Kaprow-Allan_How-To-Make-a-Happening.pdf

Allan Kaprow

How To Make A Happening

Side 1

This is a lecture on how to make a happening. There are 11 rules of the game.

1. Forget all the standard art forms. Don’t paint pictures, don’t make poetry, don’t

build architecture, don’t arrange dances, don’t write plays, don’t compose music,

don’t make movies, and above all, don’t think you’ll get a happening out of

putting all these together. This idea is nothing more than what operas always did

and you see it today in the far-out types of discotheques with their flashing lights

and film projections. The point is to make something new, something that doesn’t

even remotely remind you of culture. You’ve got to be pretty ruthless about this,

wiping out of your plans every echo of this or that story or jazz piece or painting

that I can promise you will keep coming up unconsciously.

2. You can steer clear of art by mixing up your happening by mixing it with life

situations. Make it unsure even to yourself if the happening is life or art. Art has

always been different from the world’s affairs, now you’ve got to work hard to

keep it all blurry. Two cars collide on a highway. Violet liquid pours out of the

broken radiator of one of them, and in the back seat of the other there is a huge

load of dead chickens that is spilling out all over the ground. The cops check it

out, plausible answers are given, tow trucks carry off the wrecks costs are paid

and the drivers go home to dinner.

3. The situations for a happening should come from what you see in the real world,

from real places and people rather than from the head. If you stick to imagination

too much you’ll end up with old art again, since art was always supposed to be

made from imagination. Take advantage of readymade events: a factory fire, the

fire trucks screaming to it from all sides, the water, the police barricades, the red

blinkers— a natural. Or after a storm at the shore the debris washed up can be

terrific. Or just take an afternoon off and watch women trying on dresses in a

bargain basement. An awful lot can be done with images like these. If you get

stuck for ideas, an exception to the slice-of-life idea is the greatest sourcebook of

our time, the yellow pages of the telephone directory. Break open the book at

random, put your finger down at some point in the page and you’ll come up with

private detective service, rug cleaning at home, cement blocks, airport limousine

transport, judo lessons— you can get more out of these than out of all of

Beethoven, Michaelangelo and Racine put together.

4. Break up your spaces. A single enactment space is what the theatre traditionally

uses. You can experiment by gradually widening the distances between your

events, first at a number of points along a heavily trafficked avenue, then in

several rooms and floors of an apartment house where some of the activities are

out of touch with each other, then on more than one street, then in different but

nearby cities, finally all around the world. Some of these can take place traveling

from one area to another, using public transportation and the mails. You don’t

have to be everywhere at once. You don’t even have to be everywhere. The places

you’re in are as good as the places other participants are in.

5. Break up your time and let it be real time. Real time is found when things are

going on in real places. It has nothing to do with the single time, the unified time

of stage plays or music. It has even less to do with slowing down or speeding up

actions because you want to make something expressive or you want it to work in

a compositional way. Whatever happens should happen in its natural time.

Suppose you consider how long it’d take to buy a fishing pole in a department

store just before Christmas, or how long it’d take to lay the footings for a house.

Well if a group wanted to do both in a happening, one of them would have to wait

until the other was done. Maybe if it rained, that’d decide which came first. Of

course, two groups could arrange both actions at the same time if that was wanted.

But it isn’t really necessary, except when people coming from different places

have to catch the same train. Otherwise, why not let the amount of time you do

something depend on what is practical and convenient for the particular actions in

the happening. You can waste an awful lot of time trying to coordinate things.

6. Arrange all your events in the happening in the same practical way. Not in an arty

way; avoid sonnet form, cubist multiple viewpoints, dynamic symmetry, the

golden section, the twelve tone technique, theme and variation developments,

logical and mathematical progressions and so forth. If a chicken cackles, roosts,

pecks and lays eggs, take it for granted there’s plenty of form there already.

Nature can never appear formless because of the way the brain is made, so why

worry? Just take things as they come, and try to arrange them in whatever way is

least artificial and easiest to do. A gal was reading in the subway until, as if she’s

expecting it, her hairdresser gets up from another seat and unpacks his gear, and

spends the next hour giving her a fancy do, calm-as-you-please, like it was his

shop. A lot of people all covered with some sticky stuff were lying perfectly still

across a big lawn. The wind blows yellow and red leaves over them until they’re

covered solid. A truck loaded with shredded newspaper comes and carts them off.

