A happening is a performance, event, or situation art, usually as performance art. The term was first used by Allan Kaprow in 1959 to describe a range of art-related events.
History
Origins
Allan Kaprow first coined the term "happening" in the spring of 1959 at an art picnic at George Segal's farm to describe the art pieces being performed. The first appearance in print about one was in Kaprow's famous "Legacy of Jackson Pollock" essay that was published in 1958 but primarily written in 1956. "Happening" also appeared in print in one issue of the Rutgers University undergraduate literary magazine, Anthologist.Joan M. Marter and Simon Anderson, Off Limits: Rutgers University and the Avant-Garde, 1957–1963, Rutgers University Press, 1999, p. 10. The form was imitated and the term was adopted by artists across the U.S., Germany, and Japan. The journalist and novelist William Matthew Scott was using the term, "happening" in print from the 1920s to the early 1960s to represent minor creative adventures in a social environment, but his use of the word did not represent performance art.
Happenings are difficult to describe, in part because each one is unique. One definition comes from Wardrip-Fruin and Montfort in The New Media Reader, "The term 'happening' has been used to describe many performances and events, organized by Allan Kaprow and others during the 1950s and 1960s, including a number of theatrical productions that were traditionally scripted and invited only limited audience interaction." Another definition is "a purposefully composed form of theatre in which diverse alogical elements, including nonmatrixed performing, are organized in a compartmented structure".Michael Kirby, Happenings: An Illustrated Anthology, scripts and productions by Jim Dine, Red Grooms, Allan Kaprow, Claes Oldenburg, Robert Whitman (New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., Inc., 1965), p. 21. However, Canadian theatre critic and playwright Gary Botting, who himself had "constructed" several happenings, wrote in 1972: "Happenings abandoned the matrix of story and plot for the equally complex matrix of incident and event."
Kaprow was a student of John Cage, who had experimented with "musical happenings" at Black Mountain College as early as 1952. Kaprow combined the theatrical and visual arts with discordant music. "His happenings incorporated the use of huge constructions or sculptures similar to those suggested by Artaud," wrote Botting, who also compared them to the "impermanent art" of Dada. "A happening explores negative space in the same way Cage explored silence. It is a form of symbolism: actions concerned with 'now' or fantasies derived from life, or organized structures of events appealing to archetypal symbolic associations."
Happenings can be a form of participatory new media art, emphasizing an interaction between the performer and the audience. In his Water, Robert Whitman had the performers drench each other with colored water. "One girl squirmed between wet inner tubes, ultimately struggling through a large silver vulva." Claes Oldenburg, best known for his innovative sculptures, used a vacant house, his own store, and the parking lot of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics in Los Angeles for Injun, World's Fair II and AUT OBO DYS. The idea was to break down the fourth wall between performer and spectator; with the involvement of the spectator as performer, objective criticism is transformed into subjective support. For some happenings, everyone present is included in the making of the art and even the form of the art depends on audience engagement, for they are a key factor in where the performers' spontaneity leads.
Later happenings had no set rules, only vague guidelines that the performers follow based on surrounding props. Unlike other forms of art, happenings that allow chance to enter are ever-changing. When chance determines the path the performance will follow, there is no room for failure. As Kaprow wrote in his essay, "'Happenings' in the New York Scene", "Visitors to a Happening are now and then not sure what has taken place, when it has ended, even when things have gone 'wrong". For when something goes 'wrong', something far more 'right,' more revelatory, has many times emerged".
Kaprow's piece 18 Happenings in 6 Parts (1959) is commonly cited as the first happening, although that distinction is sometimes given to a 1952 performance of Theater Piece No. 1 at Black Mountain College by John Cage, one of Kaprow's teachers in the mid-1950s. Cage stood reading from a ladder, Charles Olson read from another ladder, Robert Rauschenberg showed some of his paintings and played wax cylinders of Édith Piaf on an Edison horn recorder, David Tudor performed on a prepared piano and Merce Cunningham danced.Stuart Dale Hobbs, The End of the American Avant Garde, NYU Press, 1997, p. 109. All these things took place at the same time, among the audience rather than on a stage. Cage credited a collaborative close reading of Antonin Artaud's The Theatre and Its Double with M.C. Richards and David Tudor as the impetus for the event.
