Revolution of the ordinary: Allan Kaprow and the invention of happenings.

Abstract

This dissertation engages one of the most contentious issues about art in the wake of Jackson Pollock: a shift away from painting to theater in order to revolutionize and expand the realm of art. Allan Kaprow, a relentless advocate and producer of happenings during the 1960s, strategically argued that the "environmental" paintings of Pollock led art into the streets. "The Legacy of Jackson Pollock," Kaprow's influential essay of 1958, prescribed an initial logic for such a shift in art. Happenings--participatory, site-specific, or theatrical events--were Kaprow's invention to reawaken dramatically the oppositional and radical dream that is at the very heart of the avant-garde paradigm. This vanguard revival was unique in the United States because it interacted and intersected with countercultural formations of the late 1950s and 1960s. This countercultural sphere was fluid and changing, rather than strictly circumscribed. It embodied the Beat's subversive embrace of commercial culture, the existential hipster's revolt against conformity in the 1950s, the energetic, utopian vision of the New Left in the 1960s, and, I argue, happenings. Radicals' alienation from corporate and state power spurred a desire to reform or contest existing institutions as much as it accelerated the construction of an oppositional space. With the near-collapse of the Old Left--which was effectively undermined and suppressed by the McCarthyist crusade--young, radical intellectuals, activists, and artists focused on lifestyle, race, sexuality, or vanguard art, in addition to politics, as agents of change. Their aim was to free themselves from the Cold War consensus politics, affluent values, and conformist pressures so widely lamented by liberal and leftist writers during the Eisenhower era and after. Occupying and transforming social space, whether in the name of a liberating politics or art, were similar aims of both the New Left and the producers of happenings. In the end I argue that Kaprow's melodramatic, utopian rhetoric of the "death" of the traditional museum opened for art a productive, expansive space, counter to, yet ultimately dependent on, the institution of modernism.