Kaprow began to investigate the effect on space through the incorporation of three-dimensional and found objects into his work.
Each time Rearrangeable Panels was exhibited, the curator or artist would be forced to make choices about how to configure the panels, foreshadowing Kaprow's use of audience participation. Kaprow challenges the notion of artistic authorship through this collaborative element of construction and in its unique response to each site in which it is placed.
In this happening, the public was invited to complete a number of tasks using instructions outlined in a score. Kaprow used music theory with new developments in electronic music, theatre, and dance, all combined within a pioneering structure that demanded participatory involvement.
Kaprow authorized a reinvention of this piece just a few weeks before his death and it was performed in Munich's Haus der Kunst in November of A gallery divided into three rooms, semitransparent plastic sheets painted and collaged with references to Kaprow's earlier work, panels with words roughly painted, rows of plastic fruit, artist's hand-lettered instructions and programs, vintage posters, photographs, and videotapes - Photos and archives: Allan Kaprow Archives, the Getty Research Institute.
In this seminal work he recreated a junkyard, an immersive environment with which the audience interacted. This work contained a high element of play, but within the boundaries Kaprow had prefixed.
The piece illustrates sculpture's expansion in scale and the increasingly blurred boundaries between a "life like" and an "art like" art. In Kaprow's determination, there was no distinction between the viewer and the artwork; the viewer became part of the piece. Words , exhibited at the Smolin Gallery in New York in , takes the audience on a journey through two rooms, encouraging them to contribute to written and verbal components as they progress. Through this interactive environment, Kaprow denotes "urban text" referencing graffiti, billboards, newspapers, overheard conversations, and a lecture, engaging the viewer in a multi-sensory experience that literally brings "words" to life.
The importance of this piece is based in the responsibility of the viewer to become part of the creative process beyond passive involvement. Fluids is one of Kaprow's most ambitious works. In it, he recruited groups of local residents to build huge ice structures in various locations in Pasadena, CA during a mid career retrospective. The original "score" for the piece was displayed on a poster. The idea of collective action resulting in the inevitable melting of the ice was a comment on the obsolete nature of human labor - a "dystopian allegory of capitalist production and consumption," refuting the permanence of the art object.
Documentation of the event includes photographs, film, the billboard score, the artist's notes and drawings, letters and press clippings. This wall construction consists of various found elements with a mirror placed in the center. The name suggests a personal connection with Kaprow, though the photographs, found in a rented farmhouse, were of the Rubin family who owned the house. When catching their reflection, the viewer is unwittingly implicated in a participatory role, completing the piece.
Grandma's Boy uses participation to give meaning to its form and illustrates Kaprow's move towards a more personal focus in his work. Gift of Rhett and Robert Delford Brown.
He began by trading the soil in his garden for the "Buddhist dirt" of the center. This was then traded with various types of dirt collected by Kaprow. This sequence of events went on sporadically for three years, each exchange accompanied by an anecdote, recorded on film.
Kaprow presents dirt as a metaphor that only gains meaning as it is exchanged or "traded. Content compiled and written by Sarah Jenkins. Edited and published by The Art Story Contributors. The Art Story.
But what I believe is clearly discernible is that the entire painting comes out at the participant I shall call him that, rather than observer right into the room.
It is possible to see in this connection how Pollock is the terminal result of a gradual trend that moved from the deep space of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, to the building out from the canvas of the Cubist collages. Hence, although up on the wall, these marks surround us as they did the painter at work, so strict a correspondence has there been achieved between his impulse and the resultant art.
What we have then, is a type of art which tends to lose itself out of bounds, tends to fill our world with itself, an art which, in meaning, looks, impulse, seems to break fairly sharply with the traditions of painters back to at least the Greeks. If so, it is an exceedingly important step, and in its superior way, offers a solution to the complaints of those who would have us put a bit of life into art.
But what do we do now? One is to continue in this vein. The other is to give up the making of paintings entirely, I mean the single, flat rectangle or oval as we know it. It has been seen how Pollock came pretty close to doing so himself.
In the process, he came upon some newer values which are exceedingly difficult to discuss, yet they bear upon our present alternative.
He was, for me, amazingly childlike, capable of becoming involved in the stuff of his art as a group of concrete facts seen for the first time. There is, as I said earlier, a certain blindness, a mute belief in everything he does, even up to the end. I urge that this be not seen as a simple issue.
The crudeness of Jackson Pollock is not, therefore, uncouth or designed as such; it is manifestly frank and uncultivated, unsullied by training, trade secrets, finesse—a directness which the European artists he liked hoped for and partially succeeded in, but which he never had to strive after because he had it by nature.
This by itself would be enough to teach us something. It does. Pollock, as I see him, left us at the point where we must become preoccupied with and even dazzled by the space and objects of our everyday life, either our bodies, clothes, rooms, or, if need be, the vastness of Forty-Second Street.
Not satisfied with the suggestion through paint of our other senses, we shall utilize the specific substances of sigh, sound, movements, people, odors, touch. Objects of every sort are materials for the new art: paint, chairs, food, electric and neon lights, smoke, water, old socks, a dog, movies, a thousand other things which will be discovered by the present generation of artists.
Not only will these bold creators show us, as if for the first time, the world we have always had about us, but ignored, but they will disclose entirely unheard of happenings and events, found in garbage cans, police files, hotel lobbies, seen in store windows and on the streets, and sensed in dreams and horrible accidents. An odor of crushed strawberries, a letter from a friend or a billboard selling Draino; three taps on the front door, a scratch, a sigh or a voice lecturing endlessly, a blinding staccato flash, a bowler hat—all will become materials for this new concrete art.
He will not try to make them extraordinary. Only their real meaning will be stated. But out of nothing he will devise the extraordinary and then maybe nothingness as well. People will be delighted or horrified, critics will be confused or amused, but these, I am sure, will be the alchemies of the s.
All Rights reserved. February 9, pm. Powered by WordPress. Our Sites. Close the menu Menu. ARTnews Expand the sub menu. Art In America Logo Expand the sub menu. Despite their name, happenings were actually tightly planned and participative. Like the Black Mountain untitled event of , the environments, actions, sound, light and the timing were all integral parts of 18 Happenings in 6 Parts. Once people arrived at the second floor loft space of the Reuben Gallery they were given a programme of events, and instructions on how to behave, including when to take their seats or move between the three spaces, or when applause was appropriate at the very end only.
Lasting for ninety minutes, the eighteen simultaneous performances included painters painting on canvases, a procession of performers, readings from placards, the playing of musical instruments, and ended with two performers saying single-syllable words like 'but' and 'well' as four huge scrolls fell from a horizontal bar between them.
The end of the event was signalled by a bell ringing twice. In many ways these events brought out the ideas of chance encounters, and of giving significance to everyday events. No doubt some were bemused by the goings on, and what to make of them, but regardless, happenings took off.
Until it was cool no longer.
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