Interview with Allan Kaprow

Interview with Allan Kaprow
Conducted by Susan Hapgood
Encinitas, California, August 12, 1992

Susan Hapgood: Dore Ashton once called your work “Neo-Dada.” Do you remember what the context was?

Allan Kaprow: She reviewed my last real exhibition, two environments that I had in succession at the Hansa Gallery in 1958. A number of the sculptures were assemblages made out of a variety of things—light bulbs flashing on and off, things that moved, paintings whose surfaces were broken up into literally separate planes in space. In other words, they were prototypes for the next step, the environmental. Her review called my work “Neo-Dada.” I took exception to that because I really had none of the sociopolitical attitudes of the Dadaists. I remember one thing Ashton said in the review: “Me thinks he doth protest too much.” But I wasn’t protesting at all. I think that’s what I objected to. I was really just having fun.

SH: You said in your essay for the New Forms—New Media catalogue that critics made erroneous references to Neo-Dada to describe objects, environments, and Happenings. Can you elaborate?

AK: Dada was a common reference point. To the extent that people would comment on what we were doing in that particular show or elsewhere, they would speak about Dada. It was mainly in conversation. Frequently, I thought, we were wrongly associated with Dada. Anti-art isn’t something the Dadas invented. There’s a whole thread of “life is better than art” dating at lest to the time of Wordsworth, right through Emerson and Whitman, to John Dewey and beyond, emphasizing art as experience, trying ot blend art back into life—this tradition influenced me very much. But anti-art is an old Western theme.

SH: What about the cynical side of Dada?

AK: The cynical side was not present. IF you talk about freedoms—for example, the freedom to employ open processes or the freedom to use a variety of objects and materials from the everyday world—these were derived from the prototypes of Dada. But to ascribe to me protest and cynicism—not at all.

SH: How else was the term “Neo-Dada” used?

AK: Well, it was generally thrown around as a criticism. No one said, “Oh, isn’t it wonderful that you’re a Neo-Dadaist.” It was a criticism, not a joyous utterance.

SH: Did the active role of the audience as participants in Happenings bear any comparison to Duchamp’s insistence that the viewer creates the meaning of the work?

AK: Well, Duchamp gave that speech in Texas in 1957, I think. That’s where he made the famous statement that the work of art is essentially a composite of meanings added to by posterity, whatever the artist may have put down first. I didn’t read it until somewhat later. Then he gave a talk at the Museum of Modern Art where he also spoke more on the same lines, if I remember rightly. I did not attend, but it was recorded and published. But he also said something else about the rash of neo-Duchampian shows. He said, “When I selected my first objects, I did not have in mind whole shows of shovels and bottleracks, because that would have killed the point.” And he implied that younger artists who were just buying out hardware stores were doing the wrong thing: they would overdo it. I think we all learned from those little hints from Duchamp. A key feature was discreetness, a timing and restraint that many of us didn’t learn well enough.
Duchamp was personally very helpful to us, no question. He came to our Happenings, most of them. He certainly came to mine, and he brought friends, Ernst and Richter and Huelsenbeck. And, in my case, Duchamp later acted as a reference in my getting a number of grants. So he was very helpful, both practically and intellectually.

SH: In a 1967 interview, you said that Schwitters conceived Happenings but never did them. Were you referring to his descriptions of Merz theater?

AK: What I learned about Schwitters was simply what was available to me through books: about his plans for theater, about his performances, about his wordplay. But I never heard or saw any of them. So, as far as I knew, most of them were cabaret-style performances, not Happenings. As much as they may have been capable of being Happenings, they never evolved to that point.

SH: Why do you believe artists used detritus and junk in their art?

AK: It was clearly part of transforming reality. It gave everyone a sense of instant involvement in a kind of crude everyday reality, which was quite a relief after the high-art attitude of exclusion from the real world. It also allowed us to give up a certain kind of seriousness that traditional art-making required. What’s more, the materials were available everywhere on street corners at night. And if you didn’t sell these environmental constructions, you’d just throw them back into the garbage can. Why not just thow them out? At once, the process in its fullest would be enacted. It was very liberating to think of oneself as part of an endlessly tranforming real world.

SH: The element of getting away from tradition, couldn’t that be called an anti-art gesture?

AK: Yes. Now I know it could be, but I didn’t then. At that time, I didn’t like the idea of giving up a sense of art.

SH: In retrospect, there does seem to be some subtle protest.

AK: But the protest was not against society, it was against traditionalism in art. You might remember that this was during the Eisenhower years, and there was a powerful conservatism operating that began to repudiate Abstract Expressionist attitudes and anything attached to the European tradition of art. Even Art News and editor Tom Hes were going all out to celebrate a return to the figure and the “sanity-in-art” movement. “Sanity” meant reverting, nto only to the figure, but to European prototypes of painting and sculpture; supposedly, this would reinstate humanitarianism and the great traditional values that had been forgotten. That was what we were implicitly protesting against. Under the aegis of de Kooning, even many of the Hofmann students who had been abstract artists were reverting. Matisse and German Expressionism were recalled again. To me, that seemed less interesting than experimental work. So you could say we were protesting, some of us.

SH: Did Rauschenberg’s comment about working in the gap between art and life relfect a prevalent attitude at the time? Was it a prescription that artists followed?

AK: No, it became famous later on, but I would be very surprised if anybody even knew about it when it was first uttered. It was basically a prevalent attitude. I’ve tried to rephrase the attitude myself, not wishing to act in that gap, if there is one, but pushing it more toward the life side. I’m not too interest in gaps.

