Reinventing his past - installation artist Allan Kaprow

Art in America, June, 1994 by Jeff Kelley

Although famous as the principal originator of Happenings in the late 1950s, Allan Kaprow has faded from the screens of art-world radar in recent years as he moved steadily away from the public, often spectacular scale of his early works toward more intimate and interactive forms of ritual social exchange, such as trading pockets-full of straw with friends in a subway station (New York, 1988). Initially influenced by the action paintings of Jackson Pollock, the experimental music of John Cage, the playful absurdity of Brechtian theater and by Zen philosophy, Kaprow conceived the early Happenings as quasi-participatory events in which body movements, recorded sounds, spoken texts, painted panels or even smells could be an artist's materials. Indeed, in a moment of avant-garde exuberance Kaprow expanded the horizons of his art to include "the vastness of Forty-Second Street."[1] But the relative lack of art-world attention to his more privately scaled activities of the past 20 years has not been entirely unwelcome. It has allowed him to attend to what interests him: the experiences and meanings of everyday life.

In addition to creating the early Happenings, which were essentially outdoor events, from 1957 to '64 Kaprow made Environments, which were, in contrast, indoor spaces filled up with all manner of common objects and materials. Transitional works, the Environments marked the boundaries at which objects of art, once representations of experience, crossed over into the world of actual experience, and vice versa. It was as if the modern art work, in order to be fully concurrent with the world around it, adopted the space and time of the viewer, surrounding its audience with such common materials as "paint, chairs, food, electric and neon lights, smoke, water, old socks, a dog, movies and a thousand other things."[2]

Since 1985 or thereabouts, Kaprow has been "reinventing" certain of his early Environments in radically changed forms as a way of exploring the relationship between the history of avant-garde art--in which he played an important experimental role--and his personal memory as an artist. For example, the famous Yard Environment from 1960, in which hundreds of used tires were piled haphazardly in the narrow garden behind the Manhattan brownstone that housed the Martha Jackson Gallery, was reconceived at the Mudima Foundation in Milan in 1991, also in a rear sculpture garden, as a repair dock in which a tire-less Fiat sat on blocks surrounded by neatly filed racks of tires. With a large photograph of the old Yard hanging nearby, in which a young Kaprow is shown throwing tires to and fro, the new Yard suggested, among other things, the effects of aging on the body--immobility and intimations of mothballs. Much of the poignancy of Kaprow's reworkings lies in their capacity to mark the passage of time as well as to suggest the gap between the archival seriousness of art history (as it documents original works of art) and the permissive playfulness of an artist who starts with memory but makes things up, reinventing, as it were, his past.

The most recent of these reinventions took place last April, when Kaprow set up six audio/video "stations" on various floors, and in various rooms and passageways, of a five-story building on the corner of Spring and Greenwich streets in Manhattan. The building houses a full-service graphic-arts and printing firm known as the Trident Group. People on the mailing list of the John Gibson Gallery were invited to participate in Kaprow's project; they could come to the building during business hours, enter through the front door, and follow signs to the various stations.

Each station was composed of a table, a chair, a black-and-white video monitor, a push-button intercom and a hanging mirror, and was bordered by as many as eight vertical, galvanized stovepipes that lent a silly, circus-like air, setting off the video stations from the firm's more serious work environment. The stations were linked in pairs by closed-circuit video and audio, so that a person sitting at one could see, hear, and speak to a person sitting at the other. If someone was visible in the monitor, a conversation might occur; if nobody was visible, one could either wait, go to other stations, or look into the provided mirror.

These stations constituted a reinvention of Kaprow's first Environment (later given the name Beauty Parlor) which was made in two versions, in 1957 and '58, at the Hansa Gallery, an artists' cooperative in New York. (He did another reinvention in 1991 at the Mudima Foundation.) Originally, it played on the association of art galleries to beauty shops and of art-making to making-up. In the '57 version, hanging, parallel layers of cloth and plastic were loosely painted in "heraldic" bands of black, blue and red, and random mechanical sounds drifted down from various parts of the ceiling. In the '58 version, a "forest" of raffia strands hung from a ceiling-level net along with swarms of tiny blinking Christmas lights, and a wall of broken mirrors was framed by two rows of spotlights aimed at the spectator. An oscillating electric fan circulated chemical odors (this was before the age of "art-material hazards"), and electronic sounds emanated from four loudspeakers sited throughout the space. The idea was to subject the viewer to a dense environment of sensations through which he or she would have to push.