What's Happening?

What are ‘Happenings’, and what claims were made about them contemporaneously? Happenings carry the status of a phenomenon that were both ‘in time’ and ‘out of time’, despite a renewed interest in their reconstruction and preservation: they were very much a product of their time, as something new, something ‘happening’, if you will.

Happenings, despite claims that they should be ephemeral, carrying the status of myth with an evolution and continuation beyond static documentation, have been extensively documented; on paper and on bodies which redo the work later.

Kaprow's notes for '18 Happenings in 6 Parts'

Image Source: artplastoc.blogspot.com

Allan Kaprow, the originator of the Happenings as event, wrote that the work evolved from art and collage, the sense of the painting encroaching into the space, leading his later work to be referred to as Environments rather than Happenings. Michael Kirby, writing later, argued for the validity of the form as a new theatrical experience, and Kaprow’s reference to audience, space, and performative writing seems to support this claim. Writing about Happenings, Richard Schechner suggested that Happenings brought the busyness of a city street into the realm of art, supporting Kaprow’s intention of blurring the boundaries between life and art: recontextualising the everyday, and reifying common experience into art.

Despite Kaprow’s insistence that the work should be experiential rather than archived, he wrote vast notes and directions for his seminal piece ’18 Happenings in 6 Parts’. Andre Lepecki believed that these notes carried the weight of authorship, if not ownership, and, in reconstructing, the papers contained intention. Kirby, taking part in his own reconstruction of ’18 Happenings’, however, suggests more gaps and contradictions within the text, and seems to suggest that ownership is contained in the bodies and the intentions, rather than rigid adherence to a contextual text.

 

Original performance of '18 Happenings' ** Modern reconstruction of the work

Image Source: slideshare.net ** Image Source: youtube.com

I personally have the impression that no one really understood what Happenings were, or are, and maybe this is the point. They are alogical: formally informal, non-matrixed and non-representative, rehearsed spontaneity, 'indeterminate, not improvised', as Kirby wrote. They contain a collage of forms appealing to a primitive, sensory encounter which cannot be captured after the event, carrying, as they do, a multiplicity of indeterminate experience.