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Allan KaplOw
Notes on the Elimination of the Audience/ /1966
The emergence of Happenings in New Yo rk in the late 1950s was in part a response
to the gestural expressionism of jackson Pollock's paintings. Allan [(aprow sought
from the Happenings a heightened experience of the everyday, in which viewers
were formally fused with the space-time of the performance and thereby lost their
identity as 'audience'.
Although the Assemblages' and Environments' free style was directly carried
into the Happenings, the use of standard performance conventions from the
very start tended to truncate the implications of the art. The Happenings were
presented to small, intimate gatherings of people in lofts, classrooms,
gymnasiums and some of the offbeat galleries, where a clearing was made for
the activities. The watchers sat very close to what took place, with the artists and
their friends acting along with assembled environmental constructions. The
audience occasionally changed seats as in a game of musical chairs, turned
around to see something behind it, or stood without seats in tight but informal
clusters. Sometimes, too, the event moved in and amongst the crowd, which
produced some movement on the latter's part. But, however flexible these
techniques were in practice, there was always an audience in one (usually static)
space and a show given in another.
This proved to be a serious drawback, in my opinion, to the plastic
morphology of the works, for reasons parallel to those which make galleries
inappropriate for Assemblages and Environments. But it was more dramatically
evident. The rooms enframed the events, and the immemorial history of cultural
expectations attached to theatrical productions crippled them. It was repeatedly
clear with each Happening that in spite of the unique imagery and vitality of its
impulse, the traditional staging, if it did not suggest a 'crude' version of the
avant-garde Theatre of the Absurd, at least smacked of night club acts, side
shows, cock fights and bunkhouse skits. Audiences seemed to catch these
probably unintended allusions and so took the Happenings for charming
diversions, but hardly for art or even purposive activiry. Night club acts can of
course be more than merely diverting, but their structure of 'grammar' is
unusually hackneyed and, as such, is detrimental to experimentation and change.
Unfortunately, the fact that there was a tough nut to crack in the Happenings
seems to have struck very few of its practitioners. Even today, the majority
continues to popularize an art of 'acts' which often is well-done enough but
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