Author: Marjorie Camarda
On March 29, students from Professor Mary Beth Heffernan’s Advanced Projects/Interdisciplinary Arts class drove in a loop around campus for 12 hours, stopping frequently to remove the car’s tires and then put them back on again. Another group hauled a cubic yard of sand in the back of a pick-up, pausing to dump the sand at six different sites throughout LA and then shovel it back into the truck-all in the name of art. Or, possibly, in the name of “un-art.”
The students were reenacting self-titled “un-artist” Allan Kaprow’s “Labor Day Happening.” It was performed as part of a tribute to Kaprow’s 1959 “18 Happenings in 6 Parts.” This spring, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MOCA), invited groups from across Southern California to participate in the recreation of all 18 happenings.
“[Happenings] don’t often make sense to the general public,” participant Ricardo Vega (junior) said.
The New York Times has called happenings “anti-art, audience-participation works.” Heffernan said the form forces us to consider, “Are there differences between art and life? If so, what are they?”
Kaprow said in a 1988 interview on Dallas Cable Access TV, “What is a happening? A game, an adventure, a number of activities engaged in by participants for the sake of playing.”
A happening differs from more traditional art forms in that it focuses not on producing a tangible end result, but rather on the labor involved in the creative process. Happenings generally address unremarkable moments in time: changing car tires, shoveling sand, collecting raindrops, winking at a passerby.
In a 1958 ArtNews article, Kaprow said the mediums of the future would be “chairs, food, electric and neon lights, smoke, water, old socks, a dog, movies and a thousand other things.”
At a happening, the line between artist and audience is erased, as all observers are asked to participate. “Kaprow insisted that there be no spectators,” Heffernan said. “Even a four-year-old kid helped us shovel sand at one point.”
When there is no audience, the tire-changing and the shoveling continue. “One doesn’t hold a happening up to the conditions of spectacle,” Heffernan said. “One of the things Kaprow thought was important about them was performing without an audience. Is it art, is it a performance, if no one is there to see it?”
The “Labor Day Happening” was originally performed in Milan in 1971 to coincide with the European Labor Day. On a day that is generally observed as a holiday and a break from labor, Kaprow designed what MOCA describes as an “investigation of mental/physical boredom, failure and fatigue through repetition.”
Though the specifics of the happening were adapted to fit Los Angeles, Heffernan said these modifications did not detract from the experience in the slightest. “When [Kaprow] was alive and planning [this] retrospective, he wanted to invite people from across LA . . . to reinterpret his happenings, as if they were music scores to be reinterpreted again,” Heffernan said.
Happenings are nearly impossible to critique, as they yield no material product and are preserved only in the memory of the participants, which is-in some cases-just a single individual. But for the participants of Labor Day 2008, the happening was a success.
“This project is meaningful because I got the chance to participate in a reinvention of an important period in art history,” Vega said. “It is . . . gratifying to know that I have paid homage to Kaprow, whose work has unknowingly shaped the artistic modern world.”
Happenings as a form appear to be a success, because nearly 50 years after their inception, artists around the world are still staging them to explore the intersections between art and life, the deliberate and the mundane.
Though half-a-century has passed, the happening is still, as Kaprow said, “a totally new art. An art, which . . . would dissolve into a kind of life equivalent.”
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