Reinventing his past - installation artist Allan Kaprow

Art in America, June, 1994 by Jeff Kelley

Today, the carnivalesque, proto-psychedelic qualities of Kaprow's early Environments and Happenings--as well as those of his colleagues at the time, Jim Dine, Claes Oldenburg, Robert Whitman, Red Grooms and others--seem naive in the context of our sophisticated world of disembodied information and virtual images. But the distinction marks one of the most interesting and perhaps most compelling shifts in our consensus about where a truly social space, a space of social exchange, exists. For Kaprow, that space was originally almost any that stood outside the forms of modernist abstraction and the "beauty parlors" in which they were suspended, and that drew its esthetic qualities instead from what John Dewey--perhaps Kaprow's most important intellectual influence--called "the everyday events, doings, and sufferings that are universally recognized to constitute experience."[3]

But everyday experience is different now. Since 1960, its locus has drifted away from the physical and out toward the margins of virtuality. What this means, among other things, is that life may be more like art than it's ever been. The medium by which the art/life gap has been bridged, however, is not painting or performance or even photography, but advertising. Perhaps more than any "space" of social exchange, advertising is where the arts are put to use in the service of production. By reinventing Beauty Parlor in the workaday context of a commercial art and printing business, Kaprow has "gone to work" in a social space one step removed from the worlds of high art and low commerce that flank it. It is the environment of the middleman.

Often the metaphors in Kaprow's work are revealed in the choices viewers are invited to make. The fundamental choices here were to withdraw into narcissistic self-absorption by looking into the mirror or to be social by means of the paired electronic hookups. (These were, in fact, also options in the '58 version of Beauty Parlor.) In the art context, being social once meant sharing a physical space with others of an avant-garde bent. Then the envelope of esthetic experience--the gallery or the artist's loft--was broadened to include some of the objects, sensations and encounters that one would ordinarily find outside on the street.

Here, something of the reverse happened. Instead of inserting the stuff of life into the envelope of art, Kaprow inserted a closed audio/video loop (a channel of estheticized, quasi-social "communication") into an actual working business, with employees coming and going, supplies being loaded and stored, designs under production, visitors being received, money being made and (from time to time) someone retuning the monitors in search of a ball game.

In this context, Kaprow's audio/video loop seemed less like open, random social exchange than like an island of privileged conversation for those of Kaprowesque persuasion. It was an art loop, but one entangled in the other specialized loops that are constantly playing, repeating and intermixing in the intensely social environment called "the workplace." After a time, with forklifts lurching by, light tables humming, workers eating lunch, executives making calls, elevator bells ringing and the smell of printing ink everywhere, the activity of waiting in front of a video monitor and/or looking into a mirror seemed no more or less strange than any of the other activities that were going on all around. Each seemed equally Cagean in its wafting indeterminacy.