A happening is a performance, event, or situation art , usually as performance art . The term was first used by Allan Kaprow during the 1950s to describe a range of art-related events.
72-566: Allan Kaprow first coined the term "happening" in the spring of 1959 at an art picnic at George Segal 's farm to describe the art pieces being performed. The first appearance in print about one was in Kaprow's famous "Legacy of Jackson Pollock " essay that was published in 1958 but primarily written in 1956. "Happening" also appeared in print in one issue of the Rutgers University undergraduate literary magazine, Anthologist . The form
144-483: A "captive" audience was entangled in string emanating from a vacuum cleaner as it made its rounds (similar to Kaprow's "A Spring Happening", where he used a power lawnmower and huge electric fan to similar effect); Zen Rock Festival in which the central icon was a huge rock with which the audience interacted in unpredictable ways; Black on Black held in the Edmonton Art Gallery; and "Pipe Dream," set in
216-452: 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 cues to experience
288-483: 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
360-418: A dark, narrow corridor and up steps to a platform illuminated by an ordinary light bulb. Girls offered red and white wine to each visitor. Apples and bunches of bananas dangled from the ceiling and a girl fried banana fritters on a hotplate. In a small cave, entered only by climbing a ladder, a performer cut, salted and distributed boiled potatoes. In a log hut, bread and jam were served. Bread was stuffed between
432-411: A fireman wearing a simple costume of white pants and T-shirt with a poncholike cloak and a Smokey Stoverish fireman's helmet. Bill, the 'star' in a tall hat and black overcoat, walked back and forth across the stage with great wooden gestures. Yvonne sat on the floor by a suspended fire engine. She was a blind woman with tin-foil covered glasses and cup. Sylvia played a radio and pulled on hanging junk. For
504-564: A form of composition. One piece, Reunion (1968), written jointly with Lowell Cross features a chess game, where each move triggers a lighting effect or projection. At the premiere, the game was played between John Cage and Marcel Duchamp . Reunion is erroneously attributed to Cage in James Pritchett 's book The Music Of John Cage . Rain Forest is a sound installation created from constructed sculpture and everyday objects such as
576-412: A form of participatory new media art, emphasizing an interaction between the performer and the audience. In his Water , Robert Whitman had the performers drench each other with colored water. "One girl squirmed between wet inner tubes, ultimately struggling through a large silver vulva." Claes Oldenburg , best known for his innovative sculptures, used a vacant house, his own store, and the parking lot of
648-677: A happening by performing her Cut Piece at the Sogetsu Art Center . She walked onto the stage draped in fabric, presented the audience with a pair of scissors, and instructed the audience to cut the fabric away gradually until the performer decided they should stop. This piece was presented again in 1966 at the Destruction in Art Symposium in London, this time allowing the cutting away of her street cloths. In Belgium ,
720-691: A long teaching career, he taught at Rutgers until 1961, Pratt Institute from 1960 to 1961, the State University of New York at Stony Brook from 1961 to 1966, and the California Institute of the Arts from 1966 to 1974, before serving as a full-time faculty member at the University of California, San Diego , where he taught from 1974 to 1993. In 1958, Kaprow published the essay "The Legacy of Jackson Pollock ". In it he demands
792-797: A men's washroom with an all-female "cast". In Australia , the Yellow House Artist Collective in Sydney housed 24-hour happenings throughout the early 1970s. Behind the Iron Curtain in Poland , artist and theater director Tadeusz Kantor staged the first happenings beginning in 1965. In the second half of 1970s painter and performer Krzysztof Jung ran the Repassage gallery, which promoted performance art in Poland. Also in
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#1732786754814864-638: A metal barrel, a vintage computer disk, and plastic tubing which served as a musical accompaniment. (David Tudor and Composers Inside Electronics Inc.: Rain forest V (variation 1)) In 1969, Tudor set up India's first electronic music studio at the National Institute of Design in Ahmedabad. Upon Cage's death in 1992, Tudor took over as music director of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company . Among many works created for