SH: One of the earliest Neo-Dada artists was Jean Follett, whow as also one of the first artists to make junk sculpture when she integrated gritty found objects in her works in the early 1950s. What do you remember about her?

AK: I met her in 1947 when I was a student at Hans Hoffman’s School of Fine Arts in New York. She stood out from all the other students; her drawings looked like Picabia drawings and they were unlike the very strong Hoffman style. Hofmann would often literally draw over our work, but he never touched Jean Follett’s. He would get to Jean and he would just look at it, and almost invariably say, “Ja, das ist sehr gut, sehr gut” [Yes, that’s very good, very good].
In 1949, two Hofmann students (Wolf Kahn and Felix Pasilis) organized a group show of certain graduates of the school at a kind of semi-private gallery in their loft at 831 Broadway—I don’t think there was a name. That’s where I first saw Jean’s sculptures. Shortly thereafter, this same group got together—and Richard Stankiewicz was very helpful—to form the Hansa Gallery, which was named party to elicit the Hanseatic League, a loose federation of medieval North German states, and partly to honor Hans Hofmann. I joined Hansa in 1952.
Anywya, Jean Follett’s work impressed everybody. But we also thought she was “crazy” because she put huge prices on them, prices that seemed astronomical! But we thought that she was absolutely a wonderful artist, very very powerful. Her show was one of the most widely attended. Even Leo Castelli came to the gallery, as did Clem Greenberg. I know that Dubuffet came to New York for a show at that time, and somehow or another she got him to come to her studio and he was mightily impressed.

SH: Do you remember when you first read Motherwell’s Dada anthology?

AK: Yes. I was at Columbia in 1951 and ’52, taking classes with Meyer Schapiro. I was most interest in Mondrian at the time; and we were just getting used to Abstract Expressionism, which had peaked by then. Dada wasn’t particularly interesting to most artists. Motherwell’s anthology, The Dada Painters and Poets, came out in 1951, but I didn’t read it immediately. It was a little later before I was really very immersed in it. Probably within the year. And once I read it, of course, I found Dada, as presented by Motherwell, to be much more interesting than Surrealism. Then there followed a whole lot of publications and artists’ revived interest in Dada.
I didn’t meet Rauschenberg until 1952, but he was another important link to Dada. As was George Brecht, who was my neighbor in the early 1950s. I was teaching at Rutgers at that time, and George Brecht was working for the Personal Products Division of Johnson & Johnson, in New Brunswick [New Jersey]. And Bob Watts was part of the Art Department at Douglass College, the Women’s College of Rutgers. George Segal was also a neighbor. All of us lived in the New Brunswick area.

SH: Did you talk to Brecht about Motherwell’s anthology?

AK: Well, he had an earlier interest in Dada. He was doing work at that time—which I remember very vividly—that encouraged chance operations. For example, he once brought an eight-by-four-foot masonite panel and several boxes of wooden matches over to the farm where I was living. He laid out this panel on the driveway and casually threw matches over the surface. Then he tossed a lit match among them and they all burst into flame in some kind of random pattern. Then we lifted up the panel and the matchsticks fell off, leaving burn marks. This was his way, one of many, of trying to produce paintings that dealt concretely with what he felt Pollock was all about. He even wrote an essay on chance, which dealt with his interpretation of Pollock, essentially saying that Pollock was interest in giving up organizational techniques. But Brecht was more interested in a kind of randomized dispersion principle. I remember him showing me tables of random numbers. For him, Dada was a celebration of chance, or the appearance of chance.

SH: This is before John Cage’s class.

AK: Right. He joined Cage’s class just a bit before I did. In fact, we used to drive into New York City together. But I had known Cage earlier. Not well, but over the years I’d met him here and there and was part of the periphery of his circle, because I was familiar with Jasper [Johns] and Bob [Rauschenberg] and a lot of the musicians that Cage knew, like composer Morton Feldman. It was a very small group of people in those days. I attended Cage concerts as early as 1948, when he was diddling around with the prepared piano, and all kinds of toys and gadgets to make noise. I made a decision then to concretize my work by having a real action or activity take place. For example, hammering a nail or blowing your nose would be self-evident. It wouldn’t just be the isolated feature of one sense being recorded.
Cage’s teaching was sophisticated philosophically. From his own sensibility and from Zen Buddhist readings, he learned that he experience of the present is a combination of receptivity and action. For Cage, concreteness wasn’t the isolation of one feature of a situation, framed out of context; it was actually an experience, like that [hits table]. That sense of the experiential moment was a clarifier for me. Once I realized how simple the whole thing was, it was only a matter of taking off as fast as I could in the direction of Happenings. (I did my earliest ones in his classes in 1957-58.)

SH: Did Cage talk directly about Dad in the class?

AK: He mentioned it now and again. I know that he was familiar with all of those people and certainly he knew Duchamp.

SH: Is it fair to say that by the latter half of the 1950s there was a major shift of interest among arrists from Surrealism to Dada?

AK: Surrealism was interesting to the previous generation of New York School painters, and we sort of “got it” through over-saturation. But it was their thing, and very European. When Dada came along, there were few objects to see, it all seemed really far-out, although we didn’t necessarily understand its sociopolitical programs. We did not think, as the Dadaists did in 1916, that the world had gone crazy and there was no redemption in sight—its current of cynicism. Rather, we felt that here was freedom to put the real world together in weird ways. It was a discovery, a heady kind of appetite for debris, for cheap throwaways, for a new kind of involvement in everyday life without the judgments about it, either social or personal.

