Re-doing Kaprow
Re-doing Kaprow
How do you make a retrospective of an artist who swore his whole life by the once-only event? Haus der Kunst in Munich and the Van Abbemuseum are venturing on a survey of Allan Kaprow by means of both documentation and so called ‘re-inventions’ in the spirit of the maker. This is not entirely without its problems. ‘Do something with your saliva, from when you get up in the morning until you arrive at the studio [at the academy], including on the way there in public.’This instruction was given by Allan Kaprow to several fellow students and myself one autumn twenty years ago. And later, we reported back on some of the resulting experiences, which included dirt, shame and pleasure. As a teacher and as an artist, Kaprow was interested in direct experiences, well aware of the extent to which language is directly allied with them as an evocative, constitutive and representative medium. But for the reception of his large-scale situational and performative works, language by no means played the primary role it did in the work of other Fluxus and Conceptual artists.Now that the modest media response to his death this spring has faded, if we wish to approach Kaprow’s anti-museum oeuvre today, in anticipation of his ‘first major solo display in Europe’, we must and, thankfully, we can refer to his own writings, to the scores and instructions that played a central role in the preparation of his Happenings.1 As a man of the avant-garde, Kaprow spent a good quarter century from 1958 working, with his Happenings and subsequent pieces, on a teleological overcoming of the art that had gone before. And in his writings, he tested names for what he was doing: happening, experimental art, un-art, lifelike art through to real experiment. Due to his prompt rejection of the museum – from Kaprow’s non-art perspective, this institution is a non-place – and his frequent forays into life beyond art, the polemical, sometimes visionary essays that accompanied his work from the outset were a must for him. The collected Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life broadly testify to the skill with which Kaprow repeatedly inscribed himself into art discourse via the medium of the artist’s essay, among other things as a way of preventing an oeuvre that took place outside of art-historical criteria from being forgotten.2Even today, the radicalism of his 1966 essay Experimental Art is enough to leave one speechless, shifting the focus away from visual objects and grasping art as communication. Then in 1971, right at the end of The Education of the Un-Artist, Part 1 he says “drop out”, let us desist from professional art. And in the early seventies, for various reasons but always in search of change, a number of artists really did drop out of the male-dominated, supposedly apolitical art world. In the case of Kaprow himself, it remains a necessary critical gesture, made repeatedly, to deconstruct the artistically hollow professionalization of the field, but without losing sight of “art” as a concept.
Re-invention
But now to the actual matter at issue here. On the one hand, the major exhibitions planned for Munich, Eindhoven, Bern and Los Angeles under the title Allan Kaprow. Art is Life give reason to hope that art history is ready at last to approach this challenging chapter in twentieth century artistic practice. On the other hand, some details in the advance press releases give cause for concern. For all its efforts, could it be that this retrospective show misses the dialectic moments so essential and peculiar to Kaprow’s oeuvre? Or even flatten it, historicizing it as aesthetically pleasing art? My question as an artist to the curators is this: How, within the representational format of the exhibition, does their show present the central concept within Kaprow’s oeuvre of (working on) ‘non-representation’?On this subject, the museum press release presents a ‘historical’ change of perspective, as Kaprow, in conversation with the curators prior to his death, allegedly identified the museum as an ‘agency for action’.3 But what form of curatorial practice is authenticated by this open wording? The press text speaks of a change of mind on Kaprow’s part in his decision to authorize the re-invention of his formerly unrepeatable works. But in relation to the volume of a life’s work devoted to avoiding the fixed narratives of the museum, such anecdotic evidence is hardly convincing, and will have to be measured against the concrete form and contextual realization of the re-inventions in the exhibition.On an earlier occasion, in the catalogue for his first major European show, at the Museum am Ostwall in Dortmund in 1986, Kaprow himself applied the term re-doing to the first re-installation of his original environments in a museum context. This has echoes of what we would call ‘reconstruction’ and a reconstructive aesthetic is evident in the catalogue’s documentary photos of Yard and Push and Pull. Kaprow reflected on the problem of such pastiche works in the exhibition context and finally – in connection with a retrospective exhibition in Turin in the nineties – arrived at the artistically far more intensive and distinctive concept of re-invention for the eventuality of his works being seen and experienced again at a later date in a different place. The wild mix of terms currently in use in press releases and on websites – ‘sogenannte re-enactments’, ‘restaging’, ‘reconstructies’, ‘heropvoeringen’, ‘neue Versionen’ and finally also ‘re-invention’ – shows how unclear the consequences of this instruction have been to museums and collectors to date. In my opinion, the radical notion of a re-invention is only honoured if it is taken to its logical conclusion, with the works truly invented afresh. In artistic terms, the interesting but controversial question concerns the scope accorded to those executing the newly invented situations and environments in the present: Does the Kaprow label guarantee true Kaprow content? In the gesture of re-invention, the performer is given responsibility in practical and actual terms for the public ‘enunciation’ of the works – and thus also a form of authorship. At the time of its new release, the work is supposed to unfold its meaning in its new temporal context, including its critical attitude to the institutionalized art context.
