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58-475: At his gallery, Seth Siegelaub Contemporary Art, operating between the fall of 1964 and April 1966, for one exhibition Siegelaub encouraged visitors to lounge on couches and chairs to appreciate the show as an overall environment and hosted a four-day happening featuring the artist Arni Hendin. He was an aggressive promoter and paid as much attention to press and publicity as to the content of exhibitions, showing that even unconventional artwork could be sold. After

116-520: 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 the impetus for the event. Happenings flourished in New York City in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Key contributors to

174-483: 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

232-411: 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

290-678: 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 ,

348-799: 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

406-706: A mirror, light, and sound installation for the Art and Technology exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1971. They developed an optical system that allowed real images to float in space, to appear and disappear in an environment made up of a wall array of 6-inch corner reflectors in which the visitors saw multiple images of themselves. Whitman was one of the co-founders of Experiments in Art and Technology along with engineers Billy Klüver and Fred Waldhauer and artist Robert Rauschenberg -

464-400: 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

522-531: 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

580-587: A project to provide contemporary artists with access to new technology as it developed in research institutions and laboratories. Whitman was one of the core artists for the Pepsi Pavilion at Expo '70, Osaka Japan, a project administered by E.A.T. One of the main features of the interior of the Pavilion was the central performance space in a 90 ft diameter 120 degree spherical mirror made of aluminized reflective PET film, which produced real images of

638-548: A series of performance artworks presented October 13–23 in 1966 at the 69th Regiment Armory in New York City . For this piece, Two Holes of Water- 3 , Whitman used seven automobiles on the floor of the Armory, from which were projected film, over-the-air television programs, and closed-circuit television projections of live performances and actions, including images from one of the first fiber-optic miniature video cameras. A retrospective, Robert Whitman: Theater Works, 1960–1976

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696-402: 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

754-568: A wide range of new and original formats, including several important group shows, such as "The Xeroxbook" in December 1968, and "January 5–31, 1969" exhibition, which contained no objects, no paintings and no sculptures. He was also the originator and author, with lawyer Robert Projansky, of " The Artist's Reserved Rights Transfer and Sale Agreement ," published in 1971, which has been translated and published in French, Italian, German and Dutch. At

812-404: 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 the matrix of story and plot for the equally complex matrix of incident and event." Kaprow

870-496: 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. 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

928-499: 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 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

986-435: 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

1044-842: The Pace Wildenstein Gallery in New York City in 2002. In 2003 the Dia Art Foundation , in New York presented, Playback, a large-scale retrospective exhibition of Whitman’s works. The exhibition traveled to Porto, Portugal , and opened at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Barcelona , Spain in September 2005. A major book, Playback , a comprehensive study of his work, accompanied this exhibition. In

1102-643: 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

1160-466: 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

1218-512: 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

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1276-571: The First New York Theater Rally in New York in 1965; Prune Flat was first presented at the Cinematheque in New York in 1965 and has been performed numerous times since. In 1966, Whitman was one of the 10 New York artists who worked with Billy Klüver and more than 30 engineers and scientists from Bell Telephone Laboratories to create works that incorporated new technology for 9 Evenings: Theatre and Engineering ,

1334-628: 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

1392-674: 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

1450-662: The age of 88. Whitman was a member of the group of visual artists - Allan Kaprow , Red Grooms , Jim Dine , and Claes Oldenburg - who in the early 1960s presented theater pieces on the Lower East Side in Manhattan . Whitman presented more than 40 theater pieces in the United States and abroad, including American Moon , E.G. and Mouth at the Rueben Gallery. Night Time Sky was his contribution to

1508-490: 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

1566-436: The attendees with their messages and ideals. Robert Whitman Robert Whitman (May 23, 1935 – January 19, 2024) was an American artist best known for his seminal theater pieces of the early 1960s combining visual and sound images, actors, film, slides, and evocative props in environments of his own making. From the late 1960s on he worked with new technologies, and his latest work incorporated cellphones . Whitman