936-400: A moment these proper manners and partake wholly in the real nature of the art and life. It is a rough and sudden act, where one often feels "dirty", and dirt, we might begin to realize, is also organic and fertile, and everything including the visitors can grow a little into such circumstances." Happenings have no plot or philosophy, but rather are materialized in an improvisatory fashion. There
1008-526: A new, modern happening. Starting around 2010, a world-wide group called The Order of the Third Bird started creating flashmob style art appreciation happenings. In 2018 the Prague -based performance and poetics collective OBJECT:PARADISE was established by writers Tyko Say and Jeff Milton. The collective has since aimed to make poetry readings more similar to language happenings which involve
1080-542: A single realisation and then to use that version of the piece in all subsequent recordings". Despite the significant role Tudor had in the creative act, "during his years as a pianist, Tudor never considered himself as a composer, or even a co-composer, of the music he played". However, Benjamin Piekut argues differently, drawing from the work of Bruno Latour . These fixed realisations are examples of 'distributed authorship' where "the conception, meaning and sound-world of
1152-617: A specific site to perform a small action. He gained significant attention in September 1962 for his Words performance at the Smolin Gallery . However, the ritualistic nature of his happenings is nowhere better illustrated than in Eat (1964), which took place in a cave with irregular floors criss-crossed with puddles and streams. As Canadian playwright Gary Botting described it, "The 'visitors' entered through an old door, and walked down
1224-469: A unique experience that cannot be replicated. 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
1296-400: A variety of interdisciplinary acts and performances occurring at the same time. Kaprow explains that happenings are not a new style, but a moral act, a human stand of great urgency, whose professional status as art is less critical than their certainty as an ultimate existential commitment. He argues that once artists have been recognized and paid, they also surrender to the confinement, rather
1368-472: Is John Cage ; he gave the premiere of Cage's Music of Changes , Concert For Piano and Orchestra and the notorious 4' 33" . Cage said that many of his pieces were written either specifically for Tudor to perform or with him in mind, once stating "what you had to do was to make a situation that would interest him . That was the role he played." The two worked closely together on many of Cage's pieces, both works for piano and electronic pieces, including for
1440-500: 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. 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
1512-434: Is no direction thus the outcome is unpredictable. "It is generated in action by a headful of ideas...and it frequently has words but they may or may not make literal sense. If they do, their meaning is not representational of what the whole element conveys. Hence they carry a brief, detached quality. If they do not make sense, then they are acknowledgement of the sound of the word rather than the meaning conveyed by it." Due to
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#17327867548141584-469: Is perhaps the most significant of these early works". David Tudor David Eugene Tudor (January 20, 1926 – August 13, 1996) was an American pianist and composer of experimental music . Tudor was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania . He studied piano with Irma Wolpe and composition with Stefan Wolpe and became known as one of the leading performers of avant garde piano music. He gave
1656-612: The Smithsonian Folkways album: Indeterminacy: New Aspect of Form in Instrumental and Electronic Music (1959) . Tudor also performs on several recordings of Cage's music, including the Mainstream record of Cartridge Music , the recording on Columbia Records of Variations II , and the two Everest records of Variations IV . Tudor selected the works to be performed for the 25th Anniversary Retrospective Concert of
1728-641: The Tiananmen Square protests of 1989 . On 1 May 1999, a Pillar of Shame was set up on the Zócalo in Mexico City and it stood for two days in front of the Parliament to protest the oppression of the region's indigenous people. The non-profit, artist-run organization, iKatun, artist group, The Institute of Infinitely Small Things, has reflected the use of "happenings" influence while incorporating
1800-466: The world . In November 1993 he held the happening my inner beast where twenty sculptures were erected within 55 hours without the knowledge of the authorities all over Europe . Pillar of Shame is a series of Galschiøt's sculptures. The first happening was erected in Hong Kong on 4 June 1997, ahead of the handover from British to Chinese rule on 1 July 1997, as a protest against China's crackdown of
