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Performance into pedagogy: Anna Halprin, Allan Kaprow, and Alison Knowles' score-based events in experimental arts education

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Performance into pedagogy: Anna Halprin, Allan Kaprow, and Alison Knowles' score-based events in experimental arts education

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Performance into Pedagogy:

Anna Halprin, Allan Kaprow, and Alison Knowles’

Score-based Events in Experimental Arts Education

Karen Moss

Disssertation submitted to the Faculty of the USC Graduate School

in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

in Art History

University of Southern California

May 2016

Dissertation Committee:
Associate Professor, Suzanne Hudson, Chair
Professor Selma Holo
Professor Amelia Jones

©2016 Karen Moss

ii

DEDICATION

This dissertation
is dedicated with love to

David Lawrence Familian
and
Maximilian Moss Familian

iii
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
As is often the case, my disseration committee has changed since I first started my
research and I am indebted to both former and current faculty at University of Southern. I
would like to thank my initial committee members, art history professsors Susan Larsen and
Lynn Matteson, and the late Jim Beniger of the Annenberg School of Communication.
Additional thanks to Professor Eunice Howe and other art history faculty for the J. Paul Getty
Award and the travel fellowships I received for my initial research in Europe.
My deepest thanks to my current dissertation advisors: Associate Professor Suzanne
Hudson, my chair, for her astute guidance and infinite patience during this entire process;
Professor Selma Holo, for her incredible endurance and sage advice, and Professor Amelia
Jones, a more recent and very welcome addition to my committee.
Throughout the years my colleagues in both academic and museum contexts have
continued to inspire me: Elizabeth Armstrong, Hannah Higgins, John Killacky, Julie Lazar,
Constance Lewallen, Suzanne Lacy, Julie Lazar, Kathy O’Dell, Joan Rothfuss, David Ross, Owen
Smith, Kristine Stiles and Nicole Woods.
I would also like to thank everyone who assisted me with my research: Marsha Reed,
curator and Annette Leddy, former archivist, Special Collections, Getty Research Institute; Ina
Conzen Meairs, Archiv Sohm, Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart; Coco Halversen, former archivist,
California Institute of the Arts Archive and Kirsten Tanaka, Head Archivist and Librarian, San
Francisco Museum of Perfformance + Design.
I am extremely grateful to the artists in this dissertation, all of whom I have had the
pleasure of knowing. I first met Allan Kaprow at his Fondazione Mudima exhibtion in Milan
(1991); I have known Alison Knowles since the In the Spirit of Fluxus exhibition at the Walker Art
Center (1993) and I became acquainted with Anna Halprin at San Francisco Art Institute in 2003.
My most heartfelt thanks to my dear friends Kimberly Baer and Michael Sieverts and
Melissa Benson and Kieran Beer; my parents, George and Ruth Moss; my husband, David
Lawrence Familian, my son, Maximilian Moss Familian, and daughter-in-law, Shari Sampson.
I could not have finished this dissertaton with out their years of unconditional love and kind
understanding.

iv
TABLE OF CONTENTS

Dedication ii

Acknowledgments iii

Table of Contents iv

List of Figures v

Abstract xii

Preface xiii

Introduction 1

Chapter 1: Background to the Artists and Experimental Education 22

Chapter 2: Anna Halprin 47

Chapter 3: Allan Kaprow 103

Chapter 4: Alison Knowles 173

Chapter 5: Conclusion 218

Postscript 226

Bibliography 242

v
LIST OF FIGURES
Introduction

Fig. 1.1 Anna Halprin and San Francisco Dance Workshop, Parades and Changes, 1965,
detail of dressing and undressing sequence, Berkeley

Fig. 1.2 Anna Halprin and Lawrence Halprin, Experiments in the Environment, 1968,
detail of blindfolded walk, Kentfield

Fig. 1.3 Allan Kaprow with students from Project Other Ways, Six Ordinary Happenings,
1970, photograph of Shape in Berkeley and in Oakland Tribune article

Fig. 1.4 Allan Kaprow with CalArts students, Publicity (Happening at Vasquez Rocks),
1970, Agua Dulce

Fig. 1.5a-b Alison Knowles, students outside and inside House of Dust, 1970-71, California
Institute of the Arts, Burbank campus

Chapter 2: Anna Halprin

Fig. 2.1a-b Lawrence Halprin and Arch Lauterer, original photographs of dance deck, 1959,
Kentfield

Fig. 2.1c-d Lawrence Halprin and Arch Lauterer, original photograph of dance deck and
floor plan, 1959, Kentfield

Fig. 2.2a-b Lawrence Halprin and Arch Lauterer, contemporary photographs of dancers and
dance deck, 2014, Kentfield

Fig. 2.3a-b Anna Halprin, Movement Ritual book cover, 1975
Charleene Koonce, Movement Ritual diagrams, 1975

Fig. 2.4 San Francisco Dancer’s Workshop Storefront, 1955, Divisidero Street,
San Francisco

Fig. 2.5a-b Anna Halprin, Trunk Dance, Simone Forti and A.A. Leath and Simone Forti, John
Graham, and A. A. Leath, 1959

Fig. 2.6a-b Anna Halprin and A. A. Leath, Birds of America, 1960
John Graham and Rana Halprin, Birds of America, 1960

Fig. 2.7 Summer Workshop participants, 1960

vi
Chapter 2: Anna Halprin, continued

Fig. 2.8 La Monte Young, Composition #2, #3, #4, & #5, 1960

Fig. 2.9a-b La Monte Young, An Anthology, cover and interior folio, 1963

Fig. 2.10a-b Anna Halprin and San Francisco Dancer’s Workshop, Parades and Changes, 1965,
Stockholm Contemporary Music Festival

Fig. 2.11a-b Allan Kaprow, Paper, photographs and score of the Happening, 1964,
UC Berkeley parking lot

Fig. 2.12 Anna Halprin and San Francisco Dancer’s Workshop, Invocation of the Cement
Spirit, program cover and detail, 1970, University Art Museum, Berkeley

Fig. 2.13 Anna Halprin and San Francisco Dancer’s Workshop, Invocation of the Cement
Spirit, paper dance details, 1970, University Art Museum, Berkeley

Fig. 2.14 Anna Halprin, Gestalt Diagram, c. 1969

Fig. 2.15a Anna and Lawrence Halprin, Experiments in the Environment, 1966
San Francisco

Fig. 2.15b Anna and Lawrence Halprin, Experiments in the Environment,
detail of Gravity, 1968, Kentfield

Fig. 2.15c Anna and Lawrence Halprin, Experiments in the Environment,
details of Blindfolded Walk and discussion after event, 1968, Kentfield

Fig. 2.15d-e Anna and Lawrence Halprin, Experiments in the Environment detail,
1968, Sea Ranch, Mendocino

Fig. 2.15f-g Anna and Lawrence Halprin, Experiments in the Environment scores, 1968

Fig 2.16a-b Anna and Lawrence Halprin, Diagram of the RSVP Cycles, 1969

vii
Chapter 3: Allan Kaprow

Fig. 3.1 Brandes School, Tucson, Arizona, c. 1945

Fig. 3.2 Portrait of Allan Kaprow in a cowboy outfit, c. 1945

Fig. 3.3a-c Allan Kaprow, Figure in the Landscape, 1953, oil on canvas; Caged Pheasant,
1957, collage and Rearrangeable Panels––Kiosk version, 1957, assemblage

Fig. 3.4 Allan Kaprow, untitled scores from John Cage’s Composition class, 1957-58

Fig. 3.5 Untitled Environment, 1958, invitation, scores, and photograph, Hansa Gallery,
New York

Fig. 3.6 Allan Kaprow, cover of Assemblage, Happenings, Environments, 1966

Fig. 3.7 18 Happenings in 6 Parts, 1959, Reuben Gallery, New York

Fig. 3.8 Allan Kaprow, Yard, 1961, Martha Jackson Gallery, New York

Fig. 3.9 Allan Kaprow, Self-Service score, 1966, Boston, Los Angeles and New York

Fig. 3.10 Allan Kaprow, Fluids poster with score, 1967, Pasadena and Los Angeles

Fig. 3.11a-b Allan Kaprow, Fluids, 1967, building structures in Pasadena

Fig. 3.12a Allan Kaprow and Herbert Kohl, Project Other Ways prospectus and logo,
1968 – 69

Fig. 3.12b Allan Kaprow and Herbert Kohl, Suppose…poster, 1968 – 69, Project Other Ways

Fig. 3.12c Student collages, Project Other Ways, 1968 - 69

Fig. 3.13a Allan Kaprow and students, Six Ordinary Happenings, 1969, off-set lithograph
poster

Fig. 3.13 b Allan Kaprow and students, Charity, Six Ordinary Happenings, 1969, score and
photograph

Fig. 3.13 c Allan Kaprow and students, Giveaway, Six Ordinary Happenings, 1969, score and
photographs

Fig. 3.13d Allan Kaprow and students, Purpose, Six Ordinary Happenings, 1969, score and
photograph

viii
Chapter 3: Allan Kaprow, continued

Fig. 3.13e Allan Kaprow and students, Pose, Six Ordinary Happenings, 1969, score and
photograph

Fig. 3.13f-g Allan Kaprow and students, Shape, Six Ordinary Happenings, 1969, score and
photograph, Berkeley, and Oakland Tribune photograph

Fig. 3.1h-i Allan Kaprow, Shape and Dial, and 1969, San Francisco Art institute

Fig. 3.13j Allan Kaprow, Fine, Six Ordinary Happenings, 1969, score and photograph

Fig. 3.14 Allan Kaprow, Days Off, 1970, calendar published by the Museum of Modern Art
Fig. 3.15 and installation at John Gibson Gallery, New York

Fig. 3.16a Larry Miller and Maurice Stein, Blueprint for Counter-Education, 1969

Fig. 3.16b Modernism and Post Modernism from Blueprint for Counter-Education 1969

Fig. 3.16c The Box, 1969, California Institute of the Arts

Fig. 3.17a Cover of Prologue to a Community: California Institute of the Arts, special issue
of Arts and Society, vol. 7, no. 3, Fall-Winter 1970

Fig. 3.17 b Allan Kaprow, Roundtrip through LA between home and the institute,
photographs, 1970

Fig. 3.18a Suzanne Lacy, Maps, Happening with Allan Kaprow’s class, detail of lamb
drawing and organs, 1974, Valencia

