’s golden age, long before legalized gambling was introduced. It

was never a truly glamorous city, however, as it always possessed a carnivalesque charm. It is

fitting that the boardwalk schmaltz of the seaside resort town known for diving girls on horses

and penny arcades would later figure in the kind of faded, yet exuberantly tacky tableaux Kaprow

employed in his early works (one work from 1956 is appropriately titled Penny Arcade [fig. 18]).

However, the origins of Kaprow’s art and life perspective are not to be found in his birth city,

though it quite possibly had some impact.2

A severely asthmatic child, he was sent off at about age five or six to the outskirts of Tucson,

Arizona, to spend his days in the dry desert climate living at a quasi-communal ranch with a few

other ill children. The facility, which continued as a working ranch, had been repurposed after it

“found that it was more appropriate as a business for sick children,”3

and thus was not

specifically set up as a health center. Sources vary as to the time he spent at the Crouch Ranch,

one indicating one year, and Kaprow in a 1981 interview stating he was there about five-six

years. After his time at the ranch, he was sent to a boarding school in Tucson called the Arizona

Sunshine School where he remained until approximately 1939. This school was expressly for sick

children and had better educational capacities than the ranch; however the ranch had not been

without its merits as it was “a nice out of door life that you would expect for a young boy.”

Yet it remained a painful, at times very lonely existence, although Kaprow had close friends,

“including horses.”4 To distract himself from and to compensate for the reality of being a

weakling in a state of near-exile from his family,5 he fantasized about the cowboy and Native

6

American ways of life. He enjoyed cowboy art, comics, and folk stories particularly those of J.

Frank Dobie, who “illustrated his books in that rough sort of tiny collective cowboy horses with a

kind of lanky, oversized cowboy on top of it.” (Kaprow means the horse and cowboy were

combined into an almost mythical hybrid)6 Given his family’s traditionalism, this kind of subject

matter was quite different from what he would have been exposed to had he been healthy and

living with his parents on the East Coast. (Although ironically, he also had an apparently quite

serious interest in becoming a garbage man, a profession ostensibly more suited to an urban

dweller.7) The cowboy imagination was encouraged and seemed like a feasible possibility to the

young Kaprow. His dreams of rustling, however, were dashed when he realized that the

profession had become highly “mechanized.”8

He craved the authentic, direct, visceral

experience.

Although the cowboy is a common symbol in boyhood hero-worship, Kaprow’s proximity to

actual “cowboys and Indians” doubtlessly left a greater impression on him than images in a

movie theatre or magazine would have. Moreover, Kaprow actively participated in rodeos and

Native American ceremonies, and he appreciated the contrast of the “breakneck melodrama” and

the “solemnity and sequestration” that the two type of events implied.9 Therefore, it was not all a

childish preoccupation with machismo - there was tenderness to his longings. Reflecting on his

early artistic ambitions, he stated “As an artist I would also be the Lone Ranger. My fame, if I

were famous, would never be collected on.”10

Although he achieved a great deal of fame within

artistic circles, it is nevertheless true that he has been undervalued to an extent, and his work

never earned him a fortune.

In Arizona he felt guilt over the separation from his family, and aligned himself with the mythic

cowboy figure that likewise spent his time atoning for some murky sin, which was the crime of

being unwell. Kaprow stated he felt: “rejected in profound ways.”11 This guilt, as could be

7

Figs. 1–3 (Clockwise from Top) 1.) © Robert C. Maxwell. Atlantic City Boardwalk [Bromo Seltzer billboard], 25 July 1929. From http://www.acmuseum.org/. Accessed 18 October 2010. 2.) Allan Kaprow with lasso, 1940. From Jeff Kelley, Childsplay, VII. 3.) J.R. Williams, Out Our Way, Scribner and Sons, 1951. Image Courtesy Dorothy Sloan Rare Books. From http://www.liveauctioneers.com/item/2580244. Accessed 19 October, 2010.

8

expected, stemmed from his family. His father, an attorney, was viewed as “quite the barrister,”12

and his force could be felt all the way from New York, where his family, including a young sister,

now lived on the Upper West Side. In a revealing interview, Kaprow in 1979 discussed how he

was “brought up to believe that one must suffer,” and to constantly be giving of one’s self, even

when one’s energies had been completely tapped. (He concluded by indicating that this was a

horribly self-destructive idea, and he was just then, at age 52, trying to “catch up.”)13

This

woundedness is a key element in a good understanding, if such a thing is possible, of Kaprow’s

motives, but his art and words ultimately do not attest to this spirit. They rather have a

levelheaded and optimistic character owing to American Pragmatism and his own dogged

determinism, born from years of early struggle in a body that would not cooperate; a body and

mind driven to action in spite of themselves. Indeed, Kaprow was to remain highly productive

throughout his long career of teaching of making art.

It is unknown exactly when he first seriously began making art, but Kaprow indicates that he

“drew very much very early” and that he “wanted to be an artist as early as [he] could think of.”14

We also know from Jeff Kelley, a well-known Kaprow scholar, that he made drawings and

paintings to sell at the rodeos he attended as a child in Arizona.15 He created representations of

the standard Southwestern fare: cacti, mountains, cows, Gila monsters and sunsets.16 It was by

becoming friendly with a rodeo performer that he first discovered his life’s ambition; the rodeo-

man, like other performers, had to supplement his income by some other means, so he made

works of art to sell at the booths surrounding the venues he performed at. Ever the pragmatist,

Kaprow decided then to become a “combination” artist, which came to mean both a cartoonist

and a fine artist.17

Kaprow sold his works, and his talents were recognized early on, for example by an award given

in elementary school for handicrafts. Beyond cowboy paraphernalia illustrations, it is unknown

9

what Kaprow’s other early influences might have been. One wonders what access the young artist

had to “sophisticated” art: although Tucson was a growing city, it was far from being a New

York, or a Chicago or San Francisco, for that matter. It is possible he visited museums on his trips

home to New York, although by his admission there were no other particularly artistically

inclined members of his family.

After a brief recuperation, Kaprow was enrolled for an equally brief stint at the elite Walden

School in New York in 1939, and promptly returned to Arizona, where he would remain until

1941 attending the Brandes School.18

During his second year of high school he left for good and

enrolled at the High School of Music and Art (now LaGuardia High School), where he graduated

in 1945 with classmates Wolf Kahn, Rachel Rosenthal and Virginia Zabriskie, with Morton

Feldman a grade or so above. Kahn and Kaprow became friends during the school’s entrance

examination (likely due in part to the adjacency of their last names) and remained close

throughout their lives. Kaprow spent much time drawing and painting at Kahn’s home during

high school, as his own family was less than enthusiastic about their son’s inclinations. After

graduating, Kahn left for the University of Chicago, where held advanced placement status and

was able to graduate in just one year, after which he returned to New York and took classes with

Hans Hofmann. It was through Kahn in 1946 that Kaprow was introduced to the influential artist

and teacher, whose school he would later enroll in. Later that year, with his asthma mostly

cleared up and a transcript from a prestigious high school in hand, Kaprow embarked on a college

career.

He enrolled at New York University19 (Washington Square College) where he eventually majored

in Art History and Philosophy.20 He was involved in school life, attending plays, and acting as the

Art Editor and a cartoonist for the satiric school magazine Varieties between 1946 and 1947. The

cartoons he made are quite typical pop culture effluvia; bawdy, generically stylized, and

10

predominantly featuring sexed-up female figures analogous to perverted Archie and Jughead

comics. Kaprow at times used another pared-down and less veristic style; the figural style is

almost Ziggy-like. The flagrant sexism on display in the publication and in some of Kaprow’s

cartoons is disappointing. One snippet included in a review of campus gossip referred to

peepholes on campus used to spy on female students as “cute.”21 A Kaprow cartoon pairs a busty

nurse reading to a tucked-in child with the one-liner: “Nuts wit’ da boids ‘n’ bees...It’s time I got

a woikin’ knowledge of the subject” [fig. no. 4]. Admittedly, much in the magazines is so parodic

and Borscht-Belt corny as to deflect any criticism, and some staffers were female, but discovering

these did put Kaprow into a new light, and lent further credence to the complaints that Geoff

Hendricks, a fellow professor at Rutgers in the 1950s and 1960s, levied against the heterosexual

male-dominated culture there.22

However, an equally, if not more notable aspect of the cartoons is

the professional-level technical skill that Kaprow displayed at such a young age.

During this time he was also plying his skills as a commercial artist, not merely for the school

publication, but for at least one ad agency, Hart, Schaffner & Marx. One project he worked on

was a set of illustrations for 1920’s-styled raccoon fur collar coats (likely similar to the

illustration in fig. no. 7), which were then in vogue. Kaprow was so repelled by the constant,

tedious revisions that are inevitable in that line of work, that he took the last revision and threw it

at his boss and quit, never to look back.23

There ended his dream of being a “combination artist.”

At that point he made the switch to fine arts and the study of aesthetics, the latter of which he

eventually found “too verbal”24

and therefore divorced from the very real, tactile and optical

world of art objects. Of further frustration, the actual art considered in these studies bore no

resemblance to the art that had been relevant during the last two hundred years, or so Kaprow

thought.

11

The decision to lean towards the arts was not appreciated by Kaprow’s father, however, and his

protestations purportedly caused his son a hemorrhaged ulcer, according to Kahn.25

While his

parents had tolerated his ambitions when he was younger, they had hoped he would grow out of it

and take a position in his father’s law firm.

Still, Kaprow was resolute to continue in the fine arts, though he was not always pleased with his

college offerings. Although he gained something from his arts studies since he continued with

them, he was not particularly keen on the fine arts classes he took at New York University.

Kaprow begins his important essay, “The Effect of Recent Art Upon the Teaching of Art”

(1963)26 by relating the kind of passé and hackneyed styles advocated by his instructors, some of

which included “a then-current form of cubistic Rouaultism synthesized mainly from Weber,

Rattner and Shahn, spiced with a certain obvious social sympathy and soul weariness,” “a folksy

primitivist who seemed not to grasp the differences of the early Colonials, Grandma Moses, Henri

Rousseau and himself,” and “an Italian Surrealist who taught one to draw dashing horses, bugs

coming out of dresser drawers and the like, all extremely erotic, and executed with odd

mannerisms such as placing curlicues at every change in a line’s direction.”

27

It is easy to see how Kaprow, or any astute young creative type would feel stymied in those

environments. The mid-late 1940s were an exhilarating and critical time for American art, which

now saw itself as the heir apparent to the Parisian avant-garde. Politically, Communism, or more

specifically Trotskyism, which was once aligned with the art of American Realism, the WPA, the

Popular Front, and various publications, had seen its importance diminish greatly. Its gradual

decline stemmed from multiple, interrelated world events: the rise of Stalin, the Moscow Trials,

the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, the drying up of WPA funds, the rapid acceleration of capitalism,

the Yalta Conference and the eventual negation of all communistic possibility in the West

following the United States’ long-anticipated victory in World War II.

12

Figs. 4–7 (Clockwise from Top Left): Illustrations by Allan Kaprow for Varieties (New York University), c. 1946-47. Courtesy New York University Archives.

13

In the wake of all this paradigmatic change, something new was needed to replace American

Realism, now seen as moribund and gauche, and to fill the void of purpose (and the living rooms

of war profiteers and swelling ranks of the middle class) that American Realism left in its wake.

Many artists and gallery-owners did not see much profit until well into the 1950s, but there was

nevertheless a great sense of expectation that was in part due to a nationalistic chauvinism as well

as a genuine birth of self-confidence among American artists. Those artists who had been

struggling to create names for themselves began to shrug off the European cloak which they were

under (itself a monumental task, as Europe loomed like a sword of Damocles above American

artists). With the assistance of critics like Harold Rosenberg, Clement Greenberg, Alfred Barr,

and Thomas Hess, and gallerists such as Samuel Kootz, Peggy Guggenheim, Betty Parsons and

others, this new American art was going International. Irving Sandler recalls Jack Tworkov’s

comments revealing this newfound national confidence: “Suddenly we realized that we were

looking at each other’s work and talking about that and not about Picasso or Braque. We had

created for the first time a milieu in which American artists could talk to American artists about

their art and consider what they said important.”28 Regardless if one bought into the hoopla

surrounding the new “Internationalism” or “Universalism”29

of American art, the presence of

legendary European artists - some of whom had been displaced due to war, figures including

Francis Picabia, Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp, Willem deKooning and Andre Masson - made New

York the only place to be. Many of these artists lived and worked downtown as well, literally

steps away from the Hofmann School and New York University. (Starting in 1952, many artist-

run galleries and cooperatives were established on Tenth Street, including the Hansa Gallery, co-

founded by Kaprow.)

Therefore, for Kaprow it is hardly surprising that the man who would later write, “I am ruthlessly

impatient with anything I seriously attempt which does not shriek violently out of the unknown

present, which does not proclaim clearly its modernity as its raison d’être,”30 was disappointed

14

with what he was offered at school, when there was so much else going on outside between the

artist’s bohemia downtown and the galleries and museums proliferating uptown (though some,

like the Whitney Museum, remained downtown).

Kaprow persevered in spite of difficulties with familial support, and disappointment and

frustration with some of his courses, which lacked “...not so much ‘modernity’ as such, but a

sense of issues at stake which ‘ modernity’ provokes” [italics mine].31

In other words, the

instructors paid lip-service to the dead stock of Modernist history, but were unwilling or unable to

accept the implications of Modernism on the present. One example Kaprow cites is Frederick

Hart, his professor of Renaissance art who had cataloged the infamous Nazi Hermann Goering’s

artworks found stashed in a salt mine:

He [Hart] had none of the spirit of his great teachers, all of those great German historians who could not translate their inherited spirit which was so abundant and taken for granted in Germany, to Americans who had no culture. So all the Americans learned was names and dates, and, you know, cataloging techniques. Which was all fine, except that there wasn’t any art there, no love of art.32

Kaprow was not entirely disappointed with his courses, however. While he found many of the art

history offerings bleak (he briefly considered graduate school at the Institute of Fine Arts), he

particularly enjoyed his philosophy classes and a course taught by an expert on Norse mythology.

The professors he was most fond of were the logical empiricists Alfred Hofstadter, Sydney Hook

and Paul Edwards, which speaks volumes about the nature of Kaprow’s Happenings being linked

in an empirico-methodist tradition. It is quite possible that Kaprow was introduced to John

Dewey through one of these professors, and that Dewey’s philosophy, so important to Kaprow’s

artistic development, would have been discussed at length in class.

33

Eager to study with a recognized master, in the beginning of 1947 while still at New York

University, he enrolled at the nearby Hans Hofmann School at 52 West Eights Street where he

15

studied painting with classmates Wolf Kahn, Larry Rivers, Joseph Stefanelli, and Richard

Stankiewicz.34 As mentioned, Kaprow was first introduced to Hofmann by Kahn the year prior.

Kaprow realized then how exciting and relevant the German artist’s program was, and has spoken

of the lack of professional art education in the 1940s: “...there were precious few [art schools] in

the United States...Hofmann was one.”35 Hofmann was a legend in the art world and one of the

most famous art teachers of the twentieth century, and his instruction proved crucial to Kaprow’s

development as an artist, though Kaprow often worked against the master’s instructions, as did

many of his students.

36

Hofmann’s reliance on traditional working modes, with an emphasis on drawing, impressed

Kaprow: “Drawing was to painting as nature in the long run was to Art a preparation and a

source.”37 The source required profound amounts of patience and study; but the paradoxical aim

was a spontaneity that could only be achieved by a near-relentless practice and control. Hofmann

believed in “immersing his students in the stream of Western art, opening up all of it for potential

cultivation - and, as important, using it as the model of standards of quality.”38

This seems to fit

nicely with Kaprow’s training as a commercial artist and with his pragmatism and empiricism. As

pertains to Dewey, there was in Hofmann’s instruction an emphasis on the properties of materials

and their interaction with live body; this approach is estranged from ideas of intuition and

mysticism that lurked behind much Abstract Expressionism.

Kaprow greatly admired his mentor though he worked both with and against him. Not everyone

was pleased with Hofmann and his at times aggressive gestures, however. As John Perrault,

former art critic of the Village Voice writes, Hofmann “somehow convinced everyone that the

‘push-and-pull’ of planes and brushstrokes was the only way to paint. Thus he damaged an entire

second generation of Abstract Expressionists and furthered the reach of cubism.” Opposed to the

visual products of this mode of instruction, Perrault cedes the preeminence of the spirit of the

16

instruction: “Yet what [Hofmann] really was teaching, like [Charles] Hawthorne before him, was

a belief in art.” It was this belief in art that Kaprow was drawn to, as well as Hofmann’s emphasis

on technical methodology: “We were also put into touch with a notion foreign to our soil until

then that our work was a Destiny, but one that had a time-honored practical method, rigorous but

clear, and in no way antithetical to the idea of the New. Thus at a stroke we were confronted with

a metaphysics and a technique [italics mine], a sense of a living past and an involvement with the

moment.”39 Beyond influencing Kaprow’s artistic directions, Hofmann’s instruction also served

as a pedagogical model, as Kaprow spent the vast majority of his career as a studio and art history

teacher.

40

Kaprow also had his first known art exhibit while studying with Hofmann as part of a group

exhibition sponsored by the Woodstock Arts Association in Woodstock, New York.41 He

graduated from Hofmann’s school with a painting degree in 1948, producing works in a panoply

of styles (up to twenty, he claimed), from Expressionistic Fauvism, to works indebted to

Mondrian and Hofmann and the Abstract-Expressionist school. For the most part, he seemed to

maintain a figural style.42

Writing in 1955 in one of the first known reviews of Kaprow’s work,

Martica Sawin of Arts Digest sums up some of the stylistic and philosophical concerns found in

the artist’s early work:

A forthright and vigorous expressionist, Alan [sic] Kaprow sustains the intensity of his initial impetuous attack throughout each canvas. Throbbing, violent color, cadmiums and violets vying with each other...abrupt, slashing strokes and thick crests of pigment, lend these canvases an impassioned violence almost worthy of Soutine,43 although the violence seems to concern the act of painting itself rather than the outpouring of emotion [italics mine]...There is an immediacy here which conveys the impression of a headlong and almost hasty approach, but underlying the rapid execution of each painting is a backlog of experiment and experience which gives richness and conviction to the work.44

This conceptualization of his work will prove indispensable as we discover the evolution of his

work through Assemblage, Environments, and Happenings.

17

Fig. 8 (Top) Allan Kaprow, Figures in a Landscape, 1953. 169.2 x 213 cm. Courtesy Allan Kaprow Estate. Reproduced in Allan Kaprow: Art as L ife (2008).

Fig. 9 (Right) Chaim Soutine, Oil on Canvas. 45.75 x 31.74. in. Minneapolis Institute of Art. Courtesy of ARTstor.

18

1 Kaprow’s father was an attorney, and his mother a would-be business woman and dancer. The father’s side included many successful professionals, including an uncle name Joe who was an architect, whom Kaprow listed as an influence. The maternal side was mostly middle-class, petty tradespeople, many of whom had ties to the tourist trade in Atlantic City. Both sides originated mainly in Russia. As for their economic status, the fact that Allan Kaprow was sent to Arizona and to private, elite schools leads me to believe that his family was more than just middle-class; however, he may have been awarded scholarships. Kaprow’s only sibling was Miriam Lee Kaprow, a prominent ethnologist who started her career later in life. The artist did not spend a great deal of time with his sister, and described her as “very, very tense, brilliant, and snooty.” Miriam was sent to boarding school, furthering the notion that the Kaprows were relatively well-off. As for religion, Kaprow never identified with his family’s Judaism, most likely due not being raised around it, and not from any deep-seated antipathy towards. He later practiced Zen Buddhism in California, attending classes regularly. His works in his later years were increasingly associated with Zen-style koans, and became closer in spirit to his mentor John Cage’s work than any of the Happenings he became famous for in the 1960s. For further reading, see: Moira Roth. Oral history interview with Allan Kaprow, 1981 Feb. 5 - 18 (Smithsonian Archives of American Art; transcript from audio recording). 2 Kaprow’s parents actually lived in New York City’s Upper West Side; his mother stayed with members of the extended family during and just after her only son’s birth. However, Kaprow did spend time there visiting the large and close-knit family during his early childhood and on trips hope while living in Arizona. See Moira Roth interview. 3 Moira Roth. Oral history interview with Allan Kaprow, 1981 Feb. 5 - 18 (Smithsonian Archives of American Art; transcript from audio recording); 3. 4 Ibid. 5 “My immediate mother and father would visit me, one perhaps once a year for a few weeks and another then, mostly my mother and sister, she would come out, say with an aunt or some other relative and stay for a few weeks.” Ibid. 6 Ibid; 5. Dobie apparently did not illustrate his books himself, but rather wrote them and hired out the artwork to illustrators such as Tom Lea. Jim Williams, a popular cartoonist in the same genre, also collaborated with Dobie. 7 Allan Kaprow [interview with the artist]. Lyn Blumenthal and Kate Horsfield, prods. (Video Data Bank: Chicago, 1979). 1 videocassette (ca. 38 mins.); s.d.; b&w; 1.5 in. 8 Ibid. 9 Jeff Kelley. Childsplay (University of California Press, Berkeley, 2004); 9. 10 Linda Montano, ed. Performance Artists Talking in the E ighties (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 288. Kaprow was an artist from early on - he would sell his drawings and paintings at concessions stands at the rodeos he attended in Arizona. 11 Moira Roth interview; 4. 12 Kelley, Childsplay, 9. 13Allan Kaprow. Prods: Blumenthal and Horsfield.

19

14 Moira Roth interview; 5. 15 Childsplay, unpaginated (recto of the Contents title page). 16Allan Kaprow. Prods: Blumenthal and Horsfield. 17 Ibid. 18 The Brandes School later became what is now called the Asthma Foundation of Southern Arizona. A brief glance at an online roster of school’s alumni indicates it served a largely Jewish population: [http://www.classmates.com/directory/school/Brandes%20High%20School?org=15140.] Accessed April 10th 2010. 19 In the Getty’s online archival index, the years he attended are listed at 1946-49. Nowhere is it explained what he might have been doing in the months or year after graduating high school: [http://www.oac.cdlib.org/data/13030/dv/tf9d5nb3dv/files/tf9d5nb3dv.pdf.] Accessed 14 April 2010. 20 I am unsure of the particular course and major requirements of NYU at this time. He may have enrolled and taken core classes before deciding on Philosophy and Art History. 21 Varieties, (New York University, New York), September 1946: 3. A Kaprow cartoon featuring a busty collegiate trailed (and possibly groped) by a spastic male is on the opposite page. 22 This subject is touched upon in Geoff Hendricks’ Critical Mass: Happenings, Performance, Interactive Media and Rutgers University, 1958-1972 (Rutgers University Press: New Brunswick, NJ, 2003). It was also stressed to me in the fall of 2009 by Erika Gorder, archivist at the Rutgers University archives and organizer of the 2000 exhibit Archival Assemblages: Rutgers and the Avant-Garde, which followed in the wake of Joan Marter’s excellent Off L imits: Rutgers and the Avant Garde exhibit and catalog of 1999. Nowhere was Kaprow singled out in this discussion, but he was not exempted, either. Complicating the matter is issue of Hendricks’ homosexuality, which may have caused tension between himself and others heterosexual males like Kaprow. 23Allan Kaprow. Prods: Blumenthal and Horsfield. 24 Ibid. 25 Robert C. Morgan, Wolf Kahn and Irving Sandler, “Allan Kaprow (1927-2006),” Brooklyn Rail, May 2006. Online: http://www.brooklynrail.org/2006/05/art/allan-kaprow-19272006. Accessed 28 April 2010. 26 I963 is a notable time, for is around this date that Kaprow becomes very active in education panels and discussions at schools and museums. 27 “Effects of Recent Art Upon the Teaching of Art,” Art Journal 23, no. 2: 136. 28 Irving Sandler. A Sweeper-up After Artists: A Memoir. (Thames & Hudson: NY, 2003). 29 For a discussion of this term and its implications for American art of the mid-century, see Serge Guilbaut’s How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art.: Abstract E xpressionism, Freedom and the Cold War (The University of Chicago Press: Chicago, 1983). Trans: Arthur Goldhammer. 30 From “The Demi-Urge,” which appeared alongside an early version of 18 Happenings in 6 Parts in The Anthologist, Rutgers’ literary magazine. I quoted from the .pdf file available on http://www.ubu.com, there simply listed as “Untitled Essay,” and published as a Great Bear Pamphlet. Compare this quote with a statement by Meyer Schapiro: “The modern artist is committed to the idea of endless invention and growth.

20

He is haunted by the notion that his way of working in 1950 cannot be the way in which he worked in 1940. He has an ideal of permanent revolution in art.” Meyer Schapiro, “The Value of Modern Art,” a lecture first given in 1948, reproduced in David W. Galenson, Painting Outside the L ines: Patterns of Creativity in Modern Art (Harvard University Press: Cambridge, MA, 2002); 166. 31 Allan Kaprow, “Effects of Recent Art Upon the Teaching of Art,” Art Journal 23, no. 2; 136. 32 Moira Roth interview; 9. Kaprow would explain how he understood the reason for this, namely, the trauma that had been inflicted on that European generation. 33 I have been unable to secure permission to view Kaprow’s course listings at New York University, which requires permission from the estate represented by Hauser and Wirth Gallery. 34 For a thorough description of Hofmann’s classes, see Wolf Kahn’s “Hans Hofmann’s Good Example,” Art Journal vol. 42, no.1 (Spring 1982); 22-23. 35 Moira Roth interview; 12. 36 “He had tremendous energy, and ultimately, that is what every great teacher has. He poured it into you. He had very specific things to say and was very definite. He made things simple...He also knew how to let you alone. His down side was his dogmatism. He was so dynamic and positive that he could create dependency. Many students had to break drastically.” Mercedes Matter, as quoted in Irving Sandler, A Sweeper-up After Artists; 82. 37 Kaprow, “Hans Hofmann” Village Voice, 24 February 1966; 2. 38 Irving Sandler, The New York School: The Painters and Sculptors of the Fifties (Icon, New York, 1979; 8. 39 Allan Kaprow, “Effects of Recent Art Upon the Teaching of Art;” 136. 40 For a description of Hofmann’s classroom technique, see Moira Roth interview; 23-24. 41 This information is listed in Art as L ife, the catalog for the eponymous 2007 exhibit, in the Chronology synopsis that begins that section. However, when I contacted the Woodstock Artists Association, they were unable to locate any information regarding Kaprow’s inclusion in the exhibit. 42 Based on reproductions in art periodicals and books, such as Art as L ife. Little early work is available to view or read about. Kaprow apparently kept some of his nascent work. 43 Kaprow, the undoubted heir to Pollock, identified his forebear with Soutine in his untitled essay in “Jackson Pollock: an Artists’ Symposium,” ARTnews 66, no. (April 1967 no.?); 28-33+ 44 Review, Arts Digest 29, 15 May 1955: 30. I am not certain that this article was by Martica Sawin, as the review is only accredited to “M.S.” However, the only matching initials given in the masthead are for Sawin, who is given as a contributor.

