Life like art.

Allan Kaprow's death this spring at age seventy-eight, a profound loss by any measure, is all the more impropitious given the recent upsurge of interest in his work and the growing awareness of his contemporary relevance. While his happenings gained widespread notoriety in artistic circles and mass culture alike during the '60s and '70s, his evolving critical writings and activities both then and in later years resonate strongly within the context of today's vital considerations of performance and spectatorship, aesthetics and politics, and private experience in an age of spectacularized commerce. Taking pause to reflect on Kaprow's legacy, Artforum asked art historians Judith Rodenbeck and Jeff Kelley, as well as artists Lucas Samaras, Suzanne Lacy, and Paul McCarthy, to look again at the "un-art" and life of this pivotal figure.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Sitting at a Howard Johnson's in New Jersey in 1957, artists Allan Kaprow, Robert Watts, and George Brecht drafted a grant proposal that might be seen as a programmatic statement of the direction advanced art would take over the coming decade:

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

  In all the arts, we are struck by a general loosening of forms which
  in the past were relatively closed, strict, and objective, to ones
  which are more personal, free, random, and open, often suggesting in
  their seemingly casual formats an endless changefulness and
  boundlessness. In music, it has led to the use of what was once
  considered noise; in painting and sculpture, to materials that belong
  to industry and the wastebasket; in dance, to movements which are not
  "graceful" but which come from human action nevertheless. There is
  taking place a gradual widening of the scope of the imagination, and
  creative people are encompassing in their work what has never before
  been considered art.

Though the trio's "Project in Multiple Dimensions" was never funded, their proposal introduced the concept of "multidimensional media," which advocated the use of cutting-edge technological and industrial materials. It suggested an experiential and experimental model of art linked not to the sublime of the New York School but to the everyday, to a pragmatic willingness to embrace slapstick and even failure as readily as tragedy and success. As Kaprow would observe years later, "Multimedia in art was the mirror, the rhyme of every moment of life (which is always 'multimedial')."

Kaprow is probably best known as the "inventor" and chief proponent of happenings--a radicalized collage form of theater that he and other visual artists started to explore in the late 1950s--but he began his career as an expressionist painter, emulating the coloristic, figurative, and compositional example of Pierre Bonnard and the rigorous teaching of Hans Hofmann, with whom he studied in 1947-48. While painting with Hofmann he also studied philosophy at New York University, where he discovered the work of American pragmatist John Dewey, in particular his contextualism. Eventually Kaprow's interest in aesthetics led him to semiotician (and fellow Bonnard fan) Meyer Schapiro at Columbia University, where as a graduate student in art history Kaprow wrote a class paper on Jackson Pollock and a master's thesis on Piet Mondrian. He began teaching at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey, in 1953, the year after he cofounded the Hansa Gallery with fellow students of Hofmann's. Like many others of his generation, he rapidly cycled through a colorful and vigorous if awkward urban figurative expressionism toward abstraction and then, in the early '50s, broke through to what he called "action collage." Throughout the middle of the decade he mined "the tacky side of abstract expressionism," as he put it, experimenting with gravity, action, new materials, and open forms. But as early as 1953, he was already arranging his pictures in the angled clusters and sequences that would develop into environments. As these expanded to engage other senses (sound, smell, touch), he sought help with his taped sound and playback systems. John Cage's class in experimental composition at the New School, which Kaprow attended in 1957-58 and out of which both happenings and Fluxus would emerge, complemented the training undertaken with Hofmann and Schapiro and completed an abstractionist's trifecta.

Kaprow's best-known and least exemplary public happening grew out of these experiments and inaugurated New York's Reuben Gallery in 1959. Eighteen Happenings in Six Parts was, as he has said, "an early minimalist piece, in the sense that things happen with large spaces of nothing around them, or they overlap unexpectedly into clusters that suddenly shut off." A potpourri of historical castoffs, the script was by far the most elaborate of any of Kaprow's happenings. The textual apparatus for the piece was vast, including choreographic diagrams, tone scores and fingering charts, timings, lists of verbs, mini-speeches. A compartmentalized set was built from a recycled element of an earlier environment combined with a simple post-and-beam structure made out of two-by-fours and covered with semiopaque plastic sheeting. The "parts" were timed intervals; the audience, divided into three discrete groups, was moved from site to site by sound cues. Simple activities such as bouncing balls and walking were juxtaposed with slide projections of a mouth or a scrawled word. A brief and tendentious speech on art was complemented by fragments from Guillaume Apollinaire and an image of the word POW! At one point two painters painted (one, lines; one, circles) on either side of a transparent scrim; at another a mirror was wheeled out to face the audience. Critics had difficulties with the mixing of elements, references, and media: It wasn't "fun," and Cage objected to the degree of control. But for some, the austerity and ambition of the piece, its rigor and its serial form, provided an introduction to critical postmodernism.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