Fig. 3.18b Suzanne Lacy, Maps, Happening with Allan Kaprow’s class, detail of meat-
packing factory, 1974, Vernon

Fig. 3.19a Allan Kaprow, Publicity (Happening at Vasquez Rocks), poster, 1970

Fig. 3.19b-c Allan Kaprow, Publicity (Happening at Vasquez Rocks), 1970, Agua Dulce

Fig. 3.20a-b Allan Kaprow, Tracts, Happening with students in Allan Kaprow’s class, 1971

Fig. 3.21 Allan Kaprow, Scales, Happening with students in Allan Kaprow’s class, 1971

Fig. 3.22 Allan Kaprow, Easy, Happening with students in Allan Kaprow’s class, 1971

Fig. 3.23 Allan Kaprow, Air Conditioning, Activity booklet, 1973

ix
Chapter 4: Alison Knowles

Fig. 4.1 Alison Knowles in her studio with paintings, 1958

Fig. 4.2 George Brecht, Drip Music, 1959, performed by Dick Higgins at Fluxus Festival,
Nicolaj Church and Art Centre, Copenhagen, 1962

Fig. 4.3 Alison Knowles, Shuffle, 1961; Proposition # 2: Make A Salad, 1962; Variation #1
on Proposition #2, 1964; Nivea Cream Piece, 1962 and Variation #1 on Nivea
Cream Piece, no date, printed in by Alison Knowles, Great Bear Pamphlet, 1965

Fig 4.4a Nam June Paik, Zen for Head, 1962, International Festival of New Music,
Wiebaden, Germany

Fig. 4.4b Emmett Williams, George Maciunas, Dick Higgins and Ben Patterson performing
Philip Corner’s, Piano Activities, 1962, International Festival of New Music,
Wiesbaden

Fig. 4.4c Emmett Williams, George Maciunas, Dick Higgins and Ben Patterson performing
Philip Corner’s, Piano Activities, 1962, photograph with Alison Knowles in
background, International Festival of New Music, Wiesbaden

Fig. 4.4d Efter alle kunstens regler (When All Artists Rule), Political Cartoon, Politiken,
September 25, 1962

Fig. 4.5 Alison Knowles and Dick Higgins, Danger Music Number Two, International
Fluxus Festival of Very New Music, Wiesbaden, 1962

Fig. 4.6 Alison Knowles, Proposition #2: Make a Salad, 1962, ICA London, printed in
Great Bear Pamphlet, 1965

Fig. 4.7 George Maciunas, Artists’ Logotypes, 1964

Fig. 4.8a-c Alison Knowles with Big Book and other views of Big Book, 1967-69

Fig. 4.9a-b Alison Knowles, Identical Lunch, 1967, objects from peformance

Fig. 4.9c Alison Knowles, Journal of the Identical Lunch, 1971, artists’ book

Fig. 4.10a-b Alison Knowles and James Tenney, House of Dust, computer print-out and detail,
1971

Fig. 4.11a-b Alison Knowles, House of Dust, 1970, off-set lithographic postcards

x
Chapter 4: Alison Knowles, continued

Fig. 4.12a-b Alison Knowles, House of Dust, 1970, exterior, California Institute of the Arts

Fig. 4.12c Alison Knowles, Here is a Stone From What I’m Doing Now, contribution to
The Box, California Institute of the Arts, 1970

Fig. 4.12d-e Alison Knowles House of Dust, interior with students, 1970 and
Michael Bell, Meditation Event, 1971, California Institute of the Arts

Fig. 4.13a Alison Knowles, Computer Poem Drop, silk-screened postcards with
House of Dust and 99 Red North on front and score on back, 1969

Fig. 4.13b-c Alison Knowles and Norman Kaplan, Computer Poem Drop Over the House of
Dust, California Institute of the Arts, Valencia Campus, 1971

Fig. 4.14a-b Alison Knowles, 99 Red and detail of keys, California Institute of the Arts,
Burbank Campus, 1970

Fig. 4.15a-b Alison Knowles, Street Piece, 1962-63 and Color Music, 1963 printed in
by Alison Knowles, Great Bear Pamphlet, 1965

Fig. 4.16 House of Dust, small house installed at the preschool of the Early Childhood
Education Program at College of the Canyons in Santa Clarita, 1978

Fig. 4.17a-b Alison Knowles with Marcel Duchamp and Coeurs Volant, silkscreen, 1967

Fig. 4.18 Alison Knowles, Identical Lunch silkscreen prints with Shigeko Kubota and George
Maciunas, 1970

Chapter 5: Conclusion

Fig. 5.1a-b Anna Halprin and San Francisco Dancer’s Workshop, Parades and Changes,
2009, parade of costumes details, REDCAT, Los Angeles

Fig. 5.1c-d Anna Halprin and San Francisco Dancer’s Workshop, Parades and Changes, 2009
stage backdrop, set and props, REDCAT, Los Angeles

Fig. 5.2a-b Anna Halprin and San Francisco Dancer’s Workshop, Parades and Changes, 2013,
parade of costumes, Berkeley Art Museum Pacific Film Archive,

Fig. 5.2c Anna Halprin and San Francisco Dancer’s Workshop, Parades and Changes, 2013,
embrace detail, Berkeley Art Museum Pacific Film Archive

xi
Chapter 5: Conclusion, continued

Fig. 5.2d Anna Halprin and San Francisco Dancer’s Workshop, Parades and Changes, 2013,
finale details, Berkeley Art Museum Pacific Film Archive

Fig. 5.2e Anna Halprin and Morton Subotnick at Parades and Changes, 2013, Berkeley Art
Museum Pacific Film Archive

Fig. 5.3 Allan Kaprow, Performing Life Activity, 1996, Liestal, Switzerland

Fig. 5.4a-b Allan Kaprow, Allan Kaprow: Art as Life, 2008, installation photographs, Museum
of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles

Fig. 5.5a-b LA ArtGirls, Overflow: A Re-invention of Allan Kaprow’s Fluids, April 26, 2008
Getty Museum, Los Angeles

Fig. 5.5c-d Suzanne Lacy, Peter Kirby, Michael Rotundi, Trade Talk (reinvention of Trading
Dirt), Alan Kaprow: Art as Life, 2008, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles

Fig. 5.6a-b Alison Knowles and Bill Fontana, Gentle Surprises for the Eyes and Ears, 1975

Fig. 5.7a-b Alison Knowles, Secret Life of Ordinary Things, 2003 installation and students
with sound sculptures, Walter and McBean Galleries, San Francisco Art Institute

Fig. 5.8a-d Alison Knowles, Secret Life of Ordinary Things, 2003, details of collaborative
installation with students, Walter and McBean Galleries, San Francisco Art
Insitute

Fig. 5.9a-b Alison Knowles and students performing Newspaper Event, 2003, Walter and
McBean Galleries, San Francisco Art Insitute

Fig. 5.10a-b Alison Knowles and students, Celebration Red event, 2003, Walter and
McBean Galleries, San Francisco Art Insitute

Fig. 5.11 Alison Knowles, Make A Salad, April 22, 2012 (for Earth Day) Highline, New York

Fig. 5.12a-b Alison Knowles, Identical Lunch at Feast: Radical Hospitality in Contemporary Art,
February 16 – June 10, 2012, Smart Musuem of Art, Chicago

xii

Abstract
Anna Halprin, Allan Kaprow, and Alison Knowles each established an artistic practice
that made use of scores for event-based performances. In 1959 Halprin innovated her
improvised form of ordinary, task-oriented kinesthetic movement in collaborative events with
her San Francisco Dancers’ Workshop (SFDW), founded that year. Also in 1959, Kaprow staged
his first large-scale public Happenings, which evolved into more intimate Work Routines and
Activities. Knowles first wrote and performed her abbreviated scores, or Propositions, with
Fluxus in 1962 and since then has produced participatory intermedia events and installations.
What is less well known is how Halprin, Kaprow, and Knowles incorporated event-based
performances into experimental education in California in the 1960s and 1970s. Although a few
monographs or scholarly studies discuss these artists’ pedagogical interests, this is the first
dissertation to delve deeply into how they integrated event scores into specific courses and
collaborative workshops in self-generated contexts or established art schools and universities.
In the chapters that follow, I demonstrate how they imbricated their performances into
teaching by using everyday activities and mundane materials, by activating the body and
sensory perception, by exploring urban sites and natural environments, and by encouraging
communication and collaboration. I argue that the integration of their performance
methodologies and pedagogical strategies facilitated experimental and experiential learning,
allowing students to acquire knowledge and to access multiple intelligences. I conclude that the
event-based teaching experiments undertaken by Halprin, Kaprow, and Knowles in the 1960s
and 1970s continued to influence their subsequent artistic production and remain relevant
today given the resurgent interest in pedagogy since the mid-2000s.

xiii
PREFACE
This dissertation evolved from several decades of my work on intermedia, Fluxus, and
Happenings both in academia and as a curator, but my interest in these practices and their
relationship to pedagogy grew out of my own educational background. When I attended the
new, experimental University of California campus, UC Santa Cruz (CSC), in the mid-1970s, I
took a curatorial seminar with the late art historian and curator Nan Rosenthal that culminated
in an ambitious exhibition, Modern Sculpture from Rodin to Judd in West Coast Collections
(1977). The show included Claes Oldenburg’s False Food Selection (1966), a Fluxkit multiple of
plastic food items, and this was my first exposure to Fluxus. In the seminar I also learned about
Fluxus artist Robert Watts’s multidisciplinary Experimental Arts Workshop at UCSC (1969–70).
Derived from an earlier proposal that Watts cowrote with George Brecht and Allan Kaprow at
Rutgers University in 1957–58, the program’s curriculum consisted entirely of Fluxus scores. My
experience at UCSC shaped my hybridized career in academia and curatorial practice, instilling
in me a belief in experimental education and introducing me to Fluxus and intermedia.
During my first year of graduate school at USC, I took a course with John Bowlt on the
Russian Avant-garde and my class went on a field trip with to the new Getty Research Institute
to view avant-garde artists’ books. Marcia Reed, who was then curator of special collections,
also showed our class some materials from the Jean Brown Collection, a repository of
twentieth-century avant-garde art objects, artists’ books, and Fluxus multiples that had recently
arrived at the Getty. When she asked if anyone knew of Fluxus and I responded affirmatively,
she invited me to go to the special collections storage to view the entire collection. That was
when my research on Fluxus, Happenings, and intermedia began.

