This was sent to me from a friend, I believe it is from the New York Times:
Allan Kaprow, FF Alumn, In Memoriam Our condolences to the family and friends of Allan Kaprow. Here is his obituary from the New York Times, April 10, 2006, Allan Kaprow, Creator of Artistic 'Happenings,' Dies at 78, by Holland Cotter. Allan Kaprow, an artist who coined the term "happenings" in the late 1950's and whose anti-art, audience-participation works contributed to radical changes in the course of late-20th-century art, died on Wednesday at his home in Encinitas, Calif., near San Diego. He was 78. He died of natural causes after a long illness, said Tamara Bloomberg, his studio manager. Mr. Kaprow was born in Atlantic City and began his career as an abstract painter in New York City in the 1940's, studying with Hans Hofmann. Inspired by the swirling drips and spatters of Jackson Pollock, and focusing on the idea of the painting as a physical event rather than as the production of an object, Mr. Kaprow pushed the "action painting" aesthetic in multimedia directions, at first by bulking up his canvas surfaces with hunks of straw and wadded newspapers and adding movable parts that viewers were invited to manipulate. He called the results "action collages" and predicted, in a 1958 article in Art News, that in the art of the future action would predominate over painting and an increasing array of materials would come into play, including "chairs, food, electric and neon lights, smoke, water, old socks, a dog, movies, and a thousand other things." His own collages began to develop into room-filling environments that would pave the way for the installation art and performance art of today. Along with Pollock, Mr. Kaprow's other great influence was the composer John Cage, with whom he studied from 1956 to 1958 at the New School for Social Research. He was particularly interested in Cage's Zen-inspired reliance on chance as an organizing, or disorganizing, element in art. Like Cage, he used a combination of choice and accident as a way of creating nonverbal, quasi-theatrical situations in which performers functioned as kinetic objects, the role of the single artist-genius was de-emphasized, audience members became creative participants, and no clear distinction was made between everyday actions and ritual. The first such work, "Eighteen Happenings in Six Parts," took place in October 1959 at the Reuben Gallery in Manhattan, which Mr. Kaprow had co-founded. Although later the term "happening" would come to mean spontaneous, celebratory group behavior, Mr. Kaprow's early events were scripted assemblages of movement, sound, scent and light, with instructions given to performers and viewers alike. In the October 1959 version, spectators moved, on cue, to different parts of the gallery to experience a woman squeezing oranges, artists painting and a concert played on toy instruments. Throughout his career Mr. Kaprow, who referred to himself as an "un-artist," created happenings outside galleries and museums, in lofts, stores, gymnasiums and parking lots. An element of absurdity was never far away: with the assistance of viewer-workers, he built houses from ice in Southern California and, in 1970, constructed a wall of bread with jelly as mortar near the Berlin Wall. Mr. Kaprow was only one of the several artists involved in inventing happenings as a form: Jim Dine, Red Grooms, Claes Oldenburg, Robert Watts and Robert Whitman continued to use it. But he eventually stopped creating large public events in favor of what he called "activities" ¡¾ intimate, personal pieces for a small number of participants. People in pairs, for example, would breathe into each other's mouths, or sweep the street, or go shopping. In some cases, Mr. Kaprow himself was the sole participant and audience, as in a 1980's piece that focused on the details of his daily tooth-brushing at home. He documented these private works in small booklets of instructions that read like Concrete poetry. As an undergraduate at New York University, Mr. Kaprow was much influenced by John Dewey's book "Art as Experience." He did graduate work in art history at Columbia University with Meyer Schapiro, for whom he wrote a master's thesis on Mondrian. He taught at Rutgers University, Pratt Institute, the State University of New York at Stony Brook, California Institute of the Arts and, from 1974 to 1993, the University of California at San Diego. He was a prolific and personable writer, and much of his work is collected in "Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life," edited by Jeff Kelley and published by the University of California Press in 1993. Mr. Kelley's book on the artist, "Childsplay: The Art of Allan Kaprow," was published by the same press in 2004. That book has a foreword by the poet and performer David Antin, a longtime colleague of Mr. Kaprow, in which Mr. Antin describes a piece from the late 1980's that required a participant to carry cinder blocks, one at a time, up five flights of stairs, then down again. The number of blocks corresponded to the carrier's age. "I know that Allan sees his work as 'un-art,' " Mr. Antin concludes, "and wants to see its separation from art, envisioning it as simply an articulation of meaningful experiences from ordinary life. I'm sympathetic to this intention, but I find it hard to distinguish the existential power of this piece, which now exists only in the telling, from that of any other great work of art I've ever encountered." Mr. Kaprow is survived by his second wife, Coryl Crane; two sons, Bram, of Encinitas, and Anton, of Altadena, Calif.; two daughters, Amy, of Berkeley, Calif., and Marisa, of Pacific Beach, Calif.; and three grandchildren. __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com To unsubscribe, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Mailinglist from Sztuka Fabryka http://www.sztuka-fabryka.be/ Yahoo! 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