A number of the early happenings took place in galleries, but Kaprow, highly critical of the gallery system and the experiential bracketing it placed on the viewer, increasingly avoided such sites, and his subsequent work became looser, more open to chance and accident, and less like proscenium theater in its use of audience, space, and time. Though he was attracted to ritual forms, Kaprow understood these as more generic than "shamanistic," and used them in the context of birth, death, marriage, and so on. Happenings were produced in industrial, rural, and residential settings, and by the mid-'60s Kaprow was exploding a strictly geographic notion of "site" by having events occur in different cities, on unmarked stretches of highway, simultaneously, at unspecified times, at whim, etc. Eat, 1964, took place in an abandoned brewery vault; Tree, 1963, on George Segal's chicken farm; Calling, 1965, involved driving foil-wrapped people around New York, leaving them in Grand Central Terminal, making phone calls from pay phones, and wandering through the exurban woods; Moving, 1967, happened in various apartments and on the street; Self-Service, 1966, took place simultaneously over a period of four months in Boston, New York, and Los Angeles; Fluids, 1967, involved the laborious construction by hand of grim minimal buildings out of ice blocks at fifteen different sites in greater Los Angeles. Soap, 1965, commissioned by Florida State University in Tallahassee, was "unperformed."

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

As an artist and experimentalist who was also an art historian, Kaprow blurred the line between theory and practice, and Thomas Hess at Art News for a time adopted him as a kind of spokesman for those artists involved in "painter's theater"--Claes Oldenburg, Jim Dine, Red Grooms, Al Hansen, Dick Higgins, and Robert Whitman. But Kaprow's position among the "Happenings Boys" was somewhat uncomfortable: Slightly older than some of his cohorts and more attuned to historical precedents, he had been promoted by the art-critical establishment to the role of godfather, which the younger artists resented. Still, the category of the happening rapidly absorbed extremely varied, like-minded "theatrical" experiments: Hansen's free-for-alls, Wolf Vostell's interactions with a bombed-out postwar Berlin, sexpol spectacles in Paris by Jean-Jacques Lebel, Grooms's puppetry, Dine's expressionism, Oldenburg's materiality, and Carolee Schneemann's choreography. Kaprow himself produced work at theater festivals in Europe, including a piece staged inside the Bon Marche in Paris. And it is not unlikely that Gerhard Richter and Konrad Leug knew Kaprow's Push and Pull: A Furniture Comedy for Hans Hofmann, first produced in April 1963, when they made plans for their demonstration of "capitalist realism," Leben mit Pop Eine Demonstration fuer den Kapitalistischen Realismus, which took place in a furniture store in October of that year.

Indeed, Kaprow's neologism, "happening," almost instantly became a Pop artifact, a synonym for "groovy"--and by 1966 happenings had lost their hip cachet ("Where Not to Be Seen: At a Happening," declared Esquire magazine). The word's entry into the vernacular so demoralized Kaprow that he abandoned it and the form for small, privately executed actions he called "activities." Although frequently sited in public, these explored questions of private exchange--the boundaries and banalities of intimacy, courtesy, and social convention, usually on the scale of 1:1 or 1:2. Often they involved a kind of indexical mediation: participants taking photographs of one another, or taking turns holding up mirrors for one another to look into, then taking photographs of the photographs, or photographs of the mirrored reflections, or doing the same with telephones or tape recorders. Rates of Exchange, 1975, for example, was a piece for two people recording and playing back taped messages to each other, rethinking "exchange." Directions were disseminated in the form of bland instructional photo-text brochures and/or magazine articles. These activities--conceptual in their de-emphasis of the object in favor of the cheaply printed multiple, the tautological photo-text and the "neutral" language of "instruction"--were intended as DIY projects; unlike Lawrence Weiner's instructional works, the pieces required execution, and often this was followed either by discussion or by some kind of report.

