Despite insisting on the Happeningâs endurance in âThe Happenings are Dead â Long Live the Happenings!â 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 âSystems Estheticsâ 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 âa rather self-conscious and stagy eventâ to âa strict and elegant procedureâ, which seemed âto arise naturally from those same considerations which have crystalized the systems approach to environmental situationsâ.1 Rather than the âpsycho-dramaâ that had, in the words of the artist Lucas Samaras, dominated the Happenings of the late 1950s and early 1960s, Kaprowâs recent works constituted systematic studies of the interrelations among individuals, groups and their sociocultural contexts.2
Inspired by the biologist Ludwig von Bertalanffyâs work on organic connectivity, Burnham identified systems art with a rejection of finite objects and an embrace of social issues, including: âmaintaining the biological liveability of the Earth, producing more accurate models of social interaction, understanding the growing symbiosis in manâmachine relationships, establishing priorities for the usage and conservation of natural resources, and defining alternate patterns of education, productivity, and leisureâ.3 In his overview of general system theory, published the same year as Burnhamâs 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 âdynamic interplay of processesâ.4 Kaprowâs name is not perhaps one that immediately springs to mind when thinking about âSystems Estheticsâ â unlike, say, Hans Haacke or Les Levine â 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 Kaprowâs work proved an enduring one. Almost a decade later, Pierre Restany described the artistâs methodology as a mode of research that had moved âcloser and closer to social psychologyâ, seemingly âdesigned to rouse ⊠participants into consciousness by decomposing and recomposing the fabric of lifeâ.6 Expanding on these ideas in a 1977 Domus article, Restany argued that the small-group activities Kaprow produced during this decade were âbased on pure psycho-sociologyâ, because of their concentration on âthe common gestures of communication, meeting and exchangeâ.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, âtranscends the happening by giving it a new dimension: that of the study and analysis of psychosomatic languageâ.8 Writing contemporaneously, Jonathan Crary comparably proposed that Kaprowâs activities could be understood as âsocial psychologyâ, owing to their investment in âthe semiotic content of ordinary human encounters in which gesture, distance, hesitations become carriers of meaning as much or more so than spoken languageâ.9 Yet while for Burnham the systematic implications of Kaprowâs work were clear, Crary questioned their capacity to scale up politics on a âsmall interpersonal levelâ and address wider community issues.10
Restany and Crary were writing in the late 1970s, but as Burnhamâs inclusion of Kaprow in âSystems Estheticsâ indicates, the artistâs 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 âto enlarge and complicate the idea of communicating by turning a speaking occasion into a multimedia activityâ.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: ââCommunicationâ 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 manâs thought to another, served up as they are in a syrup sauce of democracy and smiling optimism.â14 The action punctured commodity capitalismâs 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 Kaprowâs long-term commitment to rethinking physical and psychological interaction, often within educational contexts. Although this informed multiple initiatives, such as the artistâs 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 Burnhamâs âSystems Estheticsâ, 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 â an âuncharacteristic endeavourâ â in Kaprowâs practice.16 Finkelpearl registers the ventureâs importance, but misses its connections with Kaprowâs 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 Kaprowâs 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, âan open house, a constantly changing environment of junk constructions, posters and graffiti walls, and a seminar-workshop-office, all at onceâ.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 âthe âsceneâ for scores of kids, teachers and school administratorsâ.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 1968â69 with the educator Herbert R. Kohl.20 The storefront, which was open âduring the regular days of each school weekâ, 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
This collaboration occurred at a time of pers...