21

CHAPTER TWO: EDUCATION OF THE UN-ARTIST

A dog-eared, heavily notated copy of John Dewey’s Art as Experience (1937) from his college

years presages his development of performance-based art. This work, which Kaprow first read

around 1949, contains crucial ideas which will be discussed elsewhere, but we must introduce

Dewey’s ideas here, as they had probably the most serious effect on Kaprow, as evidenced by his

work if not his declarations.1

The idea of an art that is dependent on a working-through of

materials; an art that is temporal and mutates at each stage through the direct physical, mental and

emotional participation of the formerly passive audience. Perhaps more so than his other early

influences such Mondrian and Pollock, whose works spoke of endlessness and a kind of dizzying

chaos, Dewey’s idea that events have natural culminations (as opposed to cessations) gave

structure and form to Kaprow’s later Happenings. Dewey’s stress on the active engagement of

bodies in space resonates with Hofmann’s spatial and coloristic dynamism. To highlight the germ

of Kaprow’s Happenings, I will quote a significant passage of Dewey’s:

The stone starts from somewhere, and moves, as consistently as conditions permit, toward the place and state where it will be at rest - toward an end. Let us add, by imagination, to these external facts, the ideas that it looks forward with desire to the final outcome; that it is interested in the things it meets on it way, conditions that accelerate and retard its movement with respect to their bearing on the end; that it acts and feels toward them according to the hindering or helping functions it attributes to them; and that the final coming to rest is related to all that went before as the culmination of a continuous movement. Then the stone would have an experience, and one with aesthetic quality.2

Caesuras without ends. In short, that is the ethos behind Dewey’s philosophy, or at least the most

relevant for Kaprow’s artistic development. Kaprow came to integrate this concept into a notion

of “constant metamorphosis” which he considered to be a primeval, perhaps eternal approach

towards life:

22

This viewpoint, this metaphysics, is more fundamental than our ‘throwaway’ culture. The latter is the topical vehicle for the former and, while important, should become something else in time. The conception of a non-fixed, organic universe, however, has pervaded our thinking for a longer historical space. It lies, I am convinced, at the root of our present innovations, and is pointing straight ahead along this road for the near future.3

This quality of “constant metamorphosis” did not come without an encounter with an alien force,

which makes genuine experience possible through often difficult mental and physical processing,

i.e., a challenge to one’s sensibilities - a confrontation. This confrontation is partially

psychological in nature, and Kaprow acknowledged in a 1991 interview with Robert Morgan the

relation of his work to psychoanalytic thought and to notions of transgression and taboo.4

As American and frank as his work often was, Kaprow’s art nonetheless maintained a connection

to this more serious, dark tendency of twentieth century Europe, where his work was always

highly received. As Dewey himself tersely put it, “there are few intense esthetic experiences that

are wholly gleeful.”5

As Jeff Kelley explains in his introduction to E ssays on the Blurring of Art and Life, “Dewey

contrasted the often inchoate flow of experience in general with an experience, whose boundaries,

density, and duration set it apart, giving it particular qualities and a sense of internal volition that

make it memorable.”6

Dewey’s ideas gave meaning or form to formlessness, without sacrificing

the potential inherent in any given moment. Though these ideas may arise out of difficult

psychological circumstances, they are potentially healing as they both reconstitute and repair the

subject.

Kaprow completed his Bachelor’s in 1949,7 and stayed on another year at New York University

studying philosophy at the graduate level. He left in 1950 (or early 1951) to pursue a Master’s in

Art History from Columbia University, where he studied under Meyer Schapiro, whom he came

23

to greatly admire. Kaprow later wrote of “how thrilling it was to hear [Schapiro] give a critique,

whether it was one’s own [work] or anyone else’s.”8 Like Hofmann, Schapiro was an eminence

grise of the New York School, a truly monumental character with a legendary capacity for

memory, who was an expert on not only Romanesque art, but Modernism as well, from Van

Gogh, Cezanne and Courbet to Mondrian and the Abstract Expressionists. Perhaps foremost a

Marxist and Trotskyite, he advocated for the social uses of arts, founded Dissent magazine and

organized the American Artists’ Congress (which developed into the Federation of Painters and

Sculptors), and contributed to many leftist periodicals such as The Marxist Quarterly, The New

Masses and The Partisan Review. (While Kaprow rarely acknowledged any kind of political

context to his work, showing at times disdain for topicality, he would apply elements of the

commitment to humanity, under the aegis of ritualism, in his Happenings and Events.9

)

Schapiro would serve as Kaprow’s thesis advisor on a subject close to his heart - Piet Mondrian.

This work, completed in 1952, reveals a level of clear, insightful analytic ability unusual for

someone of Kaprow’s age. The piece is a lengthy exegesis of diagrammatical renderings of

Mondrian’s works, some consisting of only a few sparse directional lines, hand-drawn on semi-

transparent overlays and inserted within the pages of the thesis (sadly, the location of the hard

copy is currently unknown, so the only version currently available to view is the micro-form,

which does not do the out-of-context drawings justice). Kaprow, possibly taking his cue from

Schapiro, posited the mystic Mondrian as an artist of indeterminacy par excellence: “The painting

of Mondrian is not trying to prove anything. It does not, as a painting, begin in itself with a

process of reasoning with a starting place which is the premise, and then proceed by deducing a

chain of necessary connections to a definite conclusion. There is no beginning or end, literally

speaking, in his work.”

10

24

Rather, Mondrian’s work was dynamic and consisting of a few terse, deftly painted strategic

elements that reverberated off each other like ripples in slow-moving stream. Here one is

poetically reminded of Heraclitus’ aphorism: “You cannot step into the same river twice.”

(Kaprow was doubtlessly aware of the pre-Socratic philosopher, and although Heraclitus was the

first philosopher to espouse a theory of the world as chance- and change-based, ideas which were

to become tenets in Kaprow’s work, the artist has never referenced the philosopher.) Heraclitus

embraced the dialectical idea of the unity of opposites, ideas clearly present in the work of

Hofmann and Mondrian, and his ideas centering on the truth of perpetual becoming as opposed to

fixed being are highly relevant in Kaprow’s work. Per Harry Cooper, Mondrian aligned himself

with Hegel’s criticisms of Platonic Forms:

...[Mondrian] knew [Platonic Forms] through the popular work of the Dutch Hegelian G.J. P.J. Bolland, if not also directly. Hegel qualified Plato's celebration of eternal Forms with a Heraclites emphasis on change and flux. He insisted that time could be transcended only by working through it, and likewise, that the ideal could only be approached along the path of material embodiment. “Spirit necessarily appears in Time,” wrote Hegel, “so long as it has not grasped its pure Notion, has not annulled Time.” “Beyond time is the True Reality,” Mondrian paraphrased, but (significantly switching the emphasis) "we are living in time. We have to reckon with its Changing.”

11

However limitless and Heraclites Mondrian’s work was, it was not without rigor: As Kaprow

later iterated in his 1961 Essay “Impurity”: “it is Mondrian who can claim to have imposed on all

Purist painting a sense of duty, rigor, and aloofness and an aura of theology.”12 Much the same

could be said for the work Kaprow would create from the late 1950s to the mid-late 1960’s, as

Kaprow would not begin to loosen up his approach until the late 1960s, particularly when he left

New York for California.13

25

Kaprow’s advocating of the idea that Mondrian’s dutiful work did not begin with a “premise,”

stood against the conception by some, including Robert Motherwell of the “scientific” aspect of

Mondrian’s art, which supposedly “has the value of a scientific demonstration...since it consists

of just the formulation of color relations, and more important, spatial relations arising from a

division of space. The scientific analogy is further configured by the fact that Mondrian clearly

employs a hypothesis about the nature of reality, of which is work is an attempt at experimental

confirmation.”14

Whether one agrees with Kaprow or Motherwell’s position on the matter, what is

relevant here is Mondrian’s art can be conceived of as lacking deterministic attitude; this is the

stance that Kaprow and many avant-garde would take on in the coming years, a stance which

would later solidify under the tutelage of John Cage.

Kaprow’s thesis reveals a keen analytic mind employing a thorough, clear method in defining the

spatial and dynamic characteristics of a body of work. It is overwhelmingly a visual study, with

relatively little historical information included. Kaprow’s text appears wholly concerned with the

present, not unlike the Happenings and Events he would later develop. What he is concerned with

in the Mondrian thesis is the unfolding of spatial relationships in seemingly simple terms. Thus, it

is as if Kaprow has excised Mondrian from his historical context and presented his body of work

as essential and timeless, instantly apprehended if one approaches it from an unbiased

perspective. In this way it is almost Greenbergian. By “instantly apprehended” I do not mean that

the totality of the work is grasped, but that each step or dynamic relation can be apperceived

readily. Each moment expands constantly, and reflection is but another active agent that leads to

new forms of presentness. In this way, Kaprow’s ideas can lead one to see him as arguably one of

the most avant-garde or Modern artists of the twentieth century, while paradoxically embodying

the kind of traditional “doing” of American practical society stemming from its Puritan heritage.

26

Lastly, of great importance in the Mondrian thesis is the clear attraction Kaprow has for art that is

fluid and boundless and how he opposed any kind of teleological process of self-limitation that

art engages in by self-referentiality and a reduction of means, as with Greenberg. He posited

Mondrian as a mystic, and was interested in giving definition to an artist who had relatively little

published about him at the time. This mysticism, however, was unique in that it was not

“subjective,” but rather “objectively universal.”15

In Mondrian’s art, Kaprow also saw plenary,

not art-for-art’s sake, and certainly not minimalism. However, this ironic plenary of a reduced

economy of shapes and colors involved multiple acts of destructions, or cancellations:

Its effect on the eye and mind is that of a fullness of visual action and counteraction whose paradoxical consequence is emptiness, a blank canvas, a tabula rasa. I have described elsewhere [“Impurity”] how this was brought about by a continuous process of optical and plastic cancellations and quoted Mondrian as saying: “The destructive element is too much neglected in art.

16

This openness, fluidness, and emphasis on the radical newness (the “tabula rasa”) of art is related

to the “American Action Painters” essay by Harold Rosenberg that was published later in 1952.

In it, Rosenberg stressed the importance of the element of surprise in contemporary American art,

and the most relevant for Kaprow, the removal of the art object through the elevation of the

action of art-making. “Call this painting ‘abstract’ or ‘Expressionist’ or ‘Abstract-Expressionist,’

what counts is its special motive for extinguishing the object, which is not the same as in other

abstract or Expressionist phases of modern art.”17

‘Extinguishing,’ however, does not have the

same kind of visceral quality as the word ‘destructive,’ though the idea somewhat aligned with

Abstract Expressionism and its Existentialist predicates. Destruction is a theme more owing to an

earlier movement enjoying a revival of sorts at the time - Dada.

Destruction was the veritable watchword of Dada, if primarily in a literary and conceptual sense,

if not so much in plastic and optic terms, as with Mondrian. While Kaprow was at Columbia and

27

working on his thesis, Motherwell’s The Dada Painters and Poets: An Anthology was published.

The tome featured essays, personal histories, manifestos, letters, art reproductions and other

documents from the internecine aesthetico-political-literary movement, many of which had never

been published, at least not in great circulation. New figures like Jacque Vaché and Arthur

Cravan were introduced and new narratives brought to light, many of which clashed with each

other in sardonic and at times vitriolic missives. Kurt Schwitters’ essay “Merz,” was reproduced

for the first time in the United States, and photographs of his “Merz” collages were included.

Reproductions of his most famous work, Merzbau (Hannover), which was destroyed in 1943,

were unfortunately not.

18

Until the publication of Motherwell’s book, Dada, and especially its predecessor, Futurism, had

been greatly sidelined. Though Duchamp and his R. Mutt-style scandals occurred in New York,

they had happened much earlier, and Duchamp by the 1950s was thought to have long given up

art-making for chess. Dada’s bastard child, Surrealism, had been assimilated into Psychic

Automatism and was in many ways as old hat as American Realist painting and the new

generation felt no immediate connection with it.19 Further, there was a disjunct between many of

the European artists living in New York and their native contemporaries, according to Motherwell

himself as well as Irving Sandler.20 Much of Dada had been left in relative obscurity in Europe

(specifically, Zurich, Hannover, Berlin, Cologne and Paris) until this book appeared, a work

which took many years to compile, in large part due to the combative relationships of certain

Dada figures. Motherwell’s efforts paid off and helped inaugurate a renewed interest in the

subject and helped to jumpstart myriad trajectories in art-making. However, it is asserted by

Norbert Lynton that: “Whatever infection Motherwell’s book on Dada generated in obscure

places, it was received in 1951 as an exceptionally interesting piece of history, an account of

strange, often nonsensical, and sometimes foolish things done a long time ago when the world

was very different.” Regardless of the extent to which Dada was taken seriously in New York

28

artistic circles, the lineage between it and Rosenberg’s “Action” essay, widely seen as the

precursor to performance art and the “new tendencies” of the 1960s and 1970s21, is clear.

Rosenberg’s essay, in turn, greatly influenced Kaprow’s “Legacy of Jackson Pollock” (1956). It

is no small coincidence, then, that this book that did so much to promote Dada in America

appeared the year before Rosenberg’s piece.22

By 1953, Dada had gained enough traction to warrant a large-scale exhibition at the Sidney Janis

Gallery, curated by none other than Duchamp. The exhibit showcased hundreds of paintings,

sculptures, collages, photomontages, drawings, broadsheets, books, manifestos, pamphlets,

posters, fliers, and sheet music. The show was geographically and temporally expansive, covering

Hannover, Cologne, Berlin, Zurich, Paris, New York and Amsterdam between the years 1916-23.

Included were legendary pieces like Duchamp’s T’ um (1918) - bearing striking resemblance to

many so-called flatbed works of the 1950s, including Kaprow’s Wall - and a replica of Fountain

(1917), as well as works by the major Dada figures, including Jean Arp, Richard Huelsenbeck,

Francis Picabia, Tristan Tzara and Jacques Levesque.

Kaprow throughout his career acknowledged Dada and its intellectual and spiritual impetus,

Futurism, and linked them to the development of Happenings:

The direct line of historical stimulation seems to have been the Futurist manifestos and noise concerts, Dada’s chance experiments and occasional cabaret performances, Surrealism’s interest in automatic drawing and poetry, and the extension of these into Action Painting. All focused in one way or another on the primacy of the irrational and/or the unconscious, on their effect upon undirected body responses, and on the elimination of pictorial and other professional skills as criteria of art.

23

29

He particularly admired Duchamp, and in an interview with Paul McCarthy at the Los Angeles

County Museum of Art in 2000, he relates a statement by Duchamp from a lecture at the Museum

of Modern Art:

24

[Duchamp] said, “Everybody now is finding whole stores of found objects, whereas when I had a urinal. . . I wasn’t thinking of transforming a hardware store into an artwork... I wanted to be uncertain.” And I think that’s what have to acknowledge influenced my description of experimentation...is that act or thought whose nature as art can never be determined.25

Though he had read about Duchamp earlier, he did not begin to fully appreciate the master until

later in the 1950s. Kaprow apperceived the dapper Frenchman as “crisp,” and this kind of

sophistication wasn’t “at the edge of [Kaprow’s] consciousness” while he was studying

philosophy in the 1940s. Gris and Mondrian were appreciated, but Duchamp “just didn’t connect.

It was like something lying out there that I was impressed with but didn’t know for what, until

around 1957.”

26

Ultimately, though, Duchamp came to:

[stand] for the mess that I had left in philosophy, that is, he was the answer, had I really looked at him earlier, to the problem that I was having in the excessive verbalization of the philosophical discipline, because it was that verb-y visual pun that resolved everything into paradox that seemed to be the only solution to questions about how do we know anything.

27

In the aforementioned LACMA interview, Kaprow stresses the wonder he experienced at the idea

that something’s status as art can never be known, and not just at the moment, but for all time - a

permanent indeterminacy.28 Though recorded near the end of his life when Kaprow was actively

practicing Zen Buddhism and most interested in “art which can’t be art,” this indeterminacy was a

theme that occurred throughout his entire oeuvre. This leitmotif was forged in the crucible of his

30

university years and his time in the New York art world of the early 1950s, and in no small part in

thanks to Duchamp and the Dadaists.

Regarding Dada specifically, while I believe he was clearly influenced by it, Kaprow retained a

kind of professorial distance, claiming that: “I cannot count it as a major influence on my art,

either in attitude, subject matter or method.” He did, however, state that Dada’s “contribution was

extremely important, for rather than being simply anarchistic, it was, at heart, liberating. I see its

‘anti-art’ position as nothing more than a healthy hatred for clichés and smug aesthetics.”29 He

also admired its “paradox of denying art by producing it.”30

By the last measure, then, Dada had

an enormous impression on Kaprow, whether he liked it or not. For as he strove for art that was

liberated from clichés and blurred boundaries between art and life, he could never escape his own

status as an artist, a difficulty he wrestled with until the end.

By his ambivalent stance towards Dada, Kaprow meant to distance himself from the radicalized,

and bombastic nature of the Dada movement, and to align himself more with a spirit of

playfulness and experimentation which was more typically American.31 His works in the 1960s

surely progressed along this line, but during the period in consideration, Kaprow maintained an

often combative tone, putting on the airs of a restless avant-gardist, boldly declaring at a 1958

panel meeting of the artists’ association The Club32on East Eighth Street: “What doesn’t bore me

is the total destruction of ideas that have any discipline...I’m giving up painting and all the arts by

doing everything and anything.” He “demanded the destruction of discipline not only in painting

but in all of the arts....The old avant-garde counterattacked by accusing Kaprow of being anti-art

and giving up art. But he denied both...insisting...that it was his intention to make works of art.”33

If not as nihilistic or Pyrrhic as Dada (in fairness, Dada was quite divergent in its approaches),

then Kaprow’s attitude was at least provocative and at most, quite scandalous. One could argue

31

that this simply places Kaprow in the traditional Modernist lineage of the avant-garde and bears

no specific reference to Dada. But having read Motherwell’s pivotal book in 1952 while still a

young, impressionable student, it seems that the book - which showcased writings that are, to my

estimation, exemplars of the avant-garde rhetoric - had a notable influence on Kaprow’s approach

towards the revolutionary in art, to say nothing of the ideas of chance, multiplicity and

simultaneity contained therein.

Simultaneity, it must be noted, was primarily a Futurist concern. For various reasons including

the association of the movement with misogyny and Fascism - especially spokesperson

Marinetti’s close affiliation with Mussolini - Futurism was suppressed consciously and

subconsciously. Dada, which gleaned much from its immediate predecessor, was far more

important as a touchstone to artists like Kaprow. However, Dada’s indebtedness to Futurism

should not be underestimated. Without Futurism, Dada would have lacked many of its most

crucial elements - socio-political scandal, the reliance on text, and its destructive character

(destructive both a negative and positive sense). The Neo-Dadaists did not have much, if any,

direct contact with Futurism, though some were likely made aware through The Dada Painters

and Poets. Many other experimental artists were introduced through John Cage’s classes where

Luigi Russolo was discussed (Cage later listed Russolo’s “Art of Noise” as one of the most

influential books on his thinking).34 No major Futurist shows were held in the United States until

1961, when an exhibition was held at the Museum of Modern Art. (The exhibit was painting-

heavy, given the lack of “eye candy” produced by the movement and because of the desire to

suppress its political content by focusing on visually novel works by Boccioni, Carra and others,

a tactic that is still employed in the teaching of the movement in college survey courses). Despite

the lack of direct contact, and beyond the intermediary of Dada, Futurism and Happenings share a

vital link in the philosophy of Henri Bergson. As Caroline Tisdall and Angelo Bozzollo state in

their Futurism of 1977:

32

Bergsonian ideals of élan vital, universal flux, dynamism, and the importance of intuition, coloured the general theoretical tone of Futurism...In Bergson, Marinetti recognized an anti-determinist philosopher proposing a future formed not by the unchangeable forces of the past, but by the action of men in the here and now: a voluntarist philosophy as expressed in Creative E volution (1907) [two years prior to the Futurist Manifesto]. Added to this was Bergson’s belief in the universality of art and the sheer vitality of creativity, made all the more relevant by his exploration of the relationships between mind and body, material and memory, time and movement, and the fact that all of these were considered in light of contemporary scientific knowledge.

35

Here we see considerable overlap between Bergson and Dewey and the tradition of the twentieth

century avant-garde art. Though the manifestations of the art vary considerably from Futurism to

Happenings, this tie to a philosophy of flux and dynamism in some ways unites Futurism more

closely to Happenings than it does to Dada:

...let us say, somewhere around the corner, a drunken hag thrusting violets into one’s face, the big hot-house apple one has just bought, the pressure of the bladder, the newspapers blowing along the street, the clouds, words words words slipping by in every direction, an adventure had tearing through the bush, one’s body full of scratches - all marvelous, all noise and all quiet, all at once - only these are inspiring. No fanfare, no finales, no enlightenments, no depressions. Pure drama!

36

1 “Kaprow’s true intellectual father was Dewey, who “...saw the task ahead as ‘recovering the continuity of aesthetic experience with the normal processes of living.’” Jeff Kelley, Childsplay; 7. Kaprow certainly makes note of Dewey but perhaps does not cite him as often as one would imagine, given the overt similarities between his Happenings and Events and the thesis of Art of E xperience. 2 As quoted in Childsplay, 227. 3 Essay from Allan Kaprow, Assemblage, E nvironments and Happenings (Harry N. Abrams: New York, 1966); unpaginated. 4 Morgan: A lot of your work has dealt with assumed prohibitions in relation to society. This whole idea of fluids seems to be about prohibition and perhaps relates to Andres Serrano’s photographs in the kind of ranker that has been stirred in relation to the Piss Christ image, for example. Kaprow: I had never thought of the Andres Serrano thing as a connection, but indeed it is, just as there is a connection to Kubrick’s film [2001: A Space Odyssey], and there’s also a connection to much psychoanalytic literature, which I may or may not have read. Robert Morgan, “Interview with Allan Kaprow,” Journal of Contemporary Art 4, no. 2 (Fall/Winter 1991). Online: http://www.jca-online.com/kaprow.html. Accessed 12 June 2010. 5 John Dewey, Art as E xperience (Perigree: New York, 2005); 41.