SH: Did John Cage’s ideas about chance develop directly out of his knowledge of Dada and Marcel Duchamp?

AK: No. He claimed that his interest in chance derived from his study of Zen Buddhism, even though Zen Buddhism has no tradition of chance whatsoever. I think for Cage it was the open sense of an unwilled grander design in the universe, one in which an experience is more important than knowledge of the grand design. For me, Cage’s teaching was a real gift, an opening-up rather than a prejudice or a gimmick. But it was threatening to a lot of people because it meant losing control.

SH: Did everyone read books on Zen? And which books were the most widely read?

AK: The grand message-bearer of Asiatic philosophy and religion to the Western world was Daisetzu Suzuki, a transcendentalist and former student of John Dewey. He ws an admirer of Ralph Waldo Emerson and all the American philosophers, and he felt that their work represented a kind of analogy to the Japanese view of the world. Suzuki was really the bridge, more than anybody else. Cage attended Suzuki’s lecutres on Zen Buddhism in the Philosophy Department at Columbia University. Those lectures and readings certainly helped Cage clarify his own point of view. Now I didn’t attend those lectures. In Cage’s case, the whole notion of chance was a result of putting together a lot of the readings: Thoreau, Emerson, anarchism, as well as Asiatic philosophy and the I Ching.
So the answer to your question about how the chance operations eveolved is: through Cage, as well as an awareness of Dada. He was very informed about Dada, a real intellecutal. I’m sure he was aware of Duchamp’s use, and Arp’s use, of chance operations. I remember reading in Motherwell’s Dada anthology, and also in the Lebel book, how Duchamp made part of the Large Glass by shooting paint-dipped matches out of a toy cannon: where they landed was where there marks went. In any cause, the question is a complex one that, to my knowledge, has never been asked—how did the system of chance operations evolve? All I know is that by the time I met Cage, I mean, when I was going to the class, it had already been worked into a system.

SH: Wasn’t your interest in the Gutai Group related to this idea of chance? Do you remember how you heard about the Gutai activities?

AK: Alfred Leslie told me about an article he had read in the New York Times [Ray Falk, “Japanese Innovators,” New York Times, Dec. 8, 1957, p. 24ff.]. It was in the Sunday paper, but I hadn’t read the Times that particular Sunday. Leslie saw I was moving into a kind of wild spatialized collage/assemblage mode, and he said, “Hey, did you read about this?”

SH: So the article was sort of a passing curiosity, then?

AK: Oh, it was a prominent article! Brecht must have heard about it, because the work he was doing paralleled the various Gutai environmental and action-type pieces. He must have read the article in the Times, and I would guess that Bob Watts would have, too.

SH: Your own article, “The Legacy of Jackson Pollock” [Art News, Oct. 1958-, was published the following year and also created something of a stir, didn’t it?

AK: Well, I got some feedback from people in my circle, like my editor, Tom Hess, who took a rather dim view of my very eccentric interpretation of Jackson Pollock as someone whose work led to conventional repetition or to what many felt was a kind of Dada junk.
It was written in its entirety after Pollock died in 1956, but then I reworked it slightly later. I gave it to Hess in 1958, within a month of finishing the rewrite. But he held on to it for reasons of caution before he published it. Then he finally made up his mind to publish it, and I asked for it back to correct a few errors.

SH: I think the part about art employing any materials necessary is very impressive considering that it was written in 1956. Were you familiar with Schwitters’s work by this point?

AK: Yes. What was unusual was the jump that I made from quasi-painting work, like Schwitters’s, in which the common metaphor of art and the world was closure, to a kind of environmental phenomenon, open to everything because it was so big. That was a really extreme leap. Painting seemed unnecessary to anyone who wanted to experiment. I didn’t, of course, say that it was over; it certainly wasn’t. So in the Pollock article, I proposed that artists could go in one of two directions: to further develop action painting, or to work environmentally in lifelike situations.

SH: Oldenburg was supposedly especially struck by that article.

AK: Yes, he told me that later, but I didn’t know him then. The first time I met Claes was at a party at George Segal’s farm. He didn’t say anything about the article, but did tell me how interested he was in what I was doing. There were some performances at the farm that day, and he was definitely very curious. That probably had something to do with his decision to become a Happener.

SH: In the Pollock article, you use the term “concrete art.” And in a brochure for a Hansa Gallery show the same year [1958], you juxtapose the words “abstract” and “concrete.” How were you using those terms?

AK: I borrowed them from music. Musique concrete was a postwar phenomenon, partly inspired by John Cage, but more well-known in France and Germany. There was simultaneously an interest in Europe in the non-abstract aspects of music and in the specific, identifiable sounds of somebody hammering or flushing a toilet. Tape recordings were new in those days, a product of the war. With tape, you could make a recording of your footsteps and then manipulate it as much as you wanted. The French were not interested in making these sounds into abstract music but in retaining their very specific concrete identity. So that’s what I had in mind: that musique concrete would then suggest a parallel in art—art concrete.

SH: Dick Higgins has said that the general nature of the performances at the Reuben Gallery were different from those at the E-pit-o-me Coffee shop, and that the latter were more allusive. Is that true? Was there a significant difference?

AK: What I do remember from the few times that I went to the E-pit-o-me was that he performances tended to be more like cabaret performances than Happenings. They were prototypes of what we would call “performance” today, where you get the auteur or auteuse, the singular actor or acress doing a number. But the Happeners—at least Claes, myself, Red Grooms, and Whitman, Vostell, and later Knizak, I think—were much more involved in the phisical materiality of things, pushing furniture around, hiding things, moving people in and amonst environmentally filled areas; like a literalization of, say, the clottedness of an Abstract Expressionist painting.

