Allan Kaprow and the Happening Game

[contracycle]

I have come across something I find quite extraordinary and would like to propose it here for discussion, because I am not really qualified to examine this properly.  I think may be of particular interest to the LARP theorists and the Nordic school.

I came across an article more or less by accident by one Allan Kaprow, described as " a leading figure in production of Happenings, principally amongst the the New York avant-garde" in the mid 50's an early 60's.  It is mentioned that this may be the source of the term "happening" as it appeared in 60's slang.  He's heavily into art as performance, as act, unconstrained by particular form.

Kaprow describes three main forms with which he worked in this period (document dates mostly to 1959), these being Assemblages, Environments, and Happenings.  Assemblages he says are also referred to as Neo-Dada or Combines and it employs a wide variety of materials in a wide variety of formats, presumably fairly informally arranged.  But, the Assemblages, in their attempt to escape the constraints of painting, brought into focus the fact that the room itself constituted a frame.

To escape the frame he moved to Environments, a space into which a person walks or crawls and which contains objects intended to be manipulated.  However in the Enviroment he doscovered a new limit, the suppression of time, sound, and the visceral presence of other people.  Ideally, he wanted to amplify these effects by reducing the effects of the other elements.  "Time," he says "would be variously weighted, compressed, or drawn out, sounds would emerge forthrightly, and things would have to be set into greater motion.  The event that has done this is increasingly called a 'Happening.'"

However, in the production of Happenings they started to run into problems, and thank you for bearing with me this far, because this is where it gets interesting.  "But, however flexible these techniques were in practice, there was always an audience in one (usually static) space and a show given in another.  This proved to be a serious drawback, in my opinion, to the plastic morphology of the works."  The contemplation of these problems lead him to lay out six considerations that might bring the Happening to a full future fruition.

A: the line between art and life should be kept as fluid as possible, perhaps indistinct.
- I see some similarity to the bricolage stuff here because his purpose is to establish maximum utility of all materials

B: The source of themes materials actions and relationships between them are to be derived from any place or period except from the arts, their derivatives, and their milieu.
-   Some of his specific comments are interesting here; his purposed is to escape the habits of art performance.  "The Happening is conceived as an art, for lack of a better word, or one that would not call endless discussion.  I, personally, would not care if it were called a sport."  And "A United States Marine Corps manual on jungle fighting tactics, a tour of a laboratory where polythene kidneys are made, the daily traffic jams on the Long Island Expressway, are more useful than Beethoven, Racine, or Michelangelo."

C: The performance of a happening should take place over several widely spaced sometimes moving and changing locales
-   The main drive for this rule is again to escape the limits of conventional form, although he consider it to be temporary; that is while this step will be needed for the development of the form, it will return later to concentrated spaces.  What he wants to achieve is to simultaneous increase the tensions between the parts, give them a sense of individual existence, and oblige the viewer/participant to construct relationships with the parts merely because movement induces time, roughly speaking.

D: Time, which follows closely on space considerations, should be variable and discontinuous
-   Again the goal here is to escape frameworks; he discusses co-ordinations, as meeting under a clock, and randomness, and suggests a set of actions might be entirely random, the various forms of those actions affecting our experience of time.  There's no reason a Happening could not occur on and off, intermittently, over months, and that even "endless activity" had been proposed, "which would apparently transcend palpable time".

E: Happenings should be performed once only
-   I'm going to quote a big chunk of this: "Yet many of the Happenings have, in fact, been given four or five times, ostensibly to accommodate larger attendances, but this, I believe, was only a rationalization of the wish to hold on the theatrical customs.  In my experience, I found the practice inadequate because I was always forced to do that which could be repeated, and had to discard the countless situations which I felt were marvellous but performable only once."

-   And this is especially interesting: "In the future, plans may be developed which take their cue from games and athletics, where the regulations provide for a variety of moves that make their outcome always uncertain.  A score might be written, so general in its instructions that it could be adapted to basic types of terrain such as oceans, woods, cities, farms, and to basic kinds of performers such as teenagers, old people, children, matrons, and so on, including insects, animals and the weather.  This could be printed and mail-ordered by anyone who wanted it."

F: It follows that audiences should be eliminated entirely
-   "All the elements – people, space, the particular materials and character of the environment, time – can in this way be integrated."