Happenings flourished in New York City in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Key contributors to the form included Carolee Schneemann, Red Grooms, Robert Whitman, Jim Dine Car Crash,Performance Descriptions Retrieved July 10, 2010 Claes Oldenburg, Robert Delford Brown, Lucas Samaras, and Robert Rauschenberg. Some of their work is documented in Michael Kirby's book Happenings (1966).Michael Kirby, Happenings: An Illustrated Anthology, scripts and productions by Jim Dine, Red Grooms, Allan Kaprow, Claes Oldenburg, Robert Whitman (New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., Inc., 1965). Kaprow claimed that "some of us will become famous, and we will have proven once again that the only success occurred when there was a lack of it". In 1963 Wolf Vostell made the happening TV-Burying at the Yam Festival in coproduction with the Smolin Gallery and in 1964 the happening You in Great Neck, New York which is on Long Island.Happening You, Great Neck, New York, 1964
During the summer of 1959, Red Grooms along with others (Yvonne Andersen, Bill Barrell, Sylvia Small and Dominic Falcone) staged the non-narrative "play" Walking Man, which began with construction sounds, such as sawing. Grooms recalls, "The curtains were opened by me, playing a fireman wearing a simple costume of white pants and T-shirt with a poncholike cloak and a Smokey Stoverish fireman's helmet. Bill, the 'star' in a tall hat and black overcoat, walked back and forth across the stage with great wooden gestures. Yvonne sat on the floor by a suspended fire engine. She was a blind woman with tin-foil covered glasses and cup. Sylvia played a radio and pulled on hanging junk. For the finale, I hid behind a false door and shouted pop code words. Then the cast did a wild run around and it ended".Judith Stein, "The Early Years: 1937–1960", Red Grooms: A Retrospective (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, 1985) Dubbing his 148 Delancey Street studio The Delancey Street Museum, Grooms staged three more happenings there, A Garden, The Burning Building and The Magic Trainride (originally titled Fireman's Dream). No wonder Kaprow called Grooms "a Charlie Chaplin forever dreaming about fire". On the opening night of The Burning Building, Bob Thompson solicited an audience member for a light, since none of the cast had one, and this gesture of spontaneous theater recurred in eight subsequent performances. The Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama staged nude happenings during the late '60s in New York City.
Difference from plays
Happenings emphasize the organic connection between art and its environment. Kaprow supports that "happenings invite us to cast aside for a moment these proper manners and partake wholly in the real nature of the art and life. It is a rough and sudden act, where one often feels "dirty", and dirt, we might begin to realize, is also organic and fertile, and everything including the visitors can grow a little into such circumstances." Happenings have no plot or philosophy, but rather are materialized in an improvisatory fashion. There is no direction thus the outcome is unpredictable. "It is generated in action by a headful of ideas...and it frequently has words but they may or may not make literal sense. If they do, their meaning is not representational of what the whole element conveys. Hence they carry a brief, detached quality. If they do not make sense, then they are acknowledgement of the sound of the word rather than the meaning conveyed by it."
Due to the convention's nature, there is no such term as "failure" which can be applied. "For when something goes "wrong", something far more "right", more revelatory may emerge. This sort of sudden near-miracle presently is made more likely by chance procedures." As a conclusion, a happening is fresh while it lasts and cannot be reproduced.
Regarding happenings, Red Grooms has remarked, "I had the sense that I knew it was something. I knew it was something because I didn't know what it was. I think that's when you're at your best point. When you're really doing something, you're doing it all out, but you don't know what it is."
The lack of plot as well as the expected audience participation can be likened to Augusto Boal's Theater of the Oppressed, which also claims that "spectator is a bad word". Boal expected audience members to participate in the theater of the oppressed by becoming the actors. His goal was to allow the downtrodden to act out the forces oppressing them in order to mobilize the people into political action. Both Kaprow and Boal are reinventing theater to try to make plays more interactive and to abolish the traditional narrative form to make theater something more free-form and organic.Augusto Boal, "Theater of the Oppressed", in
The combine performance mixes the four-dimensional elements of performance with the three-dimensional elements of happening; much us is the case with performance "living" sculptures.RoseLee Goldberg, Performance Now: Live Art for the Twenty-First Century (Thames & Hudson, 2018): p. 137. .
Contribution toward digital media
Allan Kaprow's and other artists of the 1950s and 1960s that performed these happenings helped put "new media technology developments into context". The happenings allowed other artists to create performances that would attract attention to the issue they wanted to portray.
Around the world In 1959 the French artist Yves Klein first performed Zone de Sensibilité Picturale Immatérielle. The work involved the sale of documentation of ownership of empty space (the Immaterial Zone), taking the form of a cheque, in exchange for gold; if the buyer wished, the piece could then be completed in an elaborate ritual in which the buyer would burn the cheque, and Klein would throw half of the gold into the Seine.Yves Klein, Stich, Cantz 1995, p. 156 The ritual would be performed in the presence of an art critic or distinguished dealer, an art museum director and at least two witnesses.
In 1960, Jean-Jacques Lebel supervised and participated in the first European happening L'enterrement de la Chose in Venice. For his performance there – called Happening Funeral Ceremony of the Anti-Process – Lebel invited the audience to attend a ceremony in formal dress. In a decorated room within a grand residence, a draped 'cadaver' rested on a plinth which was then ritually stabbed by an 'executioner' while a 'service' was read consisting of extracts from the French décadent writer Joris-Karl Huysmans and le Marquis de Sade. Then pall-bearers carried the coffin out into a gondola and the 'body'–which was a mechanical sculpture by Jean Tinguely –was ceremonially slid into the canal.Joseph Nechvatal, Immersive Ideals / Critical Distances. LAP Lambert Academic Publishing, 2009. p. 323