33

6 Allan Kaprow and Jeff Kelley, ed., E ssays on the Blurring of Art and L ife (University of California Press: Berkeley, 2003); xvi. 7 For an unknown reason, Kaprow is not included in the 1949 yearbook. These, at least at the time, only featured portraits of graduating seniors. Perhaps Kaprow felt a distance from the school, especially after he began studying with Hofmann. 8 Irving Sandler’s paraphrasing, in his The New York School: The Painters and Sculptors of the Fifties. 9 “...Kaprow sensed in the upheavals of the 1960s an underlying conviction that modern life could be redeemed - that the world could indeed be made better. This conviction, for him, lay at the heart of the outrage expressed by young people against military and political conflicts and especially against social injustice. Though his own work was apolitical - often poking fun at the self-seriousness of political action - Kaprow shared a powerful interest with the artists of his generation in the ‘real world,’ where so much that was crucial was taking place.” Jeff Kelley, Childsplay; 105. 10 Allan Kaprow, Piet Mondrian - An E xercise in Seeing. Master’s Thesis, Columbia University, 1952. 11 Harry Cooper, “Mondrian, Hegel, Boogie,” October 84, (Spring, 1998): 18-142. Published by: The MIT Press. 12 Allan Kaprow, Jeff Kelley, ed. E ssays on the Blurring of Art and L ife, Jeff Kelley, 29. 13 The reasons for the relaxing of structural imperatives for more contemplative and simple “Actions” had theoretical origins, but in large part these were biographical. Kaprow had extreme difficulty during in his teaching posts been effectively fired from Rutgers after being denied tenure, and left Stony Brook University after controversy had worn him down. For further reading, see Moira Roth interview. 14 Robert Motherwell, V.V.V., no. 1 (1942), as quoted in Kaprow’s 1952 thesis; 54. 15 Richard Kostelanetz, Theatre of Mixed Means: An Introduction to Happenings, K inetic E nvironments, and Other Mixed-means Presentations (RK Editions; New York, 1980); 105. 16 Allan Kaprow, “Experimental Art,” (1966) as reproduced in E ssays on the Blurring of Art and L ife, Jeff Kelley, ed.; 72. 17 Harold Rosenberg, “The American Action Painters,” ARTnews 51, no. 8 (December 1952); 22. 18 Photos of the Hannover Merzbau were included in a 1936 exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art. The work had also been reproduced in the journal of the Paris-based group Abstraction-Création in 1933-34. 19 “Surrealism was interesting to the previous generation of New York School painters, and we sort of “got it” through over-saturation. But it was their thing, and very European.” Susan Hapgood, “Interview with Allan Kaprow,” in Neo-Dada. Redefining Art, 1958-1962 (American Federation of Arts: New York, 1994); 117. 20 “On the whole, the émigrés did not interact easily with the New Yorkers. Bob [Motherwell] said: ‘To the Europeans, to be an artist was to act like an aristocrat. This was upsetting to our young working-class or middle-class artists who had been on the WPA.’” Sandler also relates a humorous anecdote involving a party Jimmy Ernst (Max’s son) threw in the spirit of inclusiveness. Irving Sandler. A Sweeper-up After Artists: A Memoir, 91. 21 Perhaps this sidelining of Dada was a result of the increasing Americanization of art; the desire from both artists and the McCarthyites to distinguish that which was particular about this country and its heritage. This emphasis on the material of American life is best exemplified by the pop artists, but was evident in the

34

rough hewn, large-scale work of the Abstract-Expressionists as well, and the encompassing, almost brute physicality of the Hard Edge artists and Minimalists. 22 Dada and Pollock were not the only impetus for Rosenberg’s essay, which was heavily indebted to French Existentialism. Rosenberg was friends with Jean-Paul Sartre and had many other connections with the Existentialists. Hannah Arendt, for example, came to at least one meeting of The Club (the artist association on Eighth Street frequented by Rosenberg, the Abstract-Expressionists and the younger generation of artists in 1950s. For a detailed discussion of this topic, see Nancy Jachec, “The Space between Art and Political Action: Abstract Expressionism and Ethical Choice in Postwar America 1945-1950,” Oxford Art Journal 14, no. 2 (1991); 18-29. 23 Allan Kaprow and Mimsy Lee, “On Happenings”, Tulane Drama Review 10, no. 4 (Summer 1966); 282. 24 Kaprow did not attend this lecture, but instead heard a recording of it. Kaprow refers to this as a MoMA lecture, and he is quite possibly referring to one given on October 19, 1961. It could also be a conflation of Duchamp’s “The Creative Act,” speech given at the American Federation of Arts in Houston in 1957.The latter is one of Duchamp’s most famous declarations, which was part of a presentation which included panelists such as Meyer Schapiro and James Johnson Sweeney of the Guggenheim. 25 Panel discussion with Allan Kaprow and Paul McCarthy. Online video. Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, recorded 2000, date unknown. [http://www.moca.org/media/audio/kaprow/KaprowMcCarthy1.mp3.] Accessed 5 May 2010. Quote c.6’30” - 7’30”. 26 Moira Roth interview; 26. 27 Ibid. 28 By “indeterminacy” I mean the characteristics of fluctuation and choice, and nothing related to indecision, as the latter would lead to stasis which is anathema to the projects of Kaprow and Cage. 29 Irving Sandler. “Art in the Galleries,” New York Post: 16 June 1963 (magazine section); 14. 30 Dorothy Gees Seckler. Oral history interview with Allan Kaprow, 1968 Sept. 10 (Smithsonian Archives of American Art; transcribed audio recording); 36. 1 sound tape reel (2 hours 30 min.) 31 American art and artists could certainly be bombastic - witness Clifford Still, Ad Reinhardt and others - but their kind of vitriol was of a qualitatively different kind than that of the Dadaists. While many of the Dada artists (particularly those outside Paris) had very definite - if at times obscured - political and philosophical leanings, the Americans I mentioned were patently against any kind of addendum or theorizing per se; as Frank Stella would famously quip, “What you see is what you see.” Directness was key, as was that American stalwart, anti-intellectualism, which the Dadas, try as they might, could not completely divorce themselves from. 32 The Club was an affiliation of mostly Abstract Expressionist painters and associated critics. Meetings here held and freeform discussions were held at the walk-up location in Greenwich Village. The Club had tremendous importance throughout the 1950s as a tastemaker and organizer of art and artists; however, the Abstract Expressionists could ever be said to be fully “organized,” as adamant of their individuality as they were. 33 From a panel discussion at The Club held in January, 1958. Thomas Hess, Alfred Barr, Jr., and Harold Rosenberg were present. Irving Sandler, The New York School; 203. 34 Richard Kostelanetz, “List no. 2” in John Cage: An Anthology (De Capo Press: New York, 1991); 138.

35

35 Catherine Tisdall and Angelo Bozzolla, Futurism (Thames and Hudson: New York, 1989); 21-22. 36 Allan Kaprow, “One Chapter from ‘The Principles of Modern Art,” It Is, no. 4 (1959); 51.

36

CHAPTER THREE: THE NEW YORK SCENE AND BEYOND

Mondrian, Hofmann and the Dadaists were not the only major figures to impress the young artist.

There is a tremendous amount to be said on Jackson Pollock’s influence and I will discuss him

later on, but I wish to mention here that Kaprow was attending Pollock’s shows in the late 1940s

and early 1950s. Hans Hofmann was also an advocate for “Still, Mondrian, Tobey, and

Pollock,”1 so it can be assumed that Kaprow was seeing the latter’s work during 1947-48, and

possibly sooner, as Pollock’s star had risen around 1943-44.2 While it is unclear when he first saw

Pollock’s work, he definitely saw the all-over paintings in either 1949, 1950 or both, when they

were exhibited at the Betty Parsons gallery.3 In an earlier opportune moment, he happened across

“Jack the Dripper,” who was having a consultation with Hofmann in the latter’s studio. At the

time Kaprow was working at an art store across the street with Larry Rivers and Alfred Leslie,

and would deliver paints to Hofmann. This sighting was especially memorable for Kaprow as

Pollock rarely attended Hofmann’s critique, as opposed to the many other old-guard Abstract

Expressionists who did, and for the fact that it countered the claim that Pollock was in no way

indebted to Hofmann, a claim levied most notably by Greenberg.

4

Kaprow also composed an essay on Pollock while in graduate school, and the document that

exists features comments by Schapiro.5 Displaying immense, precocious foresight, Kaprow wrote

in the spring of 1950, a full six and a half years before he would pen his legendary “The Legacy

of Jackson Pollock,” that: “There are landscapes in which one can travel, landscapes which can

be gazed upon, landscapes in which one may ramble, and landscapes in which one may dwell.”6

This is also two years before Rosenberg’s “The American Action Painters,” published in

December 1952.

37

Pollock remained a distant figure, however, and here I consider those artists Kaprow knew and

interacted with. While still at Columbia, Kaprow encountered the work of avant-garde artists who

would likewise prove to be major sources of inspiration. Sometime around 1950 or 1951, he

became acquainted with John Cage and Robert Rauschenberg, the latter of whom Kaprow

befriended somewhat later, while Cage and Kaprow always maintained a more professional

relationship. One vital experience Kaprow had was visiting Rauschenberg’s studio in the fall

1951 and seeing his seminal White Paintings (not exhibited until 1953) [fig. 11]. (Rauschenberg,

it should be noted, was by 1951 represented by Pollock’s very own Betty Parsons Gallery.) These

anti-paintings coincidentally became the impetus for Cage’s 4’33”.7 The works possessed

expansiveness and potentiality that pushed the boundaries of painting, and advanced the canvas

into the realm of action, perhaps even farther than Pollock’s all-over works. Kaprow recalled: “I

was walking back and forth in the studio, not knowing how I should take these things, even

though they had a kind of pedigree already, certain inclinations. . . And then I saw my shadows,

across the painting, moving. And I told him. Bob smiled.”

8

Elsewhere Kaprow relates the necessarily related aspects of fear and excitement these works

aroused: “Once a human shadow gets into a painting for a moment, everything becomes possible

and the conditions for experimentation enter the scene. Possibility, artists know, is the

most frightening idea of all.”

9

The White Paintings were created during Rauschenberg’s second period at Black Mountain

College, on the heels of an equally radical series called Night Blooming. Night Blooming was

composed of “large canvases six by eight feet that Rauschenberg took outside, saturated with wet

oil paint, and pressed into the ground, where they picked up the heavy gravel from the road. Night

blooming in North Carolina...jasmine, honeysuckle, sweet gardenia.”10 The works reference the

38

body, and contact with the abject as well as with the succulent aspects of nature: it is literally a

sponge for the world. They also remove the artist’s hand in a way more radical than Pollock, and

they possess many similarities with the Art Brut and tachisme of Jean Dubuffet and Jean Fautrier,

who used sand, gravel and straw in their works in the 1940s. In 1950 Dubuffet produced

Olympia, an homage to Manet and the flattening of pictorial and literal space. Like

Rauschenberg’s Night Blooming and Black Painting series [fig. 10], and his later flatbed pieces,

Dubuffet oriented the canvas horizontally, literally to the earth. As Leo Steinberg relates:

If flatness in painting indicates an imaginative experience, then the pressed-leaf effect, the scratched-gravel or fossil-impression effect of Dubuffet’s image dramatizes the sensation of flatness far beyond the capacity, or the intention, of most color-field painting...Pictures by Rothko, Still, Newman, deKooning, and Kline are still addressed to us head to foot - as are those of Matisse and Miro...Pollock indeed poured and dripped his pigment upon canvases laid on the ground, but this was an expedient...But something happened in painting around 1950 - most conspicuously in the work of Rauschenberg and Dubuffet...these pictures no longer simulate vertical fields but opaque flatbed horizontals...The pictures of the last fifteen to twenty years insist on a radically new orientation, in which the painted surface is no longer the analogue of a visual experience of nature but of operational processes. To repeat: it is not the actual physical placement of the image that counts...What I have in mind is the psychic address of the image, its special mode of imaginative confrontation, and I tend to regard the tilt of the picture place from vertical to horizontal as express of the most radical shift in the subject matter of art, the shift from nature to culture [italics mine].11

Kaprow must have been aware of these pieces. Dubuffet was hailed by Greenberg 1949 as

“perhaps the one new painter of real importance to have appeared on the scene in Paris in the last

decade.” Three years prior, Dubuffet made his auspicious debut in an exhibit at the Pierre Matisse

Gallery. He was included in Time and Newsweek, and went on to show at the Kootz and Janis

Galleries, hotbeds of innovative art of the 1940s and 1950s. In spite of all this, however, Dubuffet

was “Rarely perceived as an artistic innovator or influence on indigenous practice in the US.”12

This, Aruna D’Souza indicates was due to his being seen as someone who ran “parallel” to

American interests at the time; one whose work “validated” their own. However, this belies the

39

political implications of a burgeoning American art world whose history is “written according to

an internal development of form,” a form that includes “little room for influence.”13

Perhaps,

then, subconsciously Kaprow followed this logic in his consideration of Dubuffet and instead

took the same lessons from his friend Rauschenberg.

Kaprow was certainly aware of Rauschenberg’s Black Paintings, however, and these works

profoundly shaped the aesthetic he began following in the early-mid 1950s. The direct influence

of Rauschenberg can be seen as early as 1952 - if we are to believe Kaprow’s dating14 - in an

untitled collage [fig. 13] that was reproduced in a 1955 edition of Rutgers University’s art and

literary magazine The Anthologist (the artwork’s whereabouts are unknown). The reproduction,

and one assumes the artwork itself as well, is strongly vertical and narrow, possessing the same

flatbed quality as Rauschenberg’s works, and is composed of two distinct sections of light and

dark pigment, with a scattershot letter “E” and number “2,” the former of which appears

stenciled. Just below the “E” appears to be an aborted “W” or “M.” The paint is flat but layered

and scruffily applied, with bits of the competing tones appearing throughout each section. For

example, in the reproduction, splotches of white appear in the black and vice versa. The work is

almost like a tripartite Rothko piece of the early 1950s but the tones do not “float;” instead they

are compressed. The overall handling is visceral and haphazard, owing more to Hofmann or

Rauschenberg with their rougher, more plastic quality, than to a proto-Color Field artist like

Rothko. Bisecting the piece in the lower third is an unevenly edged rectangle of chicken-wire,

which extends from the edge of the dark upper part over a significant portion of the lower light-

toned section, and resembles a graffitied concrete wall, a familiar style of Rauschenberg’s. A

piece of what appears to be canvas is tacked on, overlapping the chicken-wire and light-colored

zone. Cruciform lines were drawn on this squared piece of material to superficially demarcate the

overlapping sections and echo the grid of the chicken-wire; a sort of anti-trompe de l’ oeil style

evocative of both Duchamp and Greenberg. Compare this specially with Rauschenberg’s 1951

40

Black Painting, likewise bisected - vertically instead of horizontally - and featuring the same kind

of painterly effects resembling of décollage. His 1952 Untitled (Asheville) - via synthetic cubism

- is an even better predecessor, featuring newspaper print made visible through the application of

smoky veils of white paint. A work from 1953, submitted as an entry for an exhibit with the

quaint subject matter “nature in art,” was composed of a squared patch of growing grass held

down with chicken wire and placed in a hangable box.15

Japanese paper.”

Also perhaps significant to Kaprow was

a sculptural work by Jackson Pollock from 1951 composed of chicken wire; an unusual métier for

the artist, who, although dabbling in sculpture and pottery, usually employed more traditional

sculptural materials. The piece was exhibited at the Peridot Gallery show Sculpture by Painters

and was executed as well in papier mâché, bearing “abstractions of the kind he had been doing on

16

given Pollock’s general importance and Kaprow’s esteem for him.

It is unknown whether Kaprow would have seen this exhibit but it is probable,

The Rauschenberg and Kaprow works all refer to Picasso and Braque’s Synthetic Cubism, the

former’s differentiated by rougher handling, lack of coherent and geometric structure, and

emphasis on degraded materials. In Rauschenberg and Kaprow’s case this was in many ways a

reaction against the supposed psychological, subjective origins of art and the personal mark, a

turn towards that which continued the work of the Cubist, Dadaists and Futurists, albeit in an

American vernacular filtered through John Cage. Though Kaprow did not take the famous, star-

producing courses of Cage at the New School until several years later, the ideas that Cage was

developing around 1952 are relevant to discuss at this point.

John Cage perhaps did more to promote Duchampian and Dada ideals than many elder statesmen

of his time, although these ideals were altered significantly. Notions of Dada were filtered

through this intercession, yet were bereft of political connotation, and Duchamp was drained of

his acute intellectualism.

41

Cage had met Marcel Duchamp in the early 1940s, and the two shared “a spiritual empathy and a

similar way of looking at things.”17 However, vital differences existed. Whereas Duchamp’s

interests after giving up painting in 1913 were of an intellectual nature, Cage was preoccupied

with sensorial experience, not unlike John Dewey, whose theories were imperative to the Black

Mountain School where Cage had taught. Cage elaborated on the differences between himself

and Duchamp by highlighting the exactitude of his friend: “He [Duchamp] didn’t do what we

have done since - extend the notion of the Readymades to everything. He was very precise, very

disciplined. It must have been a very difficult thing for him to make a Readymade, to come to that

decision.”

18

Cage borrowed not only from Duchamp but also Zen Buddhism, in particular the kind taught by

Daisetz (“D.T”) Suzuki at Columbia University in the 1940s. The spiritual practice emphasized a

relinquishing of control over the world and an acceptance of all its vagaries, representing the

passive and accepting in contrast to the quizzical, sardonic and quixotic.

Cage viewed Zen as a joyful realization of life through art, posited against both Duchamp - whose

work was ironical and humorous, but not “joyful” - and the negative minded, destructive impulses

of the Dadaists and the sometimes navel-gazing, self-important work of the Abstract

Expressionists. Cage preferred “laughter to tears” and saw the purpose of art as a “purposeless

play...an affirmation of life - not an attempt to bring order out of chaos, nor to suggest

improvements in creation, but simply of a way of waking up to the very life we’re living.”19

In 1966, Kaprow wrote: “Rauschenberg, who, as costume and set designer for Merce

Cunningham’s dance group, not only kept the painters aware of Cage’s thought, but also

42

Fig. 10 (Right) Robert Rauschenberg, Black Painting, c. 1951-52. Oil and newsprint on canvas. Courtesy ARTstor, © Robert Rauschenberg.

Fig. 11 (Bottom) Robert Rauschenberg, White Painting, 1951.House paint on canvas. Courtesy ARTstor, © Robert Rauschenberg

43

Fig. 12 (Top) Jean Dubuffet, Untitled, chap. 1, in the book Les Murs (The Wall) by Guillevic (Paris: Edition du Livre, 1950), 1945. Lithograph on Montval paper. Sheet: 376 x 285 mm (14 13/16 x 11 1/4 in.); Image: 370 x 284 mm (14 9/16 x 11 3/16 in.) Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. © Artists Rights Society. Courtesy ARTstor. Fig. 13 (Right) Allan Kaprow, Untitled, c. 1952. As reproduced in Marter, Off L imits: Rutgers and the Avant-Garde. Original image from Anthologist no. 3 (1955).

44

suggested how the plastic arts can become part of a performance situation,”20

indicating

Kaprow’s possible introduction to John Cage by Rauschenberg. In any case, he was kept abreast

of Cage’s ideas during the first half the decade through Rauschenberg. Though we do not know

precisely when Kaprow met Cage, it seems likeliest to have been around 1950 or 1951. Both

Rauschenberg and Cage were at the Black Mountain College in North Carolina in late 1940s and

early 1950s, with Cage teaching, and Rauschenberg painting during the summers. Rauschenberg

first attended the school in 1948, working with Cage before leaving the next year to attend classes

at the Art Students League in New York. In 1951 he would return to Black Mountain. Cage held

performances in the early 1950s in and around both New York City and North Carolina,

maintaining a fair amount of overlap between the two locations.

According to an interview given in 1992, Kaprow claimed he had attended Cage‘s performances

“as early as 1948, when he was diddling around with the prepared piano, and all kinds of toys and

gadgets to make noise.”21 While dubious, we do know that in 1952 Kaprow attended a

performance of Cage’s work at the Cherry Lane Theatre in New York.22 According to friend,

classmate and later Hansa Gallery co-founder Wolf Kahn, Kaprow lived for a while with the

expatriate German atonal composer Stefan Wolpe, at least during the summer of 1950. Wolpe,

then the music director at Black Mountain, was the boss of Cage. Kahn asserts that this musician

substantially impacted Kaprow, in fact as much as Cage did, making it quite possible that Wolpe

made the introductions to Cage and Rauschenberg.23 Another possible connection was through

Morton Feldman, who as previously mentioned graduated shortly before Kaprow at High School

for the Arts and was part of Kaprow’s extended circle. Feldman met Cage in 1950 and would

occasionally substitute for him in his courses at the New School. That Kaprow was present at

Cage’s performance of Imaginary Landscape 4 for 12 Radios at Columbia University in 1951 is

highly possible. Additionally, Kaprow may have been introduced to Cage through Schapiro or

another associate at this performance.

45

In 1952 Cage’s untitled event was performed at Black Mountain, becoming rather infamous in

New York. The work is seen by many as the first actual Happening for its involvement of

simultaneous, discrete and unscripted events.24

Whether anyone outside the immediate circle

knew the particulars, they were vaguely aware of its significance. Cage described the event years

later to his students, including Kaprow, during one of his classes in the later 1950s at the New

School for Social Research:

Taking into account the resources of talent in the community, [Cage] outlined various time brackets, totaling forty-five minutes. . . To fill the time brackets, Cage invited [Charles] Olson and Mary Caroline Richards to read their poetry, Rauschenberg to show his paintings and to play recordings of his choice, David Tudor to perform on the piano any compositions he wanted, and Merce Cunningham to dance. Each person was left free, within his precisely defined time slot, to do whatever he chose to do.

25

The work was more comprehensively described by the preeminent chronicler of Happenings,

Michael Kirby:

The chairs, all facing the center, were arranged in the middle of the dining hall, leaving open space between the audience and the walls of the room. Timed to the second as in a musical composition, the various performances took place in and around the audience. Cage, dressed in a black suit and tie, read a lecture on Meister Eckhart [the thirteenth century philosopher, theologian, and mystic] from a raised lectern at one side. (The Dadists, similarly dressed, had solemnly declaimed from Jakob Böhme and Lao-tzu.) M.C. Richards recited form a ladder. Charles Olsen and other performers “planted” in the audience each stood up when their time came and said a line or two. David Tudor played the piano. Movies were projected on the ceiling: at first they showed the school cook, then the sun, and, as the image moved from the ceiling down the wall, the sun sank. Robert Rauschenberg operated old records on a hand-wound phonograph, and Merce Cunningham improvised a dance around the audience. A dog began to follow Cunning and was accepted into the presentation.26

Murmurings of these kinds of goings on, along with the proto-Pop of Rauschenberg and later,

Johns - whom Kaprow would also befriend - hinted at alternatives to the mournful, angst-ridden,

“Age of Anxiety” style of painting dominant in New York from the 1940s and well into the

46

1950s. Irving Sandler hilariously sums up the atmosphere: “Indeed, the consummate existentialist

mise-en-scene would be a Rothko painting being contemplated by Giacometti sculpture to the

accompaniment of the tape of God in Waiting for Godot.”27 Kaprow did not simply want to

overthrow this mentality, however, perceiving a link between the emotional, psychological and

ethical crux of Abstract Expressionism and both his own work and that of his contemporaries.

Writing in 1961, he stated: “Happenings are not a new style. Instead, like American art of the late

1940s, they are a moral act, a human stand of great urgency, whose professional status as art is

less a criterion than their certainty as an ultimate existential commitment.”28 Nevertheless, savvy

young avant-garde artists were looking for something radically different from all the oppressive,

angst-ridden, Freudian romanticism that still imbued much of the painting of the 1950s.29

Some,

like Kaprow, turned towards the Cage-Duchamp paradigm while others, shortly thereafter, were

driven towards Hard-Edge abstraction and figuration, Pop and Minimalist art, the latter two

certainly containing elements of Duchamp but not of Cage.

In August of 1952, Cage held his first performance of the scandalous 4’33” in Woodstock, New

York. Kaprow was not at the Woodstock premiere but did see it later at Carnegie Hall. While

many were stunned by the gall to conduct a silent musical performance and promptly caused an

uproar, others, like Kaprow, were profoundly touched by the piece and its ability to attune oneself

to the overlooked, to reorient perspective to the wickedly and beautifully mundane. Relating the

work back to Rauschenberg, Kaprow recalled the heightened awareness of his surroundings the

work created:

The weather was still warm, and windows were open, and you could still hear the sounds on the street. So when he did 4’33” with David Tudor sitting at the piano doing nothing but pressing the time clock, closing and opening the keyboard cover, I immediately saw this as part of the picture. And then I heard the air conditioning system, I hear the elevators moving, a lot of people’s laughter and creaky chairs, coughing. I heard police sirens and cars down below, and those shadows in Bob Rauschenberg’s pictures. That is to say, there was no marking of

47

the boundary of the artwork, or the boundary of so-called everyday life, but they merge, and they indeed, as it became very clear, we the listeners in Cage’s concert and the lookers in Rauschenberg were the collaborators of the artwork. We were making it.

30

This performance was unlike any traditional musical event and in certain respects more akin to

theatre, with the objects and people producing the sounds becoming the actors and props, a

concept part of a broad range of activity occurring around that time. Here, then, I will turn to

more speculative aspects of Kaprow’s influences, which, though seldom mentioned or discussed,

likely had at least a modest impact.

As mentioned earlier, Kaprow attended plays throughout college, and had a keen interest in the

theatre, particularly early Eugène Ionesco, Japanese Noh theatre, and in the ideas in Artaud’s

Theatre of the Absurd, a book which professes, along with the contemporaneous writings of

Bertolt Brecht, affinities towards various Eastern forms of theatre including Noh. Ascertaining

exactly when Kaprow was introduced to these subjects is problematic. For instance, the Artaud

book was taught in Cage’s classes that Kaprow later took,31

but the first English translation by

Mary Caroline Richards did not appear until 1958, after having been originally published in 1938.

Since Kaprow later published articles in French, which are not noted as translations, I would

venture that he possibly would have read the original text. Further corroborating his linguistic

knowledge is the existence of more than one bibliographic source in his Master’s thesis written

in French. Regardless, being as devoted as he was to avant-garde art in all its manifestations, he

must have had at least some working knowledge of Artaud’s ideas. As Jonas Barish summarizes,

these ideas bear an uncanny resemblance to the works and texts Kaprow would later produce:

The spectator, a detached observer no longer, would be engulfed by the spectacle, bombarded by colors, lights, and sounds...With the actor discarded as a representative of humanity, or swallowed up in his distorting masks and exaggerating costumes, with the division annulled between stage and spectator, theater becomes a participatory rite meant to arouse and overwhelm the spectator

48

with intense states of consciousness. Whether in joy or panic, he is made to merge directly with his fellows, to submerge his consciousness in theirs, to experience reality unmediated, instead of seeing it transferred or delegated to others.

32

The blending of spectacle and spectator is a common theme in twentieth century art and has its

roots in the Futurist Synthetic Theatre, though this early manifestation did not go nearly as far in

incorporating the audience as did Cage and Kaprow did. At Black Mountain College there were

other, lesser-known precedents to Cage and Kaprow’s work: The first was a 1938 production of

Danse Macabre, directed by the former Bauhaus instructor Alexander (Xanti) Schawinsky.

Martin Duberman, in his essential Black Mountain: An E xploration in Community, describes the

work as “a ‘total theatre’ production in the round, including an original score composed by John

Evarts and played by the Black Mountain College orchestra under Allan Sly, and with the

participation of the audience (wearing identical masks and cloaks and forming the outside of

circles of the spectacle) - in other words, a mixed media celebration which predated by almost

fifteen years, the famed 1952 [ Cage] performance at Black Mountain [italics mine].”

33

A decade later, Cage produced a version of Erik Satie’s La Piège de Méduse (The Ruse of

Medusa), featuring Elaine deKooning (her husband Willem was set designer), Merce

Cunningham and a reluctant Buckminster Fuller. The piece was to be the culmination of the

summer program focused on Satie, whom Cage had recently “discovered,” and the work had been

translated by the estimable Mary Caroline Richards, who would later translate Antonin Artaud for

the benefit of Kaprow and everyone in the experimental art and theatrical community.

The script, referencing the 1913 original, was minimally developed with room for improvisation.

It was “a combination of text and happening, though not a ‘happening’ by the strict

definition...since the evening was ‘distinctly directed, controlled,’ and ‘related directly to the

49

music, which also produced a discipline within which you had to exist.”34

As Kaprow would later

stipulate for his Happenings, it occurred only once.

However controlled and therefore traditional the production might be, this must be taken in

measure with its radicality. Director Arthur Penn, brother of legendary photographer Irving Penn,

a playwright and later television and film director (Alice’s Restaurant is perhaps his most famous

work) was brought in to assist that summer, noted the importance of the work in radically

redefining the theatrical experience; a feature, he claimed, that came about in large part because

he was “uneducated and untutored,” about theatre, dance, and music. The rehearsals for The Ruse

of Medusa prompted him to try new techniques including the “opening up of space,” or the

expansion of the work into the audience; the breaking or blurring of the so-called “fourth wall.”

