Allan Kaprow: 1927-2006

Allan Kaprow, one of the seminal figures of the great generation of American artists of the late 1950s and early '60s, died at home in Encinitas, California, on Wednesday, 5 April 2006. Kaprow's accomplishments over his long and productive life are many. Eighteen Happenings in Six Parts, which took place at the Reuben Gallery in New York in October 1959, was the first Happening, a term that Kaprow coined to describe his new work. With Eighteen Happenings, Kaprow, initially trained as a painter, created a complex theatrical event with scripted performances taking place simultaneously in three connected rooms built in a large, loft-like space. Performances included readings of texts, everyday activities such as squeezing oranges, choreographed movement, slide projections, live music, recorded sounds, and the scripted movement of the audience through the space. Kaprow had previously articulated the radical move from painting to Happenings in a brilliant article entitled "The Legacy of Jackson Pollock" (1958), in which he argued that Pollock's mural-scale paintings took on the aspects of environments, turning observers into participants and indicating a way of transcending or abandoning painting. Pollock, Kaprow wrote,

Figure 1.

Allan Kaprow, American artist and creator of Happenings, 1986. (Photo courtesy of Hauser & Wirth Zürich London)

left us where we must become preoccupied with and 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. […W]e shall utilize the specific substances of sight, sound, movement, people, odors, touch. Objects of every sort are material for the new art: paint, chairs, food, electric and neon lights, smoke, water, old socks, a dog, movies, a thousand other things that will be discovered by the present generation of artists. Not only will these bold creators show us, as if for the first time, the world we have always had about us but ignored, but they will disclose entirely unheard of happenings and events, found in garbage cans, police files, hotel lobbies; seen in store windows and on the streets; and sensed in dreams and horrible accidents.

([1958] 1993:7, 9)

The prophetic tone and radicalism of this new concrete language of art is reminiscent of Artaud's Theatre and Its Double, published in the Unites States that same year.

There are moments in history—and this was one of them—when artists break out of the dominant scene and go back to the raw material of life, the very source of art. These artists do not only look at things differently, but also the things that they look at are different. As Gertrude Stein wrote in "Composition as Explanation": "The only thing that is different from one time to another is what is seen and what is seen depends upon how everybody is doing everything" ([1926] 1971:21). The move from painting to Happenings, events, and actions seems today to be clear-cut. Historians and critics brought out the antecedents of Happenings, the sources of possible influences, and theories to account for the change, but the single act of moving from the rectangular or oval space of painting to Happenings, actions, events, and other performance genres still holds some of its mystery. This unprecedented move was one of those acts that, without any ambivalence, separated "before" from "after."

After Eighteen Happenings, Kaprow staged several Happenings in quick succession: The Big Laugh (1960), Coca Cola Shirley Cannonball? (1960), The Apple Shrine (1960), and A Spring Happening (1961)—trying different theatrical strategies but gradually moving away from overly scripted and choreographed works, and eventually expanding his work to move outside galleries to church basements, city streets, and the outdoors. Sweeping (1962) took place in a forest clearing near Woodstock, New York, and A Service for the Death II (1962) was performed on the beach at Bridgehampton, New York.

The number of Happenings by Kaprow and other artists such as Jim Dine, Red Grooms, Claes Oldenburg, Robert Whitman, and others taking place in New York in the early 1960s was extraordinary. Kaprow himself staged approximately 20 Happenings in New York...