Word: kaprow
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...formalism. An exhibition of Fluxworks, therefore, poses a perplexing curatorial problem. Nonetheless, under the direction of Benjamin Buchloc and Judith Rodenbeck, the List Visual Arts Center at MIT has recently attempted to put together a comprehensive show, called Experiments in the Everyday, of two artists active in Fluxus, Allan Kaprow and Robert Watts. Despite attempts to reconcile such anarchic art with the limitations of a traditional gallery space, the exhibit is unable to unweave the paradoxes inherent in its conception...
...shorthand biographies of Watts and Kaprow reveal a commonality of experience if not direction: both began as abstract expressionist painters, both got master's degrees from Columbia, both collaborated on the Rutgers faculty. And both challenged traditional conceptions of art-Watts with his pop-like manipulation of media and surfaces and Kaprow in his experiments with assemblages, alternative spaces and performance art events which he called happenings...
...There's no doubt that neither Watts nor Kaprow would have intended a museum retrospective such as _Experiments in the Everyday_. Kaprow's happenings and Watts's mail-order catalogues, newsletters and consumer items were conceived to bring art out of the galleries and the audience into art. To place such objects behind the glass of a gallery frame is to stifle the subversive potential of these works: happenings were meant to be experienced, not looked at through photographs, and the newsletters and stamps were made to be circulated, not framed...
...Fluxus is often pegged the "other tradition" of the twentieth century avant-garde, the irrational alternative to high modernism's fixation on form, structure and dogma. Watts and Kaprow inherited this position from Marcel Duchamp, father of Dada and first to insist that "the viewer completes the work of art." Their process was Duchampian in intent and radical in form: they created art objects from everyday objects and performance pieces from everyday events, decontextualizing those elements and thereby giving the piece a new function within the aesthetic space of the gallery. Often they rejected the confines of the gallery space...
Oldenburg moved to New York, where he met Artists Jim Dine and Allan Kaprow, who were busy inventing the world's first "happenings." Soon Oldenburg was staging happenings too, and got married to a pretty artists' model, Pat Muschinski. The world of objects-food, toys, bric-a-brac-blazed all around him ia neighborhood stores. Claes started to reproduce them in burlap or muslin dipped in plaster and painted with all the romantic energy of Abstract Expressionism. "I wanted to extend color to three-dimensioned form," he says, "to make paint tangible and edible...