Penn cautioned, however: “It’s one of those experiences which grew as myth in time,”

underscoring the fact that no one “was alert to . . .any special significance”(get) at the time.

The work, not cited in many texts on the development of Happenings which nearly always point

to the 1952 Untitled Cage event at Black Mountain, was considered a “watershed event in ‘mixed

media’ presentations” and even the MoMA requisitioned Penn to do a re-performance.

35

Beyond Black Mountain, similar kinds of experimental art were being produced. Henry Flynt, a

Flux-artist important for George Brecht and many of his fellow Fluxists, was one such figure. In

1954, at 14 years old, he produced a work of proto-Concept art involving replacing words of

sentences with dictionary definitions, which bears at least a superficial resemblance to Kaprow’s

Words of 1962, wherein words on paper could be rearranged on paneled walls. Flynt’s event is

given pride of place on Brecht’s grand diagram of the development of Fluxus, entitled E xit

(1961/c. 1962-63). The work, on display as of July, 2010 at the MoMA as part of its permanent

collection, distinguishes Flynt’s piece as the “First Concept Art.” I have come across no reference

50

of Flynt in Kaprow’s interviews, indicating he may not have been aware of the artist for some

time, if at all, though depending on when Brecht first learned of Flynt’s art, Kaprow may have

had some familiarity by the time he began producing his most revolutionary art circa 1957-1959.

Another later influence on Happenings and Flux-art of which Kaprow was assuredly aware was

Gutai. Founded in 1954 by Jiro Yoshihara - or, as claimed by Shozo Shimamoto, co-founded by

himself and Yoshihara - Gutai - meaning “concrete,” or “embodiment” - was a movement

inspired by Pollock, Rosenberg’s “American Action Painters,” and the French proto-Performance

artist Georges Mathieu.36

Its aims were centered on art as an arena of action, with the production

of art objects relegated to the mere tracing of an act and of little value aesthetically. As early as

1954, one of its most brilliant members, Kenzo Shiraga, began painting with his feet. Shortly

after, other Gutai artists began perforating thick screens of painted paper, prefiguring Lucio

Fontana’s alternately visceral and graceful slicings, and Lee Bontecou’s cavernous solder and

canvas constructions of the 1960s. In 1955, Shiraga enacted Challenging to the Mud [fig. 15],

wherein the half-clothed artist, lying prone in an outdoor circle of mud, moved his body about in

various rhythms and intensities to produce a transient record of his activities. The photograph of

this event has become the most popularized symbol of Gutai’s activities.

Gutai was an Internationalist movement like Fluxus, the latter of which was to develop in the late

1950s and eventually cohere in the 1960s under the leadership of George Maciunius.37 Gutai

distributed its eponymous magazine throughout the 1950s, even sending them to Jackson Pollock

(possibly through Alfonso Ossorio), who retained multiple copies.38 Shows were held in Tokyo

and in Europe, but it was not until 1958 that the first American show was held at the Martha

Jackson Gallery where Kaprow would later exhibit. Kaprow has claimed that he did not see the

exhibit. This seems doubtful: he was likely aware of Gutai prior to 1958.39 In late 1957 a

prominent article was printed in the New York Times on the adventures of the Gutai artists, and

51

Kaprow’s friend and fellow artist Alfred Leslie referred Kaprow to the piece. In an interview with

Susan Hapgood in 1992, Kaprow refers to this instance but does not explicitly state that he read

the article or when.40

In the Times piece by Japan correspondent Ray Falk, details of Gutai works are remarkably

consistent with works Kaprow and his colleagues were creating, right down to the very materials

also in use by artists in Europe’s Art Brut movement:

In this falls’ indoor exhibit [in Osaka, Japan], the experimenters came up with such tableaus as Yozo Ukita’s use of big sheets of tinfoil on which he ad scratched furiously with a blue-inked pen.. Atsuko Tanka put together a painting of light bulbs that lit up like a Christmas tree; Noboru Sakamitsu smeared big patches of tar on a dark background...During the summer the Gutai artists literally use the outdoors. They exhibit in a spacious pine grove near Kobe. What few inhibitions they may have been unable to shed in the salon evaporate in the fresh air. They assimilate nature and try for new impressions from soil, woods, stones, sky and sun...Still not satisfied, the Gutai-ists turned to the theatre and gave action to their art. In some scenes they combine the finished work of the art galleries with the production of the studios and thus give the audience a peek at the artist on the job...Koichi Nakahashi and Yasuo Sumi produce a less artist but rather comic effect inside a big cellophane rectangle of which the far wall is made of white cardboard. Joined by his assistants, Nakahaski throws paper balls dipped in buckets of color to produce an incomprehensible pattern. Again the mind’s eye sees grownup men having the time of their childhood throwing colored snowballs....The soundtrack of Yamasaki’s short film “composed” by Shozo Shimamoto would be unbearable if heard by itself. It sounds like the screeching of tires, the tearing of a bolt of cotton, the grinding of metal against metal and most often the distorted recordings of ultra high-frequency radar and radio signals.

41

52

Fig. 14 (Left) Gutai Bijutsu Kyokai, Murakami Breaks Through Many Paper Screens by Saburo Murakami, October 1955. Courtesy ARTstor.

Fig. 15 (Below) Kazuo Shiraga, Making a Work with One’ s Body (Challenging the Mud), October 1955. Courtesy ARTstor.

53

In the preceding passage we are confronted by the striking similarities between Gutai and

Kaprow’s and other New York artists’ work, especially those under the direct influence of Cage.

The inspiration is bidirectional, however: Rauschenberg’s Night Blooming series can be seen

along with Pollock as a possible influence on certain Gutai works.

In “Happenings in The New York Scene” (1961), Kaprow hinted the relevance of Gutai (along

with art in San Francisco, Chicago, Cologne, Paris and Milan), but went on to say:

Of most of this we know very little; only the spirit has been sensed. Of what I know, I find that I have decidedly philosophical reservations. Therefore, the points I make are intended to represent, not the views of all those who create works that might be generically related, or even of all those whose work I admire, but of those whose works I feel to be the most adventuresome, fruitfully open to applications, and the most challenging of any art in the air at present.42

In positioning himself thus, Kaprow negated influence in favor of a shared spirit of

adventurousness.

In fairness, Kaprow did much to further the reputation of Gutai by including them in Assemblage,

E nvironments and Happenings. By the time of the book’s publication in 1966, Kaprow’s ideas

about art had changed but the essay he had composed primarily in 1959 was left much the same.

The goal of the book then became that of a pedagogical tool, informing a mass of art world

initiates - largely ignorant due to the nature of the art - of the various histories and trajectories of

avant-garde art from the mid-1950s-1960s.

Kaprow’s later art works of the 1950s were ultimately most aligned with the kind of work

produced at Black Mountain and by Cage in New York, but possessed conceptual aspects such as

those in the Henry Flynt word-substitution piece, and owed something to the physicality of Gutai.

This more audience-participatory element that Kaprow would also discern in the White Paintings,

54

Pollock’s all-over canvases and possibly Artaud’s writings would slowly come to define

Happenings and Events as the ideas gradually sank in. Between 1952 and 1956, Kaprow

continued in a figural-fauve-expressionist vein - as well described in Chapter One by Martica

Sawin - though Kaprow produced intermittent experiments that eventually translated into the

Environments of the latter half of the decade. Another course existed which Kaprow struggled to

reconcile: “...those two polarities of the Construction style that are ultimately transcendent, that

is, what we would now call a Minimalist esthetic...[and an ] Essentialist...sensual side...but the

sensual side that is marked by the French painters, [like] Matisse.”

43

While he worked towards his signature style, Kaprow involved himself in a career and other

activities. Shortly after finishing his degree at Columbia in 1952, Kaprow, along with Wolf Kahn,

Jean Follett, Jan Muller, Barbara and Jean Forst, and Richard Stankiewicz, founded the

cooperative Hansa gallery, the name in homage to both the Germanic Hanseatic League and to

Hofmann, with whom many of the founders studied. The gallery, which emerged as one of the

most important of the Tenth Street galleries (it was actually located on Twelfth Street), survived

until 1959 and became the showing grounds of many important Kaprow works, including his first

two public Environments. During the first year of operation he was included in a group show held

in the fall. Beyond the Hansa, Kaprow exhibited in 1952 in New York at the Jabberwocky

Gallery, the Rienzi Gallery, Gallery 201, and the Ramapo Gallery in Suffern, New York; Kaprow

would later dismiss these as “fly-by-night” galleries.44 Paintings were likely the only works

shown,45 and though many were visually abstract, Kaprow later confessed that they were anything

but abstract in nature: “When I painted pictures, they were not “pure paintings”; they were toy

soldiers at war, my girl friend in one corner and myself in the order; or they were musical

structures, or they were literary stories - they were everything under the sun.”

46

55

After a year showing work intermittently and casting about for work following graduation

(Kaprow had decided against pursuing Ph.D. partly to move out of his parents’ house in the

foreseeable future), he finally secured at job at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New

Jersey. The school, like many of the era, was expanding greatly following the GI bill and push

towards higher education in the United States, making it easier for someone possessing only a

Master’s to be hired as a professor. However, Kaprow recalled that his lack of a doctorate was

something “they would never let me forget.”47 Ph.D. or not, Kaprow had studio expertise - and

Schapiro advised him to stress his many talents when applying for work.48

Kaprow would end up

teaching both studio and art history courses.

He was hired in 1953 by Helmut von Erffra, a Bauhaus-trained progressive educator impressed

by Kaprow’s intelligence and artistic skill, and who shared an affinity for Hans Hofmann. Rutgers

College, the men’s campus, had a small art department and woefully inadequate studio facilities,

but it was a job and Kaprow threw himself into the work. A nearby art house, now destroyed,

housed a small gallery and served as a hang-out spot. Kaprow would have several shows at this

gallery, alongside coworkers and even von Erffra, a practicing artist. Kaprow continued, of

course, to show in New York, and worked in “a mix of about six different styles. Still in that

swing between Matisse-y Hofmann and Constructivist-Mondrian, with occasional forays into a

somewhat native mystical style of painting that I picked up from a short friendship with a guy

you may not remember, named Gandy Brody.” Kaprow described the now-forgotten Brody as

“an heir to Bonnard, the most crazy Bonnard...that dissolves in monsters, only supported by a

film of delicate, beautiful, delicious smelling paint.”

Kaprow was not content to stay for long in the two-dimensional, however sensual. In a review of

his show in ARTnews in 1953, we see nascent signs of his work to come: “The real experience he

seeks in the past is found, to some extent, in his own earlier Cubist works on panels arranged at

56

angles to each other and looking more like constructions than paintings.”49

(Perhaps this is what

Kaprow referred to when discussing the tension between the “Minimalist” and “sensualist” ethic.)

The show is billed as Kaprow’s first one-man exhibit, and he displayed a mélange of styles,

including the familiar fauvist-tinged figural and landscape works and, interestingly, copies of Old

Master works. Kaprow would later admit that he considered the latter to be complete failures and

a total dead end - these were part of a brief phase in which he became highly puritanical and was

mixing his own paints and building his own stretchers. Apart from obvious references to Kurt

Schwitters’ Merz constructions - made conspicuous in large part through Motherwell’s book - and

to Constructivism and Cubism, this work perhaps more directly points to Rauschenberg, who was

working on box structures at the time (to say nothing of Duchamp’s Box in a Valise of 1935-41).

Kaprow in 1959 described the differences between Cubism and the Assemblage art exemplified

by Rauschenberg, which I have quoted at length to underscore the importance of this thought,

whose origins lie in the early-mid 1950s:

By 1912 or 1913, the medium of collage began to break the rules, though, by our standards, modestly. Most...collages [were] conventionally pictorial, and the paper additions were pasted down so as to disturb the surface only a little. The damage, however was done. Which was the real - the paper that, as a substance, was different from the canvas; the cut-out image which began on the paper and merged with the painted image on the canvas; or the print on the paper which told you it was newspaper or an advertisement...All was kept precariously in check by the conventional form of the field... Since World War II, with the collages and constructions created in the United States, a big step was taken...If the edges of pasted matter on a collage were left sticking up far enough, that exquisite balance [of] Cubism’s use of pictorial space and real space would be destroyed - relief sculpture of a sort would result. The field no longer functioned in the pictorial way it could in an older painting...[Kaprow goes on to describe what sounds like a Lucio Fontana slit piece]...Such a ‘painting’ was ambiguous in its role, suggesting a banner, medallion or room partition...The further introduction of other foreign matter (wood, straw, bulbs, machine parts, etc.) only enhanced the dilemma.

A dilemma for some, who gave up the whole problem as a lost cause and returned to conventional methods, but an escape hatch for others...Some interesting alternatives involved relinquishing the goal of picture making entirely

57

by accepting possibilities that lay in using a broken surface or a non-geometric field.

50

The Environment-as-collage “hinges upon not only accepting the accidental but whatever is there.

I began wanting to collage the impossible - to paste-up action, to make collages of people and

things in motion.”

51

Kaprow’s development toward Assemblage not only related to collage. An overlooked aspect is

the influence of the early Junk and Assemblage art made by Jean Follett and Richard

Stankiewicz, whom Kaprow founded the Hansa with and exhibited alongside.

Many attribute the influence of Kaprow’s Assemblages to Kurt Schwitters, but Kaprow has

indicated that he was only somewhat aware of the artist through the writings in The Dada

Painters and Poets: he knew “about his plans for theater, about his performances, about his

wordplay,” but he “never heard or saw any of them.” Though the preceding involves a discussion

about the development of Happenings and not Assemblage per se, the general tone is one of

ambivalence toward Schwitters, whom Kaprow recognized as important but not for his own

work. Merzbau reproductions were not included in The Dada Painters either. Therefore it is

dubious whether these installations had any influence on Kaprow’s Environments. Having little

knowledge of Schwitters’ work in general, Kaprow’s Assemblages and Environments owe little

to them directly, but the argument that Kaprow sidelined the relevance of yet another non-

American artist should not be ruled out. Given the dominance of Paris and Synthetic Cubism,

however, it is more likely that Schwitters’ work was beside the point to a certain degree.52 Of

more immediate concern was someone like Follett, whom Kaprow included in Assemblage,

E nvironments and Happenings, and whose works were considered by Kaprow to be emblematic

of a “primitive or magical tendency through the creation of images which have the feeling of

58

fetishes - though we sense their sophisticated origin.” She also “impressed everybody,” including

luminaries Greenberg, Leo Castelli, and Jean Dubuffet.53

Follett did not produce Assemblage work as early as 1953, but I am introducing her here to

highlight the synchronicity of her and Kaprow’s work in the early- to mid- 1950s, and their co-

exhibition history. I contend that she had an influence not properly accorded to her because of her

sex.

Though Follett’s works retain Miro-esque biomorphic qualities and are more on the order of the

symbolic and metonymic, in contrast to Kaprow’s more literal, objective order style, you cannot

but draw comparisons between a mature work like Gulliver (1956) and Kaprow’s Wall (1957).

Composed of dark-colored panels of either metal or board of varying lengths, and horizontally

oriented, Gulliver is a flatbed piece - as is Wall. Smaller, white wooden sections are nailed to the

“field” of the work, and various metal pipes and mechanical devices are likewise adhered.

Though the materials are industrial in nature, rather than industrially produced, as in Wall, the

two share a similar distribution of objects; for Wall, for all its riotous color and humorous

appendages, is discretely, artfully compartmented.(and for this fact it was criticized - a point

brought up later in this paper). Indeed, both pieces reference Rauschenberg works like Minutiae,

discussed later.

While Kaprow gives due attention to Follett, he also tacitly contrasts her against himself when he

describes her style as “magical.” The effect of this is negating, denying any influence Follet may

have had on him. That being said, at least attention is given in Follett’s case, for he unfortunately

sidelines Richard Stankiewicz, also rarely discussed in the Kaprow literature outside of casual

connections even though the precedent located in his work of the early 1950s is undeniable.

59

Stankiewicz’s pieces were “almost ready-mades” according to critic Hubert Crehan. Fairfield

Porter observes that the Assemblagists (a group including Rauschenberg, Follett, John

Chamberlain and Mark di Suvero) preferred “what is broken, cast off, rubbishy, awkward, ugly

and rusty...[putting] least things first.”54 Like many of his ilk, Stankiewicz’s work was lumped

into the Neo-Dada category, but it lacked the philosophical nihilism of the European movement.

When accused of being a Dadaist, Stankiewicz decried this pointedly by stating “I am not Dada I

don’t want to shock anyone. It is natural for me to do and use what I do, just as natural as a South

Sea Islander uses shells. Maybe you are disturbed that my work is too accidental. I find most of

the materials that I use, but I throw most of these away, even after keeping them a long time. I

select very carefully. Nothing happens that I don’t want to happen.”55 This deliberateness

contrasted with the haphazard impression given by the work reflects many of Kaprow’s

Happenings, and indeed most if not all of Kaprow’s other works. Kaprow, the would-be

Doctorate, was far too professorial and too interested in process to ever be given over to whimsy

or “accident,” though the “happy accident” may have been the pursuit. While Kaprow would

allow the element of indeterminacy (here commonly understood as choice) in his works, they

were still tightly constructed around scores that, at least in the early years, were heavily Of further

relevance in the above quotation is the disparity between the negative aspects of Dada and the

kind of art Stankiewicz, Kaprow and others were concerned with. While these artists utilized

“found” objects, they were not to be considered so much as brash, ironic statements, intended to

titillate or provoke - but rather they were practical means to expressive ends, one of which was a

sometimes unconscious desire to reflect American commodity culture, and to liberate the

potential in detritus and everyday objects, the kinds of materials Kaprow would begin to employ

in earnest in 1956. Here the word “reflect” is critical.

60

Fig. 16 (Top) Jean Follett, Gulliver, 1956. Mixed media assemblage. Courtesy of ARTstor. Fig. 17 (Right) Richard Stankiewicz, Urchin in the Grass, 1956. Iron, steel. 23.625 in. Museum of Modern Art, New York. Courtesy ARTstor.

61

Whereas Dada parodied by gross hyperbole, Assemblage tended to take matter at face value,

though not to the extent that Minimalism would. It was a middle ground, appropriately a medium

between Dada and the apogee of the integration of capitalist spectacle in all the “Neos” of the

1980s. Assemblages were far from pure objects: they were hybrids, slightly warped mirrors of

reality taking an alternatively ambivalent and invigorated stance on the object which could be

repurposed to the artist’s liking. Rauschenberg fell towards the ambivalent, Follett to the

invigorated, and Stankiewicz and Kaprow, somewhere in between.

Stankiewicz first began making his junk sculptures during the winter of 1951-1952, after an

auspicious encounter with a spade in his back yard,56

but these early works, like Rauschenberg’s

White Paintings, were not exhibited until 1953. It is possible that Kaprow would have seen these

before exhibition. Rauschenberg was still working in a purely painterly vein at this time, and

would not introduce objects until around 1953-1954. Therefore, a sculptor like Stankiewicz

concerned with the object and its interaction with other pre-made objects preceded Rauschenberg

in the revitalization of the Readymade, which in turn led to new interests in dynamism and social

and performative concerns in the later part of the 1950s and on into the 1960s, to say nothing of

the obvious trajectory towards Minimalism and Pop.

Stankiewicz’s pieces, often resembling decrepit realizations of a Picabian fantasy machine

illustration combined with the offhandedness of a Duchamp bottle rack, were noted for their

“witty relationship between the mechanical and the human”57

As I shall show, this idea became

increasingly important to Kaprow during the 1950s in his Environments and Happenings, which

utilized both crude and more sophisticated technological aspects in conjunction with human

interaction.

62

In 1953 or 1954 Kaprow became associated with Robert Watts, a trained engineer and artist who

had also studied at Columbia. Watts came to Rutgers a year earlier than Kaprow to teach

engineering, but transferred to the art department at the woman’s school across campus, Douglass

College, soon after in 1953 to teach sculpture, ceramics, and African and Oceanic Art. Although

originally producing art work in the conventionalized styles of Gorky, Kline, Pollock and

Beckmann, he always had an interest in creative applications of technology. Before completely

switching modes in the latter 1950s, however, Watts, would being experimenting around 1956

with a collage style similar to what Kaprow produced around the same time - works that featured

“cut-up paintings and seemingly random collections of imagery.”

58

About the same time Watts met Kaprow, he became friends with George Brecht, a chemist,

engineer and artist who worked at the nearby Johnson and Johnson facility in the personal

products division. Brecht had seen an exhibit of Watts’ paintings in New Brunswick and was so

impressed that he reached out to contact the young teacher. The two became very close and

sometime soon after, Kaprow joined their group, meeting at the local Howard Johnson diner to

discuss art and life.

Watts’ influence is rarely mentioned by Kaprow, who had a strong affinity for Brecht’s work

(though not always for the man - the two had a collegial but at times distant relationship

according to various sources). In Kaprow’s seminal Assemblage, E nvironments and Happenings,

he would extol the practices of Brecht while only cursorily mentioning Watts. While it is

undeniable that Brecht’s pared-down, open-ended “scores” (such as 1961’s E xit) were obvious

precursors to Kaprow’s similarly loose Events, and while one cannot deny the enormous

influence Brecht had on the Fluxus movement - which Kaprow was connected with - it is curious

that someone like Watts would be sidelined. For instance, he and Kaprow were both educated at

Columbia and had studied drawing and painting and both were increasingly interested in

63

technology’s relationship to art. Perhaps most importantly, each was devoted to developing new

approaches towards arts education through new curriculum, investment in technology, and an at

times radical ontology that did away with traditional concepts of a teacher-student relationship in

favor of greater emphasis on the autonomy of students to develop projects both on their own and

in collaboration with other students. This approach found its most extreme expression in Robert

Watts, who would later become known for presenting himself as a kind of yogi, remaining nearly

silent in many of his classes, forcing his students into self-selected and directed projects and

debates.

59

Watts was apparently less oriented towards the spotlight than Kaprow, and as the scholar

Benjamin Buchloh has noted, Watts, “[seemed] to have followed Marcel Duchamp’s prognosis

that the artist of the future…would have to work underground.”60 Perhaps Watts was too

“cryptic,” especially compared with Brecht, who “described his ideal event as coming close to a

natural occurrence — effectively erasing the difference between artwork and happenstance.”61

This was in fact what Kaprow later aimed to do, as he elaborated in his later essays, particularly

“Education of the Un-Artist” parts I—III (1971, 1972, 1974). In “The Real Experiment” (1983),

Kaprow describes the adventures of a former artist who, as a lark but also with genuine interest,

decides to run for mayor. He wins, and manages to solve many of the town’s long-standing fiscal

and municipal problems. The work was art, or lifelike art, as Kaprow argues, but no one would

have been aware of it had the artist Paul McCarthy not urged the man to publish the account of

his mayorship. Its fugitive status, its “underground work” made it more potent; sealed off from

the oxidizing effects of the art establishment Kaprow set this work as an example for other artists,

including himself, to aspire to.

The fourth member of “Rutgers Group” that was to exist circa 1953-56 was George Segal. Segal

was Kaprow’s neighbor and reluctantly tended to his inherited chicken farm in South Brunswick.

64

He was also working as a school teacher in New Jersey after attending New York University’s

teacher’s college around the same time that Kaprow attended the school, but the paths of the two

had apparently never crossed. Kaprow lived near a lake on the former Rubin family farm, where

he used his barn, and sometimes Segal’s as a studio. Larry Rivers, Grace Hartigan, Bob

Goodenough, Helen Frankenthaler, Wolf Kahn, Richard Stankiewicz and many others from the

Tenth Street gallery scene would come out and visit Kaprow, where little art picnics would be

held on the bucolic cottage-dotted properties. One day, Kaprow recalled, “a brand new Buick

drives up and a man named George Segal gets out and says, ‘I heard from Larry Rivers that you

were here...I am a painter’..I liked him immediately.”

Kaprow was closest to Segal of any of his contemporaries at Rutgers, though the two did not

always agree on matters of art. Kaprow referred to Segal as a “very good listener,” albeit one who

“didn’t share my goals.” He questioned many of Kaprow’s assumptions and was a gentle but

persistent advocate for tradition, which Kaprow was impatient with.62 For his part, Segal disliked

that Kaprow removed the hand from art63 (a similar, more trenchant criticism would be leveled at

him by Claes Oldenburg, who accused Kaprow of removing people from art).64

Kaprow, Watts, Brecht and Segal would exchange ideas and collaborate on projects and group

shows throughout the 1950s, many of which were held at Hansa Gallery. However, in the first

two or three years, not many tangible results were produced which would indicate the level of

innovation that was to come.

1954 and 1955 were not watershed years for Kaprow’s artistic development, again, at least in

terms of tangible production, which continued to meander through painting styles. He did,

however, keep busy, not only teaching but exhibiting a fair amount. He also married his first wife,

65

Vaughn Rachel, in March of 1955 (the two separated in the 1970s, though the exact year is

unknown; he later divorced her and married Coryl Crane Kaprow).

The shows of 1954-1955 that were most important to Kaprow’s career were Drawings,

Watercolors and Pastels at Hansa, and a group show at the Bernard-Ganymede Gallery (formerly

the Urban Gallery), both of which were held in 1955. The first is relevant because Fairfield Porter

reviewed it, marking the first of many reviews by Porter, including a scathing takedown of 1959’s

18 Happenings in 6 Parts). The second, because a black and white reproduction was featured in

ARTnews on the same page as its corresponding Frank O’Hara review, in which the reviewer

described one piece as “inspired and impulsive.” Though still fumbling towards his signature

style, Kaprow was beginning to capture the attention of the New York art world.

The next year, on the other hand, marked an enormous transitional period in the artist’s career.