1872-427: The "impermanent art" of Dada. "A happening explores negative space in the same way Cage explored silence. It is a form of symbolism: actions concerned with 'now' or fantasies derived from life, or organized structures of events appealing to archetypal symbolic associations." A "Happening" of the same performance will have different outcomes because each performance depends on the action of the audience. Happenings can be
1944-563: The 1950s and 1960s that performed these happenings helped put "new media technology developments into context". The happenings allowed other artists to create performances that would attract attention to the issue they wanted to portray. In 1959 the French artist Yves Klein first performed Zone de Sensibilité Picturale Immatérielle . The work involved the sale of documentation of ownership of empty space (the Immaterial Zone), taking
2016-475: The 1950s and 1960s, including a number of theatrical productions that were traditionally scripted and invited only limited audience interaction." Another definition is "a purposefully composed form of theatre in which diverse alogical elements, including nonmatrixed performing, are organized in a compartmented structure". However, Canadian theatre critic and playwright Gary Botting , who himself had "constructed" several happenings, wrote in 1972: "Happenings abandoned
2088-533: The American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics in Los Angeles for Injun , World's Fair II and AUT OBO DYS . The idea was to break down the fourth wall between performer and spectator; with the involvement of the spectator as performer, objective criticism is transformed into subjective support. For some happenings, everyone present is included in the making of the art and even the form of
2160-477: 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. In 2013, Dale Eisinger of Complex ranked Yard (1961) sixth in his list of the greatest performance art works, writing, "His first happenings engaged the audience in overwhelming, often playful ways. Yard
2232-625: The French décadent writer Joris-Karl Huysmans and le Marquis de Sade . Then pall-bearers carried the coffin out into a gondola and the 'body'–which was a mechanical sculpture by Jean Tinguely –was ceremonially slid into the canal. Poet and painter Adrian Henri claimed to have organized the first happenings in England in Liverpool in 1962, taking place during the Merseyside Arts Festival. The most important event in London
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2304-627: The New York Scene", "Visitors to a Happening are now and then not sure what has taken place, when it has ended, even when things have gone 'wrong". For when something goes 'wrong', something far more 'right,' more revelatory, has many times emerged". Kaprow's piece 18 Happenings in 6 Parts (1959) is commonly cited as the first happening, although that distinction is sometimes given to a 1952 performance of Theater Piece No. 1 at Black Mountain College by John Cage , one of Kaprow's teachers in
2376-559: 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
2448-674: The a statue Het Lieverdje on the Spui, a square in the centre of Amsterdam , from 1966 till 1968. Police often raided these events. In the 1960s Joseph Beuys , Wolf Vostell , Nam June Paik , Charlotte Moorman , Dick Higgins , and HA Schult staged happenings in Germany. In Canada, Gary Botting created or "constructed" happenings between 1969 (in St. John's, Newfoundland) and 1972 (in Edmonton, Alberta), including The Aeolian Stringer in which
2520-445: The art depends on audience engagement, for they are a key factor in where the performers' spontaneity leads. Later happenings had no set rules, only vague guidelines that the performers follow based on surrounding props. Unlike other forms of art, happenings that allow chance to enter are ever-changing. When chance determines the path the performance will follow, there is no room for failure. As Kaprow wrote in his essay, "'Happenings' in
2592-478: 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
2664-486: The artist's freedom, and artists themselves hold the ultimate power to reject fame if they do not want its responsibilities. Art and music festivals play a large role in positive and successful happenings. Some of the festivals include Burning Man and the Oregon Country Fair near Veneta, Oregon . Along with the famous work of Allan Kaprow , Burning Man frowns on the idea of having spectators and stresses
2736-479: 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
2808-519: The attendees with their messages and ideals. Allan Kaprow Allan Kaprow (August 23, 1927 – April 5, 2006) was an American performance artist, installation artist, painter, and assemblagist . 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
