What Did Allan Kaprow View as the Significant Preoccupation of Art?
"The line between the Happening and daily life should be kept as fluid, and perhaps indistinct, as possible."
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"My art is the result of a deeply personal, infinitely complex, and still essentially mysterious, exploration of experience. No words will ever touch it."
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"Words, sounds, human beings in motion, painted constructions, electrical lights, movies and slides - and perhaps in the future, smells - all in continuous space involving the spectator or audience; those are the ingredients. Several or all of them may exist used in combination at any in one case, which permits me a great range of possibilities."
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"It was a dissatisfaction with the limitations of pure abstract painting. Nobody knew what the work could or should look like. Each private'southward freedom was encouraged. Since nobody knew what the new art should look like, each of united states of america was free to invent our own solution."
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Summary of Happenings
What began as a challenge to the category of "art" initiated past the Futurists and Dadaists in the 1910s and 1920s came to fruition with Functioning Art, one branch of which was referred to every bit Happenings. Happenings involved more the discrete ascertainment of the viewer; the artist engaged with Happenings required the viewer to actively participate in each piece. In that location was not a definite or consistent style for Happenings, as they profoundly varied in size and intricacy. All the same, all artists staging Happenings operated with the fundamental belief that art could be brought into the realm of everyday life. This plough toward performance was a reaction against the long-standing dominance of the technical aesthetics of Abstruse Expressionism and was a new art form that grew out of the social changes occurring in the 1950s and 1960s.
Key Ideas & Accomplishments
- A main component of Happenings was the interest of the viewer. Each example a Happening occurred the viewer was used to add in an chemical element of hazard so, every time a piece was performed or exhibited it would never be the same every bit the previous time. Unlike preceding works of fine art which were, past definition, static, Happenings could evolve and provide a unique meet for each individual who partook in the experience.
- The concept of the ephemeral was important to Happenings, equally the performance was a temporary feel, and, as such could not be exhibited in a museum in the traditional sense. The merely artifacts remaining from original Happenings are photographs and oral histories. This was a claiming to the fine art that had previously been defined by the art object itself. Art was now defined by the action, action, occasion, and/or experience that constituted the Happening, which was fundamentally fleeting and immaterial.
- The purpose of Happenings was to confront and dismantle conventional views of the category of "art." These performances were so influential to the art world that they raised the specter of the "death" of painting.
Overview of Happenings
Happenings were inspired by the performances of Futurists who would enact curt avant-garde plays and read their manifestoes and poetry on phase. The Futurist tendency to interruption the "quaternary wall" and elicit audience participation became a central idea in the Happening: the absence of boundaries between the viewer and the artwork meant the artwork became defined by the activity equally opposed to the concrete, or resulting, object.
Key Artists
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Allan Kaprow was an American painter, collagist, assemblagist and functioning creative person. Kaprow was best known for trailblazing the artistic concept "happenings," which were experiential artistic events rather than single works of fine art.
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John Cage was an American composer and conceptual creative person who incorporated chance, silence, and environmental effects into his performances. An important fine art theorist, he influenced choreographers, musicians, and the Fluxus artists of the 1970s.
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Carolee Schneemann is an American visual artist, known for her discourses on the body, sexuality and gender. Her work is primarily characterized past research into visual traditions, taboos, and the body of the private in relationship to social bodies. Schneemann'southward works accept been associated with a variety of fine art classifications including Fluxus, Neo-Dada, the Beat out Generation, and happenings.
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American sculptor and painter George Segal is best known for his life-size plaster bandage figures, often in monochromatic white. He also worked with artists such as John Muzzle and Allan Kaprow at Rutgers University in the 1950s and 60s; Kaprow'due south famous "happenings" performances first took place on Segal's farm in New Jersey.
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George Brecht's artworks and musical compositions offered a different edge than the artists of the time and Neo-Dada peers. And he fabricated important works synthetic from everyday objects designed for viewer interaction.
Do Not Miss
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Fluxus was an international network of artists of the 1960s who worked in fields ranging from music to performance to the visual arts. Taking their name from the Latin 'to flow,' Fluxus artists adopted an often anarchic and satirical approach to conventional forms of art, and their ideas paved the manner for Conceptual art.
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Neo-Dada refers to works of art from the 1950s that use popular imagery and modern materials, often resulting in something absurd. Neo-Dada is both a continuation of the earlier Dada motility and an important forerunner to Popular art. Some important Neo-Dada artists include Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Robert Morris and Allan Kaprow.
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Performance is a genre in which art is presented "live," normally by the artist simply sometimes with collaborators or performers. It has had a function in avant-garde art throughout the twentieth century, playing an of import office in anarchic movements such equally Futurism and Dada. It peculiarly flourished in the 1960s, when Operation artists became preoccupied with the body, but information technology continues to be an of import aspect of art practice.
Important Art and Artists of Happenings
American Moon (1960)
American Moon by Robert Whitman was showtime performed at the Reuben Gallery in New York. The piece consisted of six paper tunnels that radiated outwards from the performance area in which the audition would sit to lookout piles of cloth being moved accompanied past various sounds. Defunction with grids of newspaper were then hung in front end of the tunnels and a motion-picture show was projected onto them while performers made slight movements to the cloth causing distortions in the movie. At the end of the screening the tunnels were ripped down and the curtains removed. Lights flashed as figures rolled on the floor, a behemothic plastic balloon was rolled around and someone swung on a trapeze, all to a soundtrack of a vacuum cleaner. Whitman called these works "abstract theater" every bit abstracted sounds and images were a significant attribute of his work. In the variety of frenzied activity, Whitman claimed his work was much like a three-ring circus.
K (1961)
Yard by Kaprow involved the random handful and piling of tires over the floor and an invitation to visitors to climb over them. This piece was supposedly in response to Jackson Pollock'southward "drip" paintings: the incorporation of hazard as a mainstay of the work, but with a certain amount of control left to the artist. Just every bit Pollock had a certain amount of power over his drip paintings, aesthetics were still very much subject to chance. Here Kaprow used the tires as Pollock used his paint. The result- a haphazard pile of tires however circumscribed into a semblance of compositional social club- is a three-dimensional translation of Pollock's practice. Kaprow's pieces often involved materials from everyday life, including people; Kaprow stated, "Life is much more interesting than art." Chiliad, like many Happenings, has been recreated several times since Kaprow's initial installation, and each time a unique artwork is produced.
Stamp Vendor (1961)
Postage Vendor involved stamps that artist Robert Watts created and placed inside of actual stamp dispensers that Watts "borrowed" from the United States Post Role. The "borrowing" (stealing) was in protest of certain policies of the United States government at the time Watts deemed oppressive. The stamp dispensers were put on brandish in exhibitions and viewers could purchase the stamps by placing coins in the money slots. The stamps, designed by Watts, had different images on them ranging from gas cans to nude women. This piece differs from many other Happenings for the smaller, more intimate calibration and for the fact that the viewer was interacting with an object as opposed to a person. Too, unlike many other Happenings that eschewed the traditional art object, information technology should be noted that by interacting with the Stamp Vendor, the viewer was then able to have with them a work of fine art: the postage created by Watts.
Useful Resources on Happenings
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websites
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Content compiled and written by Tracy DiTolla
Edited and published by The Fine art Story Contributors
"Happenings Movement Overview and Analysis". [Net]. . TheArtStory.org
Content compiled and written past Tracy DiTolla
Edited and published past The Fine art Story Contributors
Available from:
Offset published on 21 January 2012. Updated and modified regularly
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Source: https://www.theartstory.org/movement/happenings/