s of the 1950s and ‘60s which have the most direct relevance for artists working in modes of social sculpture today are those that sprang out of the CoBrA, Situationist and Fluxus movements – all self-conscious descendants of Dada, the original modernist virus of anti-art.
From Action Painting to Acting Strange
Strangely enough, the story of contemporary social sculpture begins with avant-garde post-Cubist painting, more specifically, an interpretation of the work of Jackson Pollock.
Critics saw many things in Pollock’s revolutionary drip pantings: chaos, post-nuclear landscape, an allover formal breakthrough for modernist art, pure action as an image. Clement Greenberg’s idea that Pollock marked a degree zero of painting, a new starting point for post-Cubist medium specific abstract art was the most influential. Allan Kaprow’s interpretation of this work was different from most. Kaprow looked past the painting itself, past the object of art, at what Harold Rosenberg called the action in this action painting.
In a 1958 article on Pollock in Art News, Kaprow observed that Pollock painted his canvases on the floor, and that his marks extended past the boundaries of the canvas. Kaprow illustrated the article with one of Hans Namuth’s pictures of Pollock painting in 1950, taken from above. In another of Namuth’s photographs, the painter can be seen stepping into the canvas. In this action Kaprow, a painter himself, discerned an artistic impulse that was ready to break into the world beyond the canvas – out of the realm of illusion and abstract idealism into the world of the everyday.
Kaprow worked on this idea as he worked his art away from painting. By 1957 he was making “arrangements” of unusual materials, then “environments” for the viewer to experience, not just look at. In 1957 and ’58 he began to develop a series of actions he called Happenings. The big one was “18 Happenings in 6 Parts” (1959). It was a kind of theater piece, but it wasn’t. There was no script, and the “actors,” everyday artist folks Kaprow knew, did not act, really, they only performed everyday kinds of actions according to a carefully worked out score. It was more like a dance piece than a stage play. The set for “18 Happenings” included clear plastic sheeting with painting on it – paintings you could see through. The performers lined up very formally, like statues, like dancers – and carried out their actions simply and matter-of-factly.
In other works, Kaprow gathered together huge piles of old tires (for Yard, 1961, in the small open air courtyard of Martha Jackson’s art gallery). He made a labyrinth of hand-painted paper signs, through which people could wander (Words, 1961). In another, audience members were invited to make jelly sandwiches with automobiles as bread. In another, participants built a roofless bunker out of blocks of ice.
Kaprow was soon joined in this curious way of working by other New York artists, among them Claes Oldenburg, Jim Dine, Robert Whitman, and Al Hansen. Some called these events “painters’ theater.” These artists used various different means to create strange and unusual public events featuring their friends. All of these “happenings” shared a common difference from the conventions of theater, with a script, plot, and characters. They were more likely to be drawn from the events of daily life, on the street, in the house, around the artists’ studio.
The Happenings were tremendously successful in that they inspired artists around the world. The new art form unleashed a flood of performative public works by artists with myriad concerns.
One Method, Many Authors
This Kaprow-centric picture is a little simple, and certainly patriarchal. Kaprow was a fluent and often published writer who became a virtual technician of the art form he named. Yet the Happening was developed by many artists who knew each other working simultaneously. Richard Kostelanetz lists 15 well-known artists who made Happenings in New York between 1952 and 1966. Yes, 1952. That was the year composer John Cage and art student Robert Rauschenberg produ