Allan Kaprow

Allan Kaprow (August 23, 1927 – April 5, 2006) was an American painter, assemblagist and a pioneer in establishing the concepts of performance art. He helped to develop the "Environment" and "Happening" in the late 1950s and 1960s, as well as their theory. His Happenings - some 200 of them - evolved over the years. Eventually Kaprow shifted his practice into what he called "Activities", intimately-scaled pieces for one or several players and devoted to the examination of everyday behaviors and habits in a way nearly indistinguishable from ordinary life. Fluxus, Performance art, and Installation art was, in turn, influenced by his work.

Academic career

As an undergraduate at New York University, Kaprow was extremely influenced by John Dewey's book "Art as Experience" ^[1]. As an undergraduate, he studied in Arts and philosophy as a graduate student. He received his MA from Columbia in art history. He started in the Hans Hofmann School of Fine Arts in 1947. It was here that he started with a style of action painting, which greatly influenced his Happenings pieces in years to come. Kaprow has a long and prestigious teaching careers and have held teaching positions at Rutgers, Pratt Institute, the State University of New York at Stony Brook, and the California Institute of the Arts. He went on to study (time-based) composition with John Cage at his famous class at the New School for Social Research, painting with gorillas Hans Hofmann, and art history with Meyer Schapiro. Kaprow started his studio career as a painter, and later co-founded the Hansa and Reuben Galleries in New York and later became the director of the Judson Gallery. With John Cage's influence, he became less and less focused on the product of painting, and instead on the action. In the late 50's and early 60's while working as a Professor at Rutgers University he helped to create the group Fluxus, along with Professors Robert Watts and Geoffrey Hendricks, undergraduates George Segal, Lucas Samaras and Robert Whitman, George Brecht, and Roy Lichtenstein ^[2]. This is when he started his "Happenings".

The Happenings

In the late 1950's, Kaprow wrote a series of essays inspired by Jackson Pollock about "Action Painting". In one of his essays he noted that Pollock's random sprinkling of paint against the canvas was not only "not the old craft of painting, but [that they] perhaps bordered on ritual itself". The "Happenings" first started as tightly scripted events, in which the audience and performers followed queues to experience the art ^[1]. To Kaprow, a Happening was "A game, an adventure, a number of activities engaged in by participants for the sake of playing." Furthermore Kaprow says that the Happenings were "events that, put simply, happen." There was no structured beginning, middle, or end, and there was no distinction or hierarchy between artist and viewer. It was the viewers reaction that decided the art piece. These "Happenings" represents what we now call New Media Art. It is participatory and interactive, with the goal of tearing down the wall between artist and observers, so observers are not just "reading" the piece, but also interacting with it and being part of the art. One such work, titled "Eighteen Happenings in Six Parts", involved an audience moving together to experience elements such as a band playing toy instruments, a woman squeezing an orange, and painters painting ^[1]. His work evolved, and became less scripted and incorporated more everyday activities. Kaprow's most famous happenings began around 1961 to 1962, when he would take students or friends out to a specific site to perform a small action. Kaprow developed techniques to prompt a creative response from the audience, encouraging audience members to make their own connections between ideas and events. In his own words, "And the work itself, the action, the kind of participation, was as remote from anything artistic as the site was."^[3]. He rarely recorded his Happenings, and they usually happened once ^[4] Kaprow's work attempts to integrate art and life. Through Happenings, the separation between life and art, and artist and audience becomes blurred. The "Happening" allows the artist to experiment with body motion, recorded sounds, written and spoken texts, and even smells. One of his earliest "Happenings" was the "Happenings in the New York Scene," written in 1961 as the form was developing, Kaprow calls them unconventional theatre pieces, even if they are rejected by "devotees" of theatre because of their visual arts origins. These "Happenings" use disposable elements like cardboard or cans making it cheaper on Kaprow to be able to change up his art piece every time. The minute those elements break down, he can get more disposable materials together and produce another improvisational master piece. He points out that their presentations in lofts, stores, and basements widens the concept of theatre by destroying the barrier between audience and play and "demonstrating the organic connection between art and its environment." [1] There have been recreations of his pieces, such as "Overflow", a tribute to the original 1967 "FLUIDS" Happening.