In his 1964 Art News article "Should the Artist become a Man of the World?" Kaprow exhaustively details a scathing ethnography of cultural capital and its circulation: No longer struggling, a new "loft generation" of painters lived in circumstances that were "the conditions of a certain power." His description of that power adumbrates Arthur C. Danto's coining of the term artworld that same year; but where Danto's work provides a simple category analysis, in the space of a few pages Kaprow's essay lays bare the terms taken up by what would later become known as institutional critique. His own practice took on the analysis of cultural capital with increasing austerity, from the nonproduction of goods to the gradual and then rapid retreat from documentation to the microincidental behavioral feedback loops of his "activities" to the beautiful and koanlike "microactivities" of "just doing" (like "just intonation") and, finally, to the pedagogical exercises of his later years.

Kaprow is a key figure in the history of performance art, and his development of environments has also been heralded as a point of origin for installation. His experimental work with tape loops and noisemakers (he used cut-up tapes in his environments of the 1950s; and a crude and intentionally out-of-phase playback system using three tape decks was integral to his first happening, Communication, at Rutgers, in 1958) has long been of interest to sound artists, as has his later work with communications technologies, such as telephone, video, and satellite. His influence is acknowledged by new-media artists, especially those working with locational and network aesthetics, while architects interested in vernacular form and street life have also cited his work. His art and writing are foundational to site specificity in its earliest and most recent forms, and they are deep but disavowed presences in relational aesthetics, institutional critique, and the "service" economy of art. More recently, projects investigating aspects of sociality give a reconsideration of happenings a new historical urgency.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

But Kaprow continues to perplex. Since the cultural turn in art history, the manifesto-cum-elegy he published in 1958 in Art News, "The Legacy of Jackson Pollock," has become a survey staple. But the essay and the happenings that followed have served as props for a more marketable art and history than that in which his postformalist argument was invested. More Brechtian than Cage, less ritualistic than Joseph Beuys, and certainly less spectacularized than both, Kaprow's work was consistently antiauthoritarian and antiauthorial, emphasizing instead the specificity of the individual experience of a collective activity. He has come to serve as a convenient foil, along with Beuys, for scholars exploring the performative dimensions of Minimalism, Pop, and even Fluxus, while the rhetorical obligation to write history in terms of black hat/white hat has often placed Kaprow as an antihero not just to Cage and Fluxus, but also to Robert Rauschenberg, Andy Warhol, Claes Oldenburg, Robert Morris, Robert Smithson, and so on. (Indeed, the list is itself testament to his ubiquity.) This is partially the result of tactical errors on Kaprow's part: Kaprow was eloquent, gentlemanly, and avuncular, and his crafted writing style was something of a throwback; his reliance on sometimes cornball imagery and on the literal has tended to reinforce limited readings of his work. Triangulated by the gallery system and the historical record, Kaprow has been relegated to the position of an "almost ran"--romantic, even retardataire. The art world tends to protect its own.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

A maverick, a trickster, and a self-declared "un-artist," Kaprow gnawed at the hand that fed him for more than forty years. He was in terms of his sensibility a literalist, by training a pragmatist, and by affinity and long-term practice a Buddhist. He insisted on a strong distinction between play and game; on the architectonic considerations both of spatial and behavioral assemblages; on the material and conceptual critique of the art world (and art); and on the valorization of hard work, pragmatism, simplicity, and directness. Un-art was what he wound up advocating, and he identified it with cliched American values but also with a modernist and experimentalist (and, importantly, pedagogical) trajectory that stretched from the Bauhaus to Black Mountain College to Rutgers. "Meaningless" labor, serial arrangement, obsolescent or disposable elements--all were consistent in his work, from the timing bells of Eighteen Happenings and the melting, "throwaway" architecture of Fluids to the micro-events he performed late in life like brushing his teeth or straightening out blades of grass. His interest in "meanings-in-use" would eventually lead him to explore such disparate bodies of thought as Ludwig Wittgenstein's work on language games, Erving Goffman's semiotic sociology, and Raymond Birdwhistell's communication kinesics--a confluence of authors crucial to the then-developing field of cybernetics. Information theory had been integral to the project in multiple dimensions; in 1964 computation would be added: "The astronaut John Glenn may have caught a glimpse of heavenly blue from the porthole of his spaceship," Kaprow wrote, "but I have watched the lights of a computer in operation. And they looked like the stars."

