1.8.1 Notice this insistence on Motion: We cannot capture, hold a moment (Impressionism), repeat the moment's verbal content (theatre), capture the action itself (Futurism): we intensify the perceptions, the change, flux and release them in juxtapositions which grind into the senses. (Carolee Schneeman, Sandford, ed., 1995, pg. #)

1.8.2 In parallel to Fuller's lecture "happenings," an entire Happening movement was starting to take shape with Cage frequently credited as playing a central role. He taught an influential class in experimental composition in the New School for Social Research in New York from the fall of 1956 until the summer of 1960. His students included George Brecht, Dick Higgins, Allan Kaprow, Jackson Mac Low, and Monte Young. Localising the entire movement on Cage is problematic however, especially since Happenings were an international, pan-artistic movement. Allan Kaprow, who coined the term 'Happenings,' wrote a critique on this tendency in his response to an article written in T30. He points out that the "the direct line of historical stimulation (usually conscious) seems to be the Futurist manifestos and noise concerts, Dada's chance experiments and occasional cabaret performances, Surrealism's interest in automatic drawing and poetry, and the extension of these into action painting." (Kaprow, 1965, pg. 219) Interestingly, he points out in this same response that McLuhan has had no effect on Happenings whatsoever and to a lack of connection of the Happening movement to mass media: 1.8.3 As far as McLuhan is concerned, his name never came up in any conversation before a year or so ago. And now that it has, his basic insight, the famous, "the medium is the message" is hardly unusual, when you come down to it. French formalist art from Manet to at least Cubism offered precisely this recipe for our understanding, and it became the staple of academic modernism by 1940. McLuhan's present interest lies in his application of the theory of mass media (such as TV). So far as I know, he has had no effect on Happenings at all. (Kaprow, 1965, pg. 220)

1.8.4 In an interview with Richard Schechner when Kaprow is asked about Happenings and McLuhan, he acknowledges the importance of TV but stresses that the television community is passive and that he is interested "in a variety of modes including contemplation, observation, and participation." (Schechner, R.1995, pg. 225) Kaprow proposed, two years after Pollock's death in 1956, that the performative quality of the artist's work would be most significant for the generation of the 1960's and that Pollock's paintings heralded the end of the tradition of two-dimensional representation.

1.8.5 What we have then, is a type of art which tends to lose itself out of bounds, tends to fill our world with itself, an art which, in meaning, looks, impulse seems to break fairly sharply with traditions of painters back to at least the Greeks. Pollock's near destruction of this tradition may well be a return to a point where art was more actively involved in ritual, magic and life than we have known in our recent past. (Kaprow,1958, pg. 56)

1.8.6 Art historian and critic Barbara Rose makes an important point about Pollock's paintings in relation to performance art when she points out that Hans Namuth's photographs of Pollock in action had more impact on the audience than the paintings themselves. Thus most people experienced his art through the reproduction, the documentation of the process, not the original work. "As a result of the popularity of Namuth's film and photographs of Pollock, the persona of the artist took on greater dimension than his works." (Rose, 1979, pg.115) Thus the media persona of the artist becomes the critical element of attaching value to the work produced.

1.8.7 Although Kaprow took from Pollock whatever served his evolving conceptions of boundaries of art, it was Cage who provided him with the means to expand beyond the medium of painting. For example, Kaprow's 18 Happenings in 6 parts remained conceptually close to Cage's Water Music and his 1952 experiments at Black Mountain College. (Schimmel, 1998, pg. 63).

1.8.8 At Black Mountain College in 1952, Cage organised an event considered to be the precedent for the development of Happenings and Fluxus. Theatre Piece No. 1 involved a "multifocus" presentation that included the simultaneous performance of music for piano by David Tudor, improvised dancing by Merce Cunningham, Rauchenberg's White paintings hung from the ceiling, the reading of poetry from a ladder by M.C. Richards, and the projection of slides, films, and a lecture by Cage himself. The legendary performance did not take place on a stage but amongst the audience, thus dissolving the hierarchical relationship between the performers and audience members.

1.8.9 Although the famed performance of Cage, Rauchenberg, Cunningham, and Olson is frequently referred to as the first Happening, it was predated by the mostly forgotten work of Alexander (Xanti) Schawinsky. In 1927, "Spectrodrama" was staged by Schawinsky who, like Albers, came to Black Mountain College via Bauhaus twenty years before Fuller. Albers remained for many years, while Schawinsky moved on after two years to the "New Bauhaus" in Chicago. Based on work he had started ten years earlier at the Bauhaus, he described Spectodrama as an educational method aiming at the interchange of the Arts and the Sciences and using theatre as a laboratory and place of action and experimentation. "The working group is composed of representatives of all disciplines . . . tackling prevailing concepts and phenomena from different viewpoints, and creating stage representations expressing them." (Duberman, 1972, pg. 98)

1.8.10 Happenings were a natural outcome of the Pop artists' concern with the problems of representation and the connection between art and life. The main reference point for all Happenings was Dada. Performances were conceived as a means of stimulating a critical consciousness in the viewer/spectator, and the formula of Art = Life was central. The main advantage of performance over painting/sculpture/environment was that it could draw the audience into a live experience and participate in the moment. [top]