Responsibility
The artist Olav Westphalen met Allan Kaprow in November 2005 to discuss a planned re-invention of Tire Tower on the campus of Bard College (NY). Here too, Kaprow named the three criteria for the praxis of re-inventing his works – ‘site specific’, ‘ephemeral’ and ‘critical towards art’.5 While the first two are unproblematic, having become academic standards through art training, the decisive criterion for re-invention remains the critical motivation and attitude towards art and towards the role of the artist at the time of the new realization of the work.The curators of the forthcoming exhibitions have delegated the interpretative role assigned to them by Allan Kaprow to artist-professors who have been asked to interpret the instructions with their students.6 In view of Kaprow’s broad teaching activities, this seems logical enough, but it raises new questions. What exactly does it mean when an exhibiting institution commissions a re-formulation of a critical gesture? Is it permissible for the role of the interpreting artists/students to be extended, for them to become co-authors of the gesture?One reason for the curators to delegate the interpretative role is certainly as a way of avoiding the burdensome exposure and responsibility of authorship. They prefer to stick to the museum’s allotted terrain of an ostensibly distanced, scientific approach – while retaining the position of kingmakers. The public exposure of the re-interpreter may also have been what deterred the curator at Bard College, where the re-invention of the Kaprow piece was sadly cancelled. The serious alternative for a Kaprow retrospective would be an artist as curator, along the lines of Remy Zaugg’s Giacometti show in Paris in 1993.Incidentally, the type of re-inventions under discussion here have nothing to do with the currently widespread practice of re-enactments: the latter are a form of appropriation of (primarily historical, but also artistic) events as ready made material by artists, and their artistic value is derived from re-staging the event as an altered or new interpretation in the current art context.Moreover, the pronouncement in the museum press releases of a wave of enthusiasm for Kaprow among artists (especially performance artists) can barely be substantiated. What there is in the art business at present, by contrast, is an unmistakeable tendency towards a different, safer kind of theatricality à la Meese.
The nineties
While art historians focus great interest on the theory and practice of re-staging performative, situational works, which they discover in Kaprow’s work at the end of his life, so to speak, we take a far less excited view, as such issues have been exerting a productive influence on several artists of my generation since the early nineties, feeding into an installational praxis distinct from the object-fixated approach. I will briefly discuss three examples of this: In 1994 in Malmö, Elin Wikström presented her work Rebecka Is Waiting for Anna, Anna is Waiting for Cecilia, Cecilia is Waiting for Marie… for the first time. Using the concept of re-activation, Wikström set out the exhibition conditions for any future presentation of this “constructed situation” in an accompanying text (7). Besides instructions for the reactivated situation concerning duration, location, walk-on parts and documentation, it also states that the documentary materials are not to be exhibited, but that they should accumulate as an archive. In 2000, the Moderna Museet in Stockholm purchased the work for its collection in the form of the instructions and the archive. Since then, it has been shown several times in cities including Baltimore, London and Turin.That we know/Ce qu’on sait/Was man weiss is the title of a work of mine first presented in Glasgow in 1994. The concept sent to exhibiting institutions states that for every new presentation in the future (of a complete set of one month’s issues of ELLE magazine, which appears around the world, plus a discussion session with selected guests), a current set of magazines must be acquired and a new poster announcing the event must be created in a timely graphic style.8 In artistic terms, this stripped the first public presentation of any claim to original status and extended the scope of the piece to potential updates, to all of its moments in public (always in relation to their temporal context).Erwin Wurm’s very well known One Minute Sculptures from the mid-nineties are realized on the basis of what he calls ‘instruction diagrams’ and the ‘possibility of renewed performance’. A contract linked with the works stipulates that the reference objects (e.g. pullovers) must be changed and updated after 20-30 years, ensuring that the props in these performative works are not misunderstood as historical objects.9