Fifteen or more cars on the Long Island Expressway going along with their

brights on like a funeral. Now and then stream clouds of thin plastic film from

their windows. They pull in the stuff quickly each time. Well suppose these three

situations made up your happening? The subway thing would be easier to do, say,

at 4 a.m. when the trains are pretty empty. You could count on lots of leaves

dropping off the trees in late October when it’s still warm enough to lie on the

ground. And the procession of cars could be done on any day, just so long as

everyone has his car handy at the time. The theory of alternating contrasts like

night, day, night, action, quiet, action could cause you to arrange the three events

closely together in the order of cars, subway, leaves. But that might be

inconvenient, so string them out in whatever way is best for the participants, a

week apart if necessary. Some surprises might occur if you just forgot all the

composition lessons you were taught. I remember that being flexible paid off one

time. A group of people was to go to an automat and eat lunch when it was busy

and crowded. At a signal, they would push a plate off the table, let it break, and

quickly leave. The order of the events had to be switched around with another

one. When it did take place, at that same moment a bus boy dropped a whole load

of dishes on a floor. It couldn’t have been more planned than that, but it wasn’t

planned at all.

7. Since you’re in the world now and not art, play the game by real rules. Make up

your mind when and where a happening is appropriate. If your image calls for the

president and vice presidents of Chase-Manhattan sitting in their biggest vault and

throwing gold coins around like babies and you can’t get them to do it, then forget

it and go on to something else. If you need to cut down lots of timber with

chainsaws whining and trees cracking, find a guy who needs some woods thinned

out anyway. If you want a bulldozer to chew up some ground, find out where a

development is going up and work the happening into the driver’s regular job.

You’ll save a hundred dollars a day and might learn something about ground

leveling. If you want to work with kids, discover what they really can do and like

to instead of giving them something fancy you’d like to do but won’t. Let them

build something out of piles of trash, paint up some old cars in a junkyard, dig a

huge hole at the beach. If you want to have all your participants start naked,

swimming, making love or whatnot, there are times and plenty of places when it

wouldn’t stir up any dust. On the other hand, if you like being busted by the cops,

you might work jail into the happening.

8. Work with the power around you, not against it. It makes things much easier, and

you’re interested in getting things done. When you need official approval, go out

for it. You can use police help, the mayor, the college dean, the chamber of

commerce, the company exec, the rich, and all your neighbors. Be your own

public relations man; convince them all that what you’re doing is worthwhile

because it’s enjoyable to play, just the same as it’s enjoyable to go fishing. Its not

a snap, but they’re convincible, and once on your side you can almost go to the

moon.

9. When you’ve got the go-ahead, don’t rehearse the happening. This will make it

unnatural because it will build in the idea of good performance, that is, “art.”

There is nothing to improve in a happening; you don’t need to be a professional

performer. It is best when it is artless, for better or worse. If it doesn’t work, do

another happening. In any case, it’s unnecessary to rehearse situations like eating

your way through a room full of food, tearing down an old house, throwing love

letters into a field and watching the rain wash off the ink, driving a bunch of cars

off in different directions until they run out of gas. These aren’t perfectible

actions.

10. Perform the happening once only. Repeating it makes it stale, reminds you of

theatre and does the same thing as rehearsing: it forces you to think that there is

something to improve on. Sometimes it’d be nearly impossible to repeat

anyway— imagine trying to get copies of your old love letters, in order to see the

rain wash off those tender thoughts. Why bother?

11. Give up the whole idea of putting on a show for audiences. A happening is not a

show. Leave the shows to the theatre people and discotheques. A happening is a

game with a high, a ritual that no church would want because there’s no religion

for sale. A happening is for those who happen in this world, for those who don’t

want to stand off and just look. If you happen, you can’t be outside peeking in.