1956 saw the first of Kaprow’s full-fledged Assemblages, including Woman Out of F ire (tar over

plaster, buttons) and Penny Arcade (paint, canvas, cardboard, painted signage, cloth, wood, light

bulbs and motorized parts). Mainly written in 1959, Kaprow describes Assemblages in

Assemblage, Environments and Happenings: “in the freest of these words, the field, therefore, is

created as one goes along, rather than being there a priori, as in the case of a canvas of certain

dimensions. It is a process, and one that works for the inside out, though this should be

considered metaphorical rather than descriptive, since there actually exists no inside.”65

Assemblage therefore differs from Cubist collage in terms of its more pronounced three-

dimensionality and by virtue of being unbound from the pre-designated picture frame and canvas

size; accumulation might be equally appropriate in describing this form of art. Further, Kaprow

declaimed, “Even Dada [paintings, collages or otherwise], which purported to be free of such

considerations as ‘composition,’ obeyed the Cubist esthetic...In short, part-to-whole or part-to-

part relationships, no matter how strained were a good 50 percent of the making of the picture.”66

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Kaprow here is embracing and interpreting the physical environment in an entirely new way, by

not only representing it, but emulating its very nature. “I wanted more tangible reality than it was

possible to suggest through painting alone. I wanted above all to be literally part of the work. I

further desired something of my social world to be part of whatever art I did. Painting is far too

abstract an art, even when it depicts recognizable images.”

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The desire to include a “tangible reality” was partially connected with his remove from New

York. Speculative, of course, but it is reasonable to open up the possibility that Kaprow’s work

evolved only after he was at a sufficient distance from the New York “scene.” The contrasting

elements of the urban, suburban and agrarian (Kaprow lived on a farm), combined with

influences from New York and Rutgers, seemed to stimulate a new take on avant-garde art.

Kaprow himself acknowledged Rutgers’ geographic and psychic importance, as it was far enough

from the “loft parties and bars and each other as well.”68

Erika Gorder describes the Rutgers

milieu in more detail in her introduction to the exhibition catalog Archival Assemblages: Rutgers

University and The Avant-Garde, 1953-1964:

Downtown New Brunswick was packed with department stores, luncheonettes, bars, restaurants, delicatessens, movie theaters, thrift stores, automobile garages, and even an art gallery. In contrast, the Cook and Douglass campuses were picturesque, verdant sites. Across the river, Highland Park (the neighborhood with the small-town feel) was filled with sweet shops, “Sally’s Celebrity Room,” a Greek Orthodox Church, a synagogue, and community centers that hosted art exhibitions...And, most importantly, New Brunswick had a train station with immediate access to New York City...

The diversity of New Jersey at this time as well as its proximity to New York, may have given New Brunswick some advantages. It afforded the artists a freedom to explore and develop individual styles unhindered by what Segal would later refer to as the “Art Ghetto” of New York... ...All of the artists in the Rutgers group had intimate ties to New York as close as ones to New Jersey. But, as a unique environment, New Jersey must have affected these artists from the expansiveness of space and possibilities for large-

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scale experimentation on Segal’s farm [Kaprow’s Trees and Calling, the collaborative Yam Festival], to the raw materials to be scavenged, bought, or borrowed in the shops and junkyards. The diversity of landscape - the lights on the runways at Newark Airport, or the tires at the dump, or the Howard Johnson’s, was part of the everyday experience which so inspired them.

Apart from the effect of the landscape, Kaprow’s 1955 marriage and the subsequent birth of his

first child, Anton, in 1956 (some sources indicate 1957) undoubtedly affected the direction of his

art as well, which began to take on personalized elements, or at least elements that mimicked the

personal. The works that embody these qualities are up for debate as to their dating; like the

Untitled piece reproduced in The Anthologist, there is good reason to believe they were created

later than many sources claim, including sources close to Kaprow like Jeff Kelley, the scholar

responsible for a popular resurgence of interest in Kaprow’s work. For instance, a March 1956

review by Irving Sandler in ARTnews describes oil and tempera paintings in the familiar

Matisse/Soutine/Bonnard style, and representations of bridges, indicating that Kaprow had yet to

develop his more radical style. The review does, however, state that there were “shown (for the

first time)...several pieces of sculpture, plaster figures coated with roofing tar,” which had “a

fierceness not found in the paintings, but an ambiguous wit also.” These sculptures included the

previously mentioned Woman out of F ire (a truly grotesque, primordial figure borrowed from

deKooning or Dubuffet and run through a Giacometti nightmare filtered through an ignoble

Angelus Novus). The rest we are unsure of, but possibly included Banjo Player (iron, plaster, and

mixed media) and Hero (metal, paper, and plaster covered with roofing cement), both dated c.

1955-56. Woman out of F ire is Surrealist rather than Rauschenbergian, and though I have not

seen images of the other two works, their media implies that there were in more of a

Constructivist-Cubist vein.

While Kaprow was starting to make significant changes in his art with the advent of Assemblage

(because while exact dates are uncertain, we do know he was moving in this direction at this

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time) an event occurred in August of 1956 that would forever link Kaprow to posterity. That

event, of course, was the death of Jackson Pollock in an automobile accident just outside Springs,

New York on Long Island. Kaprow, like everyone in the local art community at the time, was

profoundly affected by Pollock’s death. Many viewed the death as the tragic conclusion of a

brilliant, troubled talent, a waste and a pity. Others were more blasé, seeing it as inevitable, and

even overdue, a thought Kaprow himself was not immune to; yet Kaprow also saw it as a relief,

and not only for Pollock who died “not at the top,” but for the artists he both inspired and

frustrated. Despite Pollock being “perhaps, the embodiment of our ambition for absolute

liberation and a secretly cherished wish to overturn old tables of crockery and flat champagne,”

and that Kaprow and his colleagues “...saw in his example the possibility of an astounding

freshness, a sort of ecstatic blindness,”69 Pollock was also “the center in a great failure: the New

Art. His heroic stand had been futile. Rather than releasing the freedom that it at first promised, it

caused not only a loss of power and possible disillusionment for Pollock but also that the jig was

up. And those of us still resistant to this idea would end up the same way, hardly at the top.”

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In his seminal essay, “The Legacy of Jackson Pollock,” in which the term “Happening” first

appears, Kaprow rallied for a new kind of art, one invested with the vigor of the “real” world in

all its multifarious permutations, and one that expanded spatiotemporal boundaries. These ideas

were derived from Pollock’s “abrupt leaving off of the activity [in his canvases], which our

imaginations continue outward indefinitely, as though refusing to accept the artificiality of an

‘ending.’” Pollock’s canvases were not, then “‘mere’ surface covering over a truer, ‘inner

content’; that is, surface as in no way bound up with its verbally implied opposite, in no way

‘superficial.’ Contemporary surface breathes, bugs you, warps, declares itself directly. Pollock’s

surface is particularly moving in this respect.”

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These imaginings, or “warps,” are a gift of choice as Kaprow saw it, much in the way that John

Cage’s concept of indeterminacy directly involves choice, demonstrating a clear affinity between

Pollock and Cage. Through this choice, and thanks to Pollock’s “near-destruction” of traditional,

canvas-based art, artists are therefore:

...at the point where we must become preoccupied with an even dazzled by the space and objects of our everyday life, either our bodies, clothes, rooms, or, if need be, the vastness of Forty-second Street. Not satisfied with the suggestion of through paint of our sense, we shall utilize the specific substances of sight, sound, movements, people, odors, touch. Objects of every sort are materials for the new art: paint, chairs, food, electric and neon lights, smoke, water, old socks, a dog, movies...Not only will these bold creators show us, as if the first time, the world we have always had about us but ignored, but they will disclose of entirely unheard-of happenings and events, found in garbage cans, office files, hotel lobbies; seen in store windows and on the streets; and sense in dreams and horrible accidents. An odor of crushed strawberries, a letter from a friend, or a billboard selling Drano; three taps on the front door, a scratch, a sigh, or a voice lecturing endlessly, a blinding staccato flash, a bowler hat - all will become materials for this new concrete art.

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“Legacy” was primarily written in 1956, shortly after Pollock’s death, but not submitted to

ARTnews until over a year later.73 Reputed for his general sympathies toward Abstract

Expressionism and its use as a bulwark against Parisian hegemony, Editor Thomas Hess sat on

the piece for some time before scheduling it for publication in October, 1958.74 However, the

editor eventually came around not only to the piece but to Kaprow, and “adopted him as a kind of

spokesperson for those artists involved in ‘painter’s theater’ - Claes Oldenburg, Jim Dine, Red

Grooms, Al Hansen, Dick Higgins and Robert Whitman.” (Dine and Grooms produced

Happenings only for a brief time before returning to more conventional art-making.)75 As Judith

Rodenbeck suggests in the 2006 Artforum memoriam to Kaprow, the artist was perhaps

uncomfortable with this mouthpiece position, largely due to his more nuanced understanding of

historical precedents, that is, his academicism.76 Whether comfortable or not, Kaprow was

quickly becoming the de facto spokesperson for his particular “school” of New York artists.

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1 Wolf Kahn, “Hans Hofmann’s Good Example,” Art Journal 42, No. 1, The Education of Artists (Spring 1982); 22. 2 “Indeed, it is astonishing to see how quickly Pollock’s work was discovered in 1943-44, and how uniform the critical celebration was, to the great surprise of Pollock himself. As B.H. Friedman explains in his book on Pollock: ‘By mid-1944 Pollock’s career was off to a good ‘start’: a first one-man show in probably the most chic gallery in town [Peggy Guggenheim’s Art of This Century], a contract with that gallery, a mural commission from its owner, generally good notices, the questionnaire is a prestigious West Coast magazine, the color reproduction in Bazaar, the Modern Art purchase, and at least one bite and some nibbles by other institutional and private collectors...” in Serge Guilbaut, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art: Arthur Goldhammer, trans.; 84-85. 3 Included in the center of the exhibition space at the 1949 exhibit was a scale model of a proposed museum to house Pollock’s works, by the architect Peter Blake. The design featured sliding panels in lieu of walls, which invited a dynamic interplay between the art and the space. William Kaizen goes into some detail on this in his excellent “Framed Space: Allan Kaprow and the Spread of Painting,” Grey Room, no. 13 (Autumn 2003): 80-107. 4 Moira Roth interview; 35. 5 From Getty Archives online index. 6 Eva Meyer-Hermann, Andrew Perchuk and Stephanie Rosenthal, eds., Allan Kaprow: Art as L ife (Getty Research Institute: Los Angeles, 2003); p. 75. However, other artists were aware of the importance of the Pollockian space, perhaps as early as Kaprow. Charles Cajori, for example, stated “This space was to our time what perspectival space was to the Renaissance.” As quoted in Irving Sandler, A Sweeper-up After Artists; 92. 7 "I responded immediately," he said, "not as objects, but as ways of seeing. I've said before that they were airports for shadows and for dust, but you could also say that they were mirrors of the air...When I saw those, I said, 'Oh yes, I must; otherwise I'm lagging, otherwise music is lagging.'" John Cage, in I-VI (The Eliot Norton Lectures) (Harvard Press: Cambridge, 1990). These works gave Cage “permission” to do the “silent piece.” David Revill, The Roaring Silence (Arcade: New York, 1992);164. All quoted from: http://solomonsmusic.net/4min33se.htm#1.%20Brief%20Description%20and%20the%20Premiere. Accessed 28 April 2010. 8 Joan Marter. Off L imits: Rutgers and the Avant-Garde (Rutgers University Press: New Brunswick, NJ, 1999); 4-5, from an interview with the artist in 1995. 9 Allan Kaprow, “Experimental Art,” as reprinted in E ssays on the Blurring of Art and Life, Jeff Kelley, ed.; 73. John Dewey in Art as E xperience discusses the choices artists must make in light of all possibilities: “In no case can a work of art rival the infinite concreteness of nature. An artist is ruthless when he selects, in following the logic of his interest while he adds to his selective bent an efflorescence or ‘abounding’ in the sense of direction in which he is drawn.” Art as E xperience; 99. 10 Helen Molesworth, in Robert Rauschenberg (October Files 4, MIT Press: Cambridge, MA, 2002); 75. 11 Leo Steinberg, Ibid.; 27-28. 12 Aruna D'Souza. "I Think Your Work Looks a Lot Like Dubuffet: Dubuffet and America, 1946” Oxford Art Journal 20, no. 2 (1997); 61. 13 Ibid; 66. 14 I do not have any particular reason to doubt Kaprow or Joan Marter, although his works of 1953 were still in more traditional painterly styles.

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15 Leo Steinberg, in Robert Rauschenberg; 28. 16 Jeffrey Potter, To A Violent Grave: An Oral Biography of Jackson Pollock (Pushcart Press: Wainscott, NY, 1987);137. 17 Otto Hahn, “Passport No. G255300: United States of America,” Art and Artists, July 1966; 7. 18 Moira and William Roth, “John Cage on Marcel Duchamp: An Interview,” Art in America, November-December 1973; 75. 19 John Cage. Silence: Lectures and Writings (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1967); 10. 20 Allan Kaprow and Mimsy Lee, “On Happenings,” The Tulane Drama Review 10, no. 4 (Summer 1966); 282. 21 Susan Hapgood 1992 interview with the artist. Online: http://umintermediai501.blogspot.com/2008/05/interview-with-allan-kaprow.html. Accessed 24 June 2010. 22 This is possibly the event put on by The Living Theatre on January 1st, featuring pieces by Pierre Boulez, Christian Wolff, Morton Feldman, and Cage, whose included work was Music of Changes. The addendum on the flier indicates this was the first performance of Cage and Feldman’s works, and the first New York performance of Wolff’s. See reproduction of flier in Liz Kotz, Words to be Looked At: Language in 1960s Art (The MIT Press: Cambridge, 2010); 110. 23 Robert C. Morgan, Wolf Kahn and Irving Sandler, “Allan Kaprow (1927-2006),” Brooklyn Rail, May 2006. Online: http://www.brooklynrail.org/2006/05/art/allan-kaprow-19272006. Accessed April 28th, 2010. Why Kaprow has never referenced Wolpe, at least to my knowledge, is a bit of a mystery and worth further research. 24 As Liz Kotz relates, “By 1949 Cage announces the complete independence of ‘event’ and ‘structure’: events are now fully singular entities, which do not rely on position within the structure or relation to one another.” Liz Kotz. Words to be Looked at: Language in 1960s Art; 36. 25 Interview with the artist, from Joan Marter, Off L imits: Rutgers and the Avant-Garde; 45n26. 26 Michael Kirby. Happenings (E.P. Dutton: New York, 1965); 31-32. 27 Irving Sandler. A Sweeper-Up After Artists; 66. 28 Allan Kaprow, “Happenings in the New York Scene,” as reproduced in The Blurring of Art and L ife; 21. 29 Rauschenberg, for example, repeatedly referred to the “sad cup of coffee,” which per Rosalind Krauss, was “his emblem for the endless psychoanalyzing of the artist’s means and hence the promiscuous spread of metaphor within the older (Surrealist-influenced) generation. Speaking of the talk at the Cedar Bar or the Club, he complained, ‘They even assigned seriousness to certain colors,’ and then, turning to the way New York artists had infected Beat poetry: ‘I used to think of that line in Allen Ginsberg’s Howl, about ‘the sad cup of coffee.’ I’ve had cold coffee and hot coffee, but I’ve never had a sad cup of coffee.’” Krauss, from “Perpetual Inventory,” in Robert Rauschenberg; 97. 30 Interview between the artist and Joan Marter, 1995, in Joan Marter, Off Limits: Rutgers and the Avant-Garde, 5. 31 Irving Sandler, The New York School; 144. 32 Jonas Barish, The Anti-Theatrical Prejudice (University of California Press: Berkeley, 1981); 455.

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33 Martin Duberman, Black Mountain: An Exploration in Community (E.P. Dutton: New York, 1972); 98. 34 Ibid; 290. 35 Ibid; 291. 36 Mathieu achieved a great deal of notoriety in France, especially for his Battle of the Bovines, which is seen as an early Performance or Happening piece, though it is quite distinct from a Kaprow Happening, as it was more directly theatrical. The work was written about stateside as well, including in an article for Time in 1955. Online: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,861307,00.html. Accessed 15 July 2010. 37 Flux-art and Happenings were closely interrelated, though Kaprow drew clear distinctions between his work and that of Fluxists like George Maciunius, Brecht, Watts, and the myriad others involved in the movement. It seems disingenuous for Kaprow to downplay his relation to the group, as he not only worked with and was friends with many of them, but their early pieces, including those of Brecht’s, were highly similar to the scores that Kaprow would produce for his Events in the later 1960s onward. Sparsely worded instructions for mundane activities were common elements in the Flux Kits (boxes containing toy or puzzle-like items, notecards and ephemera) that were produced throughout the 1960s. Kaprow was in fact set to contribute to one particular kit but nothing ever came of it. 38 Benjamin Genocchio. “Painting with Hands and Feet.” New York Times 21 August 2009. [http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/23/nyregion/23artsli.html.] Accessed 1 July 2010. 39 This was articulated in a November, 2009 Gutai panel discussion at the Guggenheim museum by Judith Rodenbeck, a performance art, intermedia and theatrical expert who is publishing a book on Kaprow. As of present I have been unable to procure a transcript of this discussion, which was held in concert with an exhibition entitled “Under Each Other’s Spell: Gutai and New York.” The exhibit was sponsored by Stony Brook University’s Pollock-Krasner House and Jersey City University’s Hemmerman Gallery and traveled to the University of Buffalo. 40 Allan Kaprow: Alfred Leslie told me about an article he had read in the New York Times [Ray Falk. “Japanese Innovators,” New York Times Dec. 8, 1957. D24]. It was in the Sunday paper, but I hadn’t read the Times that particular Sunday. Leslie saw I was moving into a kind of wild spatialized collage/assemblage mode, and he said, “Hey, did you read about this?” Susan Hapgood: So the article was sort of a passing curiosity, then? AK: Oh, it was a prominent article! Brecht must have heard about it, because the work he was doing paralleled the various Gutai environmental and action-type pieces. He must have read the article in the Times, and I would guess that Bob Watts would have, too. From 1992 interview, reproduced in Neo-Dada, and online: http://umintermediai501.blogspot.com/2008/05/interview-with-allan-kaprow.html. Accessed 2 June 2010. 41 Ray Falk. “Japanese Innovators,” D24. 42 As reproduced in Kaprow, Blurring of Art And L ife, Jeff Kelley, ed; 16. 43 Moira Roth interview; 21. 44 Ibid; 20. 45 In his “Statement” in Michael Kirby’s Happenings, Kaprow indicates that he was making Assemblages are early as 1952 for inclusion in the Hansa show of the same year. However, we cannot be sure of this claim. No such works are included in the near-comprehensive catalog Art as L ife’s chronology, which, while “selected” would presumably include important transitional pieces. Kirby, Happenings; 44.

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46 Ibid. 47 From an interview videotaped at the Dallas Public Library’s Cable Access Studio in 1988 while Kaprow was attending "Proceedings," a symposium held in his honor at the University of Texas at Arlington. It was subsequently broadcast on Dallas Cable Access TV. Online: [http://www.mailartist.com/johnheldjr/InterviewWithAlanKaprow.html.] Accessed 4 March 2010. 48 Moira Roth interview; 27. 49 This exhibit is not mentioned anywhere in the literature of Kaprow, so far as I have found, but two reviews exist - one from ARTnews, and the other from Arts Digest. 50 Allan Kaprow, Assemblage, E nvironments and Happenings; unpaginated. This is from the main essay, which was largely written in 1959 but revised shortly before its 1966 publication. It is safe to assume that many of the ideas expressed in the excerpt were salient in Kaprow’s mind, if not practice, by at least the mid-1950s if not sooner. 51 From statement by Kaprow in Harriet Janis and Rudi Blesh’s Collage, 2nd ed. revised (Chilton Book Company: Philadelphia, 1967); 273. 52 This is not to denigrate Schwitters’ work, which has a distinct character both more aggressively graphic and commercially oriented than Kaprow’s (hence Merz, from Commerz - although the relation to the scatological cannot be overlooked). Having been reared on Parisian art and Picasso in particular, American artists were less attuned to non-French movements, and this limited purview allowed them to overlook the nuances and culturally produced differences inherent in European art as a whole. 53 Susan Hapgood 1992 interview with the artist, reproduced in Neo-Dada and online: http://umintermediai501.blogspot.com/2008/05/interview-with-allan-kaprow.html Accessed 28 June 2010. 54 Fairfield Porter, “Stankiewicz Makes a Sculpture,’ ARTnews (September 1955); 63. 55 Irving Sandler. The New York School; 147. From a panel discussion at The Club in 1955. 56 Irving Sandler. The New York School; 148. 57 Ibid., 151. 58 Simon Anderson, “Living in Multiple Dimensions: George Brecht & Robert Watts 1953 - 1963.” [http://calothrix.com/living.html.] Accessed 29 May 2010. The author is a PhD and lecturer, professors and author specializing in Fluxus, Mail-art, and other forms of experimental post-war art. 59 For more on Watts’ history at Rutgers, see Critical Mass. 60 In “Cryptic Watts,” the catalog essay for a posthumous exhibition at Castelli Gallery in 1990; unpaginated. 61 Simon Anderson, “Living in Multiple Dimensions: George Brecht & Robert Watts 1953 - 1963.” [http://calothrix.com/living.html.] Accessed 29 May 2010. 62 Moira Roth interview; 38. 63 Patricia Bickers and Andrew Wilson, eds. Talking Art: Interviews Since 1976 (Ridinghouse: London); 367-69. 64 Eva Meyer-Hermann, Andrew Perchuk and Stephanie Rosenthal, eds. Art as L ife; 43.

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65 Richard Kostelanetz. Theatre of Mixed Means; 182. 66 Allan Kaprow. Blurring of Art and Life, Jeff Kelley, ed.; 3. 67 Richard Kostelanetz. Theatre of Mixed Means (1970 edition); 107-108. Online: http://sites.google.com/site/belgiumishappening/home/publications/1968-00-00_kaprow_conversationkostelanetz. Accessed 27 July 2010. 68 From the introductory essay to the “Ten from Rutgers University” survey exhibition held at the Biancini Gallery in New York in 1965. 69 Allan Kaprow. Blurring of Art and Life, Jeff Kelley, ed.; 1. 70 Ibid. 71 Multiple authors. “Jackson Pollock: An Artists' Symposium.” ARTnews 66 (April 1967) p. 28–33+ 72 Allan Kaprow. Blurring of Art and Life; 7–9. 73 As with Assemblage, E nvironments and Happenings, we ought to remain skeptical regarding how much was written at the time claimed. Though admitting that revisions were made near to the times of publication, Kaprow minimizes these corrections in favor of a view that has the crux of the essays being completed early, in 1956 in the case of “Legacy,” and 1959 in the case of Assemblage. 74 In an about-face, however, Hess was also an advocate for the “sanity in art” movement during the 1950s, which tended to look past Abstract Expressionism toward a more humane art approach, and as such, embraced works by the New Realists who invoked Matisse and German Expressionism. Kaprow criticized Hess for these points in an interview with Susan Hapgood in 1992; this is given the Matisse and German Expressionist qualities Kaprow’s own works possessed until about 1956. 75 From Judith Rodenbeck essay in Multiple authors, “Life Like Art,” Artforum (Summer 2006); 322. 76 Ibid.

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CHAPTER FOUR: THE ASCENT OF ASSEMBLAGE AND

ENVIRONMENTS

Kaprow continued to cultivate his work at steadily accelerated pace during 1956 and 1957,

applying the expanded field and kitchen-sink approach which the Pollock piece rhapsodized.

Throughout these years he remained within the Assemblage aesthetic, producing other works

which also utilized a personalized or quasi-personalized motif, such as Baby (1956 or 1957),

which features fragments of the name of Kaprow’s wife throughout the vertically banded collage.

Grandma’ s Boy of 1956 [fig. 19] (mattress ticking, found photographs, silver paper, cloth,

wooden cabinet) evokes not so much a Joseph Cornell piece with its hermetic, vaguely mystical

surrealism - similar to Schwitters’ - as it does a homespun memento. As Kaprow wrote in 1959‘s

“One Chapter from the Principles of Modern Art”: “We can no longer accept as infallible the

naive mysteries of the simple creator ‘who knoweth not what he does.’ Existence is far more

mysterious with one’s eyes wide open.’1

While Kaprow here is referencing Abstract

Expressionism and a general mystifying trend, the quote is applicable in this context as well.

Cornell and Schwitters were hardly unaware of what they were doing, but their art had become

indicative of the elusive, evocative and subterranean in art, qualities Kaprow’s work tended to

oppose, at least in the early years of its development.

The “mementos” contained in works like Grandma’ s Boy are not personal artifacts, but rather

signs thereof, and places the piece in a Duchampian/Rauschenbergian mode. More directly, with

its theoretically operable cabinet, it points to pieces like Untitled of 1953, a small box structure by

Rauschenberg. Rauschenberg’s Minutiae of 1954 [figs. 20-21] which was used as a stage prop for

a John Cage and Merce Cunningman ballet by the same name performed at the Brooklyn

Academy of Music, is a predominant influence. The piece is the artist’s largest freestanding

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combine, approximately 7” X 7” X 3,” built of similar materials, and able to be moved about and

opened and closed on several hinges, as with Grandma’ s Boy. Rauschenberg made several such

hinged works around this time - Pink Door (1954), Interview (1955) and Short Circuit (1955).

Given Kaprow’s friendship with Rauschenberg it is likely he saw the work both in the studio and

in the context of its intended use. Though they were Assemblages as well these and later works

by Rauschenberg became known as the more familiar Combines. With these Combines - which,

as with the White and Black Paintings, were directly influenced by Cage - we see “all-over”

works, composed of elements that are spatially adjacent but not juxtaposed; works that distract

and tease with their punning words, (“IMPOSSIBILTY/CONTROL” appears on Minutiae), with

nothing ultimately but the surface to contemplate. As such, they are the necessary connection

between Dada and Surrealism and Pop Art. There is, perhaps, a joke to be “gotten,” but all the

layers of meaning endlessly folding in on themselves preclude any deciphering. Attempts at

iconology in these Combines are against the point, a fact recognized by Leo Steinberg and Cage;

hence their “refusing to singularize specific iconographic elements”2 which could then be

assembled into a narrative. (Yves-Alain Bois and Carroll Dunham argue that signs or icons can be

located in Rauschenberg’s body of work, but searching for the signified is a Sisyphean task.) In a

way a continuation of Pollock, they are also refutations of his work: Pollock’s skeins of paint, the

result of deliberation as well as impulsion and arbitrariness (paint falling onto the canvas,

released from the artist’s control after being propelled from the brush) give way to discernible

images that nevertheless obscure or negate meaning more fully; the obscuring takes effect in the

locus of the image itself, which does not require obscuring; ever-present, fully visible, the thing

that is there is just that - neutral, nonhierarchical and in no great search for existential truths.3

As

Frank Stella said, “What you see is what you see.” The images are empty signs, or worse - signs

that effuse with potential, impossible to pin down, endlessly elaborative.

