Art Expanded, 1958–1978

II

Walker Living Collections Catalogue

×

Mushroom

Allan Kaprow’s
A Happening in a Cave
Liz Glass
Abstract
In 1962, Allan Kaprow visited the Twin Cities at the invitation of the Walker’s Center Arts Council. Following his visit, the artist conceived a new Happening, staged in November of that year inside the Lehmann family mushroom caves in St. Paul. Taken from the Walker’s rich archival holdings, this look into Kaprow’s Happening aims to capture an ephemeral event and understand an art form through original documents, press clippings, correspondence, and never-before-published photographs of Mushroom.
Citation
Glass, Liz. “Mushroom: Allan Kaprow’s A Happening in a Cave.” In Art Expanded, 1958-1978, edited by Eric Crosby with Liz Glass. Vol. 2 of Living Collections Catalogue. Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 2015.
http://walkerart.org/publications/art-expanded/mushroom.

Walker Art Center ©2015

Allan Kaprow, A Happening in a Cave, 1962. Minneapolis and St. Paul newspaper negatives collection, Minnesota Historical Society. Photo by Spence Hollstadt for the St. Paul Pioneer Press.

Allan Kaprow is well known as the father of the Happening: a genre of live, interactive art that emerged in the late 1950s and gained steam into the following decade. Working through the powerful legacies of Jackson Pollock and John Cage, Kaprow arrived at a form that would combine both action and object, intention and chance, all while encouraging participation and emulating theater yet eschewing its narrative structure. Kaprow staged his first Happening, 18 Happenings in 6 Parts, in 1959 at New York’s Reuben Gallery. The event was highly scripted: each member of the audience was assigned a particular, preconceived action that was to take place within the artist’s rigidly designed structure. Over the next several years, he would work to articulate a style of performance that would both challenge and integrate the audience. Employing found, handmade, and borrowed materials such as rubber tires, cardboard boxes, and scavenged furniture—all of which Kaprow used in his static Environments—the Happenings occurred at the messy interstices of art, trash, theater, and the everyday.

Working as an artist (or a self-proclaimed “un-artist”) as well as an art historian, teacher, and critic, Kaprow actively participated in the interpretation and reception of his own works. In his 1961 essay “Happenings in the New York Scene,” Kaprow defines his emergent art form:

Happenings are events that, put simply, happen. Though the best of them have a decided impact—that is, we feel “here is something important”—they appear to go nowhere and do not make any particular literary point. In contrast to the arts of the past, they have no structured beginning, middle, or end. Their form is open-ended and fluid; nothing obvious is sought and therefore nothing is won, except the certainty of a number of occurrences to which we are more than normally attentive. They exist for a single performance, or only a few, and are gone forever as new ones take their place.

1

Despite their ephemerality, Kaprow’s Happenings did leave their traces. Recorded through scripts, promotional flyers, invitations, and the like as well as the occasional photograph or original prop, these rather strange events live on through archives, museum collections, and memories.

2 A search through the Walker Art Center’s own archive reveals a rich story about a Happening performed in the Twin Cities in 1962. Commissioned by the Walker Center Arts Council, Kaprow’s work was variously called Mushroom, or A Happening in a Cave. This Happening was performed four times (over two evenings) in the mushroom caves of St. Paul, lasted a little under an hour for each performance, and was based on a ten-page script written out in Kaprow’s distinctive scrawl. One of his earliest Happenings staged outside of New York City, Mushroom was linked to its unique setting—a backdrop that combined the “sheer rawness of the out-of-doors” with “the closeness of dingy city quarters” that Kaprow idealized as the perfect setting for his art.
3

Poring over these documents, we are able to place Mushroom at a unique juncture in Kaprow’s evolution of the art form. Conceived to break down the distance between the work of art and the audience, Kaprow’s Happenings were always interactive. Yet the type and form of this interaction evolved over the years, beginning with a strictly prescribed, formulaic sort of audience “performance” into the more fluid, open-ended participation that would characterize his Happenings of the late 1960s. In Mushroom, we see Kaprow still grappling with the idea of interaction—how it can be created, controlled, and encouraged. While Mushroom is a step away from the rigor of his earlier 18 Happenings in 6 Parts, it retains much of the theatrical approach that would disappear from later actions such as Transfer (1968) and Moving (1967). While there are recurring characters, images, and ideas that cohere the different scenes of Mushroom—an intermittent reference to the idea of consumption or consumerism, for instance—Mushroom, like Kaprow’s other Happenings, was designed to be non-narrative and alogical. That the event in some ways worked against the audience’s understanding is part and parcel of Kaprow’s aim to break down the divisions between art and life.

Pulled from the Walker’s collections and archives, the materials presented here stand in for Kaprow’s ephemeral events, offering a view into his working logic, the sensibilities at play in creating Happenings, and the reception of his performances.

Liz Glass is a fellow in the visual arts department at the Walker Art Center. Her interests in art-music crossovers, performance, time-based artwork (and its documentation), and a host of other intermedia practices have led her down many rabbit holes. These interdisciplinary interests stem from her undergraduate focus on American studies and were enriched by her graduate work in curatorial practice, where her concentration on contemporary artists and organizations included the proto-punk art band Destroy All Monsters, and the now defunct arts organization La Mamelle. She has contributed to exhibitions and publications at the Walker; the Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, San Francisco; the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit; the Jewish Museum, New York; and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Her writing has appeared on platforms including Art Practical, where she was formerly an associate editor; Daily Serving; and Art Papers.

  1. Allan Kaprow, “Happenings in the New York Scene,” (1961), reprinted in Allan Kaprow, Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life, ed. Jeff Kelley (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 16–17. This book is a compendium of essays that Kaprow penned between 1958 and 1990, and offers a bibliography of texts on the artist as well.

    ↩

  2. In addition to the materials presented here from the Walker Art Center Archives, the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles holds the entirety of Kaprow’s papers. The GRI’s collection includes scores, photographs, notes, and correspondence from the 1950s through the 1990s, as well as some audio-visual materials related to Happenings and other Kaprow activities. Much of the information available at the GRI also appears in the book, Allan Kaprow – Arts as Life, Eva Meyer-Hermann, Andrew Perchuk, and Stephanie Rosenthal, eds. (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2008). The Allan Kaprow papers, 1940-1997, can be searched on the Getty’s website and accessed by appointment at the Getty Research Institute.

    ↩

  3. Kaprow, “Happenings in the New York Scene,” 18.

    ↩