This paper looks at Allan Kaprow’s Happenings through the framework of Peter Bürger’s 1971 Theory of the Avant-Garde. It suggests that Kaprow’s Happenings project can be read as a detailed ...investigation into the way in which the category ‘art’ was formulated in his society, and an exploration of alternative possibilities for the social meaning and function of works of art excluded by this dominant ontology. The paper focuses specifically on Kaprow’s interrogation of the dominant understanding of the relationship between the art work and the spectator in the mid-century American art world, and the alternatives to this model that his Happenings proposed. Throughout the course of the 1960s, I demonstrate, Kaprow painstakingly explored and developed these alternatives, slowly formulating a model for the social function and meaning of the category ‘art’ that decentred hegemonic ideas about artistic autonomy and sought to ‘reintegrate art into the praxis of life’ (Bürger, 22).
I argue performance studies' modernist ontological assumptions of fleeting are antithetical to contemporary performance art which relies on digital technology for mediated viewing processes. In this ...essay, I argue for a hybrid postmodern performance studies that allow for varying modes of experiencing performance art. I situate Allan Kaprow and Fluxus as the genealogical beginning of performance and argue that Peggy Phelan's ontological assumptions of performance are inherently modernist. I then pose a postmodern approach to performance studies that embrace an embodiment of hybrid viewing methodologies of performance. Lastly, I use three examples as embodiments and symptomatic representations of this embodiment of a hybrid postmodern performance ontology.
On Friday the 28th of May 1965 the Museum of Modern Art in New York announced that museum attendance had reached a record high of 1,058,700. The upward trend started in the fifties but really took ...off in the sixties. The rise in museum attendance was the result of an economic boom, better education and an increase in leisure time. It was also stimulated by a growing mediatisation of both the arts and the different activities of museums and art institutions. On the whole, journalists, curators, museum educators and critics enthusiastically welcomed the increased interest in the arts. But the growing mediatisation of the museum, art and exhibitions as well as the continued growth of the public's interest in art was met by some with scepticism, not least from the artists themselves. They realised that they were no longer working for a privileged and specialist audience but for a large, demanding anonymous crowd. And it worried some of them. The way artists reacted to this institutional change - their reaction, both in art and writing - has received little scholarly attention. This essay looks at how two artists, Bruce Nauman and Allan Kaprow, responded to it and how it possibly affected their work as well as their artistic identity. We will see that their concerns about the presence of the audience led them to eradicate the distance between both the work of art and the audience as well as - in some sorts - between the artist himself and the audience. What is interesting here is that the eradication of distance is, so it seems, a direct consequence of a distrust, a rather pessimistic feeling. Controlling the aesthetic process and response seemed to be their guiding principle.
Allan Kaprow conceived of his score-based "un-art" as unrepeatable yet open to reinvention: his Happenings, Environments, and Activities had to be radically reimagined, not reenacted on a stage set ...or reconstructed from photographs. Shortly before his death in 2006, Kaprow assembled visual and verbal information connected to his key works, but provided artists, curators, and scholars with few rules about how to approach them. Generally speaking, the reinventor's task is to produce difference through fidelity to whatever is so essential in the work that it can survive its dramatic transformation. While some understood this as careful attention to a work's central metaphor, others took a more literalist approach, reenacting the largely verbal scores to the letter; still others combined the two approaches, exploiting the productive tension-or parallax shift-between a work's literal and figurative elements. Through this notion of a parallax shift that brackets out certain elements to produce various meanings, this article explores different iterations of 18 Happenings in 6 Parts (1959), Yard (1961), Baggage (1972), and Easy (1972). Filled with the same productive contradictions as his writing, Kaprow's un-art here emerges through the interventions of André Lepecki, Otobong Nkanga, William Pope.L, Sharon Hayes, and Florian Dombois as central to the ongoing historicizing of live art.
Cull examines the works that the American artist Allan Kaprow (1927-2006) referred to as 'Activities', alongside the philosophy of immanence propounded by Gilles Deleuze (1925-1995) and with ...reference to the notion of 'attention' developed by Henri Bergson (1859-1941). Less well known than his Happenings, Kaprow's Activities are written scores that act as instructions for volunteer participants to engage in a series of seemingly banal actions and interactions made strange through a variety of compositional devices.
Lushetich explores the difference between Allan Kaprow's happenings and Robert Watts's, George Brecht's and Ay-O's Fluxkits and suggests that whilst the happenings invert the logic of systemic ...integration -- the logic of parts and wholes -- but nevertheless remain bound by it, the Fluxkits operate interexpressively, prompting a multilateral structuring of the one and the many. Essentially, the logic of parts and wholes can be traced to the emanation theory which postulates that finite human beings are created from a primordial overflowing, or emanation, from the One, the source of all being. Having been severed from the One, every finite being -- or individual -- yearns for a reunion with the One.
An obituary for Allan Kaprow, who died on Apr 5, 2006, is presented. Kaprow is remembered as the creator of "Happenings," events which combined visual art with performance art.
This thesis argues that presence in the performing arts can be reconceived, via the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, as an encounter with difference or ‘differential presence’ which is variously defined ...as immanence, destratification, affect/becoming, and duration. These definitions are developed through a series of four analyses of exemplary performance practices: 1) The Living Theatre; 2) Antonin Artaud; 3) Allan Kaprow and 4) Goat Island. Chapter One recuperates the Living Theatre from a dominant narrative of ‘failure’, aided by the Deleuzian concepts of ontological participation, immanence, production/creation and ‘the people to come’. Reframing the company as pioneers of methods such as audience participation and collective creation, the chapter argues that their theatrical ambition is irreducible to some simple pursuit of undifferentiated presence (as authenticity or communion). Chapter Two provides an exposition of three key concepts emerging in the encounter between Artaud and Deleuze: the body without organs, the theatre without organs, and the destratified voice. The chapter proposes that To have done with the judgment of god constitutes an instance of a theatre without organs that uses the destratified voice in a pursuit of differential presence – as a nonrepresentative encounter with difference that forces new thoughts upon us. Chapter Three defines differential presence in relation to Deleuze’s concepts of affect and becoming-imperceptible and Kaprow’s concepts of ‘experienced insight’, nonart, ‘becoming “the whole”’, and attention. The chapter argues that Kaprow and Deleuze share a concern to theorize the practice of participating in actuality beyond the subject/object distinction, in a manner that promotes an ethico-political sense of taking part in “the whole”. Finally, Chapter Four focuses on the temporal aspect of differential presence, arguing that through slowness, waiting, repetition and imitation, Goat Island’s performance work acknowledges and responds to ‘the need to open ourselves affectively to the actuality of others’ (Mullarkey 2003: 488).
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