Allan Kaprow: Publicity as Life

A group of students from California Institute of the Arts are working up a sweat at Vasquez Rocks, a nature reserve close to the Valencia campus and about 70 clicks north of the Geffen Contemporary. MOCA’s exhibition space is showing Art as Life, the partially posthumous retrospective for Allan Kaprow. Almost forty years before, Kaprow—at the behest of CalArts’ administrators—staged Publicity, a seminal happening.

The MOCA show displays Kaprow’s original score on yellow legal paper. The score included instructions for crews with Sony Portapaks to videotape the event, led by Nam June Paik. A note in the margin reads, “File tapes in library under carpentry?”

It’s easy to imagine Kaprow having mixed feelings about Publicity. So much so, he called it for what it was: an event promoted by the institution to publicize itself to the larger art world. In the early years, CalArts brought in big name faculty and visiting artists, attempting to situate the school as heir to multi-disciplinary schools like the Bauhaus and Black Mountain. By the early 70’s Kaprow’s practice had been broadcast on television and was co-opted into advertising: “I dreamed I was at a happening in my Maidenform bra.” Publicity was a way for the school to pigyback on that notoriety. One can see his practice at that time as moving away from large-scale works, just as Kaprow moved away from the then-center of the art world, New York. Eventually he would shun the term “Happening” for the more intimate “Activity.”

An integral part of Kaprow’s happenings was to put the audience into the mix, and to have them talk about it afterwards. For 18 Happenings in 6 Parts, audience members were given instructions to follow over the course of the event. There was no place in the room for a disinterested observer. Out near Agua Dulce in the California high desert, the same would hold true. In Publicity, participants would play the part of the media or be mediated.

For the reinvention of the work, students and faculty attempted to update the event with current technologies. Wood two-by-fours used at the original event would be accompanied by metal studs at the reinvention. The part of the score that called for videotaping and playback would be updated with current consumer technologies for capturing images and viewing them. As people entered Vasquez Rocks, they were given an address to send pictures and videos taken with their mobile phones. The stills and video would post instantly to a web log created for “Kaprow’s Publicity 2008.” On site, a high-speed Internet connection was established, and a laptop allowed participants to view the mediated depiction on-line and in real time.

These updates in technologies were fairly well in keeping with Kaprow’s own practice of mixing things up. His seminal work Yard—originally created in the courtyard of the Martha Jackson Gallery—had been radically transformed when reinvented by Kaprow himself. Rather than appearing like a three-dimensional Jackson Pollock made of tires, an iteration of Yard in Italy left the tires on their racks and the floor bare.

For a reinvention of 18 Happening in 6 parts after Kaprow’s death, carpenters scored the MDF flooring used to recreate the look of the original loft space, matching it to the photographic documentation. For the faculty, students, and alumni of CalArts involved in Publicity, they more concerned about the potential risks of a too-faithful reproduction. In Valencia, there was little interest in creating a Happening that seemed more like a Civil War reenactment. Kaprow biographer Jeff Kelley held a similar view. At an informal discussion after the event, he told participants that the term reinvention was a curatorial conceit, one that Kaprow wasn’t particularly fond of. Like the score for a string quartet, the focus should be on the reading and playing of the score, not the outfits or superfluous elements from the original production.

Looking back at the historical record, there were tempting events to recreate that weren’t part of the score. As Tom Mcdonough tells the story, "Publicity was to involve groups of students in competing building activities out in the California desert, but this plan was sabotaged by the intervention of a renegade group of students in ski masks who drove up and threatened to set the whole scene ablaze. Only the concerted opposition of some of Kaprow's pupils thwarted their plan, with the progressive teacher now forced into the uncomfortable role of enforcer of law and order. The limits of the genre had become all too clear." It could very well be that these hijinks were the impetus to transition to his more intimate scale works.

If no renegades showed their faces in 2008, the same can’t be said of their nemesis, the blameless administrator. Filming permits were acquired; a park ranger and fire marshal kept watch, and a MOCA representative was present, scurrying about to have releases signed. Meanwhile, participants focused on the tasks at hand, improvising structures amid the sandstone boulders.

The last line of Publicity’s score says that the day’s activities continue until sunset or, “Until everyone gets tired,” which coincidentally happed as the park rangers were locking the park at six in the evening. The group headed over to an Agua Dulce Mexican diner for drinks and discussion. Jeff Kelley—who also participated in the original version—talked about the notable differences. In 1970 the Portapaks were a novel technology. So much so, those students were probably seeing themselves depicted on video for the first time. Folks became incredibly self-conscious, which was Kaprow’s intent.

Thirty-eight years later, the video camera (or cell-phone camera for that matter) has become so ubiquitous that the current crop of students has become inured to their effect. Released from the fluorescent lights and marathon doses of critical inquiry, the CalArts students took to the fresh air and sunlight and enjoyed a day of supervised play—a comfortable and familiar context for American children raised in the 90’s. For them, the mediated image taking became less of an intrusion into their psychic space, than an opportunity to foist the duties of documentation onto someone else. Publicity indeed.

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