2880-432: The command tells us to do and where it tells us to do it. For example, a user may look at a long list of slogans on the website database section, and may submit, in text, his or her take on the most literal way to act out the slogan/command. The iKatun team will then act out the slogan in a research-performance related way. This means of performance art draws on the collaboration of the web world and tangible reality to conduct
2952-487: The company, Tudor composed Soundings: Ocean Diary (1994), the electronic component of Ocean , which was conceived by John Cage and Merce Cunningham, with choreography by Merce Cunningham, orchestral music by Andrew Culver and design by Marsha Skinner . Tudor died after a series of strokes in Tomkins Cove, New York at the age of 70. From 1951 until the late 1960s, Tudor (mainly as pianist) regularly performed
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3024-710: 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 . In 1973 Allan Kaprow performed with Jannis Kounellis , Wolf Vostell , Robert Filliou , and Mario Merz in Berlin at the ADA - Aktionen der Avantgarde . In 2014 This Is Not A Theatre Company restaged two of Allan Kaprow's Happenings in New York City as part of
3096-419: The convention's nature, there is no such term as "failure" which can be applied. "For when something goes "wrong", something far more "right", more revelatory may emerge. This sort of sudden near-miracle presently is made more likely by chance procedures." As a conclusion, a happening is fresh while it lasts and cannot be reproduced. Regarding happenings, Red Grooms has remarked, "I had the sense that I knew it
3168-406: The darkness and strangeness of the interior of the cave), and mystically (by the 'mystery' of what is beyond the walls of the hut or in the inner cave." In short, 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,
3240-613: 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. Kaprow began teaching at Rutgers University in 1953. While there, he helped to create what would eventually become one branch of the Fluxus group, along with professors Robert Watts , Geoffrey Hendricks and Roy Lichtenstein , artists George Brecht and George Segal , and undergraduates Lucas Samaras and Robert Whitman . Through
3312-641: The exhibit "Allen Kaprow. Other Ways" at the Fundacio Antoni Tapies in Barcelona: Toothbrushing Piece ("performed privately with friends"), and Pose ("Carrying chairs through the city. Sitting down here and there. Photographed. Pix left on the spot. Going on"). He published extensively and was Professor Emeritus in the Visual Arts Department of the University of California, San Diego . Kaprow
3384-409: The finale, I hid behind a false door and shouted pop code words. Then the cast did a wild run around and it ended". Dubbing his 148 Delancey Street studio The Delancey Street Museum, Grooms staged three more happenings there, A Garden , The Burning Building and The Magic Trainride (originally titled Fireman's Dream ). No wonder Kaprow called Grooms "a Charlie Chaplin forever dreaming about fire". On
3456-463: The first American performance of the Piano Sonata No. 2 by Pierre Boulez in 1950, and a European tour in 1954 greatly enhanced his reputation. Karlheinz Stockhausen dedicated his Klavierstück VI (1955) to Tudor. Tudor also gave early performances of works by Morton Feldman , Earle Brown , Christian Wolff and La Monte Young . The composer with whom Tudor is particularly associated
3528-524: The first European happening L'enterrement de la Chose in Venice . For his performance there – called Happening Funeral Ceremony of the Anti-Process – Lebel invited the audience to attend a ceremony in formal dress. In a decorated room within a grand residence, a draped 'cadaver' rested on a plinth which was then ritually stabbed by an 'executioner' while a 'service' was read consisting of extracts from
3600-708: The first happenings were organized around 1965–1968 in Antwerp , Brussels and Ostend by artists Hugo Heyrman and Panamarenko . In the Netherlands , the first documented happening took place in 1961, with the Dutch artist and performer Wim T. Schippers emptying a bottle of soda water in the North Sea near Petten. Later on, he organized random walks in the Amsterdam city centre. Provo organized happenings around
3672-475: The form of a cheque, in exchange for gold ; if the buyer wished, the piece could then be completed in an elaborate ritual in which the buyer would burn the cheque, and Klein would throw half of the gold into the Seine . The ritual would be performed in the presence of an art critic or distinguished dealer, an art museum director and at least two witnesses. In 1960, Jean-Jacques Lebel supervised and participated in
