The Four Foundations Of Human Experience: How To Define Allan Kaprow's Happenings

Irving Sandler penned an obituary of Allan Kaprow in the New Yorker in which he accounts a telling anecdote of Kaprow's artistic philosophy. Allegedly, at the Artists' Club of Abstract-Expressionist Painters in 1958, Kaprow said: "I am convinced that painting is a bore; so is literature, music. What doesn't bore me is the total destruction of ideas that have any discipline; instead of painting, move your arms; instead of music, make noise. I'm giving up painting and all of the arts by doing everything and anything" (Sandler). It is this ambition to redefine art not as product, but as a process-based, ephemeral experience that inspired Kaprow's performance-like exhibitions that he deemed "Happenings". These happenings are defined by four foundational characteristics that Kaprow believed to best express and engage the human experience: interactivity, ephemerality, connection of the body and mind, and an interdisciplinary nature. "18 Happenings in 6 Parts" (1959) was the first of Kaprow's activities to officially be marketed as a Happening. As reported in the text, Allan Kaprow: Art as Life: "For 18 Happenings in 6 Parts, Kaprow created an interactive environment that manipulated the audience to a degree unprecedented in modern art. . The work comprised a series of closely timed actions performed by Kaprow and participating actors and artists - including Sam Francis, Leslie, and Segal - who worked from a carefully conceived and tightly scri pted score. Kaprow choreographed the movement of bodies, flashing of lights, playing or making of sounds, and projection of slides and films. Although these 'happenings' were plotted out one after another on a grid, they did not relate to one another in a traditional narrative sense. The performance was staged in six parts in three rooms that were defined by semi-transparent plastic sheets, painted a collaged with references to his previous works" (Schimmel 17). This interdisciplinary work differed from other art of the time for it was interactive and it forced the audience to inhabit the gallery space with a new lens. The gallery itself was now part of the product, not simply means for exhibition. Part of this interactivity included an envelope with specific instructions regarding when to leave and when to stay in each section of the gallery, when to be quiet and when to speak. With this first, seminal work, Kaprow aimed to put his theory of process, experience-based art into practice. This work was ephemeral, interactive, and interdisciplinary, and it engaged the participants on a bodily, not solely mental or emotional, level. In 1961, Kaprow created the interactive Happening, "Yard". This piece consisted of a gallery room filled with old tires. The tires covered the floor, piled up in corners, and were both the subject and the environment of the room. Kaprow intended for participants to engage with the tires and move them around both in service of play and of ease of traversing the room. This Happening was part of the month-long "Environment Situations Spaces" show at the Martha Jackson Gallery and David Anderson Gallery along with George Brecht, James Dine, Walter Gaudnek, Claes Oldenberg, and Robert Whitman. Of this work, Kaprow writes: "(People) shall be invited to enter it physically, and to move its parts (hence the loose tires on the floor) at will. 'Yard' is not 'visual art' for the eyes alone; it involves the full spectrum of the senses in participation" (Kaprow, "Yard"). Kaprow's "Yard" is a departure from his earlier works in that its focus is more environmental and free-from participation rather than a planned, scri pted set of interactive routines and actions such as in "18 Happenings in 6 Parts". Despite these differences in their interactivity, the pieces still share the same ephemeral sense; neither experience could be recreated identically a second time. "Yard" also highlights the body-mind connection by forcing participants to engage with the art using their entire physical selves as they navigate the space and their own physical, personal boundaries.

Another daring example of interactivity and rejection of audience was Kaprow's "Self-Service". In the documentation of the Happening, Kaprow writes: "Self-Service, a piece without spectators, was performed in the summer of 1967 in Boston, New York, and Los Angeles. . Thirty-one activities were selected from a much larger number. . Activities took place among those of the participants' normal lives" (Kaprow, "Self-Service"). Activities included things such as: "In glass booths, people listen to records. They look at each other and dance" and "On the streets, kids give paper flowers to people with pleasant faces" (Kaprow, "Self-Service"). Kaprow had expressed both his dismay and delight in the inability to document any of these Happenings as they occurred around the country, and ultimately around the world (Kelley). Although he was unable to track or keep his work, he also celebrated that his reach had extended far beyond himself. The artwork was truly impossible to replicate because it was impossible to know that it even existed. It was truly interactive, and because the activities were just heightened or inspired actions of living, the work was inherently interdisciplinary and inspired the awareness of body and mind.

The origin of these four tenets interactivity, ephemerality, body-mind connection, and interdisciplinary media can be observed through Allan Kaprow's development as an artist. His childhood plagued with illness, his formative art school education with John Cage, his appreciation and passion for the work of Jackson Pollock, his work with "action collages", and his study of John Dewey's philosophy. Like the varied and multi-layered Happenings he would later be famous for, Kaprow's development as an artist and the birth of the Happenings came from a myriad of sources.

