4 Levels, 11 Rules and ‘18 Happenings in 6 Parts’ (with Allan Kaprow)
Allan Kaprow, Sept. 1959 (photo by by Fred W. McDarrah).
Not only will these bold creators show us, as if for the first time, the world we have always 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 Draino; 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 materials for this new concrete art.
— Allan Kaprow, “The Legacy of Jackson Pollock” (1958)
The above quote is the first known appearance in print of the word “happening” (in an artistic sense). This is not surprising, since the work of Jackson Pollock was instrumental to Allan Kaprow’s discovery of the “Happening” in the late 1950s. For several years prior to this, Kaprow had been working with “Assemblages”: three-dimensional collages, often mixing objects with painting. Inspired by Pollock’s frenetic techniques, Kaprow began experimenting with “action-collages”, which were “done as rapidly as possible by grasping up great hunks of varied matter: tinfoil, straw, canvas, photos, newspaper, etc.”
Kaprow’s Rearrangeable Panels (1957-59, photo by Denis Trente-Huittessan).
These action-collages began incorporating sensory elements, like the “sounds of ringing buzzers, bells, toys, etc.,” and they gradually grew larger and thicker, until they were no longer single works hanging from a gallery wall—now they took over the whole gallery. They were no longer Assemblages, they were immersive “Environments”. But as these Environments became more expansive and elaborate, Kaprow bumped up against a new limit: the gallery space itself. He grew discontent with the sense of bounded space, and the way that art galleries turn visitors into detached spectators. During 1957 and ’58, he began assigning visitors simple tasks and activities, e.g. moving objects or flipping switches.
In October of 1959, at the short-lived Reuben Gallery in Manhattan, Kaprow staged the first Happening, which was actually 18 Happenings in 6 Parts. There were precursors, to be sure, like 1952’s Theater Piece No. 1 by John Cage (who taught music composition to Kaprow around 1957-58), but it was 18 Happenings in 6 Parts which crystallized the concept and launched the term “happening” into popular usage. Although Cage provided a prototype, it was Kaprow who added the missing ingredient: participation. Theater Piece No. 1 was a stageless performance, with the audience sitting in the middle, surrounded by simultaneous acts of music, dancing, poetry, etc. But it was still a performance with an audience. Kaprow’s epiphany: every visitor to an exhibition or performance was a part of it, and from there it “follows that audiences should be eliminated entirely.”
The floor plan for Theater Piece No. 1.
4 Levels of a Happening
After 1959 Kaprow continued to refine the concept of the “Happening”. By the mid-60s, he was providing detailed descriptions and guidelines. In Michael Kirby’s Happenings, An Illustrated Anthology (1965), he lists the “elements” of a Happening (“environment, constructed sections, time, space, and people”), before describing the four levels on which every Happening operates:
1) Suchness: Happenings are “the direct ‘suchness’ of every action ... with no more meaning than the sheer immediacy of what is going on ... physical, sensible, tangible being.” (The term “suchness” should ring a bell with students of Mahayana Buddhism.)
2) Fantasy: Happenings are “performed fantasies not exactly like life, though derived from it.”
3) Structure: Happenings are “an organized structure of events.”
Happenings are not spontaneous or arbitrary, they are highly orchestrated and constrained compositions: “a collage of events in certain spans of time and in certain spaces.” However, this doesn’t mean that Kaprow sought to eliminate chance altogether: “Obviously things are done variously and flexibly in the actual performance. There are the contributions of each person, the accidents of weather, the slips in timing, etc., which nobody can figure on. Sometimes they are marvelous, sometimes not. I allow for for this. I try to plan for different degrees of flexibility within parameters of an otherwise strictly controlled imagery.”
Elsewhere in the same essay for Happenings, An Illustrated Anthology, Kaprow expresses some regret with his choice in terminology: “The name ‘Happening’ is unfortunate.” It was intended as a neutral alternative to “piece” or “performance” or “game”, avoiding associations with traditional theater or exhibitions. But it was also misleading, as the public seemed to confuse his “authored” Happenings with random, “casual and indifferent” events, with a thing that “just happens to happen.”
4) Meaning: Happenings are “usually the embodiment of a number of old, archetypal symbols ... I try to keep the symbols universal, simple, and basic.”
11 Rules of the Game
In 1966, Kaprow released a lecture on vinyl, entitled How to Make a Happening. Side 2 gives detailed examples of Happenings, while Side 1 lays out his “11 rules of the game”. Around the same time, he published an essay entitled “Assemblage, Environments & Happenings”, in a book of the same name. This essay contains a similar list which is both shorter (only seven rules) and more detailed. The rules below are an amalgam of both.
1) “Forget all the standard art forms. Don’t paint pictures, don’t make poetry, don’t build architecture, don’t arrange dances, don’t write plays, don’t compose music, don’t make movies, and above all, don’t think you’ll get a happening out of putting all these together ... The point is to make something new, something that doesn’t even remotely remind you of culture.”
Draw inspiration and source material from anything but the arts! (See #3.)
2) “The line between art and life should be kept as fluid, and perhaps indistinct, as possible.”
