ARTIFICIAL HELLS

artificial hells
Happenings in Europe took place during Jean- Jacques Lebel’s ‘Anti-
Procès’ festivals (1960 onwards), a travelling exhibition- cum- protest
against the Algerian War, in which a number of artists hung work, played
music and read sound poems in an ephemeral multi- media event. The first
single- authored European Happening was created during the second ‘Anti-
Procès’ festival in Venice (July 1960), which ended with Lebel’s
L’Enterrement de la chose de Tinguely (Burial of the Thing of Tinguely), a
complicated quasi- ritualistic performance that made references to the
Marquis de Sade, J. K. Huysmans, and Lebel’s recently murdered friend
Nina Thoeren. 63 Lebel (b.1936) maintains that he arrived at this mixedmedia
format independently of the New York avant- garde, taking his lead
from Dada, Surrealism and Artaud rather than from John Cage and Jackson
Pollock (the two touchstones for US Happenings). 64 Lebel was
nevertheless based in Paris and New York in the early 1960s and participated
in Claes Oldenburg’s Ray Gun Theater (1961) as well as in several
works by Allan Kaprow, with whom he remained close friends until the
latter’s death. For Lebel, both European and US Happenings shared a
concern to ‘give back to artistic activity what has been torn away from it:
the intensification of feeling, the play of instinct, a sense of festivity, social
agitation’. 65 However, there were important differences between US- style
Happenings and those that Lebel promoted in France.
The former, as theorised by Allan Kaprow (1927– 2006), were indebted
to the compositional innovations of John Cage, and developed in response
to the action painting of Jackson Pollock. The first work to adopt the
name ‘Happening’ was Kaprow’s own Eighteen Happenings in Six Parts,
which took place over several evenings in Autumn 1959 at the Reuben
Gallery in New York. In his early writings, Kaprow positions Happenings
against conventional theatre: they deliberately rejected plot, character,
narrative structure and the audience/ performer division in favour of
lightly scored events that injected the everyday with risk, excitement and
fear. The audience rarely had a fixed point of observation and, by the mid-
1960s, tended to be involved directly as participants in the work’s
realisation. 66 Initially performed in lofts and galleries, Happenings later
took place in outdoor areas such as farms and university campuses (working
directly in the city streets was far rarer). 67 Lebel, however, drew on
painting and especially jazz as an improvisational structuring device for
collaborative events with a changing entourage of artist colleagues and
colourful hangers- on. Unlike Kaprow, Lebel’s events were not scored,
but unfolded in an ad hoc fashion around a cluster of scenes or episodes,
arrived at through group discussion. 68
However, it was the references to contemporary political events that
represented the strongest dividing line between European and North
American Happenings. As Günter Berghaus argues, the European work
(Lebel, Wolf Vostell, Robert Filliou, the Viennese Actionists) contained a
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