Kaprow's mentor, experimental music composer and artist, John Cage, served as a major inspiration. Kaprow felt passionately about Cage's theory of chance operations and spontaneity (Kaprow, "Right Living"). Kaprow felt that exposing your art to chance and unpredictability was a way of mining to the core of human essence and experience. Kaprow found the unbalanced voyeurism of the artist-audience relationship frustrating. He passionately preferred the unpredictable nature of interactivity. "Kaprow wanted to recast spectators as participants in his environments. He did this by composing all-encompassing spaces that blurred the distinctions between performers and audience members" (Kelley 22). Kaprow uncovered foundational philosophy in the writing of John Dewey to support his passionate view. Dewey had "called upon an earlier generation of artists to rediscover the everyday sources of their works in an effort to retrieve the atrophied connection between art and experience" (Kelley 158). His book, Art as Experience (1934), inspired Kaprow deeply to create work that was interactive and ephemeral - just like life itself.

The philosophy of the body-mind connection as a tenant of human experience developed in Kaprow's childhood. As a child, Kaprow was not able to live with his family in New York City because of his chronic respiratory illness and asthma, so he was sent to boarding school in Tucson, Arizona. As a child, "Kaprow was captive of his own body, whose breathing, temperature, pulse rate, and energy level he constantly monitored. Over time, this attentiveness ripened into an interpretive self-awareness that slipped back and forth between physical sensations and imaginative interpretations of those sensations. This interplay of body and mind would become Kaprow's elemental definition of experience and, by adulthood, his modus operandi as an artist" (Kelley 9). The emphasis on the body-mind connection is evident in Kaprow's work for it requires the audience to develop awareness of their body in relation to the space, other people, and itself. Before the Happenings, Kaprow's first artistic pioneering occurred in his development of the "action collage". Deeply inspired by the Action Painting of Jackson Pollock, Kaprow invented "painting-size works composed of scraps of cardboard, sheets of tinfoil, bits of torn paper, and cut-up sections of his own paintings, all slapped onto a canvas in a spontaneous manner" (Kelley 13). This commitment to combining a variety of seemingly unrelated works and a refusal to conform to limited binaries became a testament of Kaprow's work. He developed a taste for incorporating a range of mediums and disciplines in his work in order to create a sensory orchestra, art pieces that simultaneously engaged all of the five senses.

The theatre company, Rubber Repertory, creates theatrical experiences that are in direct conversation with the work Kaprow did in the 1960s and 70s. In April 2011, they created a piece called "Biography of Physical Sensation" at the Off Shoot in east Austin, Texas. Created by Rubber Rep's artistic directors Josh Meyer and Matt Hislope, the performance consisted of a circle of colored plastic chairs in different sizes. Audience members would choose a seat in proportion to the amount of interactivity that they were comfortable engaging in. The performance consisted of an ensemble of 5 people in sterile blue scrubs ministering individual audience members through a series of sensual experiences from eating vegetables and boiled eggs with a blindfold on, to wearing a diaper and laying on a cot, to standing in a tent with a smelly steam bomb.

In "Biography of Physical Sensation", the series of experiences were meant to tell the life story of an interview subject, Jamie Damon, by replicating feelings and events from her life in metaphorical or abstract ways. This direct, physical interactivity inspires the audience's body-mind connection. Its intense physicality is reminiscent of the invitation to climb over the playgroundesque pile of tires in Kaprow's "Yard". Cate Blouke of the Austin-American Statesman writes: "More like a visual poem than a play, "Biography of Physical Sensation" is certainly not like anything you`ve seen before or anything you`ll see again since it will be different every night. The show turns its audience into co-creators, and there's no telling how people will react" (Blouke). This emphasis on interactivity, irreproducibility, and spontaneity places "Biography of Physical Sensation" squarely in the realm of Kaprow's "everything and anything" Happenings aesthetic. Also, all of the sensual experiments and obstacles for the audience members were planned with sequence and purpose. Although there was a certain level of unpredictability regarding how each audience member would react to their specific chore, the content of the experiences themselves were premeditated and orchestrated carefully like Kaprow's "18 Happenings in 6 Parts". Rubber Repertory's "Biography of Physical Sensation" is a piece of modern art that represents the four distinct qualities of Kaprow's Happenings. Miranda July is another example of a modern artist who is creating work that evokes the spirit of Kaprow's Happenings. July created an interactive, digital art piece called "Learning to Love You More" that was created in 2002 and remained active online until 2009 when it was retired and acquired by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. The project consisted of July publishing "assignments" for any and all people who had access to them. Participants were then directed to document their project and send it to July so that it may be curated online. Some examples of these assignments include make a banner with an uplifting statement (Fig. 7) or take a photo of strangers holding hands (Fig. 8). The assignments are intended to inspire people to engage with their community, develop self-awareness, and inspire creativity and whimsy.