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

From his first happenings to his last doings, Kaprow was, above all, a determined theorist of "experience." As a longtime practitioner of Zen (he was a student of Charlotte Joko Beck's, an important teacher at the Ordinary Mind Zen School, at the Zen Center of San Diego), Kaprow searched for, and found, the affinities between the analysis of microcom-munication and body language and the concentrated practice of meditation and "just doing." "What happens when you pay close attention to anything, especially routine behavior, is that it changes. Attention alters what is attended," Kaprow wrote in 1990 in these pages. "So lifelike art plays somewhere in and between attention to physical process and attention to interpretation. It is experience, yet it is ungraspable. It requires quotation marks ('lifelike') but sheds them as the un-artist sheds art."

JUDITH RODENBECK IS NOBLE FOUNDATION CHAIR IN ART AND CULTURAL HISTORY AT SARAH LAWRENCE COLLEGE IN BRONXVILLE, NEW YORK. (SEE CONTRIBUTORS.)

RELATED ARTICLE

Matter of Facts

LUCAS SAMARAS

I WAS ALLAN'S student at Rutgers in the mid-'50s. At that time, George Segal had a farm nearby, where he was showing his sculpture in a creepy old decrepit barn with lamps, cobwebs, mice, and shit--he was obviously interested in what used to be called a theatrical experience--and he invited Allan to use the structure for whatever he wanted. The first thing Allan did, I think, was hang these strips made of raffia throughout the space, which gave you the feeling of walking through tall grass. But soon Allan got interested in directing people. I don't know whose idea it was, but either he or George invited tons of people from the art world and their families to a party on the farm. Allan had them play in the fields in this childlike way--pretending one army was charging another in the fields, like rejects from Ben-Hur, or conquering a mountain that was a haystack covered with construction paper. That experience must have given Allan some ideas. But his familiarity with dance was a source, too: I remember he invited choreographer Paul Taylor to Douglass, Rutgers's women's college. Performing in a little theater, Taylor and a woman were dressed in ordinary clothes (she wore a chiffon dress), one standing, one lying down. Wind was coming from a fan in the wings. And for two or three minutes, nothing happened, except this wonderful wind. That was the dance. It was just fabulous to me, especially since I'd never seen anything like that on a stage. I know Allan studied with John Cage, but perhaps with dance, the idea of "chance" began changing into selecting something from reality--something from daily activities--and presenting it simply.

After college, I was interested in performance, working with Stella Adler and the idea of social realism--what was passing for realism at the time. So when Allan asked me to be in Eighteen Happenings in Six Parts, I thought, Why not? His directions were extremely simple and professorial: Here's a violin: make a couple sounds. There's a table; play chess with Bob Whitman. Do it as flatly as possible. Whatever you do, don't be cute; perform the act plainly. The gallery was divided into separate rooms; people sat in folding chairs but there were mirrors so they could glimpse events happening in each space. What I found interesting was that during every performance two artists would stand on opposite sides of a piece of burlap, one painting stripes and the other circles. One night it was Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, with Johns pressing paint cans against the material to leave circular imprints. The audience seemed bemused, it was so matter-of-fact, cerebral.

All this was different from other artists' happenings. Whitman offered a kind of poetry in which the materials, whether a newspaper, cloth, or plastic, became organic or uncanny. A white-dressed Red Grooms would work in a broken-down building somewhere, emerging with candlelight. Claes Oldenburg might use an old store, so you would smell something suddenly or see mold in a corner; and you had characters like a bum or a circus girl. But Allan didn't need mise-en-scene. He isolated an ordinary gesture, whether it was playing the violin or walking with a lawn mower down an aisle. It's like he didn't need theater. A performance would slice out a chunk of life. And then it would be over.

I last saw Allan about fifteen years ago, when he was doing a piece at Virginia Zabriskie's gallery in New York. His happening was to be her assistant for a week: He would get her coffee, answer the telephone, sweep the floor. He still didn't want to be making something for a museum, something for someone to hang on the wall--something that had the old-time magic. Allan knew and respected the art of the past, but he wanted no part of it. He even rejected the art of his own time. He didn't want aesthetics to come into the picture. But that's maybe why he isn't recognized as he should be--someone who towers over artists today the way Ernest Hemingway did over writers in the '50s.

