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Concept
Happening
Summary
A happening is a performance, event, or situation art, usually as performance art. The term was first used by Allan Kaprow during the 1950s to describe a range of art-related events.
Allan Kaprow first coined the term "happening" in the spring of 1959 at an art picnic at George Segal's farm to describe the art pieces that were going on. The first appearance in print was in Kaprow's famous "Legacy of Jackson Pollock" essay that was published in 1958 but primarily written in 1956. "Happening" also appeared in print in one issue of the Rutgers University undergraduate literary magazine, Anthologist. The form was imitated and the term was adopted by artists across the U.S., Germany, and Japan. Jack Kerouac referred to Kaprow as "The Happenings man", and an ad showing a woman floating in outer space declared, "I dreamt I was in a happening in my Maidenform brassiere".
Happenings are difficult to describe, in part because each one is unique. One definition comes from Wardrip-Fruin and Montfort in The New Media Reader, "The term 'happening' has been used to describe many performances and events, organized by Allan Kaprow and others during the 1950s and 1960s, including a number of theatrical productions that were traditionally scripted and invited only limited audience interaction." Another definition is, "a purposefully composed form of theatre in which diverse alogical elements, including nonmatrixed performing, are organized in a compartmented structure". However, Canadian theatre critic and playwright Gary Botting, who himself had "constructed" several happenings, wrote in 1972: "Happenings abandoned the matrix of story and plot for the equally complex matrix of incident and event."
Kaprow was a student of John Cage, who had experimented with "musical happenings" at Black Mountain College as early as 1952. Kaprow combined the theatrical and visual arts with discordant music. "His happenings incorporated the use of huge constructions or sculptures similar to those suggested by Artaud," wrote Botting, who also compared them to the "impermanent art" of Dada.
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Performance art is an artwork or art exhibition created through actions executed by the artist or other participants. It may be witnessed live or through documentation, spontaneously developed or written, and is traditionally presented to a public in a fine art context in an interdisciplinary mode. Also known as artistic action, it has been developed through the years as a genre of its own in which art is presented live. It had an important and fundamental role in 20th century avant-garde art.
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Avant-garde
In the arts and in literature, the term avant-garde (advance guard and vanguard) identifies a genre of art, an experimental work of art, and the experimental artist who created the work of art, which usually is aesthetically innovative, whilst initially being ideologically unacceptable to the artistic establishment of the time. The military metaphor of an advance guard identifies the artists and writers whose innovations in style, form, and subject-matter challenge the artistic and aesthetic validity of the established forms of art and the literary traditions of their time; thus how the artists who created the anti-novel and Surrealism were ahead of their times.