Beyond the Happening

Performance art and the politics of communication

Catherine Spencer

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781526144478
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: American Art

Beyond the Happening uncovers the heterogeneous, uniquely interdisciplinary performance-based works that emerged in the aftermath of the early Happenings. By the mid-1960s Happenings were widely declared outmoded or even 'dead', but this book reveals how many practitioners continued to work with the form during the late 1960s and 1970s, developing it into a vehicle for studying interpersonal communication that simultaneously deployed and questioned contemporary sociology and psychology. Focussing on the artists Allan Kaprow, Marta Minujín, Carolee Schneemann and Lea Lublin, it charts how they revised and retooled the premises of the Happening within a wider network of dynamic international activity. The resulting performances directly intervened in the wider discourse of communication studies, as it manifested in the politics of countercultural dropout, soft power and cultural diplomacy, alternative pedagogies, sociological art and feminist consciousness-raising.

Allan Kaprow’s lesson plans 1

Despite insisting on the Happening’s endurance in ‘The Happenings are Dead – Long Live the Happenings!’ Kaprow was already shifting away from the commitments his 1966 article espoused by the time of its writing. The critic Jack Burnham noted this change in his influential essay ‘Systems Esthetics’ for the September 1968 issue of Artforum. Although these two articles appeared in the same publication a relatively short time apart, the pictures they painted of the Happening were very different. Kaprow, Burnham averred, had transformed the Happening from ‘a rather self-conscious and stagy event’ to ‘a strict and elegant procedure’, which seemed ‘to arise naturally from those same considerations which have crystalized the systems approach to environmental situations’.¹ Rather than the ‘psycho-drama’ that had, in the words of the artist Lucas Samaras, dominated the Happenings of the late 1950s and early 1960s, Kaprow’s recent works constituted systematic studies of the interrelations among individuals, groups and their sociocultural contexts.²

Inspired by the biologist Ludwig von Bertalanffy’s work on organic connectivity, Burnham identified systems art with a rejection of finite objects and an embrace of social issues, including: ‘maintaining the biological liveability of the Earth, producing more accurate models of social interaction, understanding the growing symbiosis in man–machine relationships, establishing priorities for the usage and conservation of natural resources, and defining alternate patterns of education, productivity, and leisure’.³ In his overview of general system theory, published the same year as Burnham’s article, Bertalanffy stressed that the scientific interest in holistic systems predated cybernetics. Whereas cybernetics prioritised controlled feedback, general system theory was concerned with interrelation in an expended sense, and ‘dynamic interplay of processes’.⁴ Kaprow’s name is not perhaps one that immediately springs to mind when thinking about ‘Systems Esthetics’ – unlike, say, Hans Haacke or Les Levine – but as the 1960s progressed, he used the Happening to analyse systemic interplay of the kind Bertalanffy describes, focusing in particular on interpersonal communication and its role in education and leisure.⁵

The sea change Burnham detected in Kaprow’s work proved an enduring one. Almost a decade later, Pierre Restany described the artist’s methodology as a mode of research that had moved ‘closer and closer to social psychology’, seemingly ‘designed to rouse … participants into consciousness by decomposing and recomposing the fabric of life’.⁶ Expanding on these ideas in a 1977 Domus article, Restany argued that the small-group activities Kaprow produced during this decade were ‘based on pure psycho-sociology’, because of their concentration on ‘the common gestures of communication, meeting and exchange’.⁷ Restany concluded that a work such as Satisfaction (1976), where participants (including Restany, David Antin and Bonnie Ora Sherk) were split into couples and directed to provide reciprocal comfort through gestural rather than verbal communication, ‘transcends the happening by giving it a new dimension: that of the study and analysis of psychosomatic language’.⁸ Writing contemporaneously, Jonathan Crary comparably proposed that Kaprow’s activities could be understood as ‘social psychology’, owing to their investment in ‘the semiotic content of ordinary human encounters in which gesture, distance, hesitations become carriers of meaning as much or more so than spoken language’.⁹ Yet while for Burnham the systematic implications of Kaprow’s work were clear, Crary questioned their capacity to scale up politics on a ‘small interpersonal level’ and address wider community issues.¹⁰