--as told to Tim Griffin

LUCAS SAMARAS IS AN ARTIST LIVING IN NEW YORK.

Tracing Allan Kaprow

SUZANNE LACY

THE CASE CAN BE MADE that Allan Kaprow was an important influence on public art. But you'll never get there if you ignore his influence on '70s feminist performance (as does, for example, the ambitious but flawed exhibition on Los Angeles currently at the Centre Pompidou). In the time's messy and interrelated worlds of Conceptual, performance, feminist, Marxist, and community-based art, Allan went beyond simple issues of equity to set the stage for a populist inquiry into the possibilities and limitations of art made in public.

When I was Allan's student at CalArts during the '70s, women students were drawn to the history and practices of what he termed "lifelike" art, where artmaking was a function of a reflective life, not a skill set. As he described it at a symposium on public art in 1991, artists from the late '50s and '60s "appropriated the real environment and not the studio, garbage and not fine paints and marble.... They incorporated behavior, the weather, ecology, and political issues. In short, the dialogue moved from knowing more and more about what art was to wondering about what life was, the meaning of life."

This vision of art as a kind of "research" offered a significant aesthetic way out for young women artists whose identity politics and critical stance vis-a-vis culture demanded the production of an activist avant-garde: art that went beyond simple protest politics and engaged the public sphere in multiple and open-ended ways. He provided permission to frame life--domestic, political, relational, and public life--as art. When I developed Three Weeks in May, a 1977 piece about rape in Los Angeles, it was Allan's theories that allowed me to move into the public, using the frame of the city to contain a variety of "acts," from reflective conversations to media interventions. His ideas, originally meant to challenge the art establishment, were mined by artists moving from the body to the body politic.

Allan's impact on public art is especially evident in three ways. First, he emphasized the importance of process as the "product" of art, something particularly relevant to public art that engages multiple audiences: "The artwork," he said, "becomes less a 'work' than a process of meaning-making interaction." Second, in his commitment to what he called an "ambiguity of identity and purpose," he set up an important parameter distinguishing art from politics. What is often missed in the examination of performance-based public artists is the fundamental role of ambiguity and questioning in the structure of their work, because the content or topic--whether race relations or global warming--is so prominently positioned. (It is not surprising that political entities distrust the arts, since most artists can't deliver the canon even when projecting clear political intention.) Finally, Allan provided a platform for criticism: "Once art departs from traditional models and begins to merge into the everyday manifestations of society itself," he wrote, "artists not only cannot assume the authority of their 'talent,' they cannot claim that what takes place is valuable just because it is art."

While his own practice might appear distant from current public art, in fact he approached all meaning-making activities similarly: with respect, curiosity, and attention to what he could learn. We talked often about the skills artists need in the public sphere, relationships between men's and women's art, issues of scale, and what constituted political relevance--not with judgment but to clarify underlying meaning. "Open-endedness, to me, is democratic and challenges the mind," he said of his ethical struggle with the artist's role.

Anyone who looks at the '60s will see that these ideas were in the air. Artists from Argentina, Japan, Denmark, England, and France, theater directors like Brazil's Augusto Boal, and American activists like Abbie Hoffman were all breaking the boundaries between art and life. But Allan--who once proudly told me that Hoffman had called to consult on one of his political actions--was central to the formation of that time, and his great contribution came precisely from his curiosity and his ability to articulate the ferment around him. His influence on contemporary art will no doubt be traced in the coming decades, now that he is no longer with us, but the historicizing gaze can betray the fluid interactions of an era. Let the long-overdue legacy making begin, remembering that it will be an incalculable loss if this tracing is not as broad, generous, and relationally based as was the man himself.

SUZANNE LACY IS AN ARTIST AND CHAIR OF FINE ARTS AT OTIS COLLEGE OF ART AND DESIGN IN LOS ANGELES. (SEE CONTRIBUTORS.)

Now and Zen

JEFF KELLEY

IN THE SPRING of 1999. Allan Kaprow, then seventy-one years old, conducted a workshop for about twenty graduate students at Mills College in Oakland, California. By that time, workshops--in which Kaprow and his students undertook roughly a dozen or so activities designed for partners and then talked about their experiences--had become his preferred mode of staging what had once been known as happenings.