SH: Supposedly in 1961 you had a disagreement with Oldenburg about Happenings. Is that worth talking about?

AK: It wasn’t all that terrible. One day, after some wonderful performances at one of our storefronts, in the days when we were still in a group, Claes and I were walking down the street. He said to me that he had heard from Jim Dine or Bob Whitman that I didn’t think his work was a Happening. And I said, “Yes, I don’t think it’s a Happening, I think it’s expressionist theater. But don’t get me wrong, I think it’s wonderful theater!” So we had what amounted to a real parting of the ways right there, not necessarily cordial. Then, weeks later we were in a show at Martha Jackson Gallery [in May 1961] called Environments, Situations, Spaces. That’s where I did my tire environment Yard in the back yard. Well, the gallery organized a little supper for us on the evening of the opening. And each of us delivered a little speech, probably inspired by the old Dadaists. In any event, Claes said something that cast a pall over what we were doing. And I got the impression—though it might have been my sensitivity—that it was criticism directed at me. So I wrote him a somewhat angry letter and said, “Okay, I’ll take you on anytime”—something foolish like that—“and we’ll see where it goes from there.” The next few years we went in different ways: Claes became famous and I withdrew more and more from the art-exhibiting world, although I was hardly suffering.
I suspect our disagreement was more over theoretical interest. I wanted to deine what I thought were the experimental possibilities in art at that time. For example, he rehearsed people well after I gave that up. He had specific time slots for the pieces, at a time when I was seeing that as a dead end. He confined the performance area while I dispersed it. He definitely had audiences, when I was trying to integrate everything. Really, it was like two guys talking two different languages who, I believe, had admiration from one another.

SH: Do you agree that by 1961 there was a shift toward a cleaner, slicker look in art, especially in the work of emerging Pop artists?

AK: Sure. One of the things that happened was that the Abstract Expressionists were finally beginnign to make a sizeable impact on the market. Nothing like today, but for artists in those days to sell soemthing for three or four thousand dollars was a bonanza. But the idea that an artist could in fact make a living off art had never been even remotely thinkable before, certainly not for experimental artists. Now there was a different idea. I remember one particular article in Fortune magazine that advised collectors how to make more money buying modern art than they could in the stock market. And they actually gave tables of appreciation over a five-year period. Like, buy Larry Rivers because it was no longer affordable to buy Pollock or Newman or de Kooning. And the art market began to pick up everywhere, including a market for work by younger artists.
Symbolically, Pop art developed when Andy Warhol discovered he could move from the commercial world, in which he was quite a figure, to the fine art world and not suffer a disruption of identity. He just had da more sophisticated audience at that point. And, therefore, it was probably no accident that my friend Roy Lichtenstein gave up the Abstract Expressionist paintings he was doing at the time for something that was always present in his work but latent: the investigation of popular imagery and methodology. And as it turned out, it was very marketable.

SH: Do you recall why Yves Klein's 1961 show of blue monochromes at Castelli was boycotted?

AK: Well, I think that he was not well-received, but that is largely through hearsay. I gather this not from the show, because I didn't see it, but from the reviews. He was repudiated for two reasons: one was his showmanship, and the other was his reputed association with a conservative political group, the Chevalier de la Croix [in 1956 he was made a chevalier, or knight, of the Order of Saint Sebastian], or something like that. He was both star and impresario, a dual role that has great tradition in Europe, but which in America was associated with Broadway, razzle-dazzle, and the lowest common denominator.

SH: When did you become aware of the Nouveaux Realistes?

AK: I became aware of the New Realists when Pierre Restany organized the show in New York in 1962. It was at two different places. One was a rented storefront on 57th Street, and the other was Sidney Janis's gallery nearby. I became very interested, and in fact went to Paris the next year; there was a whole new set of people I wanted to meet. I did, in fact, and they were all very helpful. I met Spoerri right away. And Emmett Williams, who was living there at the time, and Jean-Jacques Lebel, and Robert Filliou. I became part of what I thought was an international association of artists. A number of the Japanese artists were in Paris then, so it was very international.

SH: Did you feel that there was a strong American chauvinism against Europeans between 1958 and 1962?

AK: To be as fair as I can, I would have to say that there was simply a very grateful sense that, at last, American artists were not deriving form somebody else. It was nice to feel that one was coming out of something personal. But we did not repudiate others, because obviously and logically they had just as much right to their ethos as we did ours. As I said, for us, the international sense of community was far more interesting than isolation. Some of us, after all, had a historical sense of what isolation had done back in the 1930s and '40s, and we didn't want to repeat that kind of silliness. So I was aware of some of the jingo-ism in the art world, particularly the distinctly nationalistic way in which Rockefeller and others resuscitated modern art, taking it from being the bad boy of American culture to being the exemplar of freedom. It was packaged for all over the world as a repudiation of Communism. Now this kind of turnaround was offensive to a lot of us, although we weren't taking positions of ideology either.
I think I shared the common attitude that some of the European work seemed tame, and precious. However, much New Realism was a breakthrough for the Europeans, Yves Klein, Vostell, Vautier, Spoerri, Tinguely, Filliou . . . hold up very well today.

SH: In retrospect, what effects and influences do you think Happenings had on immediately subsequent art?

