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For other uses, see The Happening. A happening is a performance, event or situation meant to be considered as an art. Happenings take place anywhere (from basements to studio lofts and even street alley ways), are often multi-disciplinary, with a nonlinear narrative and the active participation of the audience. Key elements of happenings are planned, but artists sometimes retain room for improvisation. This new media art aspect to happenings eliminates the boundary between the artwork and its viewer. Henceforth, the interactions between the audience and the artwork makes the audience, in a sense, part of the art. In the later sixties, perhaps due to the depiction in films of hippie culture, the term was used much less specifically to mean any gathering of interest, from a pool hall meetup or a jamming of a few young people to a beer blast or fancy formal party.
[edit] History[edit] Origins Allan Kaprow first coined the term happening in the Spring of 1957 at an art picnic at George Segal's farm to describe the art pieces that were going on. Happening first appeared in print in the Winter 1959 issue of the Rutgers University undergraduate literary magazine, Anthologist.[1] The form was imitated and the term was adopted by artists across the U.S., Germany, and Japan. Jack Kerouac referred to Kaprow as "The Happenings man," and an ad showing a woman floating in outer space declared, "I dreamt I was in a happening in my Maidenform brassiere." "Happenings" are very difficult to describe, in part because each one is unique and completely different from one another. One definition comes from Wardrip-Fruin and Montfort in The New Media Reader, "The term "Happening" has been used to describe many performances and events, organized by Allan Kaprow and others during the 1950s and 1960s, including a number of theatrical productions that were traditionally scripted and invited only limited audience interaction."[2] A "Happening" of the same performance will have a different outcomes because each performance depends on the action of the audience. In New York especially, "Happenings" become quite popular even though many have not seen nor experienced it. "Happenings" are a form of participatory new media art, emphasizing an interaction between the performer and the audience. Breaking the fourth wall between "performer" and "spectator", it replaces criticism with support. While it includes everyone present in the making of the art, the form of the art depends on the engagement of the audience, for they are a key factor in where the performers' spontaneity leads. There are no set rules, only vague guidelines that the performers follow based on surrounding props. Unlike other forms of art, "Happenings" are ever-changing. Because only chance determines the path the performance will follow, there is no room for failure. As Kaprow writes in his essay, '"Happenings" in the New York Scene', "Visitors to a Happening are now and then not sure what has taken place, when it has ended, even when things have gone 'wrong'. For when something goes 'wrong', something far more 'right,' more revelatory, has many times emerged"(New Media Reader, pg. 86). The art thrives on an artist's whim, with the comfort of giving their "mistakes" the benefit of the doubt. The art defines itself by the fact that it is a unique, one-time experience that depends upon what different audiences bring to the table each time. It cannot be bought or brought home, which entitles every "Happening" artist to a sense of privacy. As Kaprow explains in the aforementioned essay, since the performances are always different, each one of these artists cannot lose their creative drive to a mainstream force. Kaprow’s piece 18 Happenings in 6 Parts (1959) is commonly cited as the first happening, although that distinction is sometimes given to a 1952 performance of Theater Piece No. 1 at Black Mountain College by John Cage, one of Kaprow's teachers in the mid-1950s. Cage stood reading from a ladder, Charles Olson read from another ladder, Robert Rauschenberg showed some of his paintings and played scratched phonograph records, David Tudor performed on a prepared piano and Merce Cunningham danced.[3] All these things took place at the same time, among the audience rather than on a stage. Happenings flourished in New York City in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Key contributors to the form included Carolee Schneemann, Red Grooms, Robert Whitman, Jim Dine, Claes Oldenburg, Robert Delford Brown, Lucas Samaras, and Robert Rauschenberg. Some of their work is documented in Michael Kirby's book Happenings (1966). [edit] Contribution Toward Digital MediaAllan Kaprow's and other artists of the 1950s and 1960s that performed these "Happenings" helped put "new media technology developments into context." It was highly influential in true "intermedia" work and the interactivity in art. [edit] Around the worldIn 1959 the French artist Yves Klein first performed Zone de Sensibilité Picturale Immatérielle. The work involved the sale of documentation of ownership of empty space (the Immaterial Zone), taking the form of a cheque, in exchange for gold; if the buyer wished, the piece could then be completed in an elaborate ritual in which the buyer would burn the cheque, and Klein would throw half of the gold into the Seine [4]. The ritual would be performed in the presence of an art critic or distinguished dealer, an art museum director and at least two witnesses [4]. In 1960, Jean-Jacques Lebel oversaw and partook in the first European Happening L'enterrement de la Chose in Venice. For his performance there - called Happening Funeral Ceremony of the Anti-Process - Lebel invited the audience to attend a ceremony in formal dress. In a decorated room within a grand residence, a draped 'cadaver' rested on a plinth which was then ritually stabbed by an 'executioner' while a 'service' was read consisting of extracts from the French décadent writer Joris-Karl Huysmans and le Marquis de Sade. Then pall-bearers carried the coffin out into a gondola and the 'body' - which was in fact a mechanical sculpture by Jean Tinguely - was ceremonially slid into the canal.[5] Poet and painter Adrian Henri claimed to have organized the first happenings in England in Liverpool in 1962,[6] taking place during the Merseyside Arts Festival.[7] The most important event in London was the Albert Hall “International Poetry Incarnation” on June 11, 1965, where an audience of 7,000 people witnessed and participated in performances by some of the leading avant-garde young British and American poets of the day (see British Poetry Revival and Poetry of the United States). One of the participants, Jeff Nuttall, went on to organise a number of further happenings, often working with his friend Bob Cobbing, sound poet and performance poet. In Tokyo in 1964, Yoko Ono created a happening by performing her "Cut Piece" at the Sogetsu Art Center. She walked onto the stage draped in fabric, presented the audience with a pair of scissors, and instructed the audience to cut the fabric away gradually until she was naked.[8] In Belgium, the first happenings were organized around 1965–1968 in Antwerp, Brussels and Ostend by artists Hugo Heyrman and Panamarenko. In the Netherlands, Provo organized happenings around the little statue "Het Lieverdje" on the Spui, a square in the centre of Amsterdam, from 1966 till 1968. Police often raided these events. In Australia, the Yellow House Artist Collective in Sydney housed 24-hour happenings throughout the early 1970s. Behind the Iron Curtain, in Poland, artist and theater director Tadeusz Kantor staged the first happenings starting in 1965. Also, in the second half of 1980s, a student-based happening movement Orange Alternative founded by Major Waldemar Fydrych became known for its much attended happenings (over 10 thousand participants at one time) aimed against the military regime led by General Jaruzelski and the fear blocking the Polish society ever since the Martial Law had been imposed in December 1981. The non-profit, artist-run organization, iKatun[9], has reflected the use of "Happenings" influence while incorporating the medium of internet. They aim is one that "fosters public engagement in the politics of information." Their project entitled "The International Database of Corporate Commands" presents a scrutinizing look at the super-saturating advertisements slogans, and "commands" of companies. "The Institute for Infinitely Small Things uses these commands to conduct research performances- performances in which we attempt to enact, as literally as possible, what the command tells us to do and where it tells us to do it. For example, a user may look at a long list of slogans on the website database section, and may submit, in text, his or her take on the most literal way to act out the slogan/ command. The iKatun team will then act out the slogan in a research-performance related way. This means of performance art draws on the collaboration of the web world and tangible reality to conduct a new, modern "Happening."[10] [edit] Further reading
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