Typically, these sessions began with proposals to do something: Keep a smile (or a frown) on your face for a long time; give your partner some money (or a kiss) on demand (and then demand it back); draw a chalk line on a sidewalk while your partner erases it. Plucked at will from Kaprow's grab bag of forty-plus years of art-as-doing, these proposals, like so many riddles, jokes, or philosophical conundrums, embodied questions (about putting on your face, for example, or making your mark on the world) for which answers--or, more likely, further questions--could be considered only through experience. In this, they were analogues of Zen koans, Buddhist teaching forms intended to outmaneuver the rational mind and promote intuitive insight.

While it is a commonplace to say that Zen philosophy influenced many artists of the postwar American vanguard, it is important to note that for nearly all of them Zen was an aesthetic influence, not an ascetic practice. Such was the case for Kaprow, too, until 1978, when he began attending the Zen Center of San Diego, where after about a year of guided daily meditation he realized that sitting on a cushion was as silly as holding a smile on your face or making your mark on the world. In other words, the practice of Zen reminded him of his own works--not the happenings per se, but the psychological exchanges, dutiful routines, empty courtesies, recorded confessions, intimate maneuvers, strict imitations, and obsessive self-examinations that comprised his practice during the late '70s. (At the time, he had been breaking down conventional behavior to its parts, which was the opposite of the total art he once espoused.) Kaprow also noticed how certain attributes of Zen practice had become integral to the forms of his quasi art: the reduction of formalistic maneuvers to nonsense; the heightened awareness of the present moment; the belief in gradual enlightenment espoused by the Soto sect (as opposed to the sudden-enlightenment principles of the Rinzai); the willingness to let meanings and attachments pass unclaimed through experience. Thus did happenings come to Zen, and, thereby, to a kind of grief, since they no longer looked like happenings.

In 1958, when Kaprow first used "happenings" in an essay on Jackson Pollock, the term meant nothing; it merely suggested that something might happen. Only later did this word pertain to hybrid forms of vanguard performance ("enactment" might be more accurate), which were extensions of American action painting's energies beyond the art object and into the scenes and settings of modern, mostly urban experience. Eventually, having been appropriated by the mass media of '60s youth culture, happenings came to mean everything from antiwar sit-ins to rock 'n' roll light shows and even television commercials. One advertisement: a tight shot of a woman's big lips as she applies lipstick, followed by the declaration, "That was a happening, by Revlon." By the '70s Kaprow was calling his works "activities," another meaningless word, hoping to shed the reputation of happenings (in both the art world and mass culture) so his participants could again focus on their own experience and the unexpected meanings that emerge from doing something they couldn't easily name before (and possibly even after) doing it.

Though Kaprow invented a unique form of participatory spectacle, for which he will always be known, the key development in his work pertains to the locus of experience: Over the course of a career, his sense of this matter shifted from the world around the artist to the world inside and among individuals. In 1958, his ambition was to be the "most modern" artist, and he believed happenings should be composed of the stuff of modern life. (The modernity of happenings, which were often presented as a kind of crude, primitivistic antitheater, rested not so much in their contents as in their collagelike openness to the subjects, objects, materials, tempos, and processes of the urban environment around them. Because they were open, bits of the world spilled into them, and they, in turn, opened up pockets of aesthetic attentiveness in the half-conscious run of modern experience.) But as early as 1961, Kaprow wrote that "the artist may achieve a beautiful privacy, famed for something purely imaginary while free to explore something nobody will notice." There was always a tension in his work between wanting to gather participants and wanting to disappear within the gathering--the irony being that if he hadn't grown famous, nobody would have come. Nevertheless, later in Kaprow's life, when people did come, most of them expecting happenings, they got something else instead: a weirdly prolonged handshake, or a request for a bucket full of dirt (in exchange for one of his). Kaprow wanted participants, not an audience. The payoff was experience--your own. And his own.

At Mills College, Kaprow drew a line with colored chalk on an asphalt path while his partner, a male graduate student, worked earnestly to erase it. Both were on their hands and knees, talking as they worked--though Kaprow. engrossed in the drawing, talked less. Their nose-to-the-ground activity echoed back through a century of avant-garde erasures, and called to mind the silly games and absorbing tasks of childhood. Other pairs dotted the winding pathway, hugging the ground like piles of fallen leaves.

Kaprow once asked: "What is a kiss without the intention to endear oneself?" Fair enough. What, then, is a happening without the intention to be the most modern art? Is it Zen with a small z? Art that can't be art? The education of the un-artist? Right living?

