Childsplay: The Art of Allan Kaprow (review)

Jeff Kelly's Childsplay fills a huge gap in the study of Happenings, their creators, and avant-garde work of the 1960s and 1970s. Kelly's detailed account of the foremost creator of Happenings, Allan Kaprow, is vast, complete, and thorough almost to the point of being unwieldy. Childsplay includes 227 excellent photographs documenting Kaprow, the works he created, and an impressive collection of images (mostly in black and white) of the art world of the mid-twentieth century.

The book consists of thirteen chapters, a lengthy foreword, an introduction, and a short epilogue. David Antin's foreword provides an important contextual section, recounting events from the 1950s and 1960s New York art scene in which Kaprow was a participant. Based on direct observation, Antin defines the fundamental characteristic of Kaprow's Happenings: "[P]ainterly spectacles built out of the interplay of semiological oppositions and parallels" (xiii). He notes the differences between other American Happenings that emerged from the Pop Art world of painters, sculptors, and gallery spaces, and Kaprow's "precisionist" works that were primarily developed in found spaces and natural environments. The foreword is followed by an equally comprehensive introduction that discusses the form and sources of Happenings, a term actually coined by Kaprow in the late 1950s.

Chapter 1 explores Kaprow's greatest influence, John Dewey, whose seminal work Art as Experience was important in the early stages of Kaprow's career. Kelly recounts events of Kaprow's childhood and his life in New York City and Tucson, Arizona, that informed his later work. Chapter 2 explores his "action collages," a system of composing that would inform his later work. The results of this system were first evident in Kaprow's Rearrangeable Panels (1957) in which he began "spilling art into the room itself" (15). The chapter also details the influence of John Cage, including experimentation with chance and random sounds, leading to 1958's Communication, the first public Happening. Chapter 3 deals with Kaprow's pivotal Eighteen Happenings in Six Parts, a seminal work in the Happening scene as well as in the American avant-garde. Kelly carefully outlines this 1959 event via a visual "score" that includes important photographs of the work that took place in New York's Reuben Gallery space. The chapter provides such detail that the reader is practically able to re-experience this monumental event.

Chapters 4 and 5 chronicle a number of Kaprow's major works in the 1960s that evolved and expanded the form of Happenings. Kelly also discusses the aesthetic of other Happening creators such as Robert Whitman, Claes Oldenburg, Red Grooms, and Jim Dine, detailing the basic differences between their work and Kaprow's.

Chapter 6, "On the Road," presents Kaprow's emergence as a coveted figure of many universities, art galleries, and festivals. It was at these various locations that his fame as a creator of participatory Happenings began to grow; performances at George Segal's Farm, the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, University of California, Berkeley, and Southern Illinois University (among others) established his reputation both nationally and internationally.

Chapters 7 and 8 deal with a series of projects created between 1966 and 1968 at various US locations, including New York, California, Missouri, Connecticut, and Iowa. The works (with titles like Gas, Fluids, Runner and Transfer) had grown into large-scale outdoor events that included dozens of participants engaging in seemingly meaningless activities, with references to world events such as the growing oil industry and the environment. Throughout these events the focus remained primarily on "doing"—the actual process of the making of Happenings.

Chapter 8, "The Education of the Un-Artist I," also documents Kaprow's shift into academia as a founding member of the faculty at the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) in 1969. Chapters 9 and 10, "The Education of the Un-Artist II" and "III" respectively, continue to explore Kaprow's work at CalArts, primarily with regard to works he created in Valencia as well as a growing...