AK: Well, the effect must have been indirect, if at all, because very few people actually saw them. But if you can say things are in the air, that sometimes you don't have to read the book because you get the whole idea just from gossip, then in this case permission was in the air. It's possible to say with some caution that the Happenings allowed a good bit of Fluxus to take place, just as Gutai provided some justification for the early Happenings. You can also say that earthworks, particularly earthworks that were site-specific, were given their permission by the earlier example of Happenings, although they had nothing to do with each other directly. I think Happenings--especially things going on in multiple spaces at different times that were not physically connected--gave permission to conceptual art, the "live in your head" approach. Unfortunately, now there's a kind of new piety that's being brought to bear by critics and historians upon our work which was so irreverent at the time!

Interview from Susan Hapgood's "Neo-Dada: Redefining Art 1958-62"

Interview with Allan Kaprow

The following interview was videotaped at the Dallas Public Library Cable Access Studio in 1988 while Mr. Kaprow was attending, "Proceedings," a sympiosium in his honor held at the University of Texas at Arligngton. It was subsequently broadcast on Dallas Cable Access TV.

John Held, Jr: Tonight we have a very special guest, Mr. Allan Kaprow, who is in Dallas this week of April 12 through 16 (1988) to have a retrospective of his actions of the past called "Proceedings" at the University of Texas at Arlington. Mr. Kaprow, it's a pleasure to have you with us this evening to talk about your work.

Allan Kaprow: Thank you.

JH: Of course, you are best known as the person who coined the phrase "happenings." I just wonder how you felt the first time you heard the Supremes singing that song, "The Happening." Did you...

AK: I'd already repudiated the word, because many other people before that were using it. It was a catch word. You remember everybody went around going, "What's happening, baby?" Political uprisings on campuses and advertisements for butter and brassieres were all using the word "happening." I remember one ad showed a floating woman in outer space, a starry background, and the legend was, "I dreamt I was in a happening in my Maidenform brassiere." So by that time movies and the Supremes and all were in general usage around the world in ways that had nothing to do with my original sense, which became so foreign to me that I just dropped it. However, it's like your name, you can't drop it without somebody coming and picking it up and saying, "You dropped something mister."

JH: The place you used it first was a paper about Jackson Pollack?

AK: Yes. It was actually semi-conscious. It occurred in a paragraph toward the end of the article, which was about the presumed legacy of that artist, who had died shortly before then, in which I said there are two directions in which the legacy could go. One is to continue into and develop an action kind of painting , which was what he was doing, and the other was to take advantage of the action itself, implicit as a kind of dance ritual. Instead of making ritualistic actions, which might be one directions someone could take, I was proposing the hop right into real life, that one could step right out of the canvas, which in his case, he did while painting them.

JH: It seems to be a continuation of the Abstract Expressionist concept that the process was just as important as the product. Tell me if I'm wrong, but you were bringing the painting to life?

AK: Well, painting as painting is a lively affair in any case. Let's not repudiate painting. My interest was not in negating painting, it was to add to the number of options that an artist had at that time. I had been a painter. I might even say that I was beginning to be somewhat successful among my colleagues at that point. That was 1956. But, the idea of going farther was a heritage of Modernism at that point. hat each younger generation went farther then the last one. And the notion of a progressive amplification of options, even of a revolutionary sort, was part of our upbringing. So I was offering that option, not as a denouncement, but rather as one more opening into some other future.

JH: You mentioned that you were a painter, and you were a student in the early fifties studying under some of...

AK: In the forties.

JH: In the forties. And early fifties with Meyer Schapiro?

AK: I studied painting then under the greatest teacher in the world of Modernist painting and that was Hans Hoffman, who was of course a distinguished member of the Abstract Expressionist group in New York. And that was the liveliest school you could find anywhere. It was superb. I was very lucky, and when I studied with Meyer Schapiro, who was an eminent historian, it was a parallel study. It was not only art in the practical sense, it was art history and the philosophy of art, which I had been studying in the university before that. That was to do my masters, and I thought at the time my post-graduate work too. But I got my masters degree and did most of my course work in art history for my PhD and then I got a job with his help, that is with Meyer Schapiro's help, at Rutger's, teaching art history, and chucked the whole post-graduate program, which they never let me forget.

JH: You were concentrating then on Mondrian. Why?

AK: He was my thesis. I was interested in what turned out to be a key to what I'm doing now, although I didn't realize it then. In that master's thesis, which was an intensive analysis of the optical effects of looking at Mondrian, in a way that I thought had gotten cues from his writings, that if you do that intensively, that is almost staring for as long as two hours at a painting, the relativity of all the parts increases to the point that the clarity that you first see in the picture, you know, those straight lines - the whites, the blacks, the reds, the blues, and the yellows - no longer are at all clear. They start bending. They start disappearing under your glance, in a way that using the same kind of staring technique at other works will not happen. So there is something unique about that, and I convinced that when he was talking about the mutual destruction of all parts of the work, which would produce some sort of transcendent unity at the end, he was dealing with the elimination of painting through itself. I didn't put it that way. I ascribed to it a kind of mystical state, which I think was correct in his terms. But later on the idea took form in a different way with me when, indeed, I separated the action of action painting from the painting part of it, and in a sense jumped into life.

JH: It was very interesting to me. Those were two great teachers, Hans Hoffman and Meyer Schapiro. At the same time, a great many things were happening at Black Mountain College in North Carolina, and it seems that so many of your latter colleagues came out of Black Mountain, or had some experience with it. Did you yourself ever visit there?

