Allan Kaprow, 1927-2006

On Wednesday, Apr. 5, Allan Kaprow, the Master of the Happening, the pathbreaking artist, thinker and theorist whose explosive career of more than 40 years of environments and performances, powerful and prophetic essays, and influential teaching transformed serious artmaking forever, died peacefully in his home in Encinitas, Calif. He was 78 years old.

In October 1958 Art News published a remarkable essay, "The Legacy of Jackson Pollock." The essay, by the 31-year-old painter Allan Kaprow, was a close analysis of Pollock's work and a meditation on the meaning of his death for the painting avant-garde. In Allan's reading, Pollock's large pour and splatter paintings of the late '40s were the culminating act of advanced painting, which finally liberated it of all the formal, relational and material constraints that had been the field of its being, leaving it nowhere to go.

"So what do we do now?" Allan asked, and he offered two alternatives. One was to continue in this vein, turning out many good "near paintings" that would be minor variations on Pollock that never went any further. The other, wrote Allan, in a passage verging on prophecy, "is to give up the making of paintings entirely" and, drawing on the energy, crudeness and naivete of Pollock's great work,

we must become preoccupied with and even dazzled by the space and objects of our everyday life, either our bodies, clothes, rooms, or, if need be, the vastness of Forty-second Street. Not satisfied with the suggestion through paint of our other senses, we shall utilize the specific substances of sight, sounds, movements, people, odors, touch. Objects of every sort are materials for the new art: paint, chairs, food, electric and neon lights, smoke, water, old socks, a dog, movies, a thousand other things will be discovered by the present generation of artists. Not only will these bold creators show us, as if for the first time, the world we have had about us but ignored. But they will disclose entirely unheard-of happenings and events, found in garbage cans, police files, hotel lobbies; seen in store windows and on the streets; and sensed in dreams and horrible accidents. An odor of crushed strawberries, a letter from a friend, or a billboard selling Drano; three taps on the front door, a scratch, a sigh, or a voice lecturing endlessly, a blinding staccato flash, a bowler hat--all will become material for this new concrete art.

Young artists of today need no longer say, "I am a painter" or "a poet" or "a dancer" They are simply "artists." All of life will be open to them.

In 1958 this was truly prophecy because it wasn't till October 1959 that Allan presented 18 Happenings in Six Parts in the loft-like space of the new Reuben Gallery in New York. It was this elaborate spectacle of colored lights, materials, taped and live words and sounds, smells, sculptural constructions, and live performers carrying out nondramatic but tightly scripted actions, that announced the name "Happening" to the world and set off a train of related, though much less tightly scripted, works by Allan and his contemporaries in New York, Osaka, San Francisco, Chicago, Cologne, Paris and Milan. By 1968 Allan himself had produced more than 20 Happenings, and the news of this work spread rapidly beyond the contemporary art world--and even the related worlds of avant-garde theater, dance, music and poetry--into the general culture, where nearly any large, freewheeling and explosive event was likely to be called a Happening.

But under cover of the fame surrounding the Happenings, Allan's pieces developed along two lines as the '60s went on--from the profuse bundle of image fragments of the early Happenings and environments to the concentration on a single resonant image and to the elimination of audience and its replacement by collaborating participants in a kind of freely undertaken and otherwise purposeless, liberated work. Anyone at all familiar with Allan's pieces will remember Yard (1961), the pile of used tires surrounding tar-paper-wrapped sculptures in the sculpture court of Martha Jackson's gallery as the garbage output of our automotive culture overrunning "high culture" But not too many know Allan's 1967 piece Fluids, for which he recruit ed teams made up mostly of art students to build with him at 15 locations scattered across the many miles of the Los Angeles-Pasadena area 15 rectangular ice structures 30 feet long, 10 feet wide and 8 feet high--15 roofless minimalist igloos that were then allowed to melt in the Southern California sun. Remarkable as the image was, it was less remarkable than the hard communal work involved in building a structure out of an uncommon and awkward building material on unleveled ground by people not especially skilled at the task. It was a kind of barn-raising without the promise of any outcome other than the successful achievement of the doomed glistening structure.