Happenings performance and encounter

1950-1970's

• performance: dance, theatre, art, music, poetry.
• place: environment, landscape, city, outside the gallery
• documentation: film, photography, conversation transcripts.

Happenings are referred to as spontaneous plot-less theatrical events. They were not confined to a particular environment  form of music, visual art or theatre. 

They began evolving in New York in the late 1950's but they became popular phenomena in the 1960's and 1970's under th influence of John Cage and his theories of the importance of chance in artist creation.

Other artist who contributing to this were Claes Oldenburg, Robert Rauschenberg and Roy Lichenstein.

In Japan Gutai group and the in Europe the Fluxus group developed the original American ideals. 

And opportunity to transform a normal event into an extraordinary occurrence, through the use of everyday objects and materials taken out of context. 

In many instances artists used such venues in order to stage happenings which outraged or shocked the audience and demanded a degree of participation )e.g the happenings of Joseph beuys - Bloomsbury 1966) 

Allan Kaprow (1950's-60's)

• A New York scene: the first public happening was Allan Kaprows eighteen happenings in six parts, (October 1959)

• Theatre of actions; a new collage of performance
• the blurring or art and life

Happenings possess

• Context- the place of conception and enactment
• its habitat - the place where it grew and the removal stage and distance from the audience
• the myth of experience

In the everyday

• the habitat which these pieces are performed, such as a basement, loft or street, breakdown the barriers that separates the "audience" from the performers
• this allows for a better sense of physical interaction in a more intimate setting

the habitat or atmosphere where the piece takes place gives meaning back to how art can relate.

Gallery as off-site

• Smithson established the gallery off-site with his site works which encountered place and site alternatives to the gallery
• it addresses site specificity and the relation of visual culture to a variety of environments
• it considers independent and alternative spaces

Fluxus box- creative art form that was anti-art. Mass produced with components for event/experience

The happening operates by creating an asymmetrical network of surprises without climax or consumption, this is the logic of dreams rather than the logic of most art. Dreams have no sense of time; neither do the happenings. lacking a plot and continuous rational discourse, they have no past. As the name itself suggests, happenings are always in the present tense. the same words, if there are any are said over and over.

Situation: The situationist offered a collective vision of performance as a social intervention in its continuation of the surrealist dream of overcoming the distinctions between art, politics and everyday life through critically 'constructed situations' which modified chance operations.
Cage - asserts that the purpose of art is to sober and quiet the mind so that it is in accord with what happens and therefore available and opportune

Relational Aesthetics

1990's

• said to be rooted in happenings due to its audience relevance and Joseph Beuys idea 'Every body is an artist'
• focussed on social practice
• focusses on the level of interaction and social exchange that artworks produced
• not about politics but is democratic and often critiques social and political agenda