xiv
While working on my dissertation, I consulted on In the Spirit of Fluxus (1993) at the
Walker Art Center, the first comprehensive exhibition devoted to Fluxus in the United States.
Two years later, I accepted a position at the Walker—a hybrid role as curator and director of
education in which I was charged with organizing exhibitions and public programs to activate
the galleries and interpret the collection in new ways. During my tenure I organized exhibitions
such as Art of the 1960s: Media Is the Message (1997) and Experiencing the Everyday:
Performance of the 1970s (1998), both of which included works from the Walker’s holdings of
Fluxus and Happenings. For Joseph Beuys Multiples (1997), I collaborated on the Information
Office, a gallery/classroom modeled after Beuys’s practice of turning his office, studio, and
exhibitions into sites for discourse and debate. Including chalkboards and desks, the space
hosted free daily lectures and was available for community meetings. Through these curatorial
endeavors, I better understood the pedagogical potential of Fluxus and intermedia to enliven
institutional space and to encourage learning through direct experience.
Subsequently, when I returned to California, I experienced this pedagogical impulse in
the context of three different artists’ work. I participated in an intimate workshop of Allan
Kaprow’s Activities at the Getty Research Institute in 1998; at the San Francisco Art Institute, I
curated Alison Knowles’s solo exhibition The Secrets of Ordinary Things (2003), which included a
weeklong collaborative workshop with students; and a few years later, I attended two
iterations of Anna Halprin’s Parade and Changes, her epic event derived from her San Francisco
Dancers’ Workshop exercises.
In 2011, when I co-curated the exhibition State of Mind: New California Art circa 1970 as
part of the Getty’s Pacific Standard Time: Art in L.A. 1945–1980 initiative, I decided to write my

xv
essay for the publication on artists’ interventions, alternative spaces, and educational contexts.

Much of this essay was derived from my original research on Fluxus and intermedia, and writing
it inspired me to return to my dissertation work. I refocused my topic to investigate the
relationship between performance and pedagogy in the work of three artists I had written
about previously and known personally: Anna Halprin, Allan Kaprow, and Alison Knowles.
Embarking on the first dissertation that examines how these artists used instructional,
event-based scores in public schools, art institutes, and independent workshops, I used the
following questions as a framework: How did the artists’ own educational backgrounds and
professional training influence their interest in experimental forms of education? How did these
artists deploy their respective performance methodologies in specific pedagogical platforms?
How did their score-based events for everyday activities, ordinary movement, and bodily or
sensory engagement elicit different learning typologies? How did this more informal, often
communal and participatory process of learning promote knowledge production, and which
types of intelligence did it cultivate? And finally, how did teaching in these contexts change the
artists’ overarching practices?
Ultimately, I examine how Halprin, Kaprow, and Knowles each imbricated their own
performance practices into their pedagogical strategies, integrating their artistic production and
their teaching for experimental and experiential learning. In a similar vein to these artists, I
have integrated my curatorial background (my practice/production) and my academic work (my
teaching/pedagogy) to write this dissertation, which I hope will promote a learning experience
and inspire further research in the field.

xvi

1

Introduction

What are these texts? They can be read (have been read) under a number of rubrics:
music scores, visual art, poetic texts, performance instructions, or proposals for some
kind of action or procedure. Most often, when they are read at all, these "short form"
scores are seen as tools for something else, scripts for a performance or project or
musical piece which is the "real" art. . . . This peculiar type of "event" notation arguably
derives from Cage's work of the 1950s. . . . [It] effectively inaugurates the model of the
score as an independent graphic/textual object, inseparable words to be read and
actions to be performed. —Liz Kotz
1

In this passage from “Post Cagean Aesthetics and the Event Score,” Liz Kotz ruminates
on how the short-form texts known as event scores are “tools” for the production of “real art”:
musical compositions, written texts, material objects, and most often performances. More
specifically, event scores are open “instructions or proposals” that prompt participants to
engage in simple actions or procedures to discover new meaning in aspects of everyday life. As
participants read a text, interpret the instructions, and perform a simple, quotidian action,
they engage in a pedagogical process and learn through direct experience and discovery.
Therefore, it is entirely appropriate that Kotz also refers to scores as “rubrics”—a term used by
educators to refer to a set of guidelines—which emphasizes their pedagogical function and
origin. As she also notes, they are derived from the work of John Cage, who used graphic
scores in his legendary composition class at the New School for Social Research in New York in
the late 1950s to teach artists and composers how to make event-based performances.
2

The artists in this dissertation—Anna Halprin, Allan Kaprow, and Alison Knowles—took
up Cage’s model, using scores for event-based performances in their respective areas of

1
Liz Kotz, “Post-Cagean Aesthetics and the Event Score.” October 95. (Winter 2001): 57.
2
Cage started teaching at the New School for Social Research in 1950 and became a faculty member in 1956 when
he first taught his famous Composition class, which he re-named “Experimental Composition” in 1958.

2
dance, Happenings, and Fluxus, and they each would integrate them into their own
pedagogical experiments. Halprin innovated improvised, task-oriented movements in score-
based events with her San Francisco Dancers’ Workshop (SFDW) starting in 1959.
3
In the same
year, Kaprow staged his first public Happenings, initially large-scale, elaborately scored
spectacles that by the later 1960s progressively evolved into more intimate, focused events
and activities. Knowles started writing and performing her abbreviated, open scores called
“propositions” when she first affiliated with Fluxus in 1962 and subsequently has produced her
own body of work, which has included participatory intermedia events, installations, and
publications.
After five years of intensive experimentation with improvisation, Halprin started to
make performances based on SFDW exercises. Her first chance-derived score, Parades and
Changes (1965), included a sequence from a “dressing and undressing” exercise (fig. 1.1). The
score instructed dancers to “focus on the audience and begin slowly and steadily to take off
your clothes.”
4
As the dancers removed every article of their formal attire in slow motion four
times in succession, this attenuated action focused attention on “ordinary movement,”
exalting everyday experience.
5
For the workshop Experiments in the Environment (1968)
(fig. 1.2 ), Halprin used another SFDW-derived score that called for participants to be
blindfolded and tethered together with a rope, with instructions to hike in the woods near her
studio in Kentfield, California. Deprived of their eyesight, they had to be keenly aware of one

3
The San Francisco Dancers’ Workshop continued until 1978, when Halprin and her daughter Daria Halprin co-
founded the Tamalpa Institute, a non-profit educational organization devoted to integrating movement/dance,
visual arts, performance techniques and therapeutic practices.
4
Anna Halprin, Parades and Changes score, Anna Halprin Papers, Series II: Performances, Sub-series: Avant-garde
Work. Museum of Performance + Design, San Francisco. Box 2, Folder 96.
5
Ordinary movement is Halprin’s own term for “tasks,” a basic component of her choreography and an important
precursor to the pedestrian dance forms later pioneered by her students, which will be discussed in chapter 2.

3
another’s bodies and movements to navigate safely through the redwood trees, as their
nonvisual senses became more stimulated when they touched, heard, and smelled aspects of
the environment.
6

Kaprow’s desire to develop experimental arts curricula started with his first teaching
position, at Rutgers University in 1953. After writing several proposals, in 1969 he received a
Carnegie grant for Project Other Ways (1969–70), a pilot program for the Berkeley Public
Schools funded by the Carnegie Corporation that he codirected with educator Herbert Kohl.
7

Using scores for Six Ordinary Happenings (1969–70), Kaprow and his students staged public
interventions throughout Berkeley, such as making outlines of their bodies on the ground with
flour and lime to mark their existence and presence in the city (fig. 1.3) as they discovered and
documented new findings from their classroom in the streets. After leaving Berkeley, Kaprow
went to the new California Institute of the Arts (CalArts), where his entire curriculum used
Happenings and Activities, often labor-intensive tasks involving excursions and other
discovery-based learning process. For Publicity (1970), a Happening at Vasquez Rocks, a park in
the desert near CalArts known for its dramatic rock formations, the score called for students to
work in teams to build wooden structures. Their actions were documented on video both for
instructional purposes and, as the title implies, as a promotional film for the new school.
8

6
Halprin co-organized Experiments in the Environment with her husband, the landscape architect Lawrence
Halprin between 1966 and 1971 in San Francisco, her studio in Kentfield, and Sea Ranch in Mendocino County.
7
As will be detailed later, Kohl, an author and founder of the open education movement, was introduced to
Kaprow by a Carnegie Corporation program officer who thought that the project also needed a K–12 educator.
8
The phrase “learning by doing,” a shorthand term for experiential or authentic learning that infuses direct
experience in the student’s environment, was first theorized by John Dewey in Experience and Education (Urbana-
Champaign: Kappa Delta Pi, 1938). Reprinted by Collier Books in 1963, it became a seminal text for experimental
educators.

4
Going “off script” from the score, the students ended their event with a spontaneous parade
and concert (fig. 1.4).
When he became associate dean at CalArts, Kaprow invited Alison Knowles and a cohort
of New York Fluxus artists to teach in the School of Art. Her five-ton fiberglass sculptural
installation House of Dust (fig. 1.5a-b), built using instructions from a score derived from a
quatrain of computer-generated poetry, became the locus of her workshops and classes.
Inside these biomorphic structures students held poetry readings, screened films, and
gathered for meditation events, while outside Knowles used scores to make events based on
exchange and hospitality and to discover what she has called the “secret life of ordinary
things.”
9

These few examples demonstrate how Halprin, Kaprow, and Knowles deployed score-
based events for students to learn through everyday experience as they investigated the
environment, engaged their senses, and explored the relationship between art and life. In
collaborating on performances with students, these artists employed ordinary movement,
everyday events, and mundane activities to elicit different types of experiential, participatory,
and embodied learning that foster different forms of intelligence. Privileging process over
product, their teaching methodologies encompassed shared influences, such as John Cage’s
aleatory procedures as well as John Dewey’s writing on art, experience, and education. While
event-based workshops recall earlier arts education experiments at the Bauhaus and Black
Mountain College, my focus is on California in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when

9
The Secrets of Ordinary Things is the title of an exhibition and workshop that Knowles did at the Walter and
McBean Galleries at the San Francisco Art Institute (2002), to be discussed in chapter 4.

