What’s Happening!
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| From Television series Whats Happening! (1976-1979 I cannot help but suspect that this line (title) was originally derived from Allen Kaprow’s coining the term “Happening” during the early sixties. |
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| Allan Kaprow, 18 Happenings in 6 Parts, 1959 |
I suppose there are some advantages to
re-visiting several books assigned this semester. They were assigned to an
extent sequentially (historically sequenced) and it is kind of fun to see how the ideas of the books
which were written earlier connect in various interesting ways. What becomes
fascinating to me is how it, as a result it becomes easier to see how our own
ideas and aesthetic approaches may have unfolded. I am now re-examining my
notes taken for the book, Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life by Allen
Kaprow (2003). This is a book,
which compiles essays written over four decades therefore it includes essays
written as early as the 60’s. Kaprow coined the term happenings and I find a
rather instant connection between happenings and the ideas expressed in Nicolas
Bourriaud’s book, Relational Aesthetics that was published in 2004. One of my first blurbs in my note pages
on Kaprow’s book reads “art is not separate from experience”. Bourriaud’s
relational aesthetics seems to indicate an expansion of this “blur” as it were. In Bourriaud’s case he suggests a blurring between artist and non-artist when
referring to the participatory elements involved in relational aesthetic
practice.
The connections keep coming as I go on. I
saw a rather distinct connection between Kaprow and Wolfgang Schivelbusch
(author of The Railway Journey, The Industrialization of Time and Space in the
19th Century) Kaprow writes about how the industrialized west
separated itself from authentic experience. It seems this process of separation
at least in part began with the passenger on a train transformed into a parcel (humans as finite packages).
As I continue to read my notes I continue
to identify connections between Kaprow and Bourriaud. Bourriaud seems to much as Kaprow be interested in treating
art more as verb yet Bourriaud seems interested in taking this idea perhaps a
step forward by creating moving narratives that do more to create ways of
inhabiting space whereas it seems Kaprow’s experiments have a “period” (an end), so to
speak. Kaprow refers to experiential art as “mental metaphors” which seem to
indicate the metaphor is finite. Bourriaud seems to attempt to expand on this
trajectory.
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| Figure 1. Jackson Pollock's ‘Convergence’ (1952), 237.5cm×393.7cm, oil on canvas. © 2009 The Pollock-Krasner Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. |
I found it interesting that in Kaprow’s book he says he is not
interested in forms as a way of inscribing universals much along the lines of Clement Greenberg and his proponents. Yet, he discusses Pollock’s drip canvases as a
way of indicating and encompassing a space far beyond the borders of the canvas
itself. He departs from the formalists approach though by allowing the
potential for chaos to enter into aesthetic experience thereby allowing
extraordinary qualities of experience to be brought to light. I cannot help but
see this as directly connected to Suzi Gablik’s suggestion that to break the
collective trance of modern life there must be disruption and Kaprows idea of
allowing experience to be treated as a medium, much as Pollock would a drip,
humans gain access to ideas about how to better inhabit the world as Bourriaud
suggested in Relational Aesthetics. Kaprow suggests that formalist’s logic can
be avoided by allowing aesthetic experience to, (my term, bleed out) into lived
experience. Of course this for me helps substantiate my position as it relates
to my community service project “Drawn Together”. My project is about removing
some of the modernist’s universal pronouncements by removing qualitative
limits. I do prefer to have my project delimited to a two dimensional work on
paper (while also animating the process via stop motion animation) only to express to a broader audience that it is, in fact artistic
actions and processes that can allow us to mediate the world in a different (perhaps better) way.
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Still photographs from Drawn Together event, Reno. 19th June 2009. Still photographs
by Coral Wu. JPEG files.
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While reading these books I have tried not
to edit my own thoughts much at all. Often, while reading and taking notes I
discovered that new concepts for art projects were constantly bubbling to the
surface and I have been able to compile quite a list of what could be developed
into interesting projects (or not). Some of them are worth little more than the
paper on which they’re printed, some would be interesting experiments while others
seem to have genuine merit. I’d like to list a few of them as they appear in my
notes. I think it may be fun to leave them out of the text of these blog postings
and present them in list form. Here is a sample...
