Allan Kaprow; NY Times obit (Happenings guy)
Hyfler/Rosner
NY Times
Holland Cotter
Allan Kaprow, Creator of Artistic 'Happenings,' Dies at 78
Allan Kaprow, an artist who coined the term "happenings" in
the late 1950's and whose anti-art, audience-participation
works contributed to radical changes in the course of
late-20th-century art, died on Wednesday at his home in
Encinitas, Calif., near San Diego. He was 78.
He died of natural causes after a long illness, said Tamara
Bloomberg, his studio manager.
Mr. Kaprow was born in Atlantic City and began his career as
an abstract painter in New York City in the 1940's, studying
with Hans Hofmann. Inspired by the swirling drips and
spatters of Jackson Pollock, and focusing on the idea of the
painting as a physical event rather than as the production
of an object, Mr. Kaprow pushed the "action painting"
aesthetic in multimedia directions, at first by bulking up
his canvas surfaces with hunks of straw and wadded
newspapers and adding movable parts that viewers were
invited to manipulate.
He called the results "action collages" and predicted, in a
1958 article in Art News, that in the art of the future
action would predominate over painting and an increasing
array of materials would come into play, including "chairs,
food, electric and neon lights, smoke, water, old socks, a
dog, movies, and a thousand other things." His own collages
began to develop into room-filling environments that would
pave the way for the installation art and performance art of
today.
Along with Pollock, Mr. Kaprow's other great influence was
the composer John Cage, with whom he studied from 1956 to
1958 at the New School for Social Research. He was
particularly interested in Cage's Zen-inspired reliance on
chance as an organizing, or disorganizing, element in art.
Like Cage, he used a combination of choice and accident as a
way of creating nonverbal, quasi-theatrical situations in
which performers functioned as kinetic objects, the role of
the single artist-genius was de-emphasized, audience members
became creative participants, and no clear distinction was
made between everyday actions and ritual.
The first such work, "Eighteen Happenings in Six Parts,"
took place in October 1959 at the Reuben Gallery in
Manhattan, which Mr. Kaprow had co-founded. Although later
the term "happening" would come to mean spontaneous,
celebratory group behavior, Mr. Kaprow's early events were
scripted assemblages of movement, sound, scent and light,
with instructions given to performers and viewers alike. In
the October 1959 version, spectators moved, on cue, to
different parts of the gallery to experience a woman
squeezing oranges, artists painting and a concert played on
toy instruments.
Throughout his career Mr. Kaprow, who referred to himself as
an "un-artist," created happenings outside galleries and
museums, in lofts, stores, gymnasiums and parking lots. An
element of absurdity was never far away: with the assistance
of viewer-workers, he built houses from ice in Southern
California and, in 1970, constructed a wall of bread with
jelly as mortar near the Berlin Wall.
Mr. Kaprow was only one of the several artists involved in
inventing happenings as a form: Jim Dine, Red Grooms, Claes
Oldenburg, Robert Watts and Robert Whitman continued to use
it. But he eventually stopped creating large public events
in favor of what he called "activities" - intimate, personal
pieces for a small number of participants. People in pairs,
for example, would breathe into each other's mouths, or
sweep the street, or go shopping.
In some case, Mr. Kaprow himself was the sole participant
and audience, as in a 1980's piece that focused on the
details of his daily tooth-brushing at home. He documented
these private works in small booklets of instructions that
read like Concrete poetry.
As an undergraduate at New York University, Mr. Kaprow was
much influenced by John Dewey's book "Art as Experience." He
did graduate work in art history at Columbia University with
Meyer Schapiro, for whom he wrote a master's thesis on
Mondrian. He taught at Rutgers University, Pratt Institute,
the State University of New York at Stony Brook, California
Institute of the Arts and, from 1974 to 1993, the University
of California at San Diego.
He was a prolific and personable writer, and much of his
work is collected in "Essays on the Blurring of Art and
Life," edited by Jeff Kelley and published by the University
of California Press in 1993. Mr. Kelley's book on the
artist, "Childsplay: The Art of Allan Kaprow," was published
by the same press in 2004.
That book has a foreword by the poet and performer David
Antin, a longtime colleague of Mr. Kaprow, in which Mr.
Antin describes a piece from the late 1980's that required a
participant to carry cinder blocks, one at a time, up five
flights of stairs, then down again. The number of blocks
corresponded to the carrier's age. "I know that Allan sees
his work as 'un-art,' " Mr. Antin concludes, "and wants to
see its separation from art, envisioning it as simply an
articulation of meaningful experiences from ordinary life.
I'm sympathetic to this intention, but I find it hard to
distinguish the existential power of this piece, which now
exists only in the telling, from that of any other great
work of art I've ever encountered."
Mr. Kaprow is survived by his second wife, Coryl Crane; two
sons, Bram, of Encinitas, and Anton, of Altadena, Calif.;
two daughters, Amy, of Berkeley, Calif., and Marisa, of
Pacific Beach, Calif.; and three grandchildren.