So much for the précis.  Now, with any luck some things will have leaped off the page to you the same way they did to me.  It seems to me that RPG's display many, possibly all, of the characteristics Kaprow speculated would constitute his fully developed notional form.  Now perhaps he would be surprised to find all this happening in a shared IMAGINARY space, but surely he'd have to concede that we have comprehensively eliminated the audience.  His emphasis on the real elements and more or less free construction of relationships between them might be construed as similar to Sim; at one point he refers to "the spirit of exploration and experiment" as driving the process.  I'm just throwing that out, btw.  The manipulation of time was the first thing that caught my eye – we of course have totally plastic time at our disposal, and in discussions of scene framing have come up with devices that slice it and dice it for various purposes.  Also, we do actually PRACTICE the form intermittently, over long sequences of time, dropping in and out of daily lives, the campaign being at very least a strong motif in RPG.  This is related to the separateness of spaces, in that RPG often features purposeful travel. The limits to replicability reflect our inability to strictly script player actions, even were this desirable.  But it was really his references to considering the form a sport, and the indeterminacy generated by game-type rules systems that really made me sit up and take notice.  A "score" being "general in its instructions" is roughly what all RPG planning has to be.

It seems to me that where links to table-top might be more tenuous, they are very strong in relation to LARP.  I'd like the LARPers to weigh in on that, but conceding Kaprow probably didn't have an imaginary space in mind, the rest of the two activities seem to me almost identical.

Well, there you go – art theory bites back.  Any thoughts?

All italics are in the original text.

- Art in Theory 1900-2000, Charles Harrison/Paul Wood
- Assemblages, Environments and Happenings, Allan Kaprow, New York, 1966

[groundhog]

It seems to me spot-on that Kaprow could be talking about role-playing, without really knowing what to call it. From his own words, I gather he would lean Narrativist.

I have always thought of role-playing much like those children's plays and amusement park ride/shows that directly involve the audience or parts thereof. There's as much of this influence to most game sessions as there is from wargaming.

That being said, I could probably tie Happenings to paintball/lasertag, SCA battles, or any improvisational theater just as easily. The show "Who's Line is it Anyway?" comes to mind especially, if done with no audience.

Perhaps RPGs are one subtype of Kaprow's Happenings.

[contracycle]

Thanks for the response.  I'm not convinced Kaprow would have been Narr, because I found his essay in a section on "Objecthood", while looking for art approaches to material objects.  Its been very interesting and I may have more to say about those topics later.

That being said, I could probably tie Happenings to paintball/lasertag, SCA battles, or any improvisational theater just as easily. The show "Who's Line is it Anyway?" comes to mind especially, if done with no audience

Hmmm, yes I agree, they too would seem to fit.  I also though of the recent FlashMob phenomenon, which might be a purer expression of the concept.

[J. Tuomas Harviainen]

This is definitely a great find.

It looks very, very much like some Nordic larp manifestoes, in the sense that Kaprow both attempts to define the phenomenon and limit it to what he'd personally like it to be. The former is apprent in things like the "no audience" rule, the latter in the way he demands uniqueness and isolation from other forms of art.

Even more than larps, this reminded me of Hakim Bey's material on Immediatism (http://www.left-bank.org/bey/immediat.htm). Then again, through both that, and his TAZ concepts' influence, he too ties up to the rpg theory background...

-Jiituomas

PS: As I write this, the great majority of Nordic theorists are at the Nodal Point conference (Knutepunkt), and won't be able to participate on this thread before next week.

[Revontuli]

Even more than larps, this reminded me of Hakim Bey's material on Immediatism (http://www.left-bank.org/bey/immediat.htm). Then again, through both that, and his TAZ concepts' influence, he too ties up to the rpg theory background...

Just recently I got my hands on an actual Hakim Bey book, which consists of three parts: Chaos: The broadsheets of ontological anarchism; Communiques of the Association for Ontological Anarchy; and The Temporary Autonomous Zone.

This is all pre-Immediatism stuff, but the roots are all there. Bey asks for Poetic Terrorism and the more extreme Art Sabotage. Art Sabotage really is physical sabotage, but Poetic Terrorism is pretty close to what Immediatism later defined.

"The audience reaction or aesthetic-shock produced by PT ought to be at least as strong as the emotion of terror - powerful disgust, sexual arousal, superstitious awe, sudden intuitive breakthrough, dada-esque angst - no matter whether the PT is aimed at one person or many, no matter whether it is "signed" or anonymous, if it does not change someone's life (aside from the artist) it fails.

"PT is an act in a Theater of Cruelty which has no stage, no rows of seats, no tickets & no walls. In order to work at all, PT must cetegorically be divorced from all conventional structures for art consumption (galleries, publications, media). Even the guerilla Situationist tactics of street theater are perhaps too well known & expected now."

With that, it seems Bey's Poetic Terrorism, and later Immediatism, are no less than direct descendents of Situationism and Kaprow's Happenings. And as Jiituomas mentions, Bey has had a strong effect on recent larp theories (and practices), at least in the works of Eirik Fatland and myself.

It is very interesting to think that Kaprow could've actually predicted larp as we know it already based on his early Happening experiments.

Incidentally, Allan Kaprow is still working, and is currently the Emeritus Professor of Visual Arts in the University of California, San Diego.