Cult Artists by Ana Finel Honigman

Author:Ana Finel Honigman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: White Lion Publishing
Published: 2019-03-12T16:00:00+00:00

ALLAN KAPROW (1927–2006)

ENVIRONMENTAL ANTI-ARTIST

Allan Kaprow is adored and revered for following his youthful edict to create art from ‘paint, chairs, food, electric and neon lights, smoke, water, old socks, a dog, movies’. Kaprow’s creation of performance works that he termed ‘Happenings’ broke down barriers between art and life. He preferred perishable, everyday, material over craft and his happenings were, in his words, ‘events that, simply, happened’. For a man who described himself as an ‘un-artist’ and whose goal was creating a tiny footprint, he’s left a massive legacy changing the course of 20th-century art.

Kaprow was concerned about the environment, waste and our increasing inability to be mindful long before mobile phones, recycling or fast-fashion overproduction. Although his art appeared improvisational, it was rooted in art history and his personal biography. Born in New Jersey, he spent his childhood in Tucson, Arizona before studying art history at Columbia University. The vastness and majesty of Arizona’s desert nature inspired Kaprow, an ardent, life-long environmentalist and, after a brief stint as an abstract painter, he rejected conventional media for pioneering, nature-based performances.

Kaprow’s 1993 book Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life is the definitive treaty for artists seeking to find how art fits into real life. For Kaprow, that fit often involved mountains of used tyres or freshly squeezed orange juice. Audience members were dragged into surreal events when they attended Kaprow’s shows, dissolving the membrane between an artistic fiction and reality. Occasionally, Kaprow added viewers’ unease and concern as ingredients into his ‘Happenings’. For a ‘Spring Happening’ (1969), viewers were packed into narrow tunnels and exposed to flashing lights and sirens. A performer ended the event by pushing out audience members by approaching them with a rolling lawnmower. In another ‘Happening’, this threat and discomfort was replaced by joy and serenity when a young woman squeezed fresh orange juice in a room littered with tar paper and oranges, which rotted and hardened over time.

Like the audiences for a ‘Spring Happening’, Kaprow pushed art out of its narrow confines into abandoned buildings, random public spaces, car parks and high school gyms. Sometimes his fixation with the everyday brought him into micro-artworks, like his long-term project documenting his dental hygiene routine in the 1980s. Picking up from Duchamp’s world-changing Fountain, Kaprow is a cult artist for teaching us that art is anywhere and everywhere.

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