Happening

Happening. A form of entertainment, often carefully planned but usually including some degree of spontaneity, in which an artist performs or directs an event combining elements of theatre and the visual arts. The term was coined in 1959 by Allan Kaprow, to whom the concept of the Happening was closely bound up with his rejection of traditional principles of craftsmanship and permanence in the arts. He thought of the Happening as a development mainly from the assemblage and the environment. While both the assemblage and the environment were relatively fixed and static—the assemblage something constructed to be contemplated from outside, to be ‘handled or walked around', and the environment something to be ‘walked into', something by which the observer was enveloped and manipulated—the Happening was conceived of as a genuine ‘event'. It had close affinities with Performance art (the two terms have sometimes been used more or less synonymously) and it was not restricted like the environment to the confines of a gallery or some other specific site. In line with the theories of the composer John Cage about the importance of chance in artistic creation, Happenings were described as ‘spontaneous, plotless theatrical events'.

Cage (one of Kaprow's teachers) organized a performance at Black Mountain College in 1952 that has sometimes been described as the first Happening. Kaprow's own first Happening was Intermission Piece, staged at the Reuben Gallery, New York, in 1959; in October of the same year he performed 18 Happenings in 6 Parts at the same venue, and this was the first event to be actually titled a Happening. It took part in three ‘rooms’ (created by plastic walls dividing a loft space), with chairs arranged in circles and rectangles, so that spectators faced in different directions. The programme note with which they were provided explained that ‘The performance is divided into six parts. Each part contains three happenings which occur at once. The beginning and end of each will be signalled by a bell. At the end of the performance two strokes of the bell will be heard.’ RoseLee Goldberg (Performance Art, 1988) writes: ‘The visitors (whom the programme notes designated as members of the cast) took their seats at the ring of a bell. Loud amplified sounds announced the beginning of the performance: figures marched stiffly in single file down the narrow corridors between the makeshift rooms and in one room a woman stood still for ten seconds, left arm raised, forearm pointing at the floor. Then two performers read from hand-held placards … Flute, ukelele and violin were played, painters painted on unprimed canvas set into the walls, gramophones were rolled in on trolleys, and finally, after ninety minutes of simultaneous happenings, four nine-foot scrolls toppled off a horizontal bar between the male and female performers reciting monosyllabic words … As promised, a bell rang twice signalling the end.’ Although Kaprow announced that the term ‘happening’ was meant to indicate ‘something spontaneous, something that just happens to happen', the entire piece was carefully rehearsed for two weeks before it opened and daily during the week's run of performances.

Apart from Cage and Kaprow, the artists chiefly responsible for the development of the form in the USA include Jim Dine, Roy Lichtenstein, Claes Oldenburg, and Robert Rauschenberg. Outside America, the Happening was widely exploited in the 1960s and 1970s—by the Gutai Group in Japan, for example, and by many artists in Europe. The term has often been used to cover staged demonstrations for politicial or social propaganda, as for example in the work of Fluxus group (whose Happenings in Germany were usually called ‘Aktions'). At the other pole, some practitioners thought that the Happening should bring into being situations or events in which everyday life and everyday technology are invested with the strangeness of the poetic and the fantastic. The theory of the Happening is as diverse as the practice.