Allan Kaprow Site Visit
I visited Allan Kaprow, “Art as Life” with the class during the field trip. Allan Kaprow was a pioneer of performance in the 1950s, and is perhaps best known for coining the term, Happening, meant to describe a game, adventure or any kind of activity people might engage in for the sake of playing. Along with the Museum exhibition, MOCA was also hosting several Happenings, reinventions of key Happenings.
I think as with all artists that are primarily known for performance, it is a difficult task to create a Museum retrospective that rightfully examines the person’s work. The action and happening is essentially dead, and the original political and cultural climate is also dead. So I think pieces enter the arena of the spectacle, because audiences might come to see the piece solely because of what they read or learned about this character from a class, or a book, and that they pioneered something. The actual work has changed.
Walking through the exhibition, which had fliers, videos, films, photographs, overhead projectors, paintings, and an installation of blue furniture, I was interested in the archiving, and the attempt to re-present these materials.
The only installation I engaged in for any length of time was the blue furniture installation, which is a new version of “Push and Pull: A Furniture Comedy for Hans Hofmann.” Visitors can rearrange the furniture and play the piano. It reminded me of a preschool role playing room, with the move-able furniture and ladies’ shoes scattered around.
I really enjoyed watching a video interview of Kaprow’s where he talked about some of his projects, including the Dirt Exchange piece, where he would go around to people and simply exchange dirt with them. I think one of the very successful aspects to his Happenings is how they incorporate all kinds of people as its audience, not just fellow artists, but engaging out in the public sphere and asking something of people, in this case, dirt.