The Blurring of Art and Life. - book reviews

ArtForum, Summer, 1994 by John C. Welchman

Allan Kaprow's essays (1958-90) offer sustained arguments for what we might call quietist transgressivism. Reviewed alongside the "Happenings" and "Environments" contemporary with them, Kaprow's writings have the cumulative effect of deframing "art," opening it up to everyday life, to common, participatory understanding, or to a new order of social ritual--subject to what Kaprow describes as "alchemies" of the "ordinary" (1958) and flashes of "attention" (1990).

Kaprow's dispute with the activity of frame-bound art practice is literal and genealogical. His key formative essay "The Legacy of Jackson Pollock," 1958, offers its subject both a critical obituary and the chance of an afterlife. Pollock is held to have missed an opportunity to extrapolate his own transgressive logic--a loss that Kaprow will himself make good. The place of the loss is the margin between the floor-spread canvas and the studio wall, a zone that becomes a metaphor for the articulation of a para-painting. Yet Pollock has not ridden on the vehicle of its tropic transfer. He has refused, or been blind to, the extrapolative logic that Kaprow will supply: the next, and only, place for "art" to "go" is beyond the canvas, off the wall, off the floor, and out of the studio. "Art" must somehow merge with "life." What was once an art experience must now be relayed (or "blurred") into the sensations of the everyday.

As Jeff Kelley suggests, an important precondition of Kaprow's reorientation of practice from frame-bound object to experiential sensation is found in his reading of John Dewey's Art and Experience, and in his at least residual attachment to a form of American pragmatism. Within these terms, Kaprow disputes both formula Modernism and the available scenarios of "antiformalism": "He wants more than antiformalism: he wants the shapes, thresholds, and duration of experience itself . . . to provide the frames in which the meanings of life may be intensified and interpreted."

You will understand from this, and see from the cover of the book, that these are shaggy dog stories, fluffed up with tall wagging tales. By 1990, when the shags are longest, Kaprow had produced a counterart formula of attentive routines that reads like a hyperrealism of the commonplace. You catch yourself looking around for decision, politics, drives, or desires, but what you find has only the necessary nonurgency of respiration. There's nothing scintillating or sublime here. Yet the paradox of these writings is that they covertly return the long-estranged auras of art, turning them inside out and smuggling them back in everyday routines--where, framed and floodlit with "attention," they radiate the quiet wonder of life.

John Welchman's new book, Modernism Relocated: Disruptions, Displacements and Other Destinies in Visual Modernity, is forthcoming from Allen & Unwin, Sydney.