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#17327867548143744-602: The impetus for the event. Happenings flourished in New York City in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Key contributors to the form included Carolee Schneemann , Red Grooms , Robert Whitman , Jim Dine Car Crash , Claes Oldenburg , Robert Delford Brown , Lucas Samaras , and Robert Rauschenberg . Some of their work is documented in Michael Kirby's book Happenings (1966). Kaprow claimed that "some of us will become famous, and we will have proven once again that
3816-483: The importance of everyone being involved to create something amazing and unique. Both parties embody the "audience" and instead of creating something to show people, the audience becomes involved in helping create something incredible and spontaneous for the moment.Both of these events are happenings which are recreated and special each year; they are seen as being always new and organic. The events draw crowds of close to 50,000 people each year and reach more people than just
3888-424: The indeterminate work of John Cage. Throughout this time, "all of the music [Cage] composed", John Holzaepfel contends, "was written with one person in mind", and this person was Tudor. The culmination of this period were works that required a significant imprint of Tudor in performance. Winter Music (1957), for example, comprises a score of twenty pages, that each contain from one to 61 cluster-chords per page, with
3960-529: The logs. The visitors could eat and drink at random for an hour. There was no dialogue other than that used in the interaction of the visitors with the performers." Botting noted that Eat appealed to all the senses and superadded to that was the rhythmic, repeated ticking of metronomes set at the pace of a human heartbeat, simulating ritualistic drumming. Furthermore, "The 'visitors' were involved physically (by being required to walk, eat, drink, etc.), mentally (by being required to follow directions), emotionally (by
4032-440: The matrix of story and plot for the equally complex matrix of incident and event." Kaprow was a student of John Cage , who had experimented with "musical happenings" at Black Mountain College as early as 1952. Kaprow combined the theatrical and visual arts with discordant music. "His happenings incorporated the use of huge constructions or sculptures similar to those suggested by Artaud ," wrote Botting, who also compared them to
4104-456: The medium of internet. Their aim is one which "fosters public engagement in the politics of information". Their project entitled The International Database of Corporate Commands presents a scrutinizing look at the super-saturating advertisements slogans, and "commands" of companies. "The Institute for Infinitely Small Things" uses the commands to conduct research performances, performances in which we attempt to enact, as literally as possible, what
4176-569: The mid-1950s. Cage stood reading from a ladder, Charles Olson read from another ladder, Robert Rauschenberg showed some of his paintings and played wax cylinders of Édith Piaf on an Edison horn recorder, David Tudor performed on a prepared piano and Merce Cunningham danced. All these things took place at the same time, among the audience rather than on a stage. Cage credited a collaborative close reading of Antonin Artaud 's The Theatre and Its Double with M.C. Richards and David Tudor as
4248-669: The music of John Cage (May 16, 1958), and performed in the premiere of the Concert For Piano and Orchestra given as the closing work for that concert. Moreover, Tudor received a Foundation for Contemporary Arts John Cage Award (1992). After a stint teaching at Darmstadt from 1956 to 1961, Tudor began to wind up his activities as a pianist to concentrate on composing. He wrote mostly electronic works, many commissioned by Cage's partner, choreographer Merce Cunningham . His homemade musical circuits are considered landmarks in live electronic music and electrical instrument building as
4320-661: The only success occurred when there was a lack of it". In 1963 Wolf Vostell made the happening TV-Burying at the Yam Festival in coproduction with the Smolin Gallery and in 1964 the happening You in Great Neck, New York which is on Long Island . During the summer of 1959, Red Grooms along with others (Yvonne Andersen, Bill Barrell, Sylvia Small and Dominic Falcone) staged the non-narrative "play" Walking Man , which began with construction sounds, such as sawing. Grooms recalls, "The curtains were opened by me, playing