AK: No. I tried to get a job there after I completed my masters work and decided to stop doing the PhD. I didn't know what to do next, and I thought I was getting this job at Rutgers, but I wasn't sure so I was trying, as any young man would, as many options as I possibly could. One of them was Black Mountain, and they said to me, people who were colleagues of mine and friends, for example the composer Stefen Volker was there, and Bill de Kooning had been there, and I asked them about it. There was a party one night when they were in New York, some of it's recruiters were in New York, trying to scare up students, and I asked them for a job, and they said, "Sure, if you want to milk cows. We can't pay you." So I told them politely, thank you, I'd have to consider other alternatives.

JH: Were you married at this time. Were you supporting a family?

AK: No. Not yet.

JH: You were running a gallery? The Hansa gallery. Did that come into being about this time?

AK: The Hansa was going for years before that. It started in '53 or '54, first at one of the artists studios, Wolf Kahn, then subsequently it got it's own place toward the end of '53, I think, down in the 4th Avenue area, near 9th or 10th Streets. But that then grew subsequently into an uptown gallery, which I was part of for awhile, and then, as a cooperative it dissolved as most of the artists went on to bigger and better commercial galleries. Then I joined the Judson Group downtown at the Judson Church. At the same time, I was part of the group that overlapped to become the Reuben Gallery, where the first happenings were given.

JH: One thing I was extremely interested in while reading over your biography was that you attended a class given by John Cage at the New School for Social Research. And the reason this intrigued me so much was that, being familiar with the Fluxus artists - Dick Higgins, Alison Knowles, Yoko Ono, etc. - that's how they started - from that class of Cage.

AK: He was a kind of train station. People would sort of gather there and wait for the next train. I actually was a student of his. That was not the case with all of them. Many of them were occasional visitors. But I was already teaching at Rutgers by then. That was 1957, and I knew him slightly. Knew his work, of course. But at that point I was trying to introduce a richer range of sound into the environmental stuff that I was doing parallel with the early happenings that were done. So I went to the class - I had been on a mushroom hunt with him, that's what it was, with George Brecht, who was a neighbor of mine at that time in New Jersey - and I asked John at that time about the problems I was having with the sounds. There were mechanical gadgets that I had gimmicked up as best I could, you know, those wonderful toys the Japanese made - gorillas that growl, cows that moo, and things like that - and these were interesting, but after awhile they got boring, rather mechanical and expected, so I asked him what to do. And he said, "Why don't you come to the class next week." So I drove in for the class, and he explained rather quickly that I could use tape decks, a half dozen cheap tape decks, make all the sounds in advance, and put them on in some sort of random order, or program them as I wanted, and then distribute loud speakers around the room, and these things would have a much greater richness, done in a collage fashion, which I could understand readily, having done that, then any of the mechanical toys I had done. So I thought that was - he explained it in five minutes. You just take sticky tape and stick all these things together which you've previously recorded and put into envelopes. And he said, "Why don't you stay for the class?" "Fine," I said. At the end of the class I was so fascinated with what was going on I asked him if I could attend it regularly, and he said, "Sure." And that's where I actually did the first proto-happenings with the participation of the rest of the class members. Everyone was given homework every week and came in with a piece. And that's where I began doing that sort of work.

JH: Some of the first happenings, aside from those in Cage's class, were done on George Segal's farm. And I know that the Fluxus people did things there too. They had a Yam Festival...

AK: That was done later. In 1963.

JH: So many things were going on there. What was the karma?

AK: Well, George Segal was a neighbor of mine, and became a fast friend, and has remained so. I was living on a chicken farm, in a cabin there, while teaching at Rutgers, and he was a painter so we got to know each other very quickly. And pretty soon there were years in which we had annual picnics for our artworld friends of ours, who never in those days got out of New York. So it was a big thing to come out for a weekend to either the farm I was living on, or the farm George was living on. It was there that in one of these years we decide as part of the entertainments, to try out some of the happenings that I had been working on in John Cage's class, or at least developing the prototypes for, but now on a somewhat bigger scale, because physically we could use the chicken coops, the fields, the tractors, whatever we wanted, and a casual atmosphere of friends was present that allowed people to do it, or not to do it, as they wished. And of course, that's where I started putting into some practice the things that I started in John's class.

JH: It occurs to me that alot of this type of activity had precursors in the Dada movement...

AK: Sure. And the Futurists.

JH: ..it was in the air then too, and then it petered out in the twenties, thirties..

AK: That's right.

JH: ...forties, and then all of a sudden in the fifties - here it was again - with yourself, and the Fluxus people, and Gutai in Japan...

AK: They were before us.

JH: ...and Yves Klein and the Nouveau Realists in France.

AK: Right.

JH: It just happened again. Why? Why after all those years...

AK: There's no explanation for it. The usual kind of exhaustion principle, that the prior avant-garde had exhausted itself is true, but it's not an adequate explanation, because you don't find it happening with every exhaustion. So, why it happened pundits will have fun on speculating, and I'm sure they're all right. It's just beyond us. One could draw parallels today with the powerful conservative backlash that occurred right after the exhaustion of Abstract Expressionists around the world. Particularly those in New York in the Eisenhower years. You know, the rampages of Joe McCarthy and the Cold War in Europe. There were alot of features which resemble those of today. And one could say today perhaps almost for twenty years now, we've been in a neo-conservative state with back to all kinds of prototypical modernisms, now quoted, now so called post-modernist snide tickle-tickley cutesy stuff, all of it feeding a consumerist market, of course. Which has been revived when it was practically killed during the period that you're talking about. Well, who's to say how long this is going to last. There have been many many of these periods as there was before and whether this will be followed by a resurgence of experimentation is hard for anyone to predict. Meanwhile, of course, I'm still on this earth and very very healthy, thank heaven, and my experiments, like some of my colleagues from those days, still go on. They happen to be not particularly interesting to the prevailing tenor of the period.