“You can steer clear of art by mixing up your happening by mixing it with life situations. Make it unsure even to yourself if the happening is life or art.”
18 Happenings in 6 Parts: Kaprow at work, transforming the gallery into an “Environment”.
3) “The situations for a happening should come from what you see in the real world, from real places and people rather than from the head. If you stick to imagination too much you’ll end up with old art again, since art was always supposed to be made from imagination.”
4) “Break up your spaces. A single enactment space is what the theatre traditionally uses. You can experiment by gradually widening the distances between your events; first at a number of points along a heavily trafficked avenue, then in several rooms and floors of an apartment house where some of the activities are out of touch with each other, then on more than one street, then in different but nearby cities, finally all around the world … You don’t have to be everywhere at once. You don’t even have to be everywhere. The places you’re in are as good as the places other participants are in.”
18 Happenings in 6 Parts: The Reuben Galley was a third-floor loft along Fourth Avenue. Kaprow divided the loft into three smaller rooms, “each different in size and feeling,” using walls made of a framework of wood covered with semitransparent plastic. The walls were shorter than the gallery’s ceiling, in order to draw attention to the artifice of it all. In each room, different numbers of folding chairs were set up in different arrangements. The lighting in each room was different.
18 Happenings in 6 Parts: The view of Room 2 from Room 1 (top). A wheeled construction/record player called “the sandwich man” (bottom).
5) “Break up your time and let it be real time. Real time is found when things are going on in real places ... Whatever happens should happen in its natural time.”
Time “should be variable and discontinuous ... There need be no rhythmic coordination between the several parts of a Happening unless it is suggested by the event itself ... Above all, this is ‘real’ or ‘experienced’ time, as distinct from conceptual time.”
18 Happenings in 6 Parts took place over six days, between Oct. 4-10, 1959: “The performance is divided into six parts. Each part contains three happenings which occur at once.”
18 Happenings in 6 Parts: Four loudspeakers, each mounted high in a corner of the Reuben Gallery, broadcast audiotapes of “nonharmonic sounds”. The tapes were similar but not identical, and no attempt was made to synchronize them. The sounds from the four corners started and stopped at slightly different times, creating an “antiphonal” effect in which the dominant source kept changing.
18 Happenings in 6 Parts.
6) “Arrange all your events in the happening in the same practical way. Not in an arty way ... Nature can never appear formless because of the way the brain is made, so why worry? Just take things as they come, and arrange them in whatever way is least artificial and easiest to do.”
Let “the form emerge from what the materials can do. If a horse is part of a work, whatever a horse does gives the ‘form’ to what he does in the Happening.”
7) “Since you’re in the world now and not in art, play the game by real rules. Make up your mind when and where a happening is appropriate ... If you want to have all your participants stark naked, swimming, making love or whatnot, there are times and plenty of places where it wouldn’t stir up any dust. On the other hand, if you like being busted by the cops, you might think of working jail into the happening.”
(See #8.)
8) “Work with the power around you, not against it. It makes things much easier, and you’re interested in getting things done. When you need official approval, go out for it. You can use police help, the mayor, the college dean, the chamber of commerce, the company exec, the rich, and all your neighbors ... it’s not a snap, of course, but they’re convincible, and once on your side you can almost go to the moon.”
Rules #7 and #8 are where “guerilla performance art” often parts ways with Kaprow. Not very long after How to Make a Happening was released, the Diggers were making a splash in Haight-Ashbury, as a countercultural collective of radical street performers who made their own rules, provoking the powers that be, and who were certainly not afraid of getting arrested. For Kaprow, Happenings couldn’t accommodate acts of civil disobedience.
9) “When you’ve got the go-ahead, don’t rehearse the happening. This will make it unnatural because it will build in the idea of good performance, that is, ‘art.’ There is nothing to improve in a happening, you don’t need to be a professional performer. It’s best when it is artless, for better or worse. If it doesn’t work, do another happening.”
Kaprow developed “a method to do a performance without rehearsal—to make use of available people on the spot as quickly as possible ... I thought of the simplest situations, the simplest images—the ones having the least complicated mechanics or implications on the surface ... The more ‘unartistic’ they are, the more natural and easy to do and the less they seem inhibiting to performers.”
10) “Perform the happening once only. Repeating it makes it stale, reminds you of theatre and does the same thing as rehearsing: it forces you to think that there is something to improve on.”
18 Happenings in 6 Parts: The “orchestra”, with Kaprow in the middle, playing a wooden flute.
11) “Give up the whole idea of putting on a show for audiences. A happening is not a show ... A happening is for those who happen in this world, for those who don’t want to stand off and just look. If you happen, you can’t be outside peeking in. You’ve got to be involved physically.”
“I find it practically necessary to appear in my own works ... I need to be part of it to find out what it is like myself. Imagining a Happening and being in one are two different things.”
“It follows that audiences should be eliminated entirely ... I think that it is a mark of mutual respect that all persons involved in a Happening be willing and committed participants who have a clear idea what they are to do.”
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Bonus Track! (Why not?)
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