ced a now-famous event at the secluded Black Mountain College, a free school in the mountains of North Carolina where students and professors lived communally in the 1950s.
Back in New York City, Kaprow, along with other artists who would later join the art movement called Fluxus, studied “musical composition” with John Cage at the New School for Social Research between 1956 and ’58.
Cage is often claimed for the anarchist movement. In the McCarthyite climate of 1950s USA, though, he was not very open about either his politics or his closeted gay identity. The 1952 “happening” he told Kostelanetz in ’67 was “a testing of art against life” (Kostelanetz, p. 52). The question, “What kind of intention were you dealing with at that time?” received the response, “Non-intention.”
Cage was not being evasive. In his art, what happens happens. The artistic event, the Happening, is an open system of rules, a situation designed and set loose in the world. This non-intentionality follows from Cage’s close engagement with Zen and Buddhist thought, and the heresiarch Franco-American artist Marcel Duchamp. Duchamp was addicted to puns, language games, rule-based artistic composition (following the French novelist Raymond Roussel), and the operations of chance. Cage’s ideas, engagements and attitudes also set the aesthetic baseline for subsequent critical and curatorial considerations of “participatory art.”
A Riot in Amsterdam is a “Hap-Hap-Happening!”
Whether Cage’s or Kaprow’s, the mode of art-making which centered around the designed event and the active spectator quickly escaped the precincts of the avant garde artworld. The Happening came to Amsterdam in 1962, with a performance produced with American artists and likely based on one of Kaprow’s. After just a few of those art events, the form took off, evolving into an open-ended type of anti-authoritarian public event. These gatherings, peopled by provocative youth who were given to chanting “Hap- Hap- Happening!” at police, gave rise to the Dutch Provo movement, and with it an inventive anarchist vision for the city.
These street Happenings were animated by curious Amsterdam characters. Chief among these was Robert Jasper Grootveld, a chanting poet-magician and jokester. Grootveld campaigned against tobacco addiction and rampant consumerism. His public projects were bizarre and complex, including the “marihu” campaign, centered around a complex game of inserting packaged substances like marijuana and soliciting police attention and arrests. Grootveld convened street meetings at the statue of a little boy – paid for by a tobacco company – which at one point was set on fire. At his Happenings, Grootveld prophesied that Amsterdam would become a magic center, the home of prophets and hordes of international young people. This transfiguration, Grootveld said and graffitied around town, would be led by a “Klaas,” a mysterious figurehead. In 1965, the “Klaas” Grootveld had prophesied arrived – the Dutch Princess Beatrix married former Nazi soldier Claus Von Amsberg of Germany. The demonstrations against this unpopular alliance in a formerly occupied country launched the Provos as a political movement in Holland.
Magic played a central role in Grootveld’s and other proto-Provo’s adaptation of the Happening form. Perhaps it was a legacy of the Surrealist movement, whose aged chieftain André Breton had delved into the arcana of the Tarot. This decadence of Surrealism (in the view of many younger politicized artists) was probably less significant as an influence than were traditional modes of street performance. Similarly, Peter Schumann claimed a source of inspiration for his Bread and Puppet Theater was the itinerant street puppeteers he watched as a child in Germany.
The Provo movement was supported by Constant (Constant Nieuwenheuys), an artist of the post-war avant-garde CoBrA group. His influential conception of a city of play called New Babylon, was elaborated in drawings and collages of an infinitely adaptable fantasy architecture he had evolved in collaboration with the Situationist