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There is a line of thought that runs contrary, or rather supplements, this “Death of the Author”-

style analysis. Rosalind Krauss recalls critic and Rauschenberg intimate Brian O’Doherty’s

“Rauschenberg and the Vernacular Gaze,” which appeared in Art in America in 1973:

...in O’Doherty’s terms, “the city dweller’s rapid scan” would now displace old habits of seeing and “the art audience’s stare” would yield to “the vernacular glance.” With its voraciousness, its lack of discrimination, its wandering attention, and its equal horror of meaning and of emptiness, this leveling form of perception, he wrote, not only accepts everything - every piece of urban detritus, every homey object, every outré image - into the perceptual situation, but its logic decrees that the magnet for all these elements will be the picture surface, itself now defined as an antimuseum. This conceptual context...does not prepare us for O’Doherty’s additional avowal that there is “something that, for all his apparent clowning, he [Rauschenberg] believes in profoundly; the integrity of the picture plane.

4

Krauss goes on to highlight the ways these last terms seem at odds with most analysis of

Rauschenberg and even the artist’s own statements. She sees a glint of hope in the avenue of early

Renaissance work, citing Fra Lippi’s Annunciation of 1440:

All the pressure of the painting now converges on this object [a lily being held by an angel] since it must “hold” the surface, preventing its “violation” by an unimpeded spatial rush...Such a “holding” becomes a way of holding up two conflicting modes of being for comparison - real versus ideal, secular versus sacred, physical versus iconic, deep versus flat - all the while performing the magic trick of turning the one into the other, since it is the deep space that is the illusion and the flattened surface wafer on the surface-bound icon that is touchably real. It is in this mystery of transposition, in this crossover between flesh and idea, that the meaning of a picture plane that has sealed over its spatial puncture, thus reasserting its “integrity” announces itself as both the source and expression of “belief.”

5

While Kaprow asserted he was not interested in the “gap” between art and life as

Rauschenberg was, he was interested in testing the limits of art, precisely what

experimentalism is. However, his art was invested with belief as much as

Rauschenberg’s, in the sense outlined by Krauss above. For, while the object or event in a

Kaprow or Rauschenberg work appears self-evident or even

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Fig. 18 (Top) Allan Kaprow with his Penny Arcade, 1956. Assemblage with lights and sounds. Courtesy ARTstor.

Fig. 19 (Below) Allan Kaprow, Grandma’s Boy. ca. 1956-57. United States. Mattress ticking, found photographs, silver paper, cloth, wooden cabinet 18.5 x15. x12.5 in. Courtesy ARTstor.

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Figs. 20–21 (Top–Bottom) Robert Rauschenberg, two arrangements of Minutiae. 1954. Exhibited at PaceWildenstein, 1997. Oil, paper, fabric, newspaper, wood, metal, plastic, with mirror on string, on wood structure. 214.6 cm x 77.5 cm.

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Figs. 22–23 (Top–Bottom) Allan Kaprow, two arrangements of Kiosk (aka Rearrangeable Panels and Wall). 1957-59. Mixed Media on Hinged Panel. Private Collection, United States. Courtesy ARTstor. Bottom image as reproduced in Kaprow’s Assemblage, E nvironments and Happenings.

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tautological, the appearance of objectivity/disinterestedness/chance, also serves to underscore the

artificiality of those elements brought to the foreground in a way that they would not be in

ordinary life. Kaprow would take this general approach gleaned from Rauschenberg and others to

heart, later mixing or extending it with an experiential, vaguely phenomenological aspect derived

from Dewey and Cage.

While Krauss’ argument for an ancillary reading of Rauschenberg that places him beyond the

purveyor of vague ironies and elusive thing-as-thingness (before Donald Judd’s “Specific

Objects”) seems at first to be removed from Kaprow’s concerns at this time, I would like to

further illustrate how I believe this topic to be relevant to the subject at hand.

First and most obviously, Kaprow and Rauschenberg were friends and part of the same social

circle. Their ideas infected each other through near-constant social exchanges. Second and less

apparently, is the way in which Kaprow would later approach his Happenings, and even early on

with his Assemblages and Environments. The Happening itself is emphatically purported by

Kaprow to have been an immersion in the arts. If adequately done, however, the Happening

would completely blur or even erase the line between art and non-art, between being and

performance. However, the reality of his proposition was rarely to find full satisfaction; instead,

especially in Happenings’ early years, not only was there a blurring, there was a disjunction

between the conceptual and the real, the scripted and the aleatory, the spectator and the spectacle,

and the art context, such as a gallery or museum, and the decidedly un-art taking place (to say

nothing of the disjunct between certain types of art, art-world “somebodies” versus the bohemian

downtowners.)

Though Kaprow did not wish to live in the “gap,” borrowing from Duchamp’s famous quote, it

was nevertheless a real effect of his works.

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In late 1957, Kaprow produced his most Combine-line work, Kiosk [figs. 22-23] (also known as

Rearrangeable Panels or Wall depending on its utilization). Kiosk was to mark the first extant

“action collage” (or quasi-Environmental) structure that Kaprow would create. Like Minutiae,

Kiosk was a large, self-supporting wooden construction resembling a prop or Japanese screen. As

for the latter, (get) states, “Surely Kaprow was subliminally or directly influenced by the screens

that had provided a flexible and rearrangeable format from Shimamoto Shozo, Murakami Saburo

and other Japanese artists.” Also flexible, it could not only be opened and closed like a book or

cabinet, but totally reformed in a rectangular box structure the work was named after. Atop each

panel were four light bulbs in alternating red and white, and each exterior was designed uniquely:

one features shards of glass and artificial fruit; another, roughly applied, expressionistic paint and

tar (resembling both Rauschenberg and Hofmann), paper collaged elements and dried leaves.

While the individual elements can be interpreted in a symbolic fashion, ultimately the

rearrangeable quality (rearrangeable by curators and collections as well as by Kaprow) overrides

any particular poetic evocation the elements might contain and makes them purely contextual.

Yet like Rauschenberg, an iconography can be traced: Kaprow would use mirrors, fruit elements

(apples in particular), tar, and lighting elements in many of his works). Kaprow was aware of the

limitations of this and similar works, however, at least when he likely wrote a passage in the main

essay of Assemblage, Environments and Happenings in 1959:

By its sheer breadth the ‘object’ [in this case a large Assemblage] reverts to a quasi field again (though not exactly a painting), for one’s eyes and arms cannot possibly embrace the whole at once while standing at the usual distance of a half-dozen feet. A broken surface thus becomes a sort of topography relief in which one could travel, as though up and down the face of a cliff; and it also proceeds only partially in questioning the domination of the architectural setting, since fundamentally it needs the wall in one way or another. My own Wall is a case in point.

6

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Reviewers were dubious or critical of the piece, which Kaprow continued to develop for several

years and would include in 18 Happenings in 6 Parts. A reviewer in ARTnews thought the piece

“sensational,” but disliked the “division of the surface into four neat rectangles, each in a

different medium [which] seems at odds with the raucousness of the materials.”7

Indeed, there

was a tension in Kaprow’s work: oscillations between the explosive rawness of the material and

the conventions of formalism; between the emancipatory and controlled; chaos and order.

Unresolved conflicts are not bad things in art; they are what give it life. Still, the tension in Kiosk

did not find a particularly successful balance, and Kaprow was not entirely satisfied with the

work, but it remains a key work in artist’s oeuvre for its expansive size, its compartmented,

mobile spaces and use of low materials. It also noteworthy that it was re-purposed in Kaprow’s

first public Happening, 18 Happenings in 6 Parts (1959).

Kiosk was a direct extension of his earlier Penny Arcade, a work composed of paint, canvas,

cardboard, cloth, and wood, and featuring blinking light bulbs within the work as well as

doorbells that rang when “activated by a motorized coat hanger as it ran across live electrical

contacts.”8

Here we see the influence of Robert Watts and George Brecht. Kaprow’s abilities in

the technological realm at this time were limited and either one of them likely assisted on the

electronic elements, as Kaprow had limited abilities in the technological realm at this time.

After pieces like Penny Arcade and Kiosk, Kaprow had effectively breezed through Assemblage

in just about two years, and by 1957 had begun dedicating himself fully to more interactive,

multipurpose art involving technological aspects: expanded forms of Assemblage termed

Environments.

Meanwhile, Kaprow was pushing boundaries in the world of pedagogy too. In 1957 he

collaborated over coffee and diner food at Howard Johnsons with Watts and Brecht on a proposal

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to Rutgers University and the Carnegie Corporation for the development of new artistic

curriculum and technology. Watts had previously submitted in April 1957 a similar, truncated

proposal, serving as the template for Project in Multiple Dimensions. The collaborative proposal

was more than just a pleading for funds, however. It was an appeal for an overall paradigm shift

in the understanding of what art was and how to teach it. As Judith Rodenbeck states, “[The

proposal] suggested an experiential and experimental model of art linked not to the sublime of the

New York School but to the everyday, to a pragmatic willingness to embrace slapstick an even

failure as readily as tragedy and success.”9

1 Allan Kaprow, “One Chapter from ‘The Principles of Modern Art,” It Is, no. 4 (1959); 51.

This philosophy and methodology was to take hold

most saliently though works like Project and John Cage’s classes, which occurred mostly

simultaneously for the writers of the former.

2 Yves-Alain Bois and Carroll Dunham, “Robert Rauschenberg’s Combines: Two Views,” Artforum (March 2006). Online: http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0268/is_7_44/ai_n26804452/pg_2/?tag=content;col1. Accessed 1 July 2010. 3 I consider Pollock’s work to be more than a “search for existential meaning” as it is generally understood; nor is it solely an explosion of the id. Pollock had a great formal sensibility as well as what is derogatorily referred to as “left-hand” or “intuitive” knowledge, and was aware of pictorial issues, issues of legibility, symbolism, and whimsy and humor. In my contrast I simply wish to highlight the overt, commonly perceived aspects of Pollock’s painting. 4 Rosalind Krauss, Robert Rauschenberg; 93. 5 Ibid. 6 Allan Kaprow. Assemblage, E nvironments and Happenings; unpaginated. 7 John Ashberry, “Reviews and Previews: Six Exemplary Paintings and One Sculpture.” ARTnews (Nov. 1957); 12. 8 Jeff Kelley. Childsplay; 14. 9 Multiple authors, “Life Like Art,” Artforum; 320.

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CHAPTER FIVE: BIRTH OF THE HAPPENING

In their Project in Multiple Dimensions, the artists aligned themselves with scientists. As today,

the hard sciences are the disproportionate recipient of funds. Seeing themselves as fellow

explorers who deserved to benefit from the same funding and access to materials for use in

“multidimensional” media, their alignment partially represented a savvier way of appealing for

them. In the past, as they saw it, artists “rather than exploiting the natural properties of the [new

forms of] material...often has rejected them by casting the material into an old mold. The

problem, therefore, resolves itself into an examination of contemporary technological advances

for the purpose of discovering new forms for creative artistic expression.” Taking their cues from

Black Mountain College and its Bauhaus predecessor, artists, they argued, not only needed access

to the raw materials of modern technology, but a new perspective that could only come through a

reformed or radicalized pedagogy.

Project went on to list a number of new “fields for exploration,” which included various sound

and light devices and theories, as well as a whole gamut of subjects: “Formulation of time-space-

movement spectrum; formulation of tactile and olfactory spectra; examination of whole field of

pyrotechnics and explosives,” and so on.

Later, the proposal conceptualizes art and meaning more generally. Separating the modern era as

distinct from the “Greco-Roman-Italian Renaissance model,” it states that the paradigm for

meaning is not with “biological or visual verisimilitude,” but rather is to be found in the “space of

the mind, which we know does not have the same clear extension, boundaries or separation of

objects that we have come to accept in everyday affairs.” The mind, according to Kaprow, was

not the sine qua non of meaning; his take on Duchamp was, although a by-now familiar

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interpretation, important as means of understanding the episteme of modern or postmodern art: “If

a snow shovel becomes a work of art by simply calling it that, so is all of New York, so is the

Vietnam war, so is a pedantic article on Marcel Duchamp… The Readymade is a paradigm of the

way humans make and unmake culture. Better than ‘straight’ philosophy and social science, a

good Readymade can ‘embody’ the ironic limits of the traditional theory that says reality is

nothing but a projection of mind or minds [italics mine].”1

The proposal then juxtaposes the

“regular proportions of the classical temple” of the traditional newspaper with the jumbled

simultaneity of the tabloid (and, by tacit connection, the various Dada gazettes).

Project concludes by calling for a merging of the arts: “...the boundaries between [the] arts are so

thin already that even though their media differ, a synthetic art comprising elements of several or

all in a radically new form without being a mere throwing together of the already existing arts, is

logically necessitated by what has come before.”2

Regardless of what “new forms” were used,

this idea is not fundamentally different from the Wagnerian Gesamkunstwerk; it would not be

until Kaprow later learned the limitations of his Environments and Happenings-as-spectacles that

he would advance a more radical idea - the complete erasure of the artist as we know him, or, to

be more precise, the sublation of the artistic role into a new paradigm wherein the boundaries of

life, work, and art are intrinsically linked and the latter is no longer given due to a uniquely

transcendent or transcendentalizing sphere.

In the meantime, however, the at times inchoate ideas outlined in Project in Multiple Dimensions

would occupy Kaprow and his peers throughout the next several years. Though unsuccessful in

their bid, the collaborative effort was fruitful in refining the approaches each artist was to take

during the heady years of the late 1950s-early 1960s. Kaprow in particular clarified his position in

the following passage appended to the proposal each collaborator contributed to, though here I

must note that the final, complete proposal was not completed until the summer of 1958, after

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Kaprow had already created his first Happening on the Douglass campus. Kaprow’s ideas

indicated in his “Personal Statement” therefore clearly owe themselves to the thoughts of John

Cage, with whom he began studying in late 1957 or early 1958.

...I proceeded from the everyday situation rather than from art, observing that in a room or on the street or in the country, we have a natural combination of material coming to the sense which is harmonious enough because it isn’t forced out of already highly developed and concentrated forms, i.e., art. Taking this as a clue, I worked with very simple elements and forms and conceived of them as events occurring rather loosely together. Beginning in this way, I found that a gradual refinement took place quite easily and a “total” art seems very possible at present....[During the Assemblage phase] the environmental character of what I was doing became apparent to me and I began to include flashing electric lights, bells and buzzers...a new area of materials became available; cellophane, strings, plastic film, gauze, wire, painted cloth...Now much of this begins to operate in time as well as in space...the voice, the body in motion, the visible construction, the audience arranged in groups within the space of the piece, the artificially produced sounds, are all combined. There is no “script” or “story,” no “dance” score, no “set,” no “music,” no “stage,” no “audience,” really, since the latter has become only a passive participant in the work. This then, is a general, rather sprawling picture of the work I am engaged in. Its future possibilities appear unlimited.

3

Kaprow has claimed, in one version of his résumé indicate that he began studying with John Cage

in 1956 at the latter’s class for musical composition at the New School, a program which ran

throughout the second half of the 1950s. Most sources, however, attribute this start date to the

winter of 1957 or possibly the spring of 1958. In one interview, Kaprow himself establishes the

start date as late 1957 or early 1958.4 The reason for attending was simple: Kaprow had been

working on ambient recorded tape sounds for his work (likely Untitled (Beauty Parlor) shown at

the Hansa in February 1958), but the mediocre results produced prompted him to seek Cage’s

advice. Ostensibly, the issue had to do with producing a randomized series of sounds not tiring

and predictable to the observer; however, in a more general sense, Cage had long been such a

formidable influence that his general council on aesthetic matters was desirable. As Kaprow has

indicated, Cage was highly respected and “understood” as it were by fine artists, perhaps much

more so than by other musicians, who were “dominated by a Schoenbergian structuralism or an

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equally Neoclassic tendency and conservatism...” Younger artists of the New York School, with

their figural expressionism or latter-day abstract expressionism however, saw Cage in

Impressionistic terms, “like a low-contrast Monet,” and their own work was “pushing Monet into

a kind of pure abstraction and tachisme, and Cage fit in very well with that.”5

Cage had built up

somewhat of a cult around him, and he would only foster this tendency through his New School

courses.

Regardless of whether Kaprow pursued Cage for purely technical reasons or because he wanted

an excuse to have a formal meeting with the artist he so admired, the salient point is that from this

consultation Kaprow was invited to sit in on Cage’s classes as a non-student. Not only interested

in gleaning some technical knowhow and absorbing some of Cage’s Zen-derived aesthetic ideas,

Kaprow was also intrigued by the “image of Einsteinian space that was a total field, a unified

field. ‘Events’ was a word that Cage was using - borrowing from science, from physics - for this

music, and which my friend and colleague George Brecht adopted in his own way.”6

Cage,

therefore, had practical consequence for Kaprow as well as philosophical and scientific import,

though it can difficult to draw boundaries between these terms.

Cage was more supportive than many of Kaprow’s artist friends at this time. Viewing his

Assemblage work as ‘impure,’ they had begun “disowning” him before he attended the class.7

Kaprow indicates he would have “arrived at the same place” without the aid of Cage. This is

certainly plausible, but Cage’s instruction undeniably sped up the process that resulted in

Happenings.8 Kaprow clarified: “For Cage, concreteness wasn’t the isolation of one feature of a

situation, framed out of context; it was actually an experience, like that [hits table]. That sense of

the experiential moment was a clarifier for me. Once I realized how simple the whole thing was,

it was only a matter of taking off as fast as I could in the direction of Happenings.”9

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During these courses, Kaprow developed various proto-Happenings, or even the earliest examples

of Happenings, as Kaprow has indicated.10 These mini-works were cacophonous, though not

necessarily loud, instrumented with “circular saws and hammers and knives and forks...and

glasses that would be filled with water that I tapped at different levels,”11

and typically “scored”

in the Cagean style. As Kaprow describes:

My pieces were scored...in such a way that it was prototypically musical, although modern in the sense that it didn’t have staff lines. There would be a left-to-right lexicality in them. You’d see a line at the top of a piece, which would then have the part indicated by, for example, an electric saw. Then you’d have a duration on the line. I’d write minutes and seconds using these schema. Then I would indicate placement, which is very important as I was interested in Environments.

12

Further, these early works involved multiple spaces, which broke apart the traditional theater or

concert hall space which focused audience attention on a singular location. There were, of course,

preexisting forms of theatricality involving simultaneity: the low forms of vaudeville and the

circus, with their main acts and side shows, as well as the culturally refined realm of the opera.

Regarding the latter, Lorenzo Bianconi and Giorgio Pestell indicate “There is even a tendency

among some music historians to treat it [simultaneity] as the epitome of the specifically operatic

phenomenon.”13 Kaprow was more inclined to cite the circus, however. For example, in his

“Happenings in the New York Scene” essay which appeared in ARTnews in 1961, he traced the

phenomenon “back through Surrealism, Dada, Mim, the circus, carnivals, the traveling

saltimbanques, all the way back to medieval mystery plays and processions.” Here he is

referencing the history of Happenings in general, and was not insinuating that all the above

directly influenced his, though the circus is an oft-cited touchstone in his work. He did, however,

later admit that he saw the Environment as limited due to it essentially being a “set piece,”14 and

distanced himself from the perceived theatrical, whether high or low, at many points.

15

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The Environment, whether theatrical in any conventional sense, emerged as a necessary solution

to the problem of the gallery space in Assemblage art: “The shrine [one term Kaprow uses for

certain forms of Assemblage] may expand to larger proportions, thus becoming a chapel...This

was true of my earlier work and applies to Yayoi Kusama...and the interior of Clarence Schmidt’s

large work. In these cases it happens as a consequence of a certain frustration caused by the

discrepancy between the art and surrounding architectural space - as though size could drown out

the discomfort.” Kaprow distinguishes the Environment as an expanding zone of the actual, as

opposed to the metaphorical or figurative; a process fed by both oblique and direct associations as

well as a sort of horror vacui. That is to say, the Environment is primarily concerned with objects

and their engulfing of the spectator; as with Assemblage, accumulation is the keyword. The

develop is therefore “a pursuit of the inner evolution of [an art work], in which one thing suggests

another, and so on...expanding until it fills an entire space or evolves one, becoming an

Environment.”16

Environments are Assemblages that are propulsive and consumptive, drawing in

matter like a collapsed star and yet simultaneously projecting it, at least in theory, ad infinitum.

For as they accumulate matter, they are also extending their boundaries and being re-articulated at

each turn, as any ambient sound, movement, or sensorial experience compounds both the literal

and psychological space. Comparisons can also be made between the Environment and a test lab

and a mise en abyme, in the sense that the works are experimental and enclosed, and reduplicating

of effects; these reduplications suggests the infinite. Kaprow was always very concerned with the

heuristic approach and dizzying effects, and in 1968 he made a wonderful point regarding this, a

point which well expresses his marveling American attitude:

...[Marshall McLuhan’s] contention [is] that every man is immersed in an informational deluge; that everyone is in touch with everything instantly and that the individual’s job is to dig this and not run away from it. This may present itself as informational overload; or it may be kicks...But the limiting factor here is that we aren’t always sitting down receiving this deluge...We travel, we work. I’m interested in what happens after a person pays attention to the informational deluge. Does he go to the supermarket in the same way? What happens when his

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eye becomes a wide-angle lens that takes in the whole scene and not just the box of cornflakes? What happens when he flips the TV dial from station to station? I’ve let the vertical control on my set go out of wack and just played with it going faster and slower, watching the frames slide by. And sometimes I’ll buy five different brands of cornflakes.

17

In 1992 Kaprow, with no amount of humility, distinguished his Environments from those of Kurt

Schwitters with whom he is often linked: “...the common metaphor of art and the world [of

Schwitters] was closure.” Schwitters was involved in an ideogrammatic, hermetic project infused

with a high degree of mysticism. Kaprow saw his art, by contrast, as a “kind of environmental

phenomenon, open to everything because it was so big.” This he saw as being “a really extreme

leap.”

18

The first Environment that Kaprow held was most likely in George Segal’s barn, though the work

is rarely discussed and exact dates are unknown. It was a prototype of the Untitled/Beauty Parlor

1 show to come in March 1958 and was purportedly shown sometime just before that seminal

exhibit. As Kaprow’s favorite student Lucas Samaras19 describes it, it was composed of hanging

“strips made of raffia throughout the place, which gave you the feeling of walking through tall

grass.”20

Little else is known of the components, but they probably involved similar elements of

Untitled, discussed later.

The barn piece would not be the only New Jersey first for Kaprow, as his first Happening - unless

his experiments with Cage are counted - was also performed there. By “first Happening,” I do not

imply that it “his” in an ownership sense, but rather that it was the first such event he took part in.

This Environment was on campus, as opposed to that in the barn, and was likely visited by only

the closest of Kaprow’s peers and students; the dearth of information attests to its exclusivity. It

was likely thought of as a localized experiment intended mainly for those parties working in the

direction that Kaprow and others were; Kaprow’s work-up to Untitled 1 was also an experiment,

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but also a prototype and though I do not have proof, would possibly have included friends and

colleagues from New York. There is one crucial connection, however between these

groundbreaking works: in spite of their differences, both the barn and the site of the first

Happening were unofficial, decidedly non-art; the barn very much so. The latter work was held in

the basement of the admissions office at Douglass College. It was a small, collaborative work by

Kaprow, Watts, Brecht, Mary Anne McLean and others, and featured “a large collage with

flashing lights and an audiotape..[and] a mechanical moving hand, which emerged from a box

filled with straw. The hand featured a glove with lights and the box included a flashing blue

light.”21 All participants were able to “created anything [they] wished.”22 The space was divided

into a “decompression chamber,” painted white with a blue light fixed overhead, and a small dark

room filled with ambient sounds, varied lights, a box structure made of old doors and windows,

gauze and collage-coated windows.23 The involvement of multiple participants begs the question

of authorship in this early piece. Kaprow clearly was invested in this kind of work and

undoubtedly made a good contribution, as did McLean and Brecht, but as Geoffrey Hendricks, a

somewhat later member of the Rutgers Group asserts, the piece was Watts’. Hendricks goes

further by declaring: “it was another project giving forms to concepts developed in Project in

Multiple Dimensions. Ideas…[that] anticipated what Kaprow did over the next few years in his

choice of sites for his Happenings.”24 Further establishing this Untitled 1 piece’s prominence is a

reference in Brecht’s aforementioned E xit poster, which economically lists the accomplishments

of Watts in 1957: “1st Event Box. Random Light Work. Audience Participation.”25

Kaprow’s second Happening - if one excludes the Cage pieces and participation in Watt’s event -

was held in a church on campus soon after both the barn and Watts’ Environment. Although a

ritualistic theme fitting with the (literal) environment was found in the work, it toed the line of the

sacrilege.26 Referred to variously as Untitled or Communication, it was held in April in the

Voorhees Chapel at Douglass College. The venue was used for many types of events other than

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religious ones, but this event was particularly unorthodox. The piece was conceived as part of a

lecture and performance series entitled “Communication,” a program that included visitors such

as Cage, dancer Paul Taylor (whose sparse, elegant performance many visitors were deeply

impressed by) and the poet John Ciardi. Untitled was a heavily ritualized, layered, simultaneous

and dissonant work that presaged Kaprow’s later Happenings, and the artist sometimes refers to

the work as his first Happening.27

The work was either designed specifically for the church or the

location was sought to accommodate Kaprow’s desire for a ceremonial artwork, though it seems

most likely that the chapel was simply a suitable space for a smaller-scale indoor public art event.

It was therefore a marriage of convenience and design.