JH: You mentioned Gutai, the Japanese avant-garde movement, and that it happened just previous to your involvement. Did you know about them?

AK: No. Not until 1958, which was when I had already begun working myself, so it was quite a refreshing thing to discover that by 1955 or so, for a few years up to that point, they had been very active. Coming from a very different cultural background though, not uncongenial with the West.

JH: Many of your contemporaries of the time formed a group, Fluxus, but you remained on you own. Fluxus, I should mentioned, revolved around the leadership of George Maciunas. But you didn't get sucked into that cyclone.

AK: Well, George and I couldn't get along. Indeed, he approached me as he did everybody else to sign my entire career away to him, and I thought this was a Fluxus joke. So I said, "Up yours." And he took it seriously. But he was a marvelous man. I mean the energy and cohesion that he gave to a disparate number of artists around the world was extraordinary. So I don't say this unpleasant part history with any kind of rancor. It was like oil and water.

JH: He was a very difficult person to get along with.

AK: Evidently.

JH: You are mportant in several areas. One is performance. It has many levels now, but you're considered to be a father of the modern movement in performance. Another thing is installation, and your work with what you called assemblage.

AK: Well, let's backtrack a minute. Performance is the replacement of the word happening, or event, or activity, which we used in those days to refer to a number of somewhat related kinds of real time events. What's called an installation today is the child of what used to be called, before the happenings, an environment. Now, I think that if you look at the words there, the shifts indicate something like a real change toward the installation compared to that of the environment, and the performance to that of the happening. If you look at the word installation, installation means, very simply and literally, that somebody is taking something already fabricated or made, generally, and installing it. It has a kind of implicit art activity to it. It also suggests a kind of aesthetic intentionally, much as you would install a sculpture in a museum. The environment, the etymology of the word, and the whole connotation of the word environment, is that of a surround, in which the particular parts are not necessarily placed with some kind of formal care for their external cohesion, but rather as an interaction between the person who is being surrounded and the stuff of that environment. It has a kind of a fullness to it, which the work installation doesn't. Installation suggests a discreteness. Now, look at the word performance. It too has a conservative evocation. When you hear that word you think of Jascha Heifitz performing on the violin, Sir Laurence Olivier performing Shakespeare, and so on. You don't ordinarily think of a high performance engine, which is the more vernacular meaning of the word in English, and in many other European languages it's used the same way. So, there is the return to a kind of artifying activity, a kind of singular focus on the performer as artist, in a way that a virtuoso was a performer in classical music, or still is. Or an actor.

Now, I think those two words, installation and performance, mark accurately the shift in attitude toward a rejection or sense of abandonment of an experimental, modernist, position which had prevailed up to about, lets be generous, up to about 1968-1969, and began gradually becoming less and less energized. So, I think what you're getting there is the flavor of modernist exhaustion and incidently a return to earlier prototypes, or models, of what constitutes art. And it's no accident that the majority of most performance nowadays, there's not much installation anymore, by the way, the majority of those performances tend to be of an entertainment, show biz, song and dance, in which the focus is on the individual as skilled presenter of something that tends to have a kind of self-aggrandizing, or at least self-focusing, purpose. It is artist as performer, much like somebody is an entertainer in a nightclub. And they're interesting. Some of them are very good. I think Laurie Anderson is very good. She's got all the skills that are needed in theater, which is what this is. Many others who jump on the bandwagon, coming from the visual arts, have no theatrical skills, and know zilch about the timing, about the voic about positioning, about transitions, about juxtapositions, those moment by moment occurrences in theater that would make it work. But it's another animal, whether good or bad, from what we were doing, and I think, in general, even the good ones are a conservatizing movement.

JH: You prefer the activity, or the event, rather then an audience/actor dichotomy. You were taking the action away from galleries and into the environment itself.

AK: Well, I wanted to pursue this thread, so to speak. I was like a hound dog on the scent. I wasn't particularly concerned about leading the artworld like the Pied Piper. I mean, it would be nice if they followed, but it wasn't really necessary. So you asked a moment ago about how I wasn't part of a group, although I occasionally intersected, and the reason is that I was really quite charmed by this scent that I was on. So, I don't want to put anybody else at a disadvantage here as being less good. But what interested me was that scent, which was, to put it another way, about the possibility of a totally new art. An art, which like Mondrian's pictures, would dissolve into a kind of life equivalent.

JH: Unfortunately we are short on time, and I can't pursue as many lines as I'd love to pursue. We are skipping over an illustrious teaching career at the University of California at San Diego, and also brings us to why you are here in Dallas this week to participate in a retrospective of your actions. Are you excited about this point that you've come to, where a whole week is being devoted to your past work?

AK: Well, I haven't had a chance to be excited yet (laughs), the work is so overwhelming. But what I should say in a capsule, is that the idea that I should have a retrospective was essentially that of Jeff Kelly, with the approval of the former-chair, Jeff Sperlock of the University of Texas at Arlington. They proposed it. Jeff getting on the phone quite often. And at first it seemed impossible, because how can you retrospect on a thirty-year career where everything was a throw-away.

