Allan Kaprow, Robert Smithson, and the Limits to Art

Allan Kaprow, Robert Smithson, and the Limits to Art
Author: Philip Ursprung
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 344
Release: 2013-05-10
Genre: Art
ISBN: 0520245415

This innovative study of two of the most important artists of the twentieth century links the art practices of Allan Kaprow and Robert Smithson in their attempts to test the limits of art--both what it is and where it is. Ursprung provides a sophisticated yet accessible analysis, placing the two artists firmly in the art world of the 1960s as well as in the art historical discourse of the following decades. Although their practices were quite different, they both extended the studio and gallery into desert landscapes, abandoned warehouses, industrial sites, train stations, and other spaces. Ursprung bolsters his argument with substantial archival research and sociological and economic models of expansion and limits.

Childsplay

Childsplay
Author: Jeff Kelley
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 272
Release: 2004-12-07
Genre: Art
ISBN: 0520236718

'Childsplay' offers a description of Kaprow's 'Happenings' and other art activities, clarifying their materiality, duration and setting, as well as the ways that people participated in them, and shows that Kaprow's art forms were physically present, socially engaged, and intellectually resonant in the moment of enactment.

Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life

Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life
Author: Allan Kaprow
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 300
Release: 2023-11-10
Genre: Art
ISBN: 0520930843

Allan Kaprow's "happenings" and "environments" were the precursors to contemporary performance art, and his essays are some of the most thoughtful, provocative, and influential of his generation. His sustained inquiry into the paradoxical relationship of art to life and into the nature of meaning itself is brought into focus in this newly expanded collection of his most significant writings. A new preface and two new additional essays published in the 1990s bring this valuable collection up to date.

Allan Kaprow and Claes Oldenburg

Allan Kaprow and Claes Oldenburg
Author: Robert E. Haywood
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2017
Genre: Art and society
ISBN: 9780300222609

This new interpretation of the structure and meaning of the Happenings produced by Allan Kaprow (1927-2006) and Claes Oldenburg (b. 1929) in the late 1950s and 1960s sheds light on the context, theoretical framework, and working practice unique to this groundbreaking artistic form. Drawing on extensive archival research and including never-before-published drawings by Oldenburg, Robert E. Haywood describes the dialogue - at times contentious - between these two artists about the direction of the Happenings and modern art in general. Through a comprehensive analysis of these often overlooked works, it becomes clear that the Happenings--born in the midst of Cold War tensions and an increased uneasiness with the direction society was taking--challenged the traditional definitions of art in innovative new ways and were a critical component in the development of the art of the 20th century.

Radical Prototypes

Radical Prototypes
Author: Judith F. Rodenbeck
Publisher: Mit Press
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2011
Genre: Art
ISBN: 9780262016209

In this work, Rodenbeck recovers the critical force of happenings, addressing them both as theoretical objects and as artworks, investigating broader epistemological and formal concerns as well as their material and performative aspects.

Some Recent Happenings

Some Recent Happenings
Author: Allan Kaprow
Publisher:
Total Pages: 18
Release: 1966
Genre: Poetry
ISBN:

"Four characteristic scenarios by the inventor of the Happening concept."--Back cover

Allan Kaprow

Allan Kaprow
Author: Allan Kaprow
Publisher: Getty Publications
Total Pages: 380
Release: 2008
Genre: Art objects
ISBN: 9780892368907

Documents artist Allan Keprow's life and work through an extensive chronology that visually portrays his evolution from painter to environmental artist to inventor of the Happening and the Activity.

Allan Kaprow

Allan Kaprow
Author: Allan Kaprow
Publisher: Mousse Publishing
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2011
Genre: Art
ISBN: 9788896501795

This publication catalogues and illustrates, with a wide selection of images, Allan Kaprow's entire body of published work: from his first artist book in 1962, to his last anthological projects in the '90s. This lesser-known side of his œuvre unfolds through 35 books, published over a 40-year span.Kaprow's work moved along two parallel tracks: happenings - a field in which he was an unchallenged pioneer, starting in the '50s - and activity booklets, a tool meant to help people understand and experience these performances. But the graphic layout of his books, the originality of their structure, the literary stature of their texts, and their aesthetic quality as objects shifted his exploration of print into a higher realm, where the book became a fully-fledged work of art.'Booklets are somewhat like music scores: they aren't the actual event but as notations which one or more persons can carry out. So they shouldn't be considered documents of what actually happened.' (Allan Kaprow)

Beyond the Happening

Beyond the Happening
Author: Catherine Spencer
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Total Pages: 407
Release: 2020-06-01
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1526144476

Beyond the Happening uncovers the heterogeneous, uniquely interdisciplinary performance-based works that emerged in the aftermath of the early Happenings. By the mid-1960s Happenings were widely declared outmoded or even ‘dead’, but this book reveals how many practitioners continued to work with the form during the late 1960s and 1970s, developing it into a vehicle for studying interpersonal communication that simultaneously deployed and questioned contemporary sociology and psychology. Focussing on the artists Allan Kaprow, Marta Minujín, Carolee Schneemann and Lea Lublin, it charts how they revised and retooled the premises of the Happening within a wider network of dynamic international activity. The resulting performances directly intervened in the wider discourse of communication studies, as it manifested in the politics of countercultural dropout, soft power and cultural diplomacy, alternative pedagogies, sociological art and feminist consciousness-raising.