Allan
Kaprow

Allan Kaprow (b. 1927 in Atlantic City; d. 2006 in Encinitas, near San Diego) was a fellow of the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program in 1975. Two decades earlier, he had famously coined the term “Happening” to describe a particular form of artistic performance or event. With his action collages and Environments, Kaprow moved beyond the Abstract Expressionism of the 1950s, represented above all by Jackson Pollock, whose artistic theories he also addressed. Pollock employed a drip painting technique whereby he “stepped inside the painting.” Kaprow extended this approach into three-dimensional, architectural space, so that he can also be regarded as the father of installation art. His Environments and Happenings were always temporary and used cheap, everyday materials, underscoring the transformative nature of his practice. Kaprow was greatly influenced by John Cage, and this is reflected in his insistence on participation: the viewer’s active involvement in the creation of a work. Kaprow staged his Happenings in shops, gymnasiums, and parking lots rather than in conventional art venues. By the time he took up the DAAD fellowship, he had already created major works such as Communication Happening (1958), 18 Happenings in 6 Parts (1959), Chicken (1962), Eat (1964), and Fluids (1967), as well as the Environments Untitled Environment (1958), Yard (1961)—for which he filled the courtyard of the Martha Jackson Gallery in New York with hundreds of old car tires for visitors to walk on or throw around—and Words (1962). The focus of his practice had also shifted from larger, more publicly oriented work tospontaneous “Activities” for a small number of participants. One of these was A Sweet Wall, which he carried out in Berlin on November 11, 1970 at the invitation of gallerist René Block. It took place on wasteland close to the Berlin Wall at Potsdamer Platz. Together with Block and a small group of fellow artists, Kaprow built a cement brick wall that was approximately 30 m long and 1.5 m high, using slices of bread spread with strawberry jam to stick the bricks together. The builders toppled their own creation that same afternoon. The artist KP Brehmer filmed the Activity, which was carried out with almost no audience and was later described by Kaprow as a “political parody.” The artist’s book Sweet Wall / Testimonials, which includes reproductions of drawings by Kaprow as well as black-and-white photographs by Dick Higgins and Lee Ottinger, was published in collaboration with the Artists-in-Berlin Program in 1976 to accompany the exhibition of the same nameat Galerie René Block. In 1973 Kaprow presented the Happening Time Pieces as part of ADA Aktionen der Avantgarde. Environments, Happenings, Prozesse, Aktionen, Video, an event organized jointly by the Neuer Berliner Kunstverein (n.b.k.), the Artists-in-Berlin Program, and the Berliner Festspiele. The video documentation of Time Pieces entered the collection of the n.b.k. Video-Forum, which was established in 1971. On May 22 and 23, 1976, as part of “pro musica nova,” a festival organized by Radio Bremen, Kaprow staged the Happening Durations in cooperation with the Kunsthalle Bremen and the Artists-in-Berlin Program. For this work, up to three-meter-high columns of ice were installed in a field. Kaprow’s film Warm-Ups was also created in Berlin with support from the Artists-in-Berlin Program.

Kaprow staged numerous Happenings in cooperation with leading art institutions, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Walker Art Center, and documenta 6 and 8. In 2006, a comprehensive retrospective exhibition of his work was held at Haus der Kunst in Munich. The Happening Fluids, which Kaprow originally created in 1967 at several locations in California, was restaged in 2015 on the terrace of the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin: a rectangular enclosure of ice blocks, measuring around 9 m long, 3 m wide, and 2.4 m high, was constructed by volunteers, then simply left to melt until no trace of it remained.  

Text: Eva Scharrer
Translation: Jacqueline Todd