Radical Prototypes - 9780262526128

"Happenings" have pop connotations that conjure up 1960s youth culture andhippies in public, joyful rebellion. Scholars, meanwhile, locate happenings in a genealogy ofavant-garde performance that descends from futurism, surrealism, and Dada through the actionpainting of the 1950s. In Radical Prototypes, Judith Rodenbeck argues for a more complex etiology.Allan Kaprow coined the term in 1958 to name a new collage form of performance, calling happenings"radical prototypes" of performance art. Rodenbeck offers a rigorous art historicalreading of Kaprow's project and related artworks. She finds that these experiential and experimentalworks offered not a happy communalism but a strong and canny critique of contemporary sociality.Happenings, she argues, were far more ambivalent, negative, and even creepy than they have beenportrayed, either in contemporaneous accounts or in more recent efforts to connect them tocontemporary art's participatory strategies. In Radical Prototypes, Rodenbeck recovers the criticalforce of happenings, addressing them both as theoretical objects and as artworks, investigatingbroader epistemological and formal concerns as well as their material and performative aspects. Shelinks happenings to scores by John Cage (especially 4'33"), avant-garde theater, andphotography, and offers new readings of projects ranging from Kaprow's 18 Happenings in 6 Parts(1959) to Gerhard Richter's Leben mit Pop (1963). Rodenbeck casts happenings as a form ofparticipatory art that simultaneously delivers a radical critique of that very participation--a viewthat revises our understanding of contemporary constructions of the participatory as well as of1960s projects from Fluxus to conceptual art.