Restany and Crary were writing in the late 1970s, but as Burnham’s inclusion of Kaprow in ‘Systems Esthetics’ indicates, the artist’s fascination with the politics of communication can be traced back to the 1960s and even earlier. In 1958, Kaprow presented a lecture-performance entitled Communication in the chapel of Douglass College, New Jersey, which grew out of the experimental music classes he had taken at the New School for Social Research with John Cage.¹¹ In it, Kaprow sought ‘to enlarge and complicate the idea of communicating by turning a speaking occasion into a multimedia activity’.¹² Kaprow mutely occupied the stage while a speech he had prerecorded played. As it progressed, two other tapes of the same speech started up and multiple actions occurred. Banners unspooled from the balconies; a woman bounced a red ball up and down the aisle.¹³ The speech itself elaborated a critique of communication that became increasingly unintelligible as the recordings overlapped and merged: ‘“Communication” is one of the most hateful of words. I have dedicated my best energies to retaining this disgust. I am offended by the smug and complacent techniques designed to facilitate the passage of one man’s thought to another, served up as they are in a syrup sauce of democracy and smiling optimism.’¹⁴ The action punctured commodity capitalism’s smooth deployment of the media to sell products and induce conformity, while troubling the assumption that communication is a straightforward, transparent activity, presenting it as dogged by interruptions, misunderstandings, manipulations and distractions.

Communication marked the opening salvo in Kaprow’s long-term commitment to rethinking physical and psychological interaction, often within educational contexts. Although this informed multiple initiatives, such as the artist’s involvement in the planned Three Country Happening, there is one that stands out. Project Other Ways, which Kaprow embarked on in the same year as Burnham’s ‘Systems Esthetics’, continued his earlier enthusiasm for sociology, particularly the writings of Erving Goffman, but developed this into an investigation of verbal and nonverbal communication through alternative pedagogy.¹⁵ Tom Finkelpearl, tracing the antecedents of socially engaged art of the 1990s and 2000s, categorises Project Other Ways as an idiosyncratic outlier – an ‘uncharacteristic endeavour’ – in Kaprow’s practice.¹⁶ Finkelpearl registers the venture’s importance, but misses its connections with Kaprow’s consistent investment in art education, sociology and communications theory, and with the broader redevelopment of the Happening during the late 1960s and 1970s. This chapter, by contrast, approaches Project Other Ways as one of the most nuanced and multifaceted of Kaprow’s attempts to transform the Happening into a vehicle for enabling and examining interpersonal communication.

Open classrooms

During autumn 1968, visitors to a disused storefront at 2556 Grove Street in Berkeley found the space transformed.¹⁷ This modest brick structure a few blocks below downtown was a hive of artistic activity, filled with children painting and drawing, ‘an open house, a constantly changing environment of junk constructions, posters and graffiti walls, and a seminar-workshop-office, all at once’.¹⁸ The junk constructions and graffiti walls echo the environments of tarpaper, chicken wire and aluminium foil that Kaprow and others crafted for Happenings in New York lofts and galleries at the beginning of the decade. Yet Grove Street was not a haunt of art world cognoscenti, but rather ‘the “scene” for scores of kids, teachers and school administrators’.¹⁹ The repurposed storefront, which occupied a liminal, productive zone that blurred the definitions of classroom, field outpost, gallery, studio, shop and community centre, was the operational hub for Project Other Ways, which Kaprow worked on during the academic year of 1968–69 with the educator Herbert R. Kohl.²⁰ The storefront, which was open ‘during the regular days of each school week’, hosted workshops, classes and training sessions attended by an estimated 250 students and educators.²¹ One of the many pedagogic publications produced by the initiative contains photographs that give a flavour of the vibrant alternative education environment that resulted (Figure 1.1).²²

1.1 ‘Photo Play’ booklet, n.d., featuring images of graffiti walls and children creating collages, produced as part of Project Other Ways, directed by Allan Kaprow and Herbert R. Kohl, supported by the Carnegie Corporation and the Berkeley Unified School District, Berkeley, California.

This collaboration occurred at a time of pers...