Marketing jargon
To return to the forthcoming museum exhibition, which is now also being promoted under the title Allan Kaprow. 1955-2006: the exhibition’s concept of combining documentary material and re-inventions is not without its problems concerning the actual potential of the latter, as the presence of documentation places them on a timeline, refers to their origins and allows them to be interpreted as entertainment – as shown by the marketing jargon used on the website: ‘How about a Happening?’10In this light, the current interest in Kaprow appears more as the enthusiasm of art historians and exhibition makers at having discovered a previously neglected field of strong production and reflection in the twentieth-century art, and at being able to use its museum presentation to rewrite art history. Finally, it would be wrong to ignore the market-value-enhancing dynamic of the coming museum presentations: in 2005, Hauser & Wirth, the gallery responsible for the artist’s estate, undertook a failed attempt to restage Kaprow’s 1967 work Fluids in the context of Art Basel, turning it into an aesthetically pleasing brochure, but without labelling it as such. It goes without saying that instructions for re-whatever have now become an expensive commodity. An entirely different approach is offered by Christoph Schlingensief’s Kaprow City for the autumn 2006 season at the Volksbühne theatre in Berlin.But there is no mistaking the current trend towards and proliferation of various forms of reverting to, re-making and re-whatever. In the praxis of the nineties, there were many direct references to the art of the sixties and seventies, but today’s art practice seems very different. Whereas in the first half of the nineties, it was about a legitimate espousal and further development of specific, critical artistic practices after a period of marginalization, the current gesture of reconstruction – whether by artists or by art historians and institutions – smacks not of further development but of cultural reassurance.Experience is always also socially coded experience, whether in everyday life or in the art context, and from today’s point of view, Kaprow’s dichotomy of life and art has long since lost much of its significance: under the living and working conditions of the western world, any excursion into real life is just as much of a prefabricated product world. The tension between art and life has changed and now appears historical.But why cultural reassurance? I would hazard the following hypothesis: the current Zeitgefühl draws on the impression of a return to a long-term historical process with all its complexities, to a time without expectations for the near future. After a permanently evolving, acting modernity and its future imagined as a continuation of the present, the current cultural horizon is being confronted with references to a pre-modern time brought forth by fundamentalists of various religious stripe.The uncertainty triggered by such a re-entry into open-ended historicity reinforces the need for a kind of ‘reinsurance’ of one’s own cultural heritage. This may lead to a temporary or more marked turning away from the avant-garde paradigm of the twentieth century that was driven by a will to reject and overcome the past. The desire to reassure oneself in cultural terms of a vanishing modernism generates an interest in focussing on the gestures and the surviving members of those generations of artists who still exert a shaping influence on the aesthetic/cultural paradigms of the present.Kaprow’s legacy for the practice of subsequent generations of artists in the context of western modernism thus probably lies in his departure, formulated in the late sixties and early seventies, from the avant-garde-driven succession of art styles and from the professionalized market and exhibition business supported by it, and in his opening up of a convincing alternative: he will be remembered for having provided artistic practice itself with coordinates for inconsumable experimentation aimed at updating the present, and, logically enough, for having pushed for change in the role of the artist.Along with Lawrence Weiner’s equally momentous Statement of Intent, this gave an altered view of the history of modern artistic practice.11 The return of artistic modernism into people’s lives anticipated by Kaprow has far-reaching implications for making art and being an artist today. Let’s go and see the exhibition – maybe it has more to offer than it promises.’In glass booths, people listen to records. They look at each other and dance‘. – Allan Kaprow 12Allan Kaprow. Life as ArtHaus der Kunst, München3 oktober 2006 t/m 6 januari 2007Van Abbemuseum Eindhoven10 februari t/m 22 april 2007
Hinrich Sachs
