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Synopsis

What began as a challenge to the category of "art" initiated by the Futurists and Inch Tie Platform Bow 4 Inch Pump Satin Women's 2 Pin Black PU;6 White 3 Couture Hidden 1 Up With Heel 4 Dadaists in the 1910s and 1920s came to fruition with the performance art movements, one branch of which was referred to as Happenings. Happenings involved more than the detached observation of the viewer; the artist engaged with Happenings required the viewer to actively participate in each piece. There was not a definite or consistent style for Happenings, as they greatly varied in size and intricacy. However, all artists staging Happenings operated with the fundamental belief that art could be brought into the realm of everyday life. This turn toward performance was a reaction against the long-standing dominance of the technical aesthetics of Abstract Expressionism and was a new art form that grew out of the social changes occurring in the 1950s and 1960s.

Key Ideas

Most Important Art

Beginnings

Happenings were inspired by the performances of Futurists who would enact short avant-garde plays and read their manifestoes and poetry on stage. The Futurist tendency to break the "fourth wall" and elicit audience participation became a central idea in the Happening: the absence of boundaries between the viewer and the artwork meant the artwork became defined by the action as opposed to the physical, or resulting, object.

The Dadaists who declared that art did not have to meet expectations about what "art" was supposed to look like also influenced the artists who created Happenings. Additionally, the Dadaist use of the element of chance heavily guided the evolution of Happenings as an art form. The ideas of composer John Cage and the teachings of instructors at Black Mountain College including Josef and Anni Albers, Merce Cunningham, Robert Motherwell and Buckminster Fuller further impacted the views of Happenings artists in their belief that learning should be a continual process, with no distinction between making or learning about art and routine aspects of day-to-day life. There was an emphasis on the perpetual state of learning and creating; an appreciation for the prosaic, which influenced many artists of the time, particularly Allan Kaprow, who coined the term "Happening" while describing performance events that had taken place on George Segal's farm in 1957.

These aforementioned theories and ideas led to the creation of the Happening which was a combination of performance and installation art. Happenings fully evolved from Kaprow's "environments," which were installation pieces that involved large sculptural collages. After taking John Cage's class Kaprow introduced the element of sound into his work and from there came the first Happening by Kaprow. It was untitled and performed at Voorhees Chapel at Douglass Campus on April 22, 1958.

Concepts and Styles

The audience participation in Happenings incorporated the aspect of chance, as anything could happen at any time and each performance would be completely unique from the one before. This was the critical difference between Happenings and other performance art of the time, which emphasized a more theatrical and repeatable ethos. Happenings could be enacted anywhere; sometimes they were staged in galleries, but they were performed just as often in a theater setting, on the street, on a farm or even in one instance, a cave.

Happenings were both large-scale and elaborate or small and intimate depending upon the artist. For example, Allan Kaprow had started out looking for a way to extend the action of painting beyond the canvas and into the space of the viewer. He achieved this by building environments for viewers to be inside of and adding sound and various objects for the viewer to interact with. Robert Watts also created pieces similar in size and scale, utilizing created environments that the audience would partake in.