As Joan Marter describes it, “There were processions up and down the aisles; Kaprow lit matches

in front of a mirror. Banners were unfurled from the chapel balcony. Tapes of lectures by Kaprow

were played out of sequence from loudspeakers located in four corners...[Lucas] Samaras used tin

cans in an informal game-playing routine. The event...emphasized the fragmentary, and required

the audience to bring together disparate parts for a semblance of comprehension.”28

It was a

discordant atmosphere; one that could inspire notions of insanity and aporia. Through the multi-

sensory effects, including Cagean noise tapes, the blurring of performer and audience through the

use of the procession and interlocutionary effects (one performer might verbally engage an

audience member), the general dislogic of the piece combined with the sacral signs and “Divine

Light” of the church windows, an almost paganistic quality could be discerned. Though in

hindsight a rarefied art event, and a signal of the (perhaps unintentionally) esoteric forms of art to

come, Communication was nearly barbaric.

Art students were required to attend this performance and others in the series, so it was more

exposed than the Untitled event ascribed to Watts that was held just prior. Shortly after, in May of

1958, Kaprow attempted yet another performance, this time at George Segal’s farm, and enlisted

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the help of a group of friends and colleagues, albeit to their dissatisfaction. Pastorale, as it was

called, was not a success, but it did inform Kaprow how future endeavors ought not to be

handled. As Jeff Kelley states: “[Kaprow] was interested in merging the collage structure of

Communication with the more casual, rural, and recreational atmosphere of the spring picnic. He

also wanted to avoid ‘dumping something’ on an unsuspecting audience - in fact, he didn’t want

an audience at all, but a coterie of artists who...would be willing to participate in his design.”29

The participants were to sit in prearranged chicken coops playing with noisemakers, or to make a

canvas, and were also to perform various slow, ritualistic movements. However, the

“unsuspecting” participants did not so much appreciate the request, and resented the monotonous,

restrained motions they were asked to perform. To top it off, many had quite a bit to drink by this

point; it was a leisurely picnic, after all. The event concluded after it “fell apart, its formal

structure disintegrating into a comedy of catcalls and antics.”30 Again, per Kelley: “Kaprow had

gone from the academic solemnity of the Douglass College chapel to the barnyard irreverence of

Segal’s farm. Put off by the one and annoyed by the other, he felt the need for a kind of middle

condition: a situation that was less formal than a public lecture but more structured than an artist’s

picnic.”

31

The tension that Kaprow felt with the physical environment - and by extension, the psycho-social

conditions it engenders - whether in the case of a church or farm, gallery or museum, was a theme

that would resonate throughout his career. His works later involved public spaces, natural

settings, and private homes, as he sought to move farther from the margins of any kind of

recognizable art space. In dialogue with Robert Smithson in a 1967 edition of Arts Yearbook,

Kaprow wrote of the specter of death which “hung” over the museum: “What’s wrong with their

idea of this [the idea of art and life being connected] is that the provide canned life, an

aestheticized illustration of life. ‘Life’ in the museum is like making love in a cemetery. I am

attracted to the idea of clearing out the museums and letting better designed ones like the

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Guggenheim exist as sculptures, as works, as such, closed to people. It would be a positive

commitment to their function as mausolea.”32 (Kaprow was hardly the first to express this

sentiment: Futurist ringleader F.T. Marinetti asserted in 1909 after commandeering the front page

of France’s Le Figaro newspaper, that the Futurists would “...free Italy from her numberless

museums which cover her with countless cemeteries.”) Kaprow was not only critical of the

museum, but sought to reposition it. For his 1967 retrospective exhibition sponsored by the

Pasadena Art Museum, Kaprow was re-envisioning the purpose and structure of a museum as a

more benevolent, life-giving entity: “an educational institute, a computerized bank of cultural

history, and an agency for action.” However, he was not clear how exactly this transformation

was to occur or what, precisely, an “agency for action” meant.

33

Without any plausible alternatives, Kaprow’s first public Environment would be staged in a

mausoleum, for in 1958 he had not yet reached the logical conclusion of his art - the erasure of

the artist. The work was exhibited in March at the Hansa Gallery (just prior to

Untitled/Communication) at its uptown location on Central Park South, where the gallery had

relocated to in the mid-fifties. Untitled Environment (later titled Beauty Parlor, or Untitled

E nvironment 1) was the first fully realized Environment of Kaprow’s, and was a riot of color and

sound; Beauty Parlor here alludes to a high-keyed concoction related to the “make up” of the art

world, to its superficiality and gaudiness. It also was simply a beautiful piece for Kaprow, since it

was active and engaging and unmistakably new. It was very similar to event held in the barn, with

hanging raffia, “colored cloth hung in bands that looked like Jewish prayer shawls,”34 audio

recordings played in loops on five tape players, crumpled cellophane, varied lighting (by Watts)

“slashed and daubed enamel,”35 and various toys including “bells, tinkles, rattles, grinders,

marbles in tin cans that turned over.”36 The work allowed for glimpses of other visitors as one

passed through the claustrophobic space, which was divided into two parts - one which was

mirrored and “like a theater’s dressing room,”37 and the other featured soft lighting.

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While interesting visually and conceptually, Kaprow began to see the limitations imposed by the

space of the gallery in his Environment, and sought to give visitors a more active role, initially by

giving them options like “moving something, turning switches on.”38

In the essay “Notes on the

Creation of a Total Art” that accompanied the second incarnation of the show in November of

that year, Untitled Environment I I (Beauty Parlor I I ), Kaprow wrote:

...we do not come to look at things. We simply enter, are surrounded, and become part of what surrounds us, passive or actively according to our talents for ‘engagement’...there is a...never-ending play of changing conditions between the relatively fixed or ‘scored’ parts of my work and the ‘unexpected’ or undetermined parts...Likewise, the sounds, the silences and the spaces between them continue throughout the day with a random sequence or simultaneity that makes it possible to experience the whole exhibit differently at different times...I believe this form places a much greater responsibility on visitors than they have had before.

39

The goal of increased audience responsibility was lofty and Kaprow had faith in the program.

Writing in 2002, however, he was sharply critical of the previous essay, viewing its stance as a

temporary, even indulgent product of the market forces for tastemaking: “Today, such a

corrective for high art seems merely presumptuous, certainly unnecessary. The so-called art

world, reflecting the times, suffers from a marked conservatism and nostalgia. There is no evident

taste for experimentation. Total art may have been an interesting idea in the 1950s simply because

it was a natural reaction to over-refinement.”

40

Nevertheless, these Environments were another leap forward for Kaprow, regarding his career

and artistic development, though his Untitled/Communication work at Rutgers was far more

directional given their status as prototypes. Critics met both Beauty Parlors with confusion and

disdain, but Beauty Parlor 1 was the first Kaprow exhibit to place the artist on the map in terms

of a possessing a bona-fide connection to the avant-garde spirit, for better or worse. For if one

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sign of genius is misunderstanding, then Kaprow’s receptions meet the bill.41 One critic harshly

dismissed the show as an indulgent act of self-promotion: “It might be engaging (for a limited

period) to receive Kaprow’s exposition of what constitutes an idea. Simply for the record. Since

it’s for the record alone that this gross self-advertisement is noticed at all.”42 In a review for the

second Beauty Parlor, Hilton Kramer completely missed the point, viewing the work as a

“synthesis-of-the-arts” á la Wagner, something “so badly shopworn,” he wondered how “anyone

could sustain such a humorless interest in these tattered clichés.” After deploring the details of the

piece, he concluded with this bit of wit: “Now this exhibition should not be regarded as a hoax,

no matter what it sounds like. Kaprow is serious. Indeed, only out of an idea could something so

completely pointless emerge.”43 To an extent, pointlessness was the point. The works did not

cohere around a narrative, and did not involve a centralized, contemplative object. They were, as

Michael Kirby would come to define Happenings, non-matrixed. They were, however, still

located in a gallery and therefore tied to the traditional aspects of art, and formatted as a kind of

art dependent on a mostly static, one-way involvement with its audience, especially compared

with Happenings. One review even mentions that the first Beauty Parlor featured “a performance

[that] was arranged each afternoon...for those who preferred the artist packaged, so to speak, in

the midst of his work.”44

Exceptions were therefore made for those unwilling to make even the

slightest foray into experiential art, thus reinforcing the division of spectacle and spectatorship

present in conventional theater, and thereby establishing the parameters that were necessary for

Kaprow to overcome if he were to overcome this most central problem of dualism.

Apart from the curmudgeonly critiques by Kramer et al., there was at least one relatively positive

review, written by the now-forgotten Parker Taylor for ARTnews. Parker seemingly admired

(“seemingly” since the review is quite brief) Beauty Parlor 1 for its ability to transport the visitor

into an alternate world, one where “musique is as concrete as abstract art, and both are heroically

anti-Muzak.”45 Whether Kaprow had any intent to “abstract” people from the ordinary world, this

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review at least picks up on the thread of audience participation and interrelation that was either

misunderstood or not even considered by reviewers like Kramer.

Dore Ashton referred to Kaprow as a Neo-Dadaist in her review of the same show - a term

Kaprow and others bore with a discomfort if not outright antipathy. Neo-Dada came to define

much of Kaprow’s and related artists’ work, even if the term was a misnomer, and an often

pejorative one at that.46

While the supposed Neo-Dadaists readily acknowledged their

indebtedness to Dada, they mostly took exception to the term (these artists included

Rauschenberg, Stankiewicz, Follet, Jasper Johns, most Fluxists, early Pop and Happenings

artists). They were unique, and wanted to be seen as more than revivalists. Theirs was an

American experience and therefore radically different from the Dadaists, who, again, were quite

varied in their intent and spirit. For Kaprow, Dada wasn’t the end-all-be-all of inspiration:

Anti-art isn’t something the Dada’s invented. There’s a whole thread of ‘life is

better than art’ dating at least to the time of Wordsworth, right through Emerson

and Whitman, to John Dewey and beyond, emphasizing art as experience...this

tradition influenced me very much. But anti-art is an old Western theme.”47

In this interview with Susan Hapgood, Kaprow appears biased in favor a mostly American

tradition and, to perhaps, to the brand of Logical Positivism he was taught at New York

University. With his upbringing and heavy reliance on Dewey and Cage, his lineage was

distinctly American.48 From an interview in 1968, Kaprow called America “...probably the most

fertile atmosphere in the world for new ideas, experiences, discoveries, cataclysms.”49 In another

interview from 1968, Kaprow stated: “In this country, we’re brought up on multiplicity; it’s in the

very stuff of our spiritual and economic life...these things make me aware of time and space in a

way that traditional approaches to aesthetics never could.”50 This lineage went back not only to

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his school days and to Dewey and Cage, but to Cage’s mentor Suzuki as well - Suzuki was also

deeply indebted to American philosophy, particularly that of Dewey and William James.

In this interview Kaprow again decries the cynical nature of Dada, stating it simply was not

present in his work. While he acknowledged “the freedom to employ open processes or the

freedom to use a variety of objects and materials from the everyday world,” and “these were

derived from the prototypes of Dada,” he countered, “...to ascribe to me protest and cynicism -

not at all.”51

The proliferation of objects in mass culture did not engender in Kaprow or many of

his peers a Marxist or even an institutional critique, at least not at this stage. What is present in

these works is a semantic critique, taken from Duchamp but removed from ambivalence and

placed in a context of expansion and mutability. Although Kaprow stated in 1967 that: “The

most important influence during the course of my studying Dada was Duchamp...[and he] implied

that the whole business of is quite arbitrary,” Kaprow took this as a philosophical approach, and it

was the philosophical that Kaprow was most interested in - not the arbitrary or ambivalent, terms

that are nearly interchangeable in this context. The items and actions in the Assemblages and the

Environments were to be re-contextualized, given new life: abundance through reformulation. In

this way Assemblages and Environments neatly follow the capitalist repurposing of function to

elicit new demand. Only with Kaprow and certain of his peers, their works were largely

perishable, and although sometimes offered for sale, were not realistically expected to sell.

Further, abundance was not in Kaprow’s case the mere proliferation of shallow effects: it

connoted rich possibilities, and the exuberance of the closing paragraphs of “Legacy,” is

characteristic of this approach. Once again, the cynicism of Dada - and, to a lesser extent, of

Duchamp - was morphed into an inquisitive, intensifying expansionist art movement. Quite

simply, it was more playful and ecstatic.

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While there are important differences between Kaprow and the Dadaists, Dada did have very

practical consequences for Kaprow though the aegis of Duchamp. The elder artist came to many

Happenings, accompanied by friends such as Max Ernst, Hans Richter and Richard Huelsenbeck.

Duchamp also assisted Kaprow with receiving grants.

52

Many Dada artists looked down on their heirs, however, due to the perceived empty

aestheticizing of low materials. As Hans Richter complained, acting in the guise of Duchamp:

“When I discovered the ready-mades I sought to discourage aesthetics. In Neo-Dada they have

taken my Readymades and found aesthetic beauty in them, I threw the bottle-rack and the urinal

into their faces as a challenge and now they admire them for their aesthetic beauty.”

53

Kaprow was critical as well of some of the appropriation or Assemblage art of his time, noting its

“limited iconography: faded photos, old books, bottles, stuffed animals, old utensils, printed

gingham...all possessing a post-Surrealist nostalgia...Some of these are authentically alive and

strange, yet most are weak when compared with their Dada and Surrealist prototypes. Their effect

is one of charm rather than shock or transport...they are bloodless and cute and, naturally, are

cultivated by the over-educated and chic sets in international society.”54

Certain critics may have

seen Kaprow’s Environments as examples of this kind of sophisticated dilettantism, but his pieces

were instrumental in the development of one of the most radical forms of artwork of the twentieth

century: the Happening.

By the end of 1958 Kaprow had concluded with the Environment. He had absorbed many of the

lessons of Dada and Abstract Expressionism, refashioning them to his purposes, and began to

refine his own methods of art making. The year had seen much activity, including the publishing

of “The Legacy of Jackson Pollock” in October. Although Beauty Parlor I helped solidify

Kaprow as one of the downtown avant-garde artists du jour, it was this canonical essay that most

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firmly established him as one the most relevant avant-garde artists. ARTnews was but one of a

handful of arts publications of the era, and as Kaprow himself stated, everyone read it. “Legacy”

was a polarizing piece. Irving Sandler, who later approached Kaprow’s work with interest and

sensitivity, did not appreciate the tone of the article, which he saw as attacking and trivializing

Pollock and his death. The two writers exchanged missives in the pages of the Letters to the

Editor section. In the February 1959 edition, Kaprow responds to set the record straight regarding

his feelings on Pollock’s death and the direction of new art:

Sandler...agrees with what I did mean, that Pollock’s tragic death and art had something to do with each other. And obviously we are both referring to that part of art which is human and mysterious, philosophical even. As for the quote from [Jonathan] Swift, it appears perfectly understandable that there is a difference between dying at the height of one’s powers and dying after a period of relative inactivity and weakened strength. There is no fancy “mystique” implied here, just disappointment, since nobody likes to see this happen to a great figure...But I said this was only part of the picture. The other part, the “legacy,” the hardly morbid side of his art, was what he did for painting. He freed it fro, many former conventions and in addition freed it from painting itself by doing away with a number of the attributes which alone determine painting as a distinct art...Now as for Pollock’s being at the center of the fresh art of his time, and being at the same moment at the center of an esthetic crisis, it remains my conviction that from 1951 to the preset there has been a good bit of downright conservatism in the avant-garde and a tremendous amount of dullness in abstract expressionism and impressionism: 10th Street, for example. So a lot of us who deplore the academic atmosphere which 10th Street brings into focus did reason for a few desperate months after Pollock died that the “jig was up.” But I devoted most of my article to showing how limited this view was and how, in spite of 10th Street and most of the other galleries supposedly dedicated to new art, modern art had somewhere else to go.

55

Where art had to go for Kaprow in early 1959 was towards the Happening. The term was first

used in Kaprow’s “Legacy,” but was subsequently used in a more cohesive way in 1959’s “Demi-

Urge,” part of a piece that Kaprow wrote for Rutgers’ Anthologist literary journal. The entire

work included a score, the never performed “Untitled/Something to Take Place - A Happening,”

that was later adapted into his first public Happening, 18 Happenings in 6 Parts. “Demi-Urge” is

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credited as having being written in 1958 in the Kaprow online archives, and “Something to Take

Place” might have been appended shortly before publication in the spring issue, giving the

theoretical essay the weight of a possible scenario.

“Demi-Urge” is filled with grandiloquent phrases, bursting with the vigor of an artist about to

stumble onto the (art) world stage in a forceful way, tremulous at the thought of this new art that

he felt himself on the cusp of:

I have always dreamed of a new art, a really new art. I am moved to roaring laughter by talk of consolidating forces, of learning from the past; by yearnings for the great tradition, the end of upheavals and the era of peace and seriousness. Such an essentially fear-ridden view cannot know what a positive joy revolting is. It has never realized that revolutions of the spirit are the spirit’s very utterance of existence. Caution against indulging the new for its own sake can be flung aside. The truly new is hard to find and when one has it, it is very real indeed. I tip my hand to the man who stumbles on it; for I do not believe he can prepare for it in advance. He can only prepare himself for its discovery by leaving himself as unprotected, as exposed to “strangeness” as his ties to civilization will allow.

1 “Doctor MD,” in “A Collective Portrait of Marcel Duchamp,” in Anne d’Harnoncourt and Kynaston McShine, eds., Marcel Duchamp. A Retrospective E xhibition (Philadelphia Museum of Art: Philadelphia,1973); 205. 2 Joan Marter. Off L imits; 156. 3 Ibid.; 157-58. 4 Ibid.; 135. 5 Interview with Joan Marter, Ibid; 131-32. 6 Ibid; 132. 7 Richard Kostelanetz. Theatre of Mixed Means; 106. 8 Ibid. 9 Susan Hapgood 1992 interview with the artist, reproduced in Neo-Dada and online: http://umintermediai501.blogspot.com/2008/05/interview-with-allan-kaprow.html. 10 Joan Marter, Off Limits; ? 11 Moira Roth interview; 23.

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12 Ibid, 24. 13 Lorenzo Bianconi and Giorgio Pestelli, eds. Opera in Theory and Practice, Image and Myth, Kenneth Chalmers and Mary Whittall, trans. (University of Chicago Press: Chicago, 2003); 132. Though traditional forms of theater and opera may have used simultaneity to a degree, those spaces were constituted within a field of view that could take in the disparate scenes in one glance, as it were. Kaprow’s works, in contradistinction, began to incorporate events that were spatially dislocated and temporally simultaneous (or dis-simultaneous, as the case sometimes was in Kaprow’s more linear pieces). For instance, in the proto-Happenings developed in Cage’s class, Kaprow would utilize “moving sound sources, such as a person going ‘ahhhh,’ moving from here to there, or going outside the classroom and going into the hallway, so you could hear a sound but couldn’t see it.” Kaprow, in Joan Marter, Off L imits; 133. This sort of spatialization was more in line with those used by circuses, a source that Kaprow readily acknowledges. 14 Richard Kostelanetz, Theatre of Mixed Means (1970 edition). http://sites.google.com/site/belgiumishappening/home/publications/1968-00-00_kaprow_conversationkostelanetz. Accessed 11 August 2010. 15 Kaprow most notably distinguishes Happenings from theatre in “Some Recent Happenings in the New York Scene,” as reproduced in Blurring of Art and Life; 17–19. 16 Allan Kaprow, Assemblage, E nvironments and Happenings; unpaginated. 17 Richard Schechner, “Extensions in Time and Space. An Interview with Allan Kaprow,” The Tulane Drama Review 12, no. 3 (Spring1968); 156. 18 Susan Hapgood 1992 interview with the artist, as reproduced in Neo-Dada and online: http://umintermediai501.blogspot.com/2008/05/interview-with-allan-kaprow.html. 19 Kaprow was responsible for securing a rare and prestigious scholarship for Samaras. He also served as Samaras’ Honors thesis advisor. When the thesis project became an item of controversy (it involved a curse word), Kaprow defended Samaras, allowing the talented student to graduate from the Honors program (he was not under threat of expulsion, however, and would have graduated regardless). Due to this experience and other difficulties at Rutgers, Kaprow was effectively fired, as he was not given the option of tenure and was told that he was not welcome back. From Moira Roth interview and conversation with Erika Gorder, Fall 2009. 20 Multiple authors, “Life Like Art,” Artforum (Summer 2006); 321. 21 Joan Marter, Off L imits; 29. 22 Geoffrey Hendricks, Critical Mass; 17. 23 Ibid 24 Ibid. 25 George Brecht, E xit. 1961/c. 1962-63) Also credited to Watts: “1st Botanical Piece.” 26 Though not to the extent of later events at Rutgers, such as Hermann Nitsch’s infamous Orgies Mysteries Theatre, which featured a slaughtered lamb affixed to a crucifix (à la Picabia), or a Madonna figurine lit aflame in a chapel during a performance in the Flux-Mass festival in the 1970s. 27 Joan Marter, Off L imits; 8. Specifically, “Later, Kaprow acknowledge that this performance was his first Happening, although he had presented earlier events in Cage’s class at the New School.”

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28 Joan Marter, Off L imits; 9. 29 Jeff Kelley, Childsplay; 25. 30 Ibid.; 27. 31 Ibid. 32 As reproduced Peter Eleey, Olaf Blanke, Ina Blom and Peter Osborne, The Quick and The Dead [exh. cat.] (Walker Art Center: Minneapolis, MN, 2009); 137. 33 Statement by Kaprow, in Allan Kaprow [exh. cat.] (Pasadena Art Museum: Pasadena, CA, 1967); 3. Indeed, until his death, he had never come to terms with the museum as such. Efforts to involve the artist in his career retrospective Art As L ife, which featured numerous “re-inventions” (Kaprow’s term for re-performances), were met with his begrudging permission ultimately hands-off approach. Kaprow was also ill during this time, and died before the exhibit opened in 2008. 34 Michael Kirby, Happenings; 46. 35 Ibid. 36 Ibid. 37 Joan Marter, Off L imits; 8. 38 Ibid. 39 Allan Kaprow, Blurring of Art and Life, Jeff Kelley, ed.; 10. 40 Geoffrey Hendricks, Critical Mass; 7. 41 Rauschenberg and many other proto-Pop artists met the same fate in the 1950s; even Warhol was initially met with hostility. 42 Vernon Young, “Exhibition at Hansa Gallery,” Arts Magazine 31 (March 1958); 6. 43 Hilton Kramer, “Show at the Hansa Gallery,” Arts Magazine 33 (January 1959); 50. 44 Arts Magazine review from May 1958. Reviewer is only given as “J.R.M.” Page unknown. As reproduced in Eva Meyer-Hermann, Andrew Perchuk and Stephanie Rosenthal, Art As L ife; 119. 45 Parker Tyler, “Exhibition at Hansa,” ARTnews 57 (May 1958); 14. 46 The disparaging use of the term was not limited to an American purview; Europeans such as the French critic and Nouveau Realisme cohort Pierre Restany called their American counterparts: “Romantic by heart, Cubistic in spirit, and Baroque in tone...The American neo-dadaists are reconstituting the fetishism of the object.” This he saw in contrast to the Europeans, who were “more rigorous in their logic, simpler and more precise in their presentation, more direct in their appropriations.” From “Le Nouveau Realisme a Paris et á New York” (reproduced in unpublished manuscript Pierre Restany, A 40° au-dessus de Dada, 199). Archives critiques d’art, Chateaugiron, France. From New Realisms: 1957-1962. 38no3. 47 Susan Hapgood, Neo-Dada; 115. 48 Jackson Pollock, as one of the totem figures in Kaprow’s development, was likewise prototypically American. For all the European-derived Psychic Automatism in his works, he was strongly influenced by

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Albert Pinkham Ryder; this at a time when it was still rather gauche to admit such importance to an American artist. However, both Pollock and Kaprow certainly respected and were influenced by European artists, many of whom Kaprow was largely introduced to by Hans Hofmann. In an interview with Richard Kostelanetz in the latter’s Theatre of Mixed Means, he answers the question: “Why did you admire Europe?” with “It was something Hofmann taught me. There was nothing better around at the time, except the just-beginning Action Painting movement in this country, which I knew too little about; and although Hofmann was a major figure in the movement, he rarely showed us his work. Even if he had, it would have essentially seemed an out-growth of his European ideas.” Kaprow then indicates, however, that if he were to do it over, he would’ve studied Abstract Expressionism. Richard Kostelanetz, Theatre of Mixed Means (1970 edition) Online: http://sites.google.com/site/belgiumishappening/home/publications/1968-00-00_kaprow_conversationkostelanetz. 49 1968 interview in Richard Kostelanetz, Theatre of Mixed Means. (Pittman: London, 1970). Online: http://sites.google.com/site/belgiumishappening/home/publications/1968-00-00_kaprow_conversationkostelanetz 50 Richard Schechner, “Extensions in Time and Space. An Interview with Allan Kaprow,” The Tulane Drama Review 12, no. 3 (Spring1968); 155. 51 Susan Hapgood, Neo-Dada; 115. 52 Ibid.; 116. 53 Marcel Duchamp, in Hans Richter, Dada: Art and Anti-Art (McGraw Hill: New York, 1965); 207-208. 54 Allan Kaprow, Assemblage, E nvironments and Happenings; unpaginated. 55 Allan Kaprow, “Letter to the Editor,” ARTnews 57, no. 10; 4.

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CHAPTER SIX: 18 HAPPENINGS IN SIX PARTS

The ideas in “Untitled” and “Demi-Urge” were the direct extensions of the Beauty Parlor

Environments at Hansa and to the reception to Kaprow’s Pollock essay, which was relatively

enormous. The Anthologist issue came just before work was to be started on 18 Happenings,

which was constructed over the course of the summer in the newly founded Reuben Gallery

located at 61 Fourth Avenue near Cooper Union in New York in a third-floor gallery. The

Reuben was sponsored by the wealthy Anita Reuben, but sources indicate that it was Kaprow

who directed much of the kind of art that was to be shown; he is credited with co-founding the

space with Reuben the same year.