You’ve got to be involved physically. Without an audience, you can be off on the

move, using all kinds of environments, mixing in the supermarket world, never

worrying about what those out there in the seats are thinking, and you can spread

your action all around the globe whenever you want. Traditional art is like college

education and drugs: it’s fed to people who have to sit on their butts for longer

and longer amounts of time to get the point, and the point is that there’s lots of

actions somewhere else, which all the smart people prefer to just think about. But

happeners have a plan, and go ahead and carry it out. To use an old expression,

they don’t merely dig the scene, they make it.

Side 2

Now what about some examples of happenings… the impression most people have is that

they’re a wild and mad deluge of events pouring down, something like this:

Everybody’s at a train station. It’s hot. There are lots of big cartons sitting

all over the arcade. One by one they start to move, sliding and careening

drunkenly in every direction, lunging into commuters and one another

accompanied by loud breathing sounds over the public address system.

Now it’s winter and it’s cold and dark, and all around little blue lights go

on and off at their own speed while three large gunny sack constructions

drag an enormous pile of ice and stones over bumps, losing most of it, and

blankets keep falling over everything from the ceiling. A hundred iron

barrels and gallon wine jugs hanging on ropes swing back and forth,

crashing like church bells, spewing glass all about. Suddenly mushy

shapes pop up from the floor and painters slash at curtains dripping with

action. A wall of trees tied with colored rags advances on the crowd,

scattering everybody forcing them to leave. Eating is going on incessantly,

eating and vomiting and eating and vomiting, all in relentless yellow.

There are Muslim telephone boots for all with a record player or

microphone that tunes everybody in on everybody else. Coughing, you

breath noxious fumes of the smell of hospitals and lemon juice. A nude

girl runs after the racing pool of a searchlight, and throws water into it.

Slides and movies projected in motion over walls and hurrying people

depict hamburgers, huge ones, red ones, skinny ones, flat ones and so on.

You push things around like packing crates, words rumble past

whispering, “Dee-dah, Bah-room, Lovely, Lovely, Love Me.” (1:49)

Shadows jiggle on screens, power saws and lawn mowers screech just like

the subway at union square. Tin cans rattle, soaking rags slush and you

stand up to shout questions at shoeshine boys and old ladies. Long silences

when nothing at all happens when bang— there you are facing yourself in

a mirror jammed at you. Listen— a call from the alley, you giggle, talk to

someone nonchalantly while eating strawberry jam sandwiches. Electric

fans start, wafting breezes of new car smell past your nose as leaves bury

heaps of whining, burping, foul pinky mess (2:30) .

Actually, the happenings are much less complicated, and there’s a stronger give and take

between the environment and its participants. A typical program will read like this:

Naked women eat giant bowls of cheerios and milk atop a mountain of

used tires. Children disgorge barrels of whitewash over the mountain. A

hundred yards away, men and women swimmers in brightly colored

plastic pools continually leap out of the water to catch with their mouths

rubber gaskets festooned with lifesaver candies that hang from chains of

mens’ belts. The mountain is taken down tire by tire and moved into the

pools, and the water spills out. The children tie the adults together with the

belts, they pour whitewash over the now-still heaps of bodies. Then they

buckle dozens more of the belts around their necks, waists and legs. They

take the remaining lifesavers to a factory-fresh tire shop and offer them for

sale in laughy voices.

A program is nothing more than a short list of situations or images jotted down on a few

sheets of paper. Sometimes they have some notes attached at the end. These programs are

sent out to a group of people that might be interested in participating. Those who are

come to a meeting where the happening is discussed and the practical details of who does

what and when are ironed out. Then, as soon as possible, the piece is put into action.

I’d like to read three programs now, but before I do, it ought to be clear that what I read is

just literature, not the happenings themselves.

Soap

1 st morning: clothes dirtied by urination

1 st evening: clothes washed

(in the sea)

(in the laundromat)

2 nd morning: cars dirtied with jam on a busy street

cars cleaned

(in a parking lot)

(in a car-wash)

2 nd evening: bodies dirtied with jam

bodies buried in mounds at the sea edge

bodies cleaned by the tide

The notes to “Soap” read as follows:

1 st morning

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