5
experimental education prevailed across disciplines to promote educational reform at all
levels.
Although a few monographs and scholarly studies devoted to Halprin, Kaprow, and
Knowles have discussed their teaching or the pedagogical implications of their practices, this is
the first dissertation to delve deeply into how these three artists used instructional event-
based scores as the core of their curricula in public schools, art institutes, and independent
workshops in California in the early 1960s through the mid-1970s. By analyzing specific scores,
the resulting events, and the type of learning they elicit, I will demonstrate how they extended
their particular performance methodologies into specific pedagogical platforms in these
various experimental educational contexts. Ultimately, my goal is to demonstrate how inquiry,
student-centered learning, and knowledge transmission became integral parts of their
teaching, which in turn expanded their own artistic production. I conclude with a discussion of
how this productive tension between performance and pedagogy sustained the experimental
workshops that they developed in the 1960s and 1970s and throughout their respective long
careers. Finally, I posit how these experiments in education from decades ago have become
relevant and revived in recent discourses, such as the so-called “educational turn” in
contemporary art, curating, and pedagogical practices of artists in the 2000s.
10

10
The term “turn” has been used in reference to contemporary collaborative, pedagogical and curatorial practices
in Claire Bishop, “The Social Turn: Collaboration and Its Discontents,” Artforum. Volume 44, no. 6 (February 2006):
178-183; Kristina Lee Podesva, “A Pedagogical Turn: Brief Notes on Education as Art,” Fillip 6. (Summer 2007),
under http://fillip.ca/content/a-pedagogical-turn (accessed February 15, 2016) and in Paul O’Neill and Mick
Wilson, eds. Curating and the Educational Turn (Amsterdam: Open Editions/De Appel Arts Centre, 2010).

6
Research and Current Scholarship
When I began my research on Happenings, Fluxus, and intermedia in California, these
practices remained significantly underrepresented in art historical scholarship, critical
discourse, and exhibition publications from major contemporary art institutions.
11
While an
increasing number of theses and dissertations and numerous exhibition publications and
monographs have appeared in the 1990s and into the 2000s, comparatively little of this
material focused specifically on artists who had worked in California. The reason for this is that
while these events generally took place outside the purview of mainstream arts institutions,
often at alternative galleries or artist-run spaces, in California more often they occurred within
experimental programs within art schools, universities, or artists’ studios.
Given this dissertation’s specific emphasis on performance and pedagogy and the
relative dearth of scholarship on this topic, primary sources such as the artists’ books, critical
writings, performance scores, descriptions of workshops, course syllabi, and, in particular,
photographic and video documentation became particularly important to my research
process. As several scholars have discussed, 1960s and 1970s documentary photographs and
videos can either be problematic in how they alter our understanding of performances or
emblematic in further explicating or instantiating the original event. Kathy O’Dell argues that
documentary photographs purport to reconstruct a performance, but they are mere fragments
or incomplete reconstructions.
12
Amelia Jones, however, asserts that the documentary
photograph has a symbiotic relationship to the live performance: the activity or event requires

11
I will focus on the scholarship and publications relevant to my specific topic and performance and pedagogy;
more general resources about Fluxus, Happenings, and intermedia appear in footnotes and/or the bibliography.
12
Kathy O’Dell, “Displacing the Haptic: Performance Art, the Photographic Document, and the 1970s,”
Performance Research Volume 2, no. 1. (1997): 73–74.

7
photographic evidence, while the photograph needs a corporeal, performative action for its
indexicality.
13
Philip Auslander has proposed that the authenticity of the performance
document resides in its relationship to its beholder rather than to an originary event,
suggesting that perhaps its authority is phenomenological rather than ontological.
14

Each of these authors raises critical issues about the efficacy of documentation that may
skew, amplify, or shift our perceptions of a performance. The primary documentation for the
event-based performances in this dissertation, however, have never circulated: most materials
initially came from the artists, and additional personal papers have recently been accessioned
into archives. Thus the problem of an a priori understanding (or misunderstanding) of the
documentation is less of an issue. That said, this dissertation includes analysis of not only live
performances but also pedagogical events that I argue pose ontological or existential
questions and provoke perceptual or phenomenological responses. I am therefore cognizant
that both visual and written documentation, as well as other primary sources, must be
carefully interrogated and supplemented by secondary sources.
The secondary sources that I have used include doctoral dissertations and master’s
theses as well as monographs or thematic studies with particular attention to educational and
pedagogical issues. Additionally, there are a few specific exhibition publications devoted to
experiments in education, and articles by or interviews with former students of the three
artists that have also contributed to my analysis.

13
Amelia Jones, “‘Presence’ in Absentia: Experiencing Performance as Documentation,” Art Journal Volume 56, no.
4. (1997): 16.
14
Philip Auslander, “The Performativity of Performance Art Documentation,” PAJ: A Journal of Performance and
Art 84. (2006): 1–10.

8
Halprin: Kinesthetic Education and Embodied Events
Most of my research on Halprin and her SFDW occurred at the Anna Halprin Archives at
the Museum of Art + Design, San Francisco before materials became available through a digital
archive in 2015.
15
Two recent exhibitions also presented previously unseen archival materials:
Anna Halprin: Parades and Changes / MATRIX 246 at the Berkeley Art Museum included scores
and notes, and Experiments in the Environment: The Halprin Workshops, 1966–71 at the
Graham Foundation in Chicago presented photographs of all three of Halprin’s workshops.
16

In addition to these archival materials, Halprin’s autobiography, Moving toward Life:
Five Decades of Transformational Dance, is another important resource for her writing. The
book is organized thematically, and Halprin’s writings are contextualized by three prominent
dance historians and scholars.
17
Rachel Kaplan, Halprin’s primary biographer and the editor of
the volume, points out that in the early 1960s “the Dancers’ Workshop began to create what
Halprin called Events—nearly synonymous and synchronous with Allan Kaprow’s Happenings—
group experiments of which the audience members were an integral and creative part.”
18
This
is critical as it aligns Halprin’s work with my reading of her work as avant-garde, event-based
performance rather than just dance. Sally Banes’s introduction to this volume acknowledges
Halprin’s relationship to Merce Cunningham, and their mutual rebellion against

15
Anna Halprin’s Archives, Museum of Performance + Design, San Francisco, donated to the library by Halprin
between October 1994 and November 2013. Some materials are now in the Halprin Digital Archive,
http://annahalprindigitalarchive.omeka.net/. Additional archival materials are housed at the Jerome Robbins
Dance Division, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at the Dorothy Cullman Center.
16
Anna Halprin: Parades and Changes / MATRIX 246, February 15–April 21, 2013, at Berkeley Art Museum Pacific
Archive and Experiments in the Environment, 1966–1971, September 19–December 13, 2014, at the Graham
Foundation, Chicago.
17
Anna Halprin, Moving toward Life: Five Decades of Transformational Dance, ed. Rachel Kaplan (Middletown:
Wesleyan University Press, 1995). Anna Halprin, Moving toward Life: Five Decades of Transformational Dance, ed.
Rachel Kaplan (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1995).
18
Ibid., Rachel Kaplan, Editor’s note, xxvii.

9
expressionistic, stilted modern dance, in particular, how Halprin’s improvisations “penetrated
the interior of the body/mind, guiding her dancers and students to scrutinize individual
anatomical workings as well as unconscious needs and desires, in the voice as well as with
movement.”
19
I will demonstrate how Halprin translated her integrated, holistic mind/body
approach into a teaching methodology that encouraged students to mine their own
experiences and emotions as they engaged in very rigorous study of anatomy and kinesiology.
This yielded free, energetic, sometimes wild improvisations as well as more sedate, task-like
movements that would be incorporated into performances.
The early dissertations and theses on Halprin––while compelling and important––
primarily by dance educators or historians from the 1980s and 1990s, addressed her
methodology as a choreographer and the relationship of her work to theater, so they are not
particularly relevant.
20
Janice Ross, however, wrote her dissertation on the introduction of
dance into the American university system,
21
beginning with the first program for women at
the University of Wisconsin, Madison, where Halprin studied with Margaret H’Doubler.
Subsequently, Ross published the most comprehensive monograph to date, Anna Halprin:
Experience as Dance (2007).
22
The book thoroughly examines Halprin’s own education, the

19
Ibid., Sally Banes, Introduction, 3.
20
These include Alice A. Rutkowski, “Development, Definition, and Demonstration of the Halprin Life/Art Process
in Dance Education” (PhD diss., International College, Los Angeles, 1984) and Heidi A. Biegel “Anna Halprin: Dance
Scoring as an Alternative to Choreography,” (M.A. Thesis, University of California, Riverside, 1988) and Marsha
McMann Paludan, “Expanding the Circle: Anna Halprin and Contemporary Theatre Practice” (PhD diss., University
of Kansas, 1996).
21
Janice Ross, “The Feminization of Physical Culture: The Introduction of Dance into the American University
Curriculum” (PhD diss., Stanford University, 1998).
22
Janice Ross, Anna Halprin Experience as Dance (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2007).
The only previous monograph, Helen Poynor and Libby Worth, Anna Halprin (London and New York: Routledge,
2004), is a slim volume that provides an overview of Halprin’s life and work, theory and practice, and selected
performances. One other monograph published more recently, Ronit Land, Ursula Schorn and Gabriele Wittman,
Anna Halprin: Dance – Process – Form (London and Philadelphia: Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 2014) focuses on the

10
influence of H’Doubler and John Dewey’s ideas of experience on Halprin, and the formation of
the SFDW. While I concur with Ross’s thesis about the primacy of ordinary experience in
Halprin’s work, she firmly situates her within dance history, rather than within a broader
context of performance art or experimental intermedia practices, and focuses more on her
performance than pedagogy.
Since the publication of Ross’s book, several other scholarly studies have been written.
Tusa Shea’s dissertation, “Autonomy as a Temporary Collective Experience: Anna Halprin's
Dance-Events, Deweyan Aesthetics, and the Emergence of Dialogical Art in the Sixties” (2012),
focuses on Halprin’s large-scale, community-based collaborations of the 1970s through
contemporary theories of relational aesthetics, dialogical practices, and most particularly,
Hakim Bey’s notion of “temporary autonomous zones.”
23
Shea discusses how Dewey's
pragmatist aesthetics influenced Halprin in her antiformalist, experiential practice, and this is
relevant to my own study, but she is not interested in Halprin’s own teaching or pedagogy;
instead, she uses an “anarchist lens” to analyze what she calls “contingent collectivism”
grounded in holistic experience.
24

Two recent master’s theses have examined Halprin’s Summer Workshop of 1960, which
introduced task-based improvisation to her students Trisha Brown, Simone Forti, and Yvonne
Rainer, who would then innovate their own forms of pedestrian movement in New York.
Harmony Wolfe’s thesis examines the workshop in relationship to landscape architecture and

relationship between Halprin’s later work and the relationship between her life/art process and its therapeutic
applications
23
Tusa Shea, “Autonomy as a Temporary Collective Experience: Anna Halprin's Dance-Events, Deweyan Aesthetics,
and the Emergence of Dialogical Art in the Sixties” (PhD diss., University of Victoria, 2012). For a full discussion of
the TAZ, see Hakim Bey, T.A.Z. The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism (Brooklyn:
Autonomedia, 1991).
24
Ibid., iii.

