Happening

A happening is a performance, event, or situation meant to be considered art, usually as performance art. The term was first used by Allan Kaprow during the 1950s to describe a range of art-related events. A happening is a performance, event, or situation meant to be considered art, usually as performance art. The term was first used by Allan Kaprow during the 1950s to describe a range of art-related events. Happenings occur anywhere and are often multi-disciplinary, with a nonlinear narrative and the active participation of the audience. Key elements of happenings are planned but artists sometimes retain room for improvisation. This new media art aspect to happenings eliminates the boundary between the artwork and its viewer. In the late 1960s, perhaps due to the depiction in films of hippie culture, the term was used much less specifically to mean any gathering of interest from a pool hall meetup or a jamming of a few young people to a beer blast or fancy formal party. 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 that were going on. The first appearance in print 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. The form was imitated and the term was adopted by artists across the U.S., Germany, and Japan. Jack Kerouac referred to Kaprow as 'The Happenings man', and an ad showing a woman floating in outer space declared, 'I dreamt I was in a happening in my Maidenform brassiere'. Happenings are difficult to describe, in part because each one is unique and completely different from one another. 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'. 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.' A 'Happening' of the same performance will have different outcomes because each performance depends on the action of the audience. In New York City especially, 'Happenings' became quite popular even though many had neither seen nor experienced them. 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 coloured 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. All these things took place at the same time, among the audience rather than on a stage. 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, Claes Oldenburg, Robert Delford Brown, Lucas Samaras, and Robert Rauschenberg. Some of their work is documented in Michael Kirby's book Happenings (1966). 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.