Allan Kaprow and Claes Oldenburg

Allan Kaprow and Claes Oldenburg

Author: Robert E. Haywood

Publisher:

Published: 2017

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9780300222609

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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: National Geographic Books

Published: 2014-02-14

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 0262526123

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An examination of an experiential and experimental art form that, despite its evanescence, has shaped participatory art into the present. “Happenings” have pop connotations that conjure up 1960s youth culture and hippies in public, joyful rebellion. Scholars, meanwhile, locate happenings in a genealogy of avant-garde performance that descends from futurism, surrealism, and Dada through the action painting of the 1950s. In Radical Prototypes, Judith Rodenbeck argues for a more complex etiology. Allan Kaprow coined the term in 1958 to name a new collage form of performance, calling happenings “radical prototypes” of performance art. Rodenbeck offers a rigorous art historical reading of Kaprow's project and related artworks. She finds that these experiential and experimental works offered not a happy communalism but a strong and canny critique of contemporary sociality. Happenings, she argues, were far more ambivalent, negative, and even creepy than they have been portrayed, either in contemporaneous accounts or in more recent efforts to connect them to contemporary art's participatory strategies. In Radical Prototypes, 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. She links happenings to scores by John Cage (especially 4'33”), avant-garde theater, and photography, and offers new readings of projects ranging from Kaprow's 18 Happenings in 6 Parts (1959) to Gerhard Richter's Leben mit Pop (1963). Rodenbeck casts happenings as a form of participatory art that simultaneously delivers a radical critique of that very participation—a view that revises our understanding of contemporary constructions of the participatory as well as of 1960s projects from Fluxus to conceptual art.


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

Published: 2013-05-10

Total Pages: 344

ISBN-13: 0520245415

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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.


Happenings and Other Acts

Happenings and Other Acts

Author: Mariellen Sandford

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2003-09-02

Total Pages: 371

ISBN-13: 1134857829

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First published in 2004. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.


Claes Oldenburg's Theater of Vision

Claes Oldenburg's Theater of Vision

Author: Nadja Rottner

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2023-11-10

Total Pages: 317

ISBN-13: 1000998894

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In four chronologically organized chapters, this study traces the conceptual dependence and deep connectivity among Claes Oldenburg’s poetry, sculpture, films, and performance art between 1956 and 1965. This research-intensive book argues that Oldenburg’s art relies on machine vision and other metaphors to visualize the structure and image content of human thought as an artistic problem. Anchored in new oral history interviews and extensive archival material, it brings together understudied visual and concrete poetry, experimental films, fifteen group performances (commonly referred to as happenings), and a close analysis of his well-known installations of The Street (1960) and The Store (1961–62), effectively setting in place a reexamination of Oldenburg’s pop art from the street, store, home, and cinema years. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, film studies, performance studies, literature, intermedia studies, and media theory.


Against the Avant-garde

Against the Avant-garde

Author: Ara H. Merjian

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2020

Total Pages: 285

ISBN-13: 022665527X

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"This book casts the poet and filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini in a fresh light: his life and work in relation to the visual and performance arts of his time in both Europe and the US. Lavishly illustrated with both documentary and fine art images, it shows how essentially conservative Pasolini was politically and aesthetically despite his reputation as an avant-garde writer and filmmaker. But it also shows how truly advanced Pasolini was when it comes to interdisciplinary art, making him enormously relevant today"--


Allan Kaprow

Allan Kaprow

Author: Allan Kaprow

Publisher: Getty Publications

Published: 2008

Total Pages: 380

ISBN-13: 9780892368907

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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.


A Primer of Happenings & Time/space Art

A Primer of Happenings & Time/space Art

Author: Al Hansen

Publisher:

Published: 1965

Total Pages: 170

ISBN-13:

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An oral-visual account of the origin and development of Happenings. Artists discussed include Dick Higgins, Alison Knowles, Carolee Schneemann, Allan Kaprow, Wolf Vostell, Nam June Paik, Claes Oldenburg, Meredith Monk, Jackson Mac Low, Yvonne Rainer, John Cage, etc.