remembering Allan Kaprow
Hoodoo
by Robert C. Morgan, Wolf Kahn and Irving Sandler
http://www.brooklynrail.org/2006-05/art/allan-kaprow-19272006
http://www.brooklynrail.org/article_image/image/187/Kaprow1.jpg
Allan Kaprow. Photograph Courtesy of Hauser & Wirth Zürich London
Allan Kaprow, the Happener
In the late Fifties, the spirit of Dada was revived in Post-World War
II American Art. For Allan Kaprow, the artist who led this revival was
Jackson Pollock. In a famous article, written in 1956 (the year of
Pollock’s death) and published two years later in Art News by the
distinguished editor Thomas Hess, Kaprow claimed that Pollock was less
important for his paintings as material objects than for the kind of
choreographic approach to painting that the artist instigated. This
led Kaprow to explore a concept, close to Dada, in which intermedia
performances involving groups of participants—which came to be known
as “Happenings”—became a new art form. By 1959 Kaprow was exploring a
direction in art where idea and process were considered more important
than the object. Others, like Jim Dine, Robert Whitman, Claes
Oldenburg, and Red Grooms, eventually joined in with their own
versions of this phenomenon. In many ways, Kaprow was as much a link
between Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art as Rauschenberg, Jasper
Johns, or even the sculptor George Segal.
As the Happenings moved from its association with Neo-Dada in the late
Fifties to Fluxus in the early Sixties, it became clear that Kaprow’s
idea was also shifting between avant-garde aesthetics on one hand and
popular culture on the other. By the late Sixties, his work had
indirectly spurred various countercultural phenomena—such as the
“be-ins” and “love-ins”—as well as the massive outdoor rock festivals
of that era. This kind of popularization was not particularly welcomed
by Kaprow, who believed his ideas were being distorted by the
commercial media and, at a certain point, refused to allow journalists
and press photographers admittance to his events. In retrospect,
Kaprow’s Happenings were less “anti-art” than many claimed and were
never entirely devoid of aesthetic interest. As much as he tried to
integrate the art-and-life paradigm by giving his “activities” in the
Seventies a purposefully bland and reductive appearance, Kaprow’s
rarefied, somewhat overdetermined aesthetic became even more
pronounced. As much as he tried to reduce the formal ingredients by
which a Happening could be identified as “art,” its cultural framework
somehow managed to remain indelible. Its spontaneous element was
always guided by the structure of the piece, regardless of its
openness.
Having curated a Kaprow retrospective at the Ulrich Museum of Art in
Kansas in 1979, and then later, in 1987, giving a keynote talk at
another in Texas (curated by Jeff Kelley), I grew increasingly to
admire the importance of this deeply singular artist’s work. Allan
never wanted to be part of a movement nor did he believe that the
market had any real relevance to the future of art. He was forever
committed to art as a medium that could feed and nourish our
understanding of human psychology, sociology, aesthetics, and
politics. Initially influenced by the philosophy of John Dewey and
later by the teachings of Meyer Shapiro, John Cage, and Hans Hofmann,
Kaprow believed in an expanded idea of art—prior to the conceptualists
and long before the advent of postmodernism—that was inextricably
bound to aesthetics and could encompass actions and ideas as much as
objects. Allan Kaprow was always in advance of his time and, in many
ways, he still is.
—Robert C. Morgan
First Nam June Paik. Now Allan Kaprow. Two great innovators, gone.
In 1957, I wrote a review for Art News in which I praised Allan’s
wall-size collage-action-paintings. Raw, raucous, and frenetic, they
introduced a fresh note of urban realism into Abstract Expressionist
painting. I met Allan shortly after, and we became friends.
Allan’s soft-spoken reasonableness belied his iconoclasm. I recall him
taking the floor at the end of a panel at The Club, the Abstract
Expressionist hangout, in 1958 and quietly challenging in the
audience, which consisted primarily of painters. He said: “I am
convinced that painting is a bore. So is music and literature. What
doesn’t bore me is the total destruction of ideas that have any
discipline. Instead of painting, move your arms; instead of music,
make noise. I’m giving up painting and all the arts by doing
everything and anything.” Like his mentor, John Cage, Allan was
calling for artists to break down all barriers between art and
non-art. There was a shocked silence in the room before the painters
turned in fury on Allan. He had anticipated what to expect and
remained calm. The avant-garde art world would never be the same.
In a seminal article, titled “The Legacy of Jackson Pollock,”
published in the October 1958 issue of Art News, Allan predicted that
in the future he and like-minded artists would “become preoccupied
with and even dazzled by the space and objects of everyday life…Not
satisfied with the suggestion through paint of our other senses, we
shall utilize the specific substances of sight, sound, movements,
people, odors, touch. [We shall show] as if for the first time, the
world we have always had about us, but ignored.” The upshot would be a
new kind of visual art theater.
If Allan’s thinking was influenced by Cage, it was also rooted in
Harold Rosenberg’s conception of Action Painting. However, as Allan
said, he had kept the action and jettisoned the painting. He put down
all post-Pollock painting as passé. As a partisan of Abstract
Expressionism, I disagreed strongly with Allan and rebutted his
statements in a letter to Art News. Nonetheless, I recognized the
importance and timeliness of his ideas and invited him to participate
on Club panels. And in 1963, recognizing that he had become the
primary spokesperson for Environments and Happenings, I introduced his
ideas to the general public readership of The New York Post by
publishing a lengthy interview with him in the newspaper.
