ew, 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 produced 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 i