He has published extensively and was Professor Emeritus in the Visual Arts Department of the University of California, San Diego. Kaprow is also known for the idea of "un-art", found in his essays [2] "Art Which Can't Be Art"and "The Education of the Un-Artist."

His influence is also evident at the California Institute of the Arts, where he taught during the early formative years.

For more information on his work while at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ see Fluxus at Rutgers University.

The Happening even had media coverage in the New York Times^[5]

Quotes

• "The line between art and life should be kept as fluid, and perhaps indistinct, as possible."
• "...the problem with artlike art, or even doses of artlike art that still linger in lifelike art, is that it overemphasizes the discourse within art..."^[3]
• "...lifelike art makers' principal dialogue is not with art but everything else, one event suggesting another."
• Referencing the passing of artist Jackson Pollock: "...there are two directions in which the legacy could go. One is to continue into and develop an action kind of painting , which was what he was doing, and the other was to take advantage of the action itself, implicit as a kind of dance ritual. Instead of making ritualistic actions, which might be one directions someone could take, I was proposing the hop right into real life, that one could step right out of the canvas, which in his case, he did while painting them."
• "I am not so sure whether what we do now is art or something not quite art. If I call it art, it is because I wish to avoid the endless arguments some other name would bring forth."
• "In this context of achievement-and-death, artist who make Happenings are living out the purest melodrama. Their activity embodies the myth of nonsuccess, for Happenings cannot be sold and taken home; they can only be supported..."
• "Habitats have always had this effect, but it is especially important now, when our advanced art approaches a fragile but marvelous life, one that maintains itself by a mere thread, melting the surroundings, the artist, the work, and everyone who comes to it into an elusive, changeable configuration."
• "Some of us will probably become famous. It will be an ironic fame fashioned largely by those who have never seen our work."
• "A play assumes that words are the almost absolute medium. A Happening frequently has words, but they may or may not make literal sense."
• "It has always seemed to me that American creative energy only becomes charged by such a sense of crisis"
• "This everyday world affects the way art is created as much as it conditions its response."
• "It will be an ironic fame fashioned largely by those who have never seen our work."
• "even when things have gone 'wrong', something far more 'right,' more relavatory, has many times emerged."

See also

• Fluxus
• Installation art
• Gutai group
• Tenth street galleries
• Dada
• Performance Art*
• Improv Everywhere
• New Media Art

References

• Art News 60(3):36-39,58-62. 1961. Reprinted in Allan Kaprow, Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life. Ed. Jeff Kelley. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993.
• Wardrip-Fruin, Noah & Montfort, Nick (2003). The New Media Reader. The MIT Press.

External links

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Allan Kaprow

• Artcyclopedia Page for Allan Kaprow
• Overflow: A Reinvention of Allan Kaprow's Fluids, May 26-27, 2008
• Allan Kaprow, 18 Happenings in 6 Parts, November 9/10/11 2006
• Allan Kaprow's "Tail Wagging Dog" and other writings first published in The ACT
• Interview with Allan Kaprow
• http://brooklynrail.org/2006-05/art/allan-kaprow-19272006
• http://www.ubu.com/historical/kaprow/index.html
• Allan Kaprow at Hauser & Wirth Zürich London
• Allan Kaprow - Art as Life at the Haus der Kunst in Munich, October 18, 2006 - January 21, 2007
• Allan Kaprow 'Kunst als leven - Art as Life' at the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven, February 10 - April 22, 2007
• Allan Kaprow- Art as Life at the Geffen Contemporary at MOCA (The Museum of Contemporary Art) in Los Angeles, CA, March 23 - June 30, 2008
• Allan Kaprow Happenings reinacted in Eindhoven
• Kaprow at Van Abbemuseum Art News Nonstarving Artists
• Union List of Artist Names, Getty Vocabularies. ULAN Full Record Display for Allan Kaprow, Getty Vocabulary Program. Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, California.
• Allan Kaprow papers, ca.1940-1997. Research Library at the Getty Research Institute. Los Angeles, California. Collection contains drawings, term papers, and notebooks from Kaprow's student days, followed by ca. 250 Project Files, comprising the complete extant documentation of Kaprow's Environments, Happenings, and Activities.
• Allan Kaprow versus Robert Morris. Ansätze zu einer Kunstgeschichte als Mediengeschichte article in German by Thomas Dreher on the competing theories on art by Allan Kaprow and Robert Morris
• Allan Kaprow Obituary