Statements like the one Allan made at the The Club got him labeled as
a Neo-Dada, but he was not anti-art. In the Post interview, he
acknowledged the importance of Dada for its “healthy hatred for
clichés and smug esthetics,” but he did not “count it as a major
influence on [his] art, either in attitude, subject or method.” He
only rejected what he believed was dead in contemporary art. And his
nay-saying led him to innovate what he would label Environments and
Happenings. As he said, the purpose of these works, like “that of any
art [is] to come to grips with the world, to do something revelatory
which in turn could make things about us more meaningful…This, I
think, is central to the best art, no matter what else it may
superficially be about.”
As I write this appreciation, memories of Allan’s Happenings come back
to mind: happily clambering over a mountain of used tires in the yard
of the Martha Jackson Gallery, or lost in an Environment of words
painted and collaged on the walls of a gallery and three-dimensional
constructions that Allan built within it. The mise-en-scene enveloped
the viewer, calling to the mind the mesh of words—newspaper, magazine,
radio, T.V., etc.—that clutters up our minds. It was a hyper slice of
reality. In 1962, I helped arrange Allan’s most ambitious Happening.
It took place in the nine-story high courtyard of the disused Mills
Hotel on Bleecker Street. As its climax, a huge inverted mountain
descended from the roof onto an upright mountain, the two peaks
figuratively kissing.
I asked Allan if the transience of his works concerned him. He
answered: “No. If the work is of value it will stimulate the creation
of related works later on and thus the tradition will stay alive that
way.” The trail-blazer of Environments and Happenings, Allan
influenced Claes Oldenburg and Jim Dine, among others in the late
1950s. He was also a formative influence on subsequent Installation
Art and Performance Art, which is to be seen everywhere in today’s art
world. Allan’s incisive polemics and the documentation of his work
have been very much alive for almost half a century, and if current
art is any indication, ?will surely live on.
—Irving Sandler
I met Allan Kaprow at the High School of Music and Art in 1942.
(Because of his asthma, his family had moved him from Arizona to New
York.) I remember the first few weeks Allan used to come to school
wearing cowboy hat and boots, talking about horses and all us New York
kids thought he was strange, but we became friends anyway. After
graduation in 1945, while I was away in the navy for a year, Allan had
developed a hemorrhaged ulcer (a result of having argued with his
father over his fate. Mr. Kaprow, the senior, was a self-made lawyer
who wanted his son to follow his footstep instead of being an artist)
which was so severe that they had to take him to the hospital in order
to clean different part of his organs separately. At which point, the
doctor told his father “you’ve got to let that boy do what he wants.”
That was how Allan came to the Hofmann School with me.
Art school was where he wanted to be, but the environment didn’t quite
fit his temperament. Allan wasn’t exactly the most natural painter. He
used to say to me,” Every time I made a brush stroke it was taken from
Kandinsky, Miro or Picasso”, which I responded,” That’s silly. You’re
a student you can afford to be influenced”. But by nature Allan was
too much of a rebel to do anything that has a look of tradition.
One weekend in the summer 1950, I had a job working on a farm in
Hopewell Junction, New Jersey, Allan came by to visit me—he was
staying with Stefan Wolpe, who besides John Cage, I think had an
equally great impact on Allan’s thinking about the avant-garde—and he
said to me, “ Painting is dead ”. That was the summer that marked the
beginning of Allan’s new thinking about art, which he wrote eight
years later in an article, “The Legacy of Jackson Pollock.” In the
interval Allan went to study art history with Meyer Schapiro at
Columbia University and later with John Cage at the New School for
Social Research. One of Allan’s first memorable show, Penny Arcade,
was at Hansa gallery in 1956, with objects and things hanging from the
ceiling and all kind of noises including a telephone ringing at
unpredictable time, which would get Dick Bellamy, who was at the time
the gallery director, running to the telephone for nothing. A few
years later Allan became a member of the Reuben gallery where he
installed his landmark, 18 Happening in 6 Parts. After that, through
George Segal, Allan got a teaching job at Rutgers University and a few
other institutions before heading to California. In spite of the long
distance, we still managed to talk on the telephone quite regularly
when he was at the University of California in San Diego, where he
taught the rest of his professional life.
To my greatest surprise, Allan agreed to give a lecture on my work
when I had a show at the San Diego Museum in 1981. Everyone said it
was highly intelligent and praising of my work, and so I call Allan up
and said: “Gee whiz, I thought you said painting was dead.” He said
“Well you know that was a public statement. Privately, I might think
something else.” Allan kept amazing me. We grew up with the idea that
artists were marginal types who didn’t shake hands with the world at
large. If anybody got popular or started to sell, it was the kiss of
death. But Allan thought that was sophomorically romantic, and he
wrote an article in repudiation,” Should the Artist Be a Man of the
World.” Perhaps Allan’s vision was prophetic because I’m still
struggling to be a man in the world. In the meanwhile I hope that
Allan is doing good Household on Cloud Nine, spreading strawberry jam
over an old Volkswagen and having the angels lick it off.
—Wolf Kahn
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Hyfler/Rosner
"Hoodoo" <hoo...@spamcop.net> wrote in message
news:hnn362di7uhs7bofg...@4ax.com...
> Allan Kaprow (1927-2006)
>
> by Robert C. Morgan, Wolf Kahn and Irving Sandler
> http://www.brooklynrail.org/2006-05/art/allan-kaprow-19272006
>
> http://www.brooklynrail.org/article_image/image/187/Kaprow1.jpg
> Allan Kaprow. Photograph Courtesy of Hauser & Wirth Zürich
> London
> Allan Kaprow, the Happener
Cool. Thanks.