If any artist can be said to have invented the notoriously unpredictable Happenings, Allan Kaprow is the one. In 1959, at a New York loft newly transformed into the controversial Reuben Gallery, he presented a daring and hugely influential event called 18 Happenings in 6 Parts. The timing was ideal for such an audacious experiment. Like so many artists who came to maturity after the Second World War, Kaprow had been decisively influenced by Jackson Pollock and the Abstract Expressionists. But after Pollock’s sudden death in 1956, the most original members of the emergent generation decided that it was no longer enough to paint conventional abstract pictures.

Kaprow, born in Atlantic City and a graduate of New York University in 1949, had subsequently been trained as an art historian under Meyer Schapiro at Columbia University. So he was articulate enough to write an essay for Artnews magazine voicing the restlessness of his avant-garde contemporaries.

Published in 1958 under the title The Legacy of Jackson Pollock, it declared that Pollock had “destroyed painting”. According to Kaprow, the great need now was “to give up the making of painting entirely — I mean the single flat rectangle or oval as we know it”. In an astonishingly eloquent and prophetic passage, filled with possibilities for the future opening-out of art, he predicted that “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 42nd Street”. Refusing to set any arbitrary limits on the resources that artists could now deploy, he announced: “We shall utilise the specific substances of sight, sound, movements, people, odours, 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 that 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 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.”

It amounted to an exhilarating manifesto for the art of the future, and a whole range of artists from Claes Oldenburg to Dan Flavin would soon begin to explore these heady concerns. Kaprow himself was teaching art history at Rutgers University in New Jersey when his article was published. But in 1958 he also attended John Cage’s class in experimental music composition at the New School for Social Research in New York. Cage’s freewheeling emphasis on inventiveness, chance, time, theatre and the free organisation of sounds pushed at the orthodox boundaries of music at every turn. Kaprow aimed at a similar revolution in art, insisting in his Artnews credo that “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.” And this belief, that “out of nothing they will devise the extraordinary”, lay behind his responses to Cage’s class assignments. Using the objects that Cage wanted to be employed in noisy actions, Kaprow added the movement of figures in space. The outcome of this theatrical experiment became the embryo for his 1959 event at the Reuben Gallery, which can now be seen as the first fully fledged Happening ever to be performed in public.

Kaprow divided the gallery into three rooms with the aid of wood covered by canvas and plastic sheets. He added painted or collaged material, including panels of roughly executed words and rows of plastic fruit, to be used as props by the participants. The entire space was transformed even further with projected slides and films, as well as a mixture of electronic, mechanical and live sounds. But the main emphasis lay with six participants, who carried out angular yet disconnected movements (like squeezing oranges) to the rhythm of beats counted in their heads. Completely deadpan, they also uttered disconnected sentences and played an “orchestra” of toy instruments.

Members of the audience were expected to move between the rooms, obeying a timed score and occupying numbered seats. At a certain point two people in the audience, on one occasion Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, painted both sides of a canvas, one with stripes and one with a circle. But none of the spectators could grasp the totality of this “three-ring circus” event, which lasted an hour and was only performed on six consecutive evenings in early October.

Avant-garde New York quickly became fascinated by the immense potential of Happenings. Elusiveness was a central part of their appeal, as Susan Sontag pointed out. “One cannot hold on to a Happening,” she wrote, “and one can only cherish it as one cherishes a firecracker going off dangerously close to one’s face.” The sense of danger proved irresistible, and Kaprow lost little time in taking his Happenings away from the predictable confines of the gallery space. “I thought how much better it would be if you could just go out of doors and float an environment into the rest of life,” he explained later. That is why he invaded the backyard of the Martha Jackson Gallery in 1961, filling it with heaps of clapped-out tyres alongside one of Hans Namuth’s iconic photographs of Jackson Pollock at work.

Behind the apparent anarchy, though, the bearded and pipe-smoking Kaprow ensured that everything was rigorously disciplined. He returned to the Reuben Gallery in March 1961, where in its new downstairs space he staged the menace-filled A Spring Happening.

On the whole, though, Kaprow preferred to work outside the gallery’s boundaries. Working for the most part on commission from organisations, he advertised the Happenings with posters containing drawings and scripts for the event. As the years went on, he involved audiences more and more in the performances.

Kaprow came to believe that Happenings should never be repeated. He wanted them to be as immediate and visceral as possible, far removed from the fashionable gallery environment with its “white walls, tasteful aluminium frames, lovely lighting, fawn-gray rugs, cocktails and polite conversation”.

He became fascinated by natural processes, most notably in a Happening where the traces of various events — paper men placed in bare orchard branches, naked bodies painted grey, sheets of writing spread over a field and little boats painted along a gutter — were only washed away by the rain. A similar imperative governed a Happening called Fluids in 1967. Here, Kaprow decreed that about 20 “rectangular enclosures of ice blocks (measuring about 30 feet long, 10 feet wide and 8 feet high) are built throughout the city. Their walls are unbroken. They are left to melt.” The structures were duly erected by amateurs in Pasadena, and the builders’ interaction became an important part of the work’s meaning. So did chance encounters with passers-by, intrigued and bewildered by the sudden, unexplained advent of immense ice-blocks in their neighbourhood.

The influence of Kaprow’s pioneering work on subsequent developments in art is incalculably vast. “Allan took art off the walls and put it in places where anyone could encounter it,” said the poet and artist David Antin, an old friend of Kaprow’s. “It was a step in the democratisation of fine art and a big psychological breakthrough. He was an enormously important artist.” Kaprow disseminated his own ideas by writing about them in magazine articles, a 1966 book Assemblage, Environments & Happenings, and his aptly named 1993 volume Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life. In the late 1960s he moved to California and joined the teaching faculty at UC Berkeley.

Subsequently he taught at the California Institute of Arts in Valencia before joining the staff of the new visual arts department at UC San Diego in 1974. There he remained for the rest of his academic career, ending up as an Emeritus Professor before his death, at home in Encinitas on April 5. He was 78, and is survived by his wife, Carol Crane, and four children — three of them from his previous marriage to Vaughan Rachel.





Allan Kaprow, artist, was born on August 23, 1927. He died on April 5, 2006, aged 78.