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, devoted to the study of normal human activity in a way congruent to ordinary life. Fluxus, Performance art, and Installation art was, in turn, influenced by his work.
Academic career
Studies
Kaprow began his early education in Tucson, Arizona where he attended boarding school. Later he would attend the High School of Music and Art in New York where his fellow students were the artists Wolf Kahn, Rachel Rosenthal and the future New York gallerist Virginia Zabriskie. As an undergraduate at New York University, Kaprow was influenced by John Dewey's book "Art as Experience" . He studied in the Arts and philosophy as a graduate student. He received his MA degree from Columbia University 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.
Teachings
Through a long teaching career, he held teaching positions at Rutgers, Pratt Institute, the State University of New York at Stony Brook, and the California Institute of the Arts, before serving as a full time faculty at the University of California, San Diego, where he taught from 1974-1993. He went on to study (time-based) composition with John Cage in his class at the New School for Social Research, painting with 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 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 50s and early 60s while working as a Professor at Rutgers University, he helped to create the group Fluxus, along with Professors Robert Watts, Geoffrey Hendricks, and Roy Lichtenstein, artists George Brecht, and George Segal, and undergraduates Lucas Samaras and Robert Whitman, . This is when he started his "Happenings".
Chronology of Teaching Institutions
Rutgers University 1953-1956
Pratt Institute 1960-1961
State University of New York at Stony Brook 1961-1966
California Institute of Arts 1966-1974
University of California San Diego 1974-1993
The Happenings
In 1958, Kaprow published the essay "The Legacy of Jackson Pollock". In it he demands a "concrete art" made of everyday materials such as "paint, chairs, food, electric and neon lights, smoke, water, old socks, a dog, movies." In this particular text, he uses the term "happening" for the first time stating that craftsmanship and permanence should be forgotten and perishable materials should be used in art.
The "Happenings" first started as tightly scripted events, in which the audience and performers followed queues to experience the art . 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 viewer's reaction that decided the art piece, making each Happening a unique experience that cannot be replicated. These "Happenings" represent what we now call New Media Art. It is participatory and interactive, with the goal of tearing down the wall a.k.a. "the fourth wall" between artist and observers, so observers are not just "reading" the piece, but also interacting with it, becoming 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 . His work evolved, and became less scripted and incorporated more everyday activities. Another example of a Happening he created involved bringing people into a room containing a large abundance of ice cubes, which they had to touch, causing them to melt and bringing the piece full circle.
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." He rarely recorded his Happenings which made them a one time occurrence.
Kaprow's work attempts to integrate art and life. Through Happenings, the separation between life, art, 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 theater pieces, even if they are rejected by "devotees" of theater 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 theater 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."
Many well-known artists, for example, Claes Oldenburg, cite him as an influence on their work.
His influence is also evident at the California Institute of the Arts, where he taught during his 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
Published works
Assemblage,Environments, and Happenings (1966) presented the work of like-minded artists through both photographs and critical essays, and is a standard text in the field of performance art. Kaprow's Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life (1993), a collection of pieces written over four decades, has made his theories about the practice of art in the present day available to a new generation of artists and critics.
Quotes
See also
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
- 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- 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
- 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
- Allan Kaprow Chronology
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