4392-455: The opening night of The Burning Building , Bob Thompson solicited an audience member for a light, since none of the cast had one, and this gesture of spontaneous theater recurred in eight subsequent performances. The Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama staged nude happenings during the late '60s in New York City. Happenings emphasize the organic connection between art and its environment. Kaprow supports that "happenings invite us to cast aside for
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#17327867548144464-529: The performer deciding which of these to play. In his realisations of these scores, Tudor "pin[ned] them down like butterflies", making the indeterminate determined, such that each performance of these works was consistent with the last. He chose to 'fix' his interpretation, such that he never improvised from the score, and rather each performance of Winter Music by Tudor was consistent across time. As Martin Iddon explains: "Tudor's practice was, broadly, to create
4536-562: The second half of the 1980s, a student-based happening movement Orange Alternative founded by Major Waldemar Fydrych became known for its much attended happenings (over 10 thousand participants at one time) aimed against the military regime led by General Jaruzelski and the fear blocking the Polish society ever since martial law had been imposed in December 1981. Since 1993 the artist Jens Galschiøt has had political happenings all over
4608-415: The ski lift and again as they watched themselves riding the ski lift on the monitors. 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
4680-596: The study of normal human activity in a way congruent to ordinary life. Fluxus , performance art , and installation art were, in turn, influenced by his work. Because of a chronic illness Kaprow was forced to move from New York to Tucson, Arizona. He began his early education in Tucson where he attended boarding school. Later he would attend the High School of Music and Art in New York where his fellow students were
4752-410: The tastes of the patrons (even if that may not be the intention on both ends). "The whole situation is corrosive, neither patrons nor artists comprehend their role...and out of this hidden discomfort comes a stillborn art, tight or merely repetitive and at worst, chic." Though the we may easily blame those offering the temptation, Kaprow reminds us that it is not the publicist's moral obligation to protect
4824-406: The theater of the oppressed by becoming the actors. His goal was to allow the downtrodden to act out the forces oppressing them in order to mobilize the people into political action. Both Kaprow and Boal are reinventing theater to try to make plays more interactive and to abolish the traditional narrative form to make theater something more free-form and organic. Allan Kaprow 's and other artists of
4896-469: Was as remote from anything artistic as the site was." He rarely recorded his Happenings which made them a one time occurrence. At the 1971 International Design Conference at Aspen , Kaprow directed a happening called "Tag" on the Aspen Highlands ski lift which focused on one of the conference themes: "the technological revolution". Using five video cameras and monitors, he recorded people riding
4968-530: Was here that he started with a style of action painting , which greatly influenced his Happenings pieces in years to come. He went on to study 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
5040-625: Was imitated and the term was adopted by artists across the U.S. , Germany , and Japan . Jack Kerouac referred to Kaprow as "The Happenings man", and an ad showing a woman floating in outer space declared, "I dreamt I was in a happening in my Maidenform brassiere". Happenings are difficult to describe, in part because each one is unique. One definition comes from Wardrip-Fruin and Montfort in The New Media Reader , "The term 'happening' has been used to describe many performances and events, organized by Allan Kaprow and others during
5112-496: Was something. I knew it was something because I didn't know what it was. I think that's when you're at your best point. When you're really doing something, you're doing it all out, but you don't know what it is." The lack of plot as well as the expected audience participation can be likened to Augusto Boal's Theater of the Oppressed , which also claims that "spectator is a bad word". Boal expected audience members to participate in
5184-637: Was the Albert Hall " International Poetry Incarnation " on June 11, 1965, where an audience of 7,000 people witnessed and participated in performances by some of the leading avant-garde young British and American poets of the day (see British Poetry Revival and Poetry of the United States ). One of the participants, Jeff Nuttall , went on to organize a number of further happenings, often working with his friend Bob Cobbing , sound poet and performance poet . In Tokyo in 1964, Yoko Ono created
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