Era
1958–1968
Downtown New York× 1958–1968× Biome: Avant & Anti-Art
A programme in six parts · the audience is the material
“Painters stepping through the canvas into staged, unrepeatable events — the assembled situation as artwork, with the audience as material.”
Card · handed to you at the door
Take a card. It tells you where to sit. It tells you what you will do. There will be no encore, no recording, and nothing to buy. The performance has already begun.
in which a canvas is found to have a far side
It begins as an argument about paint. In 1958 Allan Kaprow published ‘The Legacy of Jackson Pollock’ and drew from action painting the one conclusion nobody else would state: if the act was the art, then the canvas was an arbitrary edge. Pollock had burst the picture plane, and what lay past it was everything — the room, the street, the objects and people of ordinary life.
The following year Kaprow made the inference physical. At the Reuben Gallery he staged 18 Happenings in 6 Parts, handing each visitor a card that told them where to sit and what to do. Painting stepped through its own surface, and did not come back.
lofts, storefronts, junk, and nerve
The cohort converged on a few downtown blocks from two directions. From John Cage’s composition class at the New School came the score-minded — Kaprow, George Brecht, Al Hansen, Dick Higgins — trained to treat chance, instruction and ordinary noise as compositional material. From the lofts came painters with junk and nerve: Oldenburg building The Street and The Store, Dine staging Car Crash, Grooms setting off The Burning Building, Whitman assembling whole environments, Schneemann pressing the form toward the body.
The economy was nearly free — cheap lofts, storefront galleries, the city’s detritus for a palette — and the audience was mostly one another, which is the incubating temperature at which scenes catch.
Cast · in order of appearance
the recurring motifs, in the form the scene preferred: instructions
The rules were few and radical. A happening was performed once and never repeated. The audience was assigned tasks — seated, moved, handed props, implicated — made material alongside the junk. And nothing was left to sell: no object, no edition, no relic beyond a mimeographed score and a rumour. The scarcity was total and immediate. You were there, or you had missed it forever.
Card No. 1
Step through the picture plane. The room is the canvas now.
Card No. 2
Keep this score. The instruction handed to a stranger is a permission.
Card No. 3
Perform once. Repeat nothing. Leave nothing to sell.
Card No. 4
You, the audience: you are the material, and the accomplice.
Card No. 5
Use the city’s junk. Its detritus is the palette.
If action painting is truly about the act, the canvas is an arbitrary boundary; the artwork can be an assembled situation in real space and time — made of things, bodies and chance, complete only in its single performance.
mimeographed · passed hand to hand · downtown
memetic forces · why the word spread faster than the work
‘Happening’ promised that anything might. The press could not resist it — and repaid the scene with a fame it had never asked to manage.
Unrepeatability made attendance a credential. Every event was a scarcity of one: you were there, or you missed it forever.
Action painting’s authority travelled with the painters — the most advanced position in American art, carried bodily into a new medium.
Cheap lofts and storefronts made the means of production nearly free. Anyone with junk and nerve could stage a world.
internal dynamics · convergent and divergent engines
Less a group than a circuit: painters mounted one another’s events, shared props and audiences, argued about credit, and were held together by the tiny downtown economy that made the work possible at all — with Kaprow as theorist-in-chief. What pulled the circuit together and what let it scatter were nearly the same forces, wound in opposite directions.
convergent engines
divergent engines
society impact · what the grammar seeded
By 1968 the vernacular had finished its work: a ‘happening’ now meant any party worth attending, and the word had come loose from the art entirely. The originators had already moved on. Kaprow retreated into ever-quieter ‘Activities’ — un-arting, he called it — scores for daily life, performed for almost no one.
The estate passed intact to Judson Dance Theater and onward to performance and installation art at large, which still speak the grammar this circuit built: the score handed to strangers, the room as medium, the event as work. The be-in, the media stunt and the pop-up all inherit it. Few scenes have been so completely victorious in defeat — the culture took the name away precisely because it had absorbed the idea.
A composition class and a few blocks of lofts converting painting’s most advanced position into a new medium in under five years — art history moved by a cohort, not a genius.
Mediums
Archetypes
By 1968 the culture used the word for anything, the originators had moved on, and the form’s true estate — performance and installation art — no longer needed the name. The evening is over. Keep your card.