Events were simply dissolved into the air, as all events are. And the best one could have about those events was a memory, distorted perhaps, but a memory. So, it occurred to us, that the way that we may go about this was not to have a show in the conventional sense, since there's nothing to show, but to have a yearlong of retrospections. Which might mean, and it turned out this way, that I would invent my career. And that's the way it would be interesting to me.

All these events had been, for the most part, once only things, and they were meant as changeable events, there was no fixed form in them, depending upon where they were, who did them, so why not continue to change my memory of them. After all, it's a faulty memory, and I might as well take the whole thing by the horns, so to speak, and do it with great joy. That is, change willfully.
So, in taking one of the first of the selected events to recapitulate, the one we did in New York a few weeks ago, which you've probably heard is very often quoted as a fairly well-known prototype of that time, "18 Happenings in 6 Parts." I wholesale changed it. I took it's principals of participation, of changeability, of simultaneity, and spread these, instead of the original loft work where the thing had taken place in 1959, I had it take place at the desires of the participants all over New York City.

JH: Did you have some of the same people...

AK: I tried to get them, but for one reason or another, some of them just weren't available.

JH: Because I was just looking at the original program today and it was a pretty impressive cast, such as John Cage, Ray Johnson, Robert Rauschenberg, Robert Filliou, George Brecht...

AK: There were alot of my colleagues there. But for one reason or another we couldn't get them this time. They were busy
.
JH: Well, I thank you for speaking with us today, and wish you the best of luck in the week ahead.

AK: Thank you.

Some Observations on Contemporary Art

We are beginning to see clearly now that in the last decade or so the several categories of the plastic arts have become increasingly indistinguishable. What separates a large drawing from a painting, a construction from a collage or sculpture, and so forth, is not at all easy to define. A kind of interchange is occurring which, besides blurring traditional outlines, is producing a new set of forms that in turn are reconditioning our experience.

Thought individual points of view vary, I feel there has been a shift in general from a concern for the work of art as a thing to be possessed, i.e., a valuable object upon which highly specialized care has been lavished, to the work of art as a situation, an action, an environment or an event.

More often than not, the result is fragile, as though it had emerged spontaneously, composed of mixed "mediums" that usually do not belong to "art," but to industry, the household, nature, the ash can and the hardware store. Its shape is sprawling and irregular, sometimes made up of units that are infinitely rearrangeable, expandable and reduceable to adjust to different areas, which gives the whole an ambiguous, fluid existence. Added to this seeming lack of professional definition (and therefore respectability), is the rawness or immediacy of impulse present in the manner some of these artists use their materials, or, in other cases where the touch is more delicate, the indifference to the "beauty" of craftsman-like arrangement. Not only have permanence and skill largely been given up in the literal finished product, but this implies philosophically greater preoccupation with the changeable as a raison d'etre.

The structural principle of these works can best be conveyed by the term "extention." Changeableness being what it is, one thing may become another, which may extend to another ad infinitum. Unrestricted to paint on canvas, these may literally include: anything. Space is no longer pictorial but actual (and sometimes both), and sound, odors, artificial light, movement and time are now utilized. Hence, extension as an organic function is meant to embrace the whole world of experience.

These agglomerates may grow, as if they were some self-energized being, into rooms-full and become in every sense of the word environments where the spectator is a real part, i.e., a participant rather than a passive observer. And in their most extended form, the environments have gone the next step to "happenings," events in a given time in which, put simply, "things happen" according to flexible scores and where theoretically the participant becomes even more actively engaged. (This present exhibition, for practical reasons, cannot show the more fully developed aspects of this new art, but even so, certain rudiments of it can be recognized by the sensitive visitor.)

Considering the above, the art world here may find itself on the edge of a crisis. Aesthetically, the absence of clear categories, of familiar names (What is it, i.e., it is art?), makes judgment nearly impossible for all but the few deeply involved. Critics' frequent references to neo-dada in this connection, a completely erroneous comparison, reveals more the helplessness and anarchy of understanding in the minds of these judges, than it does the nature of the art. (The real roots of it may actually be traced to the last generation of radical painting in the United States. This cannot be examined here, but I would suggest that some insight into the reasons why can be gained simply reflecting on the overtones of the words "action school.")

More crucial yet is the ephemeral existence of the work with its attendant financial consequences. We are no longer producing monuments or heirlooms. One cannot emphasize strongly enough the clear-headed decisiveness of those who choose to employ as media tissue paper, the un-programmed visitor, real food or growing grass. For they have recognized the connection between the impermanence of the physical life of their work and the principle of change. Their reward is the feeling that something truthful and essential is happening; and besides, that a whole realm of forms hitherto impossible with conventional means, has emerged.

This is all healthy and positive rather than irresponsible and bitter as some have thought. For in the long run, whatever drawbacks exist now will disappear and it will all seem perfectly credible and will be praised as a note of freedom in a trying period.

In addition, the amateur may in fact make this art as much a part of his life as he has any other art of the past or present. The human condition is still the only source of its meaning. What has altered is a mode of speech, as it were, in keeping with the different way we are viewing ourselves today. if one cannot in every case pass this on to his children in the form of a piece of "property," the attitudes and values it embodies surely can be transmitted. And like so many facets of our lives, this art can be considered as a semi-intangible entity, something to be renewed in different forms like a garden or the seasonal changes, which we do not always put into our pockets, but need nevertheless.

We ought to begin to realize, I think, that there is no fundamental reason why a work of art should be a fixed object to be placed in a locked case. The spirit does not really require the proofs of the embalmer.

Allan Kaprow
From "New Forms--New Media"
Martha Jackson Gallery