You may have to kiss to find out.

JEFF KELLEY IS A CRITIC BASED IN OAKLAND, CALIFORNIA, AND THE AUTHOR OF CHILDSPLAY: THE ART OF ALLAN KAPROW (UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS. 2004).

Final Scores

PAUL MCCARTHY

IF YOU TALKED TO ALLAN, he would say he wasn't an artist. But he still maintained a kind of presence in the art world. I once did a gallery show in the early '90s and asked him to contribute. After a while he came back and said, "Yeah, I want to do something. Could you ask the dealer to take a garden hose and water the sidewalk every day before the gallery opens?" The piece essentially went unnoticed. It wasn't announced; there were no photographs or indication by the gallery that anything had happened. And yet it was a kind of participation.

A couple of years ago, when a number of museums approached Allan, I thought it was fucked up that he was asked to redo classic works like Yard; he was being treated like history. I didn't realize he'd been "reinventing" his earlier works for quite a while, and that they were radically altered for a new period. In fact, for his retrospective next fall in Munich, he gave the curators permission to reinvent his work: Toward the end of his life, he had created around twenty boxes, each one containing documentation of a single work and a statement indicating that the box could be used to reinvent his piece. It was like a music score. But Allan never specified to the curators who should look through the box and do the reinventing; and he never said the work should look the same. He leaves an open door. Something similar happened last year in Zurich and Basel, where Words, Fluids, and Sawdust were reinvented, and he asked his gallery's technicians to look at the documentation. For Words, they were supposed to come up with four or five different ways to reinvent the piece, and he would choose one of them; he chose one using tape recorders, but he didn't specify what to do with them.

I once did an action in the mid-'60s, running down a hill, but then falling because it was so steep. I was in control, and then lost control. Thinking about Kaprow, I made the connection that Yes, I could think of this as a piece of language, or as art. By its very nature, his work was about not being confined by the need to make an object and then put it in a cubicle. This opens up possibilities. Out beyond the cubicle is an endless range.

Allan once said to me that he wasn't sure he understood why a gallery would be interested in him: The work was impermanent; it was contextual; its very basis was the doubt of art. That's an interesting statement, but those three things don't add up to something that doesn't last, or which can't be considered. Think of the way he's allowing the work to continue: If someone reinvents these pieces, which part of it isn't Allan Kaprow? The work is not a happening by Allan in any formal or aesthetic way, but as a conceptual activity, it is a Kaprow piece. I'm often interested in revisiting and remaking my own work, going backward and forward at once. But as a final thing to have done, Allan's reinvention and continuation of his work is radical.

--as told to Tim Griffin

PAUL MCCARTHY IS AN ARTIST LIVING IN LOS ANGELES.

ALLAN        ME            TO      REUBEN        THREE       CHILDLIKE
WAS          FOUR          GIVE    GALLERY       OF          AND
RESPONSIBLE  YEARS         HIM     TO            HIS         WELL
FOR          LATER         TENURE  SHOW          PIONEERING  READ.
MY           FOR           WHEN    MY            HAPPENINGS  HIS
GETTING      WRITING       IT      WORK,         AND         MIND
AN           A             WAS     WHICH         THEN        WAS
ART          POEM          TIME    THEY          HE          MORE
SCHOLARSHIP  WITH          AND     DID.          MOVED       BRILLIANT
AT           A             AH      HIS           TO          THAN
RUTGERS      REPEATED      YES     CONVERSATION  CALIFORNIA  HIS
IN           EXPLETIVE     IN      WAS           TO          HAND
1955         IN            1959    ALWAYS        TEACH       WHICH
AND          MY            HE      GOOD          AND         I
AH           HONORS        TOLD    HELPFUL       MAKE        NOW
YES          PROJECT       THE     AND           EVENTS.     SEEM
HE           THEREBY       OWNERS  FLEXIBLE.     HE          TO
PREVENTED    FACILITATING  OF      I             WAS         BITE.
THE          THE           THE     APPEARED      KIND
DEAN         RUTGERS       SOON    IN            AND
FROM         WORTHIES      TO      TWO           GENEROUS    5/10/06
EXPELLING    NOT           OPEN    OR            HUMOROUS    LUCAS.

Lucas Samaras, untitled work for Allan Kaprow, 2006.