1624-547: The close of the gallery he gradually became, in Joseph Kosuth 's words, a "curator-at-large". He was the first exhibition organizer to specialize in dealing with conceptual art , holding group exhibitions that had no existence outside of the catalogue, and was an active "independent curator", organizing 21 art exhibitions, books, catalogues and projects, throughout the USA, Canada and Europe between February 1968 and July 1971 in

1682-433: 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

1740-421: 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

1798-771: The early 1970s, developed and participated in a number of innovative communications projects : - Anand Project: he was part of an interdisciplinary team to develop methods for instructional television programming for rural Indian villages; - Children and Communications, open environments for children to work with a variety of communication equipment; - Telex: Q&A: a worldwide person-to-person question and answer opportunity using telex equipment in New York, Stockholm, Ahmedabad, India, and Tokyo; - Artists and Television, artists’ programming on New York cable channels. In 1972, Whitman produced his first telephone piece, NEWS, in which participants, using pay phones , called in reports which were broadcast live over radio station WBAI . NEWS

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1856-698: The fall of 2004, Whitman presented a theater performance, Antenna , in Leeds , England, sponsored by Lumens, as part of the New Media Festival there. Whitman collaborated with engineers on installations and works that incorporate new technology: laser sculptures, including Solid Red Line , in which a red line draws itself around the walls of a room and then erases itself and Pon , a sound-activated metallized PET film mirror installation shown at The Jewish Museum in New York City in 1969. His long collaboration with optics scientist John Forkner began with

1914-411: 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

1972-524: 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

2030-708: 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

2088-503: 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 the only success occurred when there was a lack of it". In 1963 Wolf Vostell made

2146-477: 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

2204-642: 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

2262-485: 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

2320-457: 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

2378-458: 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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2436-599: 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 the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics in Los Angeles for Injun , World's Fair II and AUT OBO DYS . The idea

2494-640: 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 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)

2552-432: 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 a form of participatory new media art, emphasizing an interaction between

2610-506: 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

2668-410: 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

2726-407: 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

2784-731: The turn of the 21st century, he founded the Stichting Egress Foundation in Amsterdam to bring together his varied range of projects: contemporary art, textile history, time & causality research, and left communications study. Siegelaub was born in the Bronx , New York, grew up in New York City, and resided in Amsterdam , the Netherlands. He died in Basel, Switzerland on June 15, 2013. Happening A happening

2842-481: The visitors hanging upside down in space. Significant one-person exhibitions of Whitman's sculpture and installation pieces include shows at The Museum of Modern Art in New York, The Hudson River Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, and Thielska Galleriet, Stockholm. Whitman enjoyed one person gallery exhibitions at PaceWildenstein in New York, and his work has been included in many group exhibitions. Whitman, working with Experiments in Art and Technology , E.A.T., in

2900-419: 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 the "impermanent art" of Dada. "A happening explores negative space in

2958-686: Was born in Manhattan , New York City , on May 23, 1935, and moved to Englewood, New Jersey , at the age of 10, after his father's death. He attended the local public schools and the Englewood School for Boys (now part of Dwight-Englewood School ). Whitman studied literature at Rutgers University from 1953 to 1957 and art history at Columbia University in 1958. He was represented by the Pace Gallery in New York. Whitman died at his home in Warwick, New York , on January 19, 2024, at

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3016-532: Was held in 1976 sponsored by the Dia Art Foundation and presented six earlier works and the premiere of Light Touch . His theater works have been presented at the Galerie Maeght Festival in France, Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston , Texas, Moderna Museet , Stockholm ; Walker Art Center , Vera List Art Center at MIT , and many more. Ghost , his most recent theater performance, was staged at

3074-571: 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 the 1950s and 1960s, including a number of theatrical productions that were traditionally scripted and invited only limited audience interaction." Another definition

3132-463: Was performed later in Houston, Minneapolis, and other cities over a two- or three-year period. A later performance in Leeds , England in 2002, utilized cell phones, and the calls were broadcast in real time on large speakers in a public square in the town. A recording of the performance was made available by the sponsor, Lumens , at Ubuweb . In the summer of 2005, Whitman presented Local Report ,

3190-477: 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 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

3248-497: 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

3306-574: 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

3364-449: 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 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

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