July's work has numerous similarities with Kaprow's, especially his Happenings like "Self-Service" that transcended a singular location and was made democratic through mass call for participation. July's piece was also multidisciplinary, implementing video, audio, photographs of analog materials, and performance. Unlike "Self-Service", "Learning to Love You More" could be easily documented because of the available documentation and communication technology of the relative time periods. Because of this documentation, the work still results in a product; this may appear to negate the work's ephemeral connection to Kaprow. However, the process which July may argue is the actual art remains ephemeral for, although documented, it is impossible to replicate. July's project also engages the body-mind connection, for it requires active participation. However, the acts are less physically taxing than in Kaprow's "Yard" or Rubber Rep's "Biography of Physical Sensation". Ultimately, Miranda July's "Learning to Love You More" does incorporate all four foundational characteristics of Kaprow's Happenings.

In his essay, "The Legacy of Jackson Pollock" (1958), Kaprow writes: "Young artists of today need no longer say, 'I am a painter' or 'a poet' or 'a dancer'. They are simply 'artists'. All of life will be open to them. . Out of the ordinary they will devise the extraordinary and then maybe nothingness as well. People will be delighted and horrified, critics will be confused or amused, but these, I am certain, will be the alchemies of the 1960s." (Kaprow, The Blurring of Art and Life 9) Allan Kaprow's Happenings, especially in the context of the four pillars of interactivity, ephemerality, body/mind connection, and interdisciplinary mediums has inspired me to reconsider the kind of theatre art that I make. I am inspired to engage the four principles of human experience fully as I create interactive, immersive performance art as a theatre artist. Kaprow's art work demolished boundaries between artist and audience, life and art, product and process, and ultimately the self from experience. It has served to foster a continuing generation of interactive, interdisciplinary work that defies labels or expectation but continues to provide enrichment and inspiration to all who encounter and engage with the work.

Fig 1: 18 Happenings in 6 Parts. The audience watches the spectacle from various spaces throughout the gallery.There is a clothesline with paintings hung from it. Fig 2: 18 Happenings in 6 Parts. Kaprow is featured in the white shirt, playing the wooden flute.

Fig 3: Yard. A woman jumps from tire to tire as she plays and interacts with Kaprow's installation/happening, "Yard". Kaprow is featured on the left, wearing the white shirt.

Fig 4: Self-Service. A sample of the transcri pt of Self-Service, outlining the activities for the people of New York City.

Fig 5: Biography of Physical Sensation. This is the staging of Rubber Repertory's performance "Biography of Physical Sensation"; there are various chair sizes that audience members can choose for varied levels of interactivity.

Fig 6: Biography of Physical Sensation. An example of Rubber Rep's Artistic Director, Josh Meyer engaging an audience member in one of a series of interactive experiments during the performance. Fig 7: Learning to Love You More. From the piece: "Assignment #63 Make an encouraging banner . Think of something encouraging you often tell yourself. For example: Everything will be ok. Or: Don`t listen to them. Or: It`ll blow over. Now make a banner" (July)

Fig 8: Learning to Love You More. From the piece: "Assignment #30 Take a picture of strangers holding hands . Ask two or more people who are strangers to you and to each other to hold hands and then take a picture of them. Take the picture when they aren`t smiling. Please make sure the picture includes the faces of the strangers" (July)

Works Cited

Blouke, Cate. "Review: 'The Biography of Physical Sensation'" Austin 360. October 19, 2010. Web. http://www.austin360.com/blogs/content/shared-gen/blogs/austin/seeingthings/entries/2010/10/19/review_the_biography_of_physic.html/?cxntfid=blogs_austin_arts_seeing_things

Deak, Frantisek. "Allan Kaprow 1927-2006." The Drama Review. Volume 50 (2006): page 9-12.

July, Miranda and Harrell Fletcher. Learning to Love You More. Digital collection of art projects. 2002-2009. Web. http://www.learningtoloveyoumore.com/

Kaprow, Allan. "18 Happenings in 6 Parts." New York, NY: Hauser & Wirth, 2007. Printed transcri pt of art piece.

Kaprow, Allan. "Right Living, John Cage 1912-1992." The Drama Review. Volume 37 (1993): page 12014.

Kaprow, Allan. "Self-Service: A Happening." The Drama Review. Volume 12 (1968): page 160-164.

Kaprow, Allan. "Yard". New York, NY: Hauser & Wirth, 2007. Printed transcri pt of art piece.

Kaprow, Allan. Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life. Berkley, CA: University of California Press, 1993. Print.

Kelley, Jeff. Childsplay: The Art of Allan Kaprow. Berkley, CA: University of California Press, 2004. Print.

Rosenthal, Stephanie. "Agency for Action." Allan Kaprow: Art as Life. Ed. Eva Meyer-Herman, Andrew Perchuk and Stephanie Rosenthal. Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2008. 57-71. Print.

Sandler, Irving. "Allan Kaprow: Art and Life." Jewish Museum. New York, NY: 2007. Panel discussion.

Schimmel, Paul. "'Only memory can carry it into the future:' Kaprow's Development from the Action-Collages to the Happenings." Allan Kaprow: Art as Life. Ed. Eva Meyer-Herman, Andrew Perchuk and Stephanie Rosenthal. Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2008. 8-19. Print.