11
therefore, is not relevant to my study.
25
However, Emma Forbes’s “Contact, Explore, Respond:
An Embodied Engagement with the Work and Influence of Anna Halprin” is quite pertinent.
26
Using her own “embodied” experience of taking Halprin’s three-part Contact, Explore,
Respond workshop, Forbes focuses on her workshopping process, interweaving an analysis of
specific movements with subjective responses. Her argument pivots on how the emphasis on
the process and the individual’s own “lived” experience is difficult to analyze and theorize, but
she uses the writings of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Drew Leder to support her ideas
regarding embodiment and phenomenology in Halprin’s work. I found Forbes’s observations
informative for my own analysis of how Halprin’s workshop exercises use these forms of
kinesthetic, sensory, and embodied learning to enhance mind-body integration, but I locate
them specifically within the experiential and experimental arts education that I am discussing
in this dissertation.

Kaprow: Teaching with Happenings
During the earlier phase of my research, I was fortunate to meet Kaprow and conduct
several personal interviews with him. Subsequently, when the Allan Kaprow Papers became
part of Special Collections at the Getty Research Institute and my dissertation topic became
focused on his pedagogy and teaching, I could access key documents that are not available or
published anywhere else.

25
Harmony Violet Wolfe, “Landscapes of Dance: The 1960 Summer Workshop of Anna Halprin” (master’s thesis,
University of California, Riverside, 2012).
26
Emma Forbes, “Contact, Explore, Respond: An Embodied Engagement with the Work and Influence of Anna
Halprin” (master’s thesis, University of Glasgow, Scotland, 2013).

12
While there is more scholarly literature on Kaprow than on Halprin or Knowles, Kathy
O’Dell’s master’s thesis, “Allan Kaprow: The Artist as Educator” (1981), is the only study to
discuss his multiple roles as an artist, teacher, and writer.
27
Inspired by attending one of his
workshops, O’Dell examines Dewey’s influence on Kaprow and the relationship among art,
education, and the language of experience, a discussion that informed my understanding of his
hybrid roles. O’Dell takes a distinctly structuralist approach, focusing on texts, writing, and
“meta-communication” by the artist and other theorists. Ultimately, she argues for
incorporating philosophy and linguistics not just into her analysis of Kaprow but also into art
history. Presenting Kaprow as an exemplar of the artist who integrates writing and philosophy
into his practice, her thesis functions as a position paper for the future of the field.
While no other study has focused on Kaprow’s teaching in experimental contexts, some
scholars and writers have discussed specific aspects of his educational practice within larger
topics. Suzanne Lacy’s dissertation Imperfect Art: Working in Public: A Case Study of the
Oakland Projects, (1991–2001)—which examines a long-term social practice and pedagogical
project of public art, workshops, and media events—includes a section on Project Other Ways,
especially Kaprow’s relationship with his collaborator the educator Herbert Kohl. Citing their
differences—radical Berkeley school reformer versus artist/intellectual—Lacy explains that Kohl
did not find Kaprow “political enough.”
28
However, she makes a convincing argument that
Kaprow’s engagement with education reform was indeed radical in its own way, which I agree

27
Kathy O’Dell, “Allan Kaprow: The Artist as Educator” (master’s thesis, University of California, Berkeley, 1981).
28
Suzanne Lacy, Imperfect Art: Working in Public: A Case Study of the Oakland Projects (PhD diss. Robert Gordon
University Aberdeen, Scotland, 2014).

13
with completely. Lacy, who studied with Kaprow at CalArts, also provide insights into his
influence on her own pedagogy, which I discuss in chapter 3.
The anthropologist Judith Adler’s “Artists in Offices,” a dissertation and ethnographic
study of the early years of CalArts provided critical details regarding the school’s institutional
formation and the growing pains of the fledging art school.
29
Janet Sarbanes, who currently
teaches at CalArts, attempts to reconstruct some of its fragmented history and helped me to
better comprehend the aspirational and experimental educational environment of the early
years at CalArts when both Kaprow and Knowles taught there.
Judith Rodenbeck’s book Radical Prototypes: Allan Kaprow and the Invention of
Happenings provides a new reading of his Happenings that recuperates their criticality and
questions their status as optimistic communal events.
30
Although Rodenbeck’s deeply
theoretical approach and focus on the aesthetic and epistemological aspects of Happenings
are insightful, this reassessment is less applicable to Kaprow’s teaching in the late 1960s and
1970s, when he concentrated more on pedagogy and philosophy in an art school where
criticality resided more with the individual or the institution rather than in an overarching
social critique.
Allan Kaprow: Art as Life (2008), the publication for Kaprow’s major posthumous
exhibition—which traveled to the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and several

29
Judith Adler, Artists in Offices: An Ethnography of an Academic Art Scene (New Brunswick: Transaction Books,
1979), is based on her dissertation written when she also taught art and sociology at CalArts 1970–72. Janet
Sarbanes, “The Poiegg and Mickeymaushaus: Pedagogy and Spatial Practice at the California institute of the Arts”
in Art, Architecture, Pedagogy: Experiments in Learning, ed. Ken Ehrlich (Valencia: Viral.net, Center for Integrated
Media, California Institute of the Arts, 2010).
30
Judith Rodenbeck, Radical Prototypes: Allan Kaprow and the Invention of Happenings (Cambridge: MIT Press,
2011). This book is derived from her dissertation, “Crash: Happenings (as) the Black Box of Experience, 1958-1966
Allan Kaprow, John Cage, Jim Dine, Claes Oldenburg” (PhD diss., Columbia University, 2003).

14
European venues—is an important resource for this study, especially the illustrated and
annotated chronology by Annette Leddy, a former Getty archivist.
31
Two other exhibition
publications examine Kaprow’s experimental art practices and pedagogy at Rutgers: Off Limits:
Rutgers University and the Avant-garde, 1957–1963 (1999)
32
includes the previously
unpublished “Project in Multiple Dimensions” (1957–58), an education proposal by Kaprow,
Robert Watts, and George Brecht. Critical Mass: Happenings, Fluxus, Performance, Intermedia,
and Rutgers University, 1958–1972 (2003) includes an essay on “Project in Multiple
Dimensions,” which I will assert is a key document for understanding Kaprow’s later teaching
in both New Jersey and California.
33

In his biographical/chronological monograph Childsplay: The Art of Allan Kaprow (2004),
Jeff Kelley introduces Kaprow through Dewey’s pragmatism and through non-art subjects,
discovery, and play, all of which I find essential to the artist’s pedagogy. Kelley’s
comprehensive narrative includes many indispensable details and photographs of Project
Other Ways and CalArts events that have not been published elsewhere, and as a former
student, he also comments on his mentor’s teaching. The artist’s collection of writings, Essays
on the Blurring of Art and Life, essential to understanding the ontology of his Happenings, was
also edited by Kelley.
34
In the introduction Kelley comments that with the absence of

31
Eva Meyer-Hermann, Andrew Perchuk, and Stephanie Rosenthal, eds. Allan Kaprow - Arts as Life (Los Angeles:
Getty Research Institute, 2008). Organized by the Haus der Kunst and the Van Abbemuseum in 2007, its U.S. debut
at the Museum of Contemporary Art was from March 23–June 30, 2008.
32
Joan Marter, ed. Off Limits: Rutgers University and the Avant-Garde, 1957–1963 (Rutgers: Rutgers University
Press, 1999). On view from February 18 May 16, 1999 at the Newark Museum, Newark, New Jersey.
33
Geoffrey Hendricks, ed. Critical Mass: Happenings, Fluxus, Performance, Intermedia, and Rutgers University
1958-1972. (New Brunswick and London: Rutgers University Press, 2003). On view at the Mead Art Museum,
Amherst from February 1–June 1, 2003 and at Mason Gross School of the Arts, Rutgers, September 29–November
5, 2003.
34
Allan Kaprow, Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life, ed. Jeff Kelley (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of
California Press, 1993).

15
conventional works of art, Kaprow’s own texts are critical, as they functions as the “notes on
the margins of an experimental career,”
35
In spite of his laudatory tone and almost reverential
attitude toward Kaprow, Kelley’ comments offer some important insights into his role as a
teacher and the philosophical underpinnings of his pedagogy.

Knowles: Propositions into Pedagogy
I have had the good fortune to meet and interview Alison Knowles several times since
the early 1990s, and throughout the years she has generously sent me materials from her
personal archives. I have also reviewed materials related to Knowles in the Dick Higgins Papers
and the Jean Brown Papers at the Getty, but currently most of her original documents are still
in her personal possession. While Knowles’ work has been included in an ever-increasing
number of anthologies and exhibition publications, she has not published an autobiography or
a compilation of her expository writing. She has written a few articles about her work, given
several interviews, and published numerous artists’ book with scores and poetry. The latter
are the most significant primary sources and vehicles for understanding her intermedia work.
As of the writing of this dissertation, there is not a major monograph on Knowles.
However, Nicole L. Woods will be publishing a book based on her dissertation, “Performing
Chance: Alison Knowles, Fluxus, and the Enigmatic Work of Art.”
36
In this first major study of
the sole female founding member of Fluxus, Woods focuses on a group of key intermedia
works from 1962 to 1975 that use indeterminate structures to engage participatory

35
Ibid., x.
36
Nicole Lynn Woods, "Performing Chance: Alison Knowles, Fluxus, and the Enigmatic Work of Art, 1961-75" (PhD
diss., University of California, Irvine, 2010).