1. Idea: perform shorts for one audience member at a time. The
audience must not reveal the short performance. Some will be repeats of
previous performances but there will be no way other audience members will know
unless the audience member reveals the performance.
I kind of like this because in some ways
it reminds me a bit of Portland artist Joe Thurston’s crates within which he’s
hidden his own life keepsakes and mementos. I like the idea of a performance
addressing the concept of secrets and dealing with things hidden and things
revealed.
In Kaprow’s essay on Jackson Pollock I’ve
noted that he referred to art that has a defined beginning, middle and end. I
then wrote:
“Could this idea of no beginning middle
and end be applied to a work literally having no beginning middle or end as
well as no actual author or even definable authors? All over could mean
everyone all over?” I am trying to recall more accurately the context of my
thinking here and see it is perhaps connected in some ways to Nicolas Bourriaud’s
idea of a ceaseless narrative which he expressed in so many words in the book, The Radicant (at this point in the semester I have not read Bourriaud’s
book, Relational Aesthetics). The
idea that Pollock’s canvases suggest a metaphysically ceaseless landscape seems
to relate very directly to my community service project “Drawn Together” which
I have made no plans to “end” as it were.
It seems difficult to get through several
of these books without some form of homage or reference to Marcel Duchamp and
this book was no exception. I suppose in addressing or countering the modernist
idea regarding universal values of aesthetic determinism Kaprow suggested that
only the changing is enduring, the only universal is instability, which reminds
me of many passages from the book Duchamp, A Biography by Calvin Tomkins. I
also ran across this passage written by Richard Merritt from the April 2003
online issue of Tout-fait, The Marcel
Duchamp Studies Online Journal for an article titled, Logical and Subversive
the Art of Marcel Duchamp, Concept Visualization and Immersive Experience: “The
body of work produced by Marcel Duchamp was a programmatic, if playful,
undermining of deterministic thinking. He demolished arbitrary discipline
boundaries between artist, scientist and mathematician. His clues to altering
our perspective were equally pertinent to viewing and understanding his oeuvre
as they were to viewing individual works of art. His implicit and explicit call
for altering our vantage point relative to his intentions inherently calls into
question modernist singular interpretations. Yet, through the use of concept
visualization, we can create more exploratory modes of information
visualization; modes which allow for simultaneous multiple dimensional
thinking. In an immersive environment the viewer can experience a panorama of
Duchamp's intentions, one that does not enforce strict rules of consistency,
but nonetheless leads us to comprehension of a poly-dynamic yet visceral logic.
Duchamp in challenging the definition of the art objects by
exalting the primacy of the idea over the creative act he subverted the
modernist convention of the artist/object and viewer relationships. “
I suppose Duchamp,
for me would be the ultimate studio visit!! I do recall reading about a studio visit by Duchamp to an
artist’s studio in which he asks the artist what he was doing to which the
artist replied, “ I have no idea.” Duchamp then said to this effect, “ Keep up
the good work.” This passage is not the first to refer to Duchamp’s approach as
“playful”. It further seems that
it is this instability (Kaprow even uses the word fragility) that in itself
represents life best.
A few
thoughts on Happenings in the New York Scene 1961 (p.15)
Kaprow on the Pure and Impure
In this essay Kaprow seems to address the
paradoxical dependency that purity must have on the impure to even exist.
Kaprow writes, “ … for purity suggests something beyond innocence or the
clergy, namely what is abstract, essential, authentic, true, absolute, perfect,
utter, sheer. These meanings may be found in any dictionary. And they are the
qualities that, in varying degrees, also help make up our idea of the
classical.
Impurity, then, is a second-hand state, a mongrel at best
physically; therefore tainted morally; and metaphysically impossible by
definition. From this concept we derive much of our image of the romantic. But
just as evidently, when romantic thoughts prevail, impurity is scrawled over
the earth as a truth of nature more honest than any classical artifice.”
He goes on to suggest that, “one (purity and impurity) takes its meaning from the denial of the
other, and neither can exist in fact without invoking shades of its
opponent”. In my view this is the
kind of dynamic relation that the precise, linear epitomes related to
industrial capitalism regularly overlook, discourage and avoid.
“
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