1

Kaprow worked diligently during the three–month span installing the wooden partitions that

divided the space into distinct compartments, which were meant to resemble a three–ring circus.2

(Coincidentally, the Hansa closed its doors in June.) In the promotional letter sent for the piece,

Kaprow called for “collaborators” who would “become a part of the happenings...simultaneously

experience them.” Here we find the art world’s most salient recognition of the word

“Happening,” as it defined the direct experience they would soon be having. Certain of the

invitations were made of strips of paper inserted in glassine envelopes, and played on the notions

of randomness - the paper pieces could be plucked out at whim - and an overt theme of

transparency versus opaqueness.

For forty years the primary source material for this event was Michael Kirby’s Happenings,

which describes the work meticulously, and includes the “Untitled” score. The opening of the

Kaprow archives upon his death in 2006 shed more light on the piece. André Lepecki, who

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organized a reinterpretation of the work in 2007, describes the various notes, illustrations,

diagrams and musings as being part of:

...a massive textual and visual work, almost autonomous in itself in its prolific poetic ramifications and performative potentialities...On paper, 18 Happenings in 6 Parts is a dynamic, truly rhizomatic collection of virtual ideas, beautiful poems, impossible actions, architectural dreams, sharp short manifestos on art, music, and theatre, hilariously self-aggrandizing narratives, hilariously self-deprecating narratives, brilliantly compact theoretical texts, insightful quasi-ethnographic snapshots of quotidian expressions, acute diagnostics on urban life, heartbreaking confessions of the artist before the huge challenges posed by the project.

3

18 Happenings was certainly multifaceted. However, the most important objective of the work,

which had been attempted in the Douglass piece, was “to break up the audience into asymmetrical

groups and then have them move about at prescribed times so that their size and composition

would change.”4 By following this apparently simple method, a non-matrixed work was

produced: this strategy very closely resembled the fractured and repetitive but ultimately

transcendent music of Cage (Kaprow, one could argue, was a Romantic at heart like Cage). The

piece incorporated various sounds, media, and actions executed by performers, all of whom were

Kaprow’s friends. Multi-layered and ambient, it was nevertheless the pinnacle of art-as-

controlled-experiment. Repeated over many nights, it was literally a controlled experiment, with

the variables being the guests - and they were guests at this time, not having reached the stage of

“collaborators,” despite the artist’s assertions. This is because they were never fully integrated

into the work, which was more spectacle than engagement. Each attendee was randomly handed

a stapled set of instructions upon entering the gallery, which were mainly used for seating

purposes. This mode of seating arrangement served the function of breaking apart friends,

couples, and colleagues, allowing for a greater range of experience. It also introduced the element

of chance - in fact the only element of chance in this otherwise highly orchestrated work. The

space itself was divided into the three partitions; each “room” held several seats and one could

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pass through to each through a central “door,” which was really an open frame. The walls were

made of semi-transparent plastic - they served as both windows and screens - the latter in more

than one sense, as the material both revealed and obscured the action in other spaces, and

reflected projected slides. The walls themselves did not reach the full height of the ceiling, and as

the foremost chronicler of Happenings, Michael Kirby, has noted, this emphasized the artificiality

of the space.5

Performers were given various tasks, scheduled around highly time-sensitive scores

and rehearsed doggedly well in advance. (Performers included Lucas Samaras, Robert

Rauschenberg, Robert Whitman, Jim Dine, Jasper Johns, and Rose Montague.) The tasks were

simple, and often vaguely allegorical: bending of the arms, squeezing oranges, playing a board

game with oversize blocks. As Kirby describes:

Only the execution of a generally simple and undemanding act [is required]...Variations and difference simply do not matter - within, of course, the limits of the particular action and omitting additional action. The choices are up to him, but he does not work to create anything. The creation was done by the artist when he formulated the idea of the action. The performer merely embodies and makes concrete the idea.

6

The spectators were seated and waited for a bell to sound, at which time the first Happenings,

accompanied by prerecorded noise tapes, would begin. After one set of two Happenings, the

participants would hear another bell and be rotated to another room, again depending on their

instructions. A fifteen–minute intercession was allowed between each set. (The intercessions

actually lasted longer than the performances.) Each spectator would be in a room three times,

though not necessarily in each of the rooms, viewing two Happenings each time, for a total of six

performances. Eighteen Happenings in all would occur, and depending on the viewer’s position,

they could view all of these or only a few.

The Happenings were varied in duration, extent and theme, though all were highly polished and

cool. A man posed birdlike with his hands out from his hips; speeches, both dramatic and

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nonsensical were given; artists painted on the plastic scrims (painters included Robert Thompson,

Sam Francis, Alfred Leslie and George Segal). Various props were used: Rearrangeable Panels

hung on the wall of the first room, now heavily festooned with plastic fruit; the “sandwich man,”

a wooden contraption on wheels somewhat resembling a matchbook figure wielding a sandwich

board was pushed up and down the side aisles by the performers; two full-length mirrors, one in

the first room and one in the second, reflected the dizzying spectacle and attempted to unite the

spectators with the piece; slides of cropped photos, children’s art and other images were projected

on one scrimmed wall, and recorded and live sounds were used throughout. Form emerged in

time through the employment of these various techniques; it did not exist a priori, except in the

context of the plan, which was unknown to the visitors. As Kaprow states in 1966:

In making a Happening, it is better to approach composition without borrowed from theories, and instead to let the form emerge from what the materials can do. If a horse is part of a work, whatever a horse does gives the ‘form’ to what he does in the Happening: trotting, standing, pulling a cart, eating defecating, and so forth...In this way a whole body of non-intellectualized, non-culturized experience is opened to the artist and he is free to use his mind anew in connecting things he did not consider before.

7

The above statement was published in 1966, though Kaprow has maintained that the bulk of the

text in his Assemblage, Environments and Happenings was written in 1959. If this is the case,

then one wonders which method Kaprow used to select his “materials,” whether people, collages

or photographic slides. Cage had his I -Ching to aid him with his chance determinations, but

Kaprow’s tools are less specific. In Assemblage, mathematical forms are referenced, and in an

interview published in 1968 Kaprow admits to frequent use of the Yellow Pages.8

such an early stage the chance determinations appear minimal with respect to the objects

However, at

employed.

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Fig. 24 -Two views of 18 Happenings in 6 Parts, Reuben Gallery, New York City, 1959. At left is an image of the first room one entered; on the wall is one incarnation of Wall (1957–1959), and the dark mass on the plastic room divider reflects the efforts of the “painters.” At right is a view from the anterior room, with the Sandwich Man at right. Images courtesy Allan Kaprow Estate, as reproduced in Art as L ife (2008).

Fig. 2- At left, Rose Montague squeezing oranges during 18 Happenings in 6 Parts. At right, a hand-written set of instructions for bodily actions to occur in Room 1 during Set 1 of the same piece. Images courtesy Allan Kaprow Estate, as reproduced in Art as L ife.

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Clearly indebted to Cage’s Untitled event at Black Mountain, 18 Happenings was unique for its

inclusion of chance and segmented structure. Most significant was the de-centeredness of the

performances; never having one focal point, obscured at various points by physical structures and

the limits of human attentiveness, the work could never be taken as a whole. Cage’s event was

fragmentary and simultaneous, but the audience could take in each the sensorial devices, even if

they were unable to cohere them into a narrative. While Cage’s work pioneered the disjointed

and explored new modes of audience and performer arrangement, Kaprow’s 18 Happenings is

most notable as a study in contradiction:

Chance associations for the audience emerged from the artist’s rigorously enforced script. The performance was conceived as a total work of art but could be experienced only partially. It was segmented over time but had no plot. Its performers undertook tasks but did not act. Its tasks embodied action but were not self-expressive. Sounds were broadcast but did not harmonize. The smells of oranges and enamel clashed in the early evening heat. Couples who came together were directed by cards into separate rooms, where they had separate experiences. The happenings in one room were interrupted by the shadows, sounds, and smells of those in another.

9

Kaprow’s later definition of Happenings rules out tactics used in 18 Happenings, or rather

expands upon them, but this first piece marks an unmistakable break with the past. Variations

from early - late Happenings (c. 1959-1965) are significant but all revolve around the theme of art

as taken directly from lived experiences:

A Happening is an assemblage of events performed or perceived in more than one time and place. Its material environments may be constructed, taken over directly from what is available, or altered slightly; just as its activities may be invented or commonplace. A Happening, unlike a stage play, may occur at a supermarket, driving along a highway, under a pile of rugs, and in a friend’s kitchen, either at once or sequentially. If sequentially, time may extend to more than a year. The Happenings in performed according to plan but without rehearsal, audience, or repetition. It is art but closer to life.

10

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Fig. 26. Hand-written notational score for 18 Happenings in 6 Parts. Courtesy Allan Kaprow Estate, as reproduced in Art as L ife.

Fig. 27. Instructions for guests of 18 Happenings in 6 Parts, with cast and program information. Courtesy Allan Kaprow Estate, as reproduced in Art as L ife.

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18 Happenings was over in about an hour. Performed over six nights in October, 1959, it quickly

gained notoriety, and marked “the end of Kaprow’s formative phase as an artist...”11 The work

was isolated in many respects: “... Kaprow would never again compose anything as complex and

calculated in the service of aleatory experience, the experiments yielded verifiable data that he

drew on at through the 1960s.”12 In spite of its singularity, the work has defined not only his

oeuvre but to a certain extent Happenings in general. Part of this is due to the attendees - many

important figures came, including Cage, David Tudor, Leo Castelli, Ivan Karp, Dan Flavin,

Meyer Schapiro, Richard Bellamy and Fairfield Porter. (Porter wrote a negative review in the

Nation, and Kaprow drafted a never-sent response, inquiring why the painter-critic was so intent

on visiting all of Kaprow’s shows when he apparently did not care for the work.)13

Although not

in attendance, Robert Motherwell contributed ten dollars to the endeavor.

The attendance and participant roster reads like a who’s-who of the art world, but that is not why

it is as famous as it is. After all, many did not like the piece. Even Cage did not stand by the

work, after years of strong support, because he disliked the highly controlling aspect of the

piece.14 Regardless, it was something of a cause célèbre, and was reviewed in all the major art

periodicals. This solidified the Happenings movement that was beginning to pick up speed, with

Red Grooms’ Burning Building (December, 1959) and subsequent efforts by Oldenburg and Jim

Dine. 18 Happenings also marked a more or less permanent shift in Kaprow’s work for the next

several years - his Happenings continued in much the same stylistic and theoretical vein until

approximately 1963-1964, up through commissioned works like Bon Marché and Out (both

1963) and the dramatic, symbolic welter of Household (Ithaca, NY, 1964). Gas, a 1965 piece

sponsored by a local CBS affiliate, was perhaps the coup de grace to Kaprow’s Happenings -

more spectacle than Happening, the televised multi-day and location event solidified Kaprow’s

reservations toward his own movement. He had begun to see the limitations earlier than this, but

had yet to devise an alternative, and new efforts were “spotty.”15

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The piece is also relevant as it possesses a relationship to the soon-to-be-ascendant Minimalist

movement, though the two art forms appear antithetical in nature. 18 Happenings has been

described by Kaprow as a Minimalist piece: “...things happen with large spaces of nothing around

them, or they overlap unexpectedly into clusters that suddenly shut off.”16

The work was a potpourri of historical castoffs, and the script was by far the most elaborate of

Kaprow’s Happenings. The textual apparatus for the piece was vast, including choreographic

diagrams, “tone scores and fingering charts, timings, lists of verbs, mini-speeches.”17

It is

therefore interesting that he uses the term minimalism, as his kitchen sink, expanded field

approach seems anything but. If anything, it seems the Happening should be linked to theater,

which it often is. All superficial appearances aside, however, it is important to recall that

Minimalism - in the art-historical sense - was often construed as theatrical, most famously by

Michael Fried in his “Art and Objecthood” of 1967. It was also a movement deeply concerned

with the literal and the indexical, and involved in the infinite exchangeability of signs; here we

see a parallel with Kaprow’s Assemblages and Environments and Rauschenberg’s breed of anti-

symbolism. These notions rest upon a bedrock of non-subjectivity, which stood as both the

culmination and rupture of high modernism, as elaborated by Hal Foster in “The Return of the

Real” (1999).

The theatrical and the non-subjective cannot be ignored in 18 Happenings, though the piece

overtly aspires to be non-theatrical and multi-subjective. Underscoring this fact is the

concentration on objects, discrete actions that nearly become objects (“...things...that suddenly

shut off”), and the reliance on absurd and at times melodramatic texts. Besides being minimal 18

Happenings was also matter-of-fact (directness and minimality should not necessarily be

conflated). As Samaras, an “actor” in the piece describes it: “...directions were extremely simple

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and professorial: Here’s a violin; make a couple of sounds. There’s a table; play chess with Bob

Whitman. Do it as flatly as possible [italics mine]. Whatever you do, don’t be cute; perform the

act plainly....One night it was Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg [painting on either sides of

the scrim], with Johns pressing paint cans against the material to leave circular imprints. The

audience seemed bemused, it was so matter-of-fact.”18

The priority of substance in Kaprow’s work - from Happenings until the end of his career - was

direct experience. Writing in the 1960s, this is what Kaprow referred to as the first of four levels

of meaning in his work: “...physical, sensible, tangible being.”19 The fourth level was:

“...‘meaning’ in a symbolical or suggestive sense.”20

1 As indicated in Eva Herman, Andrew Perchuk and Stephanie Rosenthal, Art As L ife; 120.

Over several nights in 1959, Kaprow may

have broken apart the theatrical apparatus and refashioned it, he had not done away with its core -

the search for the meaningful via the symbolic. He had not done away with the core of traditional

art at all, but was making tentative steps towards its dissolution.

2 Richard Kostelanetz, Theatre of Mixed Means; 110. 3 Richard Schechner, “There’s Something Happenin’ Here...," The Tulane Drama Review 54, no 2 (Summer 2010); 143. 4 Richard Kostelanetz, Theatre of Mixed Means; 110. 5 Michael Kirby, Happenings; 69. 6 Ibid.; 17. 7 Allan Kaprow, Assemblage, E nvironments and Happenings; 198. 8 Richard Kostelanetz, Theatre of Mixed Means; 113. 9 Jeff Kelley, Childsplay; 38. 10 Allan Kaprow, Blurring of Art and Life; 202. 11 Ibid. 12 Ibid. 13 Eva Meyer-Herman, Andrew Perchuk and Stephanie Rosenthal, Art as L ife; 36.

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14 John Cage, Michael Kirby and Richard Schechner, “An Interview with John Cage,” The Tulane Drama Review 10, no. 2 (Winter 1965); 69. 15 Robert Morgan, “Interview with Allan Kaprow.” Online: http://www.jca-online.com/kaprow.html. Accessed 12 June 2010. 16 Unsure of the origin of this quote, but it is included in Rodenbeck’s memoriam of Kaprow in “Life Like Art”; 321. 17 Judith Rodenbeck, in “Life Like Art,” Artforum; 321. 18 Lucas Samaras, in Ibid. 19 Michael Kirby, Happenings; 49. 20 Jeff Kelley, Childsplay; 38.

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CONCLUSION

There are various extrapolations to be made from the impact of 18 Happenings in 6 Parts. The

Minimalist approach focused on the importance of objects is an important alternate reading on

this legendary work and deserves a full treatment, but the overarching theme of the piece - the

theme that has been communicated through the art historical canon - is one of audience

participation and chance operations in a newly defined theatrical space. This is 18 Happenings’

true legacy, if such a thing exists, and it was a legacy Kaprow extensively promoted in his many

writings. By 1968, he had published “over thirty-five articles and essays, ten interviews, three

pamphlets, one book, and one long-playing record entitled ‘How to Make a Happening,’”1

mostly

on the topic of Happenings. In 1965 Michael Kirby’s Happenings appeared, a book which

chronicled 18 Happenings as well as a number of other Happenings in great detail and provided

the first published photos of the Kaprow’s hallmark event. Over time, 18 Happenings gained the

mythic status that its creator had predicted in 1961 in his “Happenings in the New York Scene.”

Though Kaprow’s later works would evolve considerably, for better or worse it is this piece that

has made his name.

In spite of the energy Kaprow put into developing and disseminating Happenings and their

simplified spin-offs, the Events, he ultimately wished for these works to be mined for new

meanings and to not be held as historical relics or imprimaturs to be followed to the letter. Thus

his turn to Reinventions - recreated versions of previous Happenings and Events - which he began

creating and endorsing in the 1980s. These were introduced as a solution to the problem of

traditional exhibitions, which were anathema to Kaprow. Try as he might, however, he was never

completely able to escape the historicizing of his work, whether through scholastic endeavors, the

myth-making of his events in artistic circles, photographic reproductions and instruction manuals,

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or through his Reinventions, which sometimes lend the appearance of a historical reenactment

akin to those of Civil War enthusiasts. Underscoring this dual connection to the radical idea of

“Un-Art” and to his institutional ties, Kaprow maintained impatience with the past alongside a

consummate knowledge of and interest in art history.

It is with this thought that I conclude this paper: paradoxically, it is only by studying the concrete

historical facts that we may come to better appreciate an art which held as its ideology a

reformulation of time, authorship, and the creative act itself; an art whose literal and figurative

text and subtext reveal the possibility of an extratextual nature of art.2

1 James Thomas Hindman. Happening Theory and Methodology: Allan Kaprow, Claes Oldenburg, Ann Halprin: 1959-1967. Dissertation. University of Georgia, 1971. Athens, GA. Proquest/UMI (Publication NO. AAT 7210974). Accessed 10 August 2010.

2 “-textual” being used in a very loose sense; both literal and figurative.

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SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

Books and E xhibition Catalogs

Jonas Barish, The Anti-Theatrical Prejudice (University of California Press: Berkeley, 1981.

Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, Judith Rodenbeck and Robert E. Haywood, eds. Experiments in the E veryday: Allan Kaprow and Robert Watts - E vents, Objects, Documents (Miriam Ira D. Wallach Art Gallery: New York, 2000).

John Cage, I -VI (The Eliot Norton Lectures) (Harvard Press: Cambridge, 1990).

Cage, Cage: An Anthology, Richard Kostelanetz, ed. (De Capo Press: New York, 1991).

Cage. Silence: Lectures and Writings (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1967).

John Dewey, Art as E xperience (Perigree: New York, 2005).

Martin Duberman, Black Mountain: An E xploration in Community (E.P Dutton & Co.: New York, 1972). Peter Eleey, Olaf Blanke, Ina Blom and Peter Osborne, The Quick and The Dead [exh. cat.] (Walker Art Center: Minneapolis, MN, 2009).

RoseLee Goldberg, Performance Art from Futurism to the Present (Harry N. Abrams: New York, 1988).

Erika Gorder, Archival Assemblages: Rutgers and the Avant-Garde (My version is unpublished, though published a version exists. Exhibition was held at Special Collections and University Archives at Alexander Library, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ, 2001).

Serge Guilbaut, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art: Abstract E xpressionism, Freedom, and the Cold War, Arthur Goldhammer, trans. (University of Chicago Press: Chicago, 1983).

Susan Hapgood, Neo-Dada. Redefining Art, 1958-1962 (American Federation of Arts: New York, 1994).

120

Geoffrey Hendricks, Critical Mass: Happenings, F luxus, Performance, Intermedia and Rutgers University: 1958-1972 [exh. cat.] (Rutgers University Press: New Brunswick, NJ, 2003).

Eva Meyer-Hermann, Andrew Perchuk and Stephanie Rosenthal, eds. Allan Kaprow - Art as Life (Getty Research Institute: Los Angeles, CA, 2008).

Allan Kaprow, Assemblage, Environments and Happenings (Harry N. Abrams: New York, 1966).

Kaprow, E ssays on the Blurring of Art and Life, Jeff Kelley, ed. (University of California: Berkeley, CA, 2004).

Jeff Kelley, Childsplay: The Art of Allan Kaprow (University of California Press: Berkeley, CA, 2004).

Michael Kirby, Happenings: An I llustrated Anthology (E.P. Dutton & Co.: New York, 1965).

Richard Kostelanetz, Theatre of Mixed Means: An Introduction to Happenings, K inetic E nvironments, and Other Mixed-means Presentations (RK Editions; New York, 1980). 1970 Pittman publication online: [http://sites.google.com/site/belgiumishappening/home/publications/1968-00-00_kaprow_conversationkostelanetz].

Liz Kotz, Words to Look at: Language in 1960’ s Art (MIT Press: Cambridge, MA, 2010).

Joan Marter, Off Limits: Rutgers and the Avant-Garde [exh. cat.] (Rutgers University Press: New Brunswick, NJ, 1999).

Linda Montano, ed. Performance Artists Talking in the Eighties (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000).

Robert Motherwell, ed. The Dada Painters and Poets: An Anthology, second ed. (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press: Cambridge, MA, 1981).

Julia Robinson, ed., New Realisms: 1957-1962: Object Strategies Between Readymade and Spectacle [exh. cat.] (MIT Press: Cambridge, MA, 2010).

Irving Sandler, A Sweeper-up After Artists: A Memoir (Thames & Hudson: New York, 2009).

121

Irving Sandler, The New York School: The Painters and Sculptors of the Fifties (Harper & Row: New York, 1978).

Catherine Tisdall and Angelo Bozzollo, Futurism (Thames and Hudson: New York, 1989).

Allan Kaprow [exh. cat.] (Pasadena Art Museum: Pasadena, CA, 1967).

E nvironments, Situations, Spaces [exh. cat.] (Martha Jackson Gallery, NY, 1961).

Hans Hofmann [exh. pamphlet] (Art House/Rutgers University: New Brunswick, NJ, 1956).

New Forms - New Media 1 [exh. cat.] (Martha Jackson Gallery: New York, 1960).

Robert Rauschenberg (October Files 4, MIT Press: Cambridge, MA, 2002).

Under E ach Other’ s Spell: and New York [exh. cat.] (Stony Brook Foundation, Inc: Stony Brook, NY, 2009).

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Articles, Interviews, Audio and Misc.

Gavin Butt, “Happenings in History, or the Epistemology of the Memoir,” Oxford Art Journal 24, no. 2 (2001): 113-26.

Ray Falk. “Japanese Innovators,” New York Times

Douglas M. Davis, “‘To What Purpose? I am Still Thinking’: Following the Script for a Happening,” National Observer, 12 June 1967.

Dec. 8, 1957. D24.

Marcel Duchamp, “The Creative Act.” Speech given at the American Federation of Arts in Houston, Texas, April 1957. [http://ubu.artmob.ca/sound/aspen/mp3/duchamp1.mp3].

7 min. 28 sec. Accessed

14 May 2010.

Dorothy Gees Seckler. Oral history interview with Allan Kaprow, 1968 Sept. 10 (Smithsonian Archives of American Art; transcribed audio recording). 1 sound tape reel (2 hours 30 min.)

James Thomas Hindman. Happening Theory and Methodology: Allan Kaprow, Claes Oldenburg, Ann Halprin: 1959-1967. Dissertation, University of Georgia, 1971. Athens, GA. Proquest/UMI (Publication NO. AAT 7210974). Accessed 10 August 2010.

Nancy Jachec, “The Space between Art and Political Action: Abstract Expressionism and Ethical Choice in Postwar America 1945-1950,” Oxford Art Journal 14, no. 2 (1991); 18-29.

Wolf Kahn, “Hans Hofmann’s Good Example,” Art Journal 42, no.1 (Spring 1982): 22-23

Allan Kaprow, “An Artist’s Story of a Happening,” New York Times

Kaprow, “The Demi-Urge,” [includes score for untitled event] Anthologist 30, no 4. (1959):4-17.

, 6 October 1963; 17.

Kaprow, “Effect of Recent Art Upon the Teaching of Art,” Art Journal 23: 136-38.

Kaprow, “Hans Hofmann” Village Voice, 24 February 1966: 2.

Kaprow and Mimsy Lee, “On Happenings,” The Tulane Drama Review 10, no. 4 (Summer 1966); 281-283.

Kaprow, “One Chapter from ‘The Principles of Modern Art,’” It Is, no. 4 (1959): 51-52.

Kaprow, Piet Mondrian: An Exercise in Seeing. Master’s Thesis, Columbia University, 1952.

Kaprow, “Rub-A-Dub,” Anthologist 29, no. 2 (1957): 16-18.

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Robert C. Morgan, “Interview with Allan Kaprow,” Journal of Contemporary Art 4, no. 2 (Fall/Winter 1991). [http://www.jca-online.com/kaprow.html]. Accessed 12 July 2010.

Robert C. Morgan, Wolf Kahn and Irving Sandler, “Allan Kaprow (1927-2006),” Brooklyn Rail, May 2006. [http://www.brooklynrail.org/2006/05/art/allan-kaprow-19272006.] Accessed April 28th, 2010.

Fairfield Porter, “Art Review,” [18 Happenings in 6 Parts] The Nation (October 1959). Betty Rollin and Allan Kaprow, “Eat,” Vogue 143, no. 4: 125. Harold Rosenberg, “The American Action Painters,” ARTnews 51, no. 8 (December 1952); 22.

Moira Roth. Oral History Interview with Allan Kaprow, 1981 Feb. 5 - 18 (Smithsonian Archives of American Art: transcript from audio recording).

M.S. (Martica Sawin?), “Review,” Arts Digest 29, 15 May 1955: 30.

Richard Schechner, “Extensions in Time and Space. An Interview with Allan Kaprow,” The Tulane Drama Review 12, no. 3 (Spring1968); 153-59.

Richard Schechner, “There’s Something Happenin’ Here...," The Tulane Drama Review 54, no 2 (Summer 2010);

Allan Kaprow

[interview with the artist]. Lyn Blumenthal and Kate Horsfield, prods. (Video Data Bank: Chicago, 1979). 1 videocassette (ca. 38 mins.); s.d.; b&w; 1.5 in.

Multiple Authors, “Jackson Pollock: an Artists’ Symposium,” ARTnews 66 (April 1967); 28-33+.

Multiple Authors, “Life Like Art,” Artforum (Summer 2006); 321-23+.

Interview with Allan Kaprow. Dallas Public Library Cable Access Studio, April 1988. [http://www.mailartist.com/johnheldjr/InterviewWithAlanKaprow.html.] Accessed 4 April 2010.

Panel discussion with Allan Kaprow and Paul McCarthy. Online video. Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, recorded 2000, date unknown. [http://www.moca.org/media/audio/kaprow/KaprowMcCarthy1.mp3.] Accessed 5 May 2010.

.