16
spectatorship, often with food and hospitality in public sites. Woods’s primary argument
centers on Knowles’s challenging of traditional notions of artistic labor, and she demonstrates
how her work, in and out of Fluxus, explores gender, the body, consumption, and domestic
subjects. This study, the most comprehensive to date on Knowles, includes thoughtful analysis
of the event scores, computer-generated poem, and installations she created while teaching in
California and has been an invaluable resource. I agree with Woods that Knowles’ emphasis on
domestic labor, female subjectivities and participation demand deeper analysis and merit
further attention might even be considered quite radical, but this did not translate into
political activism. While at CalArts, however, Knowles’ did not consider herself a feminist, and I
believe that the her performative and pedagogical experiments of this period are important
for their insistent focus on the potential of everyday experience as a source for sensory
learning. A recent master’s thesis, Lucia Fabio’s “Alison Knowles' Make a Salad and Identical
Lunch: Communal and Sensory Performance through Open Scores,”
37
examines Knowles’s
food-based scores and performances in terms of bodily consumption and the importance of
sensory perception to her work.
Perhaps the most inspirational source for this dissertation is Hannah Higgins’s book
Fluxus Experience. As the daughter of Dick Higgins and Knowles, Higgins has quite literally
experienced Fluxus her entire life and is part of the first generation of art historians to write
dissertations on the subject.
38
Fluxus Experience, based on her dissertation, has a closing

37
Lucia Fabio, “Alison Knowles' Make a Salad and Identical Lunch: Communal and Sensory Performance through
Open Scores,” (master’s thesis, University of Southern California, 2014).
38
Hannah Higgins, "Enversioning Fluxus: A Venture into Whose Fluxus Where and When" (PhD diss., University of
Chicago), 1994, published as Fluxus Experience (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2002).
Others include: Simon Anderson, “Re-Flux Action” (PhD diss., Royal Academy of Art, London, 1988) and Owen
Smith, "George Maciunas and a History of Fluxus; or, The Art Movement that Never Existed" (PhD diss., University

17
chapter titled “Teaching and Learning as Art Forms: Toward a Fluxus-Inspired Pedagogy.” In
this coda, Higgins discusses a range of “pedagogy”: teaching, learning styles, educational
theories, and philosophy in the work of Cage, Kaprow, Brecht, and, of course, Knowles. This
overview piqued my interest and definitely influenced my choice of this dissertation topic, as I
have expanded on some of the pedagogical ideas that Higgins introduces in her conclusion in
my own analysis and interpretation of Halprin, Kaprow, and Knowles.

Methodology and Contents
In his “The Web of Circumstance: Challenges Posed by the Biographical Question to
Contemporary Theory,” the literary theorist Sean Burke attempts to recuperate what he calls
the “vexed categories of biography and lived experience,” specifically in reference to authors:
It would be facile to say that we have just emerged from a century in which the cultural
appeal of biography has been matched only by the critical disrepute into which the
genre has fallen. Psychobiography itself is a twentieth-century innovation and achieved
a fragile, albeit lurid, respectability up until the 1950s, and scholarly biographies have
continued to command the attention of literary academics. Furthermore, to judge from
recent publications and conference papers, "biography" is once again a word and
concept that can be freely owned by scholars and theorists concerned to reinvestigate
the always vertiginous relationship between a life and a work. . . . With hindsight, this
renewed interest in the authorial life has been inevitable in that new contextualisms
have depended upon a biographical recourse that has failed to incorporate itself at a
methodological level.
39

Burke attributes the ambivalence about authorship and using biography to texts of the late
1960s such as Roland Barthes’s “Death of the Author” (1967) that questions the validity of the
author and argued against using the biography or intentions of the writer in interpreting texts

of Washington, 1991), later published as Fluxus: The History of an Attitude (San Diego: San Diego University Press,
1999).
39
Sean Burke, “The Web of Circumstance: Challenges Posed by the Biographical Question to Contemporary
Theory” (University of Southern Denmark: Institut for Litteratur, Kultur & Medier, Syddask Universitet, 2001).

18
in favor of empowering the reader.
40
In direct response to Barthes Michel Foucault’s “What Is
an Author?” (1968) rejected the death of the author” and viewed the “author function”
integral to the function of discourse.
41
While Burke writes specifically about literature, the use
of personal biography and lives of artists became equally suspect in art history in the 1960s.
42

Examining the artists’ own early lives and education is critical to my methodology in this
dissertation. Each of the artists had formative experiences and specific mentors during their
own schooling who are part of their educational or intellectual biography and whose methods
influenced their later pedagogical development. Additionally, given the overriding fact that
their practices center on the relationship between art and everyday life, it seems appropriate
to reference aspects of their own lived experience.
Following this introduction, in chapter 1 I begin with an overview of Halprin’s, Kaprow’s,
and Knowles’s own studies and some of their shared interests and mentors, including Cage
and Dewey. Next I delve into how they each developed their respective scoring methods for
event-based performances and the types of writings and publications they developed as part
of their practices. I briefly examine the historical roots of workshops and and different
definitions of this pedagogical format in contemporary performance. I provide background on
experimental art schools founded in the first half of the twentieth century, such as the
Bauhaus and Black Mountain College, which impacted postwar institutions such as CalArts. I
also discuss the resurgence of experimental education, both in K–12 public schools and

40
Roland Barthes, “Death of the Author,” ed. Brian O’Doherty and trans. Richard Howard Aspen no. 5-6 (New York:
Roaring Fork Press, 1967). The essay later appeared in Manteia no. 5 (1968) in French. and in an anthology of
Barthes's essays, Image-Music-Text ed. and trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977).
41
Michel Foucault, “What is an Author?,” ed. James D. Faubion, Aesthetics, Methods and Epistemology (New York:
The New Press, 1998): 205-222.
42
This can be attributed, in part, to a reaction against subjective, psychoanalytic, and existentialist methodologies
of the preceding decade that were replaced by the emergence of formalist criticism in 1960s.

19
colleges and universities, as an outgrowth of both government policies of the mid-1960s and
the rampant institutional upheaval and reforms of the later 1960s, particularly in California.
Each of the main chapters begins with the artist’s education and background, early
work, and formative mentors who were integral to their experimental practices, pedagogical
positions, and philosophical interests. Following this, I delve into their early work to analyze
how they developed their individual scoring systems and methodologies for event-based
performances and to articulate their engagement with ordinary movement or everyday
subjects through events, artists’ books, publications, or other discursive platforms. My primary
aim is to elucidate how Halprin, Kaprow, and Knowles extended inherently instructional,
informational score-based event structures into experimental workshops, classes, and courses.
In chapter 2, I trace the development of Halprin’s SFDW, looking at how she developed
her task-based improvisations, a collaborative workshop methodology, and an open scoring
system. I focus on Parades and Changes (1965), the first work in which she used chance
operations, and her incorporation of both workshop exercises and spontaneous improvisation
into her events. I discuss the Experiments in the Environment (1966–71), the cross-disciplinary
workshops that Halprin collaborated on with her husband, the landscape designer Lawrence
Halprin. This three-part series of events in urban and natural environments inspired their
creation of the RSVP Cycles, an overarching score and foundational framework for
collaboration and pedagogical process.
In chapter 3, after a thorough discussion of Kaprow’s hybrid roles as artist, teacher, and
writer, I explain how in the mid-1960s he became increasingly interested in experimental arts
education and progressively less involved with larger-scale Happenings. By the late 1960s this

20
led him to teaching in Project Other Ways in Berkeley and at the newly established California
Institute of the Arts (1971–74), where he could experiment with smaller-scale Happenings and
more intimate activities. I demonstrate how these events formed the core of his curriculum of
student-centered “learning through doing” using task-based activities and forms of labor to
encourage discovery, problem solving, and discourse. I trace the trajectory of his teaching as it
merged with his practice, which directly inspired him to make instructional Activity booklets
with scores for self-exploration and experiential learning that he used for the remainder of his
career.
In chapter 4, I concentrate on Alison Knowles, looking at how as a core member of
Fluxus she devised her own form of event scores called propositions, inviting participants to
engage in convivial gestures and sensory experience. When Kaprow invited Knowles to teach
at CalArts, she used her event scores to activate students to engage with her intermedia
installation project House of Dust (1967–71) and developed her own collaborative,
participatory workshop methodology, which has been a mainstay of her own practice for forty-
five years.
In chapter 5, I conclude by reiterating both the similarities and subtle differences
between the three artists’ events and educational endeavors in terms of experiments and
experience, multisensory perception and embodiment, labor and play, knowledge acquisition,
learning styles, and multiple intelligences. I will discuss how their practices and pedagogies of
the 1960s and 1970s sustained the artists throughout their careers: Halprin transitioned SFDW
into the Tamalpa Institute; Kaprow presented lectures, workshops, and Activities for
conferences, museums, and other institutions; and Knowles extended her workshops into

21
residencies in art schools and universities and staged events as part of exhibitions. Finally, I
posit how these experiments in education––that involve collaborative performance, direct
participation and social engagement––have become relevant in recent discourses in the so-
called contemporary education and also in pedagogical practices of artists in the 2000s.

22
CHAPTER 1
Background to the Artists and Experimental Education

Studies and Shared Interests
Halprin (b. 1920), Kaprow (b. 1927), and Knowles (b. 1933) are all part of the
generation that came of age as many colleges and universities were establishing fine arts
departments and the number of bachelor and master of fine arts programs increased
significantly.
43
While all three studied art, they each pursued other subjects in college and
graduate school. Halprin studied with the pioneering dance educator Margaret H’Doubler at
the University of Wisconsin, earning a degree in kinesthetics and also dance, a discipline that
at that time had only recently emerged from the physical education department. Kaprow
studied art, music, and philosophy at New York University and simultaneously attended the
Hans Hofmann School of Fine Arts. He originally planned to continue graduate studies in
philosophy at NYU but transferred to Columbia University to work with Meyer Schapiro on his
master’s in art history. Knowles first studied French, literature, and painting at Middlebury
College in Vermont but transferred to Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, where she worked with
Richard Lindner and Adolph Gottlieb and also took a special summer course at Syracuse
University with Josef Albers.
Following their formal training, Halprin, Kaprow, and Knowles each rejected aspects of
the prevailing artistic practices in their fields. Halprin rebelled against the hegemonic influence
of New York–centered modern dance, epitomized by Martha Graham’s choreography; she

43
Howard Singerman, Art Subjects: Making Artists in the American University (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University
of California Press, 1999), particularly chapter 1: “Writing Artists into Campuses,” is the first and best source
chronicling this history of the development of arts programs in American universities of the postwar era.

23
found it artificial, unemotional, and too narrative, which instigated her to forge in her own
direction through improvisation of task-based movement.
44
After studying with Hans Hofmann
and John Cage, Kaprow eschewed Abstract Expressionism and painting in general, which
precipitated the advent of Happenings and his early critical writing on this new form, followed
by more engaged, less spectacular events and Activities. Knowles would also reject Abstract
Expressionism and the monochromatic canvases she made in her classes with Adolph Gottlieb
and Josef Albers in favor of chance-oriented practices. This happened first in her painting and
then in her score-based Fluxus events that engaged everyday materials and sensory
perception.
Halprin, Kaprow, Watts, and Knowles shared significant interests, first and foremost,
John Cage. Halprin met Cage and his partner, the dancer/choreographer Merce Cunningham,
in 1940 in New York, and maintained a lifelong friendship with them even after she moved to
California in the mid-1940s. Halprin closely followed Cage’s work throughout the 1950s,
including his famous Untitled Event (1952) performed at Black Mountain College.
When the Fluxus composer La Monte Young studied with Karlheinz Stockhausen in
1959, the German composer introduced him to Cage’s work and suggested he meet him on his
return to California (where he was studying music at the University of California, Berkeley).
Cage recommended that Young contact Halprin, and she subsequently hired him as co–musical
director for her San Francisco Dancers’ Workshop in 1960. At this exact moment Young first

44
Anna Halprin, “Notes on Workshops,” Anna Halprin Papers, Series V: Education, Sub-series III: San Francisco
Dancers’ Workshop, Museum of Performance + Design, San Francisco. In these notes on SFDW Halprin states:
“First and foremost, the workshop was a place to replace the existing restrictive and dogmatic modern dance
classes in order to explore, experiment and discover new ideas.” This is just one of the many instances where she
articulated her conscious opposition to aspects of modern dance.

24
wrote his Cagean-inspired, language-based intermedia scores with instructions to perform
nonmusical events such “build a fire” or “release butterflies,” everyday activities consisting of
physical actions and sensory perceptions that both complemented and influenced Halprin’s
own practice.
45

Between 1956 and 1960 Cage invited artists, poets, and other composers he admired—
including Kaprow and future Fluxus artists George Brecht, Al Hansen, Dick Higgins, and Jackson
Mac Low—to his Composition class at the New School for Social Research. Cage’s
compositions, ranging from short, succinct events to full-length operas, along with his essays,
poems, lectures, and theoretical writings, provided the foundation of the New School course,
described as follows: “Experimental music, a course in musical composition with technological,
musicological, and philosophical aspects, open to those with or without previous training.
Whereas conventional theories of harmony, counterpoint, and musical form are based on the
pitch and frequency components of sound, this course offers problems and solutions in the
field of composition based on other components of sound: duration, timbre, amplitude, and
morphology; the course also encourages inventiveness.”
46

As Cage’s description indicates, the course combined technology, musicology, and
philosophy, striking a delicate balance between “conventional theory” and more “inventive”
experimental composition as he taught students about his concepts of “found sounds” and
indeterminacy. Cage’s 1957 axiom “Let sounds be themselves rather than vehicles of for man-

45
After moving to New York the next year, La Monte Young also organized the Chamber Street Series of concerts
at Yoko Ono’s loft, which featured the work of Henry Flynt, Jackson Mac Low, Philip Corner, and Toshi Ichiyanagi,
all later affiliated with Fluxus.
46
John Cage, “Experimental Music” course description, New School Catalog Volume 14, no. 1. (New York, 1956).

25
made theories or expressions of human sentiment,”
47
derived from the Zen philosophy of
noninvolvement he first learned from D. T. Suzuki at Columbia in 1947, guided his
compositions and his course assignments. Because Cage’s compositions utilized everyday
“found sounds” —the auditory equivalent of the Duchamp’s readymade—these aleatory,
indeterminate compositions critiqued Western rationality and “freed the pure materiality of
sound and emancipated noise from its exclusion from the realm of music.”
48

Cage’s most influential lessons perhaps revolved around his indeterminate musical
procedures and method of “chance operations,” first published in his Music of Changes (1951),
which used charts from the I Ching, or Book of Changes, that resemble serial music
compositions by Arnold Schoenberg, with whom he studied in California in the 1930s.
49
In
Cage’s composition course, Kaprow and the other students employed chance operations to
generate compositions without their own will, intent, or intervention to achieve a balance
between the rational and the irrational, control and randomness. Cage did not use standard
musical instruments or notation; instead he made visual scores with graphic notations, and
this also became an important part of his curriculum. Students produced their own graphic
scores with text-based instructions, combining ordinary sound, everyday objects, and simple
actions into live intermedia events. Higgins elaborated on Cage’s ideas in his “Statement on

47
John Cage, Experimental Music a lecture to the convention of the Music Teachers National Association in Chicago
in the winter of 1957, later printed in the brochure accompanying George Avakian’s recording of his twenty-five-
year retrospective concert at Town Hall, New York, in 1958.
48
Andreas Huyssens, In the Spirit of Fluxus, eds. Elizabeth Armstrong and Joan Rothfuss (Minneapolis: Walker Art
Center, 1993), 148.
49
See Marc G. Jensen, “John Cage, Chance Operations and the Chaos Game,” The Musical Times Volume 150, no.
1907 (Summer 2009): 97-102 for a discussion of Western and Eastern influences on Cage and their relationship to
chaos theory. http://www.jstor.org/stable/25597623 (accessed October 2, 2015).

26
Intermedia” (1966), which emphasizes the dialectic among media, dissolving strict boundaries
so that they become interdependent and indistinguishable from one another.
50

Having studied with Cage in 1957–58, Kaprow was influenced by his scoring, chance
operations, Zen Buddhist influences, and intermedia sensibility, and this prompted his
invention of Happenings shortly after the class. Other Cage students exposed to intermedia
and indeterminate scores for actions incorporating the body and everyday objects continued
their own explorations. Along with La Monte Young, George Brecht became an important
proponent of very abbreviated scores—some consisting of just a word or two—instructions for
everyday actions or proposed hypothetical situations that may or may not be physically
possible to enact.
Knowles had heard about Cage when she was still in school studying painting, and she
learned more through “osmosis” in constant conversations with her husband, Dick Higgins,
when he took the course.
51
Cage would continue to be a critical influence not only for Knowles
and Higgins but also for the other international intermedia artists who would embark on a
series of concerts in Europe in 1962 organized under the aegis of George Maciunas and would
form the loose affiliation of artists that became known as Fluxus. Subsequently Knowles
collaborated with Cage on the book Notations (1969), issued through Higgins’s independent

50
Dick Higgins, “Statement on Intermedia,” Something Else Press Newsletter, 1-2 (1966). In my interview with
Higgins in Santa Monica in July 1994, he told me how Samuel Taylor Coleridge first used the term intermedium in
his notebooks in 1814 to describe how he combined writing, poetry, and drawing, often while listening to music.
Higgins also cites this in Modernism since Postmodernism: Essays on Intermedia (San Diego: San Diego State
University Press, 1997): 224.
51
Knowles expressed her regrets at not joining Cage’s class in Judith Olch Richards, Oral history interview with
Alison Knowles, 2010 June 1-2, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, unpaginated.
http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-alison-knowles-15822 (accessed August 27,
2015).

27
avant-garde publishing venture, Something Else Press (one of the most important avant-garde
presses in the 1960s and early 1970s).
52

In addition to their respective exposure to the aesthetics and philosophy of John Cage,
Halprin, Kaprow, and Knowles, were influenced, either directly or indirectly, by the American
pragmatist philosopher and education theorist John Dewey. In his major publication on
aesthetics, Art and Experience (1934), Dewey posited a rethinking of the primacy of the
material and expressive qualities of art objects to further consider both the process and the
experience of reception.
Deweyan aesthetics propose a relationship between the experience of works of art and
everyday activities and events, arguing that in order to understand the aesthetic, one must
begin with an encounter with the everyday world: “An experience is a product, one might
almost say by-product, of continuous and cumulative interaction of an organic self with the
world. There is no other foundation upon which esthetic theory and criticism can build.”
53
This
emphasis on the personal experience of the everyday world to facilitate an understanding of
aesthetics closely parallels the art-meets-life agenda of all three of the artists in this study.
Dewey’s subsequent and equally influential text Experience and Education (1938)
espouses the primary concepts of his non-authoritarian, student-centered form of progressive
learning. A few aspects of experiential learning that Dewey discusses in his second chapter,
“The Need of a Theory of Experience,” are particularly relevant to event-based performance:
experimentation; active, non-static, direct engagement with the outside environment; and

52
Something Else Press became the premiere avant-garde press from 1963 until it closed in 1974. For Notations,
the second Something Else Press book, Cage and Knowles edited a collection of 269 graphical scores for music
compositions, using I Ching to determine which composers would write about their work and the exact length of
their entries.
53
John Dewey, Art as Experience, 220.11th ed. (New York: Putnam, 1958), 220.

28
events that occur in a specific progression, or what he called the “experiential continuum.”
54

These precepts greatly influenced advocates of experimental education and experiential
learning who innovated for “open education” in the 1960s.
Dewey experimented with his concept of education as “the laboratory in which
philosophical distinctions become concrete and are tested”
55
at the University of Chicago,
where he founded the University Elementary School near the campus in Hyde Park in 1896.
When University of Chicago incorporated the Chicago Institute, a private normal school headed
by Francis W. Parker, Dewey’s school aptly became referred to as the “Laboratory School.”
56

Both Halprin and Kaprow attended experimental elementary schools founded by
Dewey’s students and studied curricula steeped in his philosophical and pedagogical ideas.
Halprin attended an elementary school in the Chicago suburb of Winnetka, a district that
participated in an educational experiment developed by Carleton Washburne, who was
inspired by Dewey’s Laboratory School. The so-called Winnetka Plan attempted to expand
educational curricula in the arts to foster emotional and social development. Kaprow briefly
attended the progressive Walden School in New York City, founded by Margaret Naumburg,
who had studied at Columbia, and he rediscovered Dewey in his own studies of pragmatist
philosophy as an undergraduate at New York University. Halprin and Kaprow were exposed to
Dewey’s progressive education at any early age, and his aesthetic philosophy influenced them

54
Dewey, Education and Experience, 19.
55
John Dewey, Democracy and Education: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Education (New York: Macmillan
Company, 1916; reprinted by Simon and Schuster, 1997), 339.
56
D.C. Phillips, ed. Encyclopedia of Educational Theory and Philosophy, volume 2 (Thousand Oaks: Sage
Publications, 2014), 455-458. Today the “Lab Schools” consists of three separate buildings adjacent to the
University of Chicago campus.

29
later in life. While Knowles never formally studied Dewey, his ideas about art, experience, and
everyday life clearly shaped her artistic and teaching practices.

Scores, Writing, and Publications
Halprin, Kaprow, and Knowles would each develop their own specific scoring methods
to enact events. No matter what form these scores took, their intrinsically instructional
language served as the catalyst for events that link a performative action and some kind of
learning experience. As a choreographer, Halprin created open visual scores involving
kinesthetic movement that would result in embodied experience. Initially she wrote these on
gridded charts but switched to outlining chance procedures on index cards just prior to events
to facilitate the most spontaneous improvisations from dancers, students, and other
participants.
Kaprow’s scores varied from the long narratives for complex durational Happenings to
shorter more poetic stanzas, and finally, to simple instructions for task-based events. His
scores would eventually evolve into even more reductive texts and photographic illustrations
in his instructional Activity booklets, created for more intimate do-it-yourself explorations
performed by individuals, pairs, or small groups.
Knowles’s abbreviated event scores, which she called “propositions” early in her Fluxus
career, employ a minimum of words to invite an incipient interaction—often an action
between a participant and objects that achieves a maximum engagement with the senses and
the body. Knowles used her scores not only to elicit performance events but also in other

30
forms of production, including her artist’s books, prints, sculptures, and a computerized poem,
a quatrain of which served as the score for the House of Dust.
57

In addition to writing scores, Halprin, Kaprow, and Knowles also all wrote other kinds of
texts, important primary sources that further illuminate specific events or their artistic and
pedagogic intent. From an early stage of her career, Halprin documented her pedagogical
ideas and her workshop methodology, initially in a magazine she started called Impulse,
followed by numerous SFDW brochures and later by her autobiography.
58
With her husband,
Lawrence, Halprin coauthored the RSVP Cycles, a score or rubric for collaboration in workshops
and a system for evaluating the resulting events.
59

While still an art history student at Columbia, Kaprow began producing critical writings
with his landmark article “The Legacy of Jackson Pollock,” which discussed the demise of easel
painting and fervently called for artists to engage with the everyday life in radical new forms
such as his environments and Happenings.
60
He continued to write about Happenings and
published Assemblages, Happenings and Environment (1966), a hybrid of an artist’s book and
an encyclopedia, which served as the most comprehensive source on this subject for
decades.
61
Kaprow’s proposals for experimental programs in art schools, such as the “Project

57
Considered as one of the first computerized poems, the process for composing this score and construction of the
The House of Dust sculptural installation will be discussed later in chapter 4.
58
Anna Halprin, Moving Through Life: Five Decades of Transformational Dance, ed. Rachel Kaplan. (Middletown:
Wesleyan University Press, 1995).
59
Lawrence Halprin, The RSVP Cycles: Creative Processes in the Human Environment (New York: Braziller, 1970).
Although Lawrence is listed as the only author of the book of drawings, it is clear from handwritten notes in the
Anna Halprin Papers that she was a co-creator of The RSVP Cycles. Jim Burns, Lawrence’s architect colleague, also
made contributions to the book.
60
Allan Kaprow, “The Legacy of Jackson Pollock,” Art News Volume 57, no. 6. (October 1958): 24–26.
61
Allan Kaprow, Assemblage, Environments & Happenings (New York: Harry Abrams, 1966).

31
in Multiple Dimensions,” and Project Other Ways are the foundations for using Happenings
and events in his teaching at CalArts and later at the University of California, San Diego.
Kaprow’s three-part series of articles in Art News, “The Education of the Un-Artist”
(1971–74), which he started in 1969, reveals his evolving belief that non-art activities and
everyday life are at the core of solutions not only for education and experimental art but also
for artists.
62
The first article begins the series of propositions for how un-artists can shift their
language and practices from art to non-art activities; encourages them to focus on play rather
than work, and concludes with models for experimental arts by artists of his generation
derived less from art historical precedents and more from everyday life. Coinciding with
Project Other Ways in Berkeley and continued during his tenure at CalArts, this series of
articles functions as a kind of blueprint for his practice and pedagogy.
Unlike Halprin and Kaprow, Knowles is not predisposed to expository or critical writing:
her scores read more like poetry or Zen koans. Her artists’ publications take many inventive
forms, from small-scale objects such as her Fluxus multiples (for example, Bean Rolls, which
consisted of scores in a tin can) to her illustrated Journal of the Identical Lunch to more
monumental endeavors like her installation Big Book. Together these different texts function
as a spine of her practice, a continuum of writings about her works that are perceptual and
phenomenological.
Including artists’ statements, critical writings, journal articles, and proposals for
educational programs and pedagogical discourses, these texts further elucidate Halprin’s,

62
Allan Kaprow, “The Education of the Un-Artist, Part I,” Art News Volume 69, no. 10. (February 1971): 28–31; and
“The Education of the Un-Artist, Part II,” Art News Volume 71, no. 3 (May 1972): 34–39 and “The Education of the
Un-Artist, Part III,” Art in America Volume 62 , no. 1 (January-February 1974): 85-89.

32
Kaprow’s, and Knowles’s ideas about their respective practices in relationship to their
teaching. The artists’ writings and publications are particularly pertinent to this topic and will
be discussed in greater detail throughout this dissertation.

Workshop Methodology
Halprin, Kaprow, and Knowles all started to teach during very particular moments in
their careers. Even before he finalized his master’s thesis at Columbia, Kaprow became an
assistant professor of art history at Rutgers University in 1957 and then taught at the State
University of New York at Stony Brook until 1969, when he moved to California to work at
CalArts as an associate dean and professor. Conversely, Halprin and Knowles did not have
advanced degrees, but each developed her own unique workshops for teaching with event-
based performances. When she moved to California, Halprin founded her own school, then
established SFDW, while Knowles, who had not taught formally until she went to CalArts, used
this opportunity to devise her own workshop methodology. Remarkably, both women are still
using these pedagogical formats in their work today.
63

Gravitating toward more open, experimental programs and schools or forming their
own alternatives, Halprin, Knowles, and Kaprow implemented more adventurous,
experimental teaching that mirrored the departure from medium-specific, strictly discipline-
based divisions occurring in institutional contexts, especially the academy. More specifically,

63
It is important to note the difference between Kaprow, who spent his entire adult life in academia as a tenured
professor in art schools and universities, and Halprin and Knowles, who worked primarily outside of institutions.
Although each worked with their respective partners, Lawrence Halprin and Dick Higgins, who did support them,
they had to negotiate the difficult balance between their art careers, domestic responsibilities, and family life
because of the gender role stereotypes that still existed in the late 1950s and into the 1960s.

33
they created experimental curricula using event-based workshops, a pedagogical format that
existed in both performance and experimental arts education.
The primary and most literal definition of a workshop is a space, atelier, or studio where
a particular type of labor is performed and production occurs, artistic or otherwise. This type
of workshop has its historical roots within the medieval guild system, in which associations of
artisans and merchants taught production and regulated the standards for the labor and the
sale of goods. Students and scholars—consumers and producers of knowledge rather than
goods—also formed their own guilds, which precipitated the formation of some of the earliest
universities in Europe.
64

During the early Renaissance the concept of the workshop became synonymous with
artist-apprentices who trained in a particular masters’ studios and assisted them with
production. While this tradition prevailed for centuries, workshops in major European cities
waned as more ambitious artists preferred not to be tied to a single geographic location or
encumbered by a master so that they could travel to seek out their own patrons.
65
These
guilds and workshops also eventually evolved into the first state-sponsored academies.
66

The term workshop is also used to describe a modern pedagogical format, most often
within formal institutions but also in informal educational environments. In this context a

64
Hastings Rashdall, The Universities of Europe in the Middle Ages, Volume 1: Salerno, Bologna and Paris (Oxford:
Oxford University Clarendon Press, 1895/1951), 150, cites Bologna University, founded in 1088, as a “University of
Guilds of students.” Additionally, many European cities created guilds under the name of St. Luke, the patron saint
of artists, such as the Académie de Saint Luc in Paris, founded 1391, while the Accademia di San Luca in Rome was
formed in 1577 with the explicit purpose to elevate architects, sculptors, and painters above “mere” craftsmen,
indicating the hierarchy existed between the fine arts and more utilitarian crafts.
65
Louis Waldman, “Artists and the Workshop in 16
th
Century Florence: A Complicated Relationship,” lecture at the
Getty Center, August 16, 2015. http://www.getty.edu/visit/cal/events/ev_559.html (accessed December 26, 2015)
66
The first Académie de peinture et sculpture was founded in 1648 by Cardinal Mazarin, and those in other
disciplines proliferated during the seventeenth century.

34
workshop is a designated gathering or a class that meets regularly, in which participants
engage in focused, intensive activity related to a specific medium or practice, subject, or area
of inquiry. This type of workshop, often with a limited number of students to facilitate
discourse and participatory learning in group interactions, is the kind that formed the curricula
of several experimental art schools in the twentieth century.
The final, most contemporary definition of workshops derives from the transitive verb
“to workshop”: to develop ideas or materials for a work-in-progress (“workshopping”) or
engage in a critical discussion before its formal presentation. This type of process-oriented
workshop often revolves around a particular medium, set of practices, or teaching
methodology. A salient example of this type are the workshops devoted specifically to
performance that started to proliferate in avant-garde theater the late 1950s and early 1960s.
In a special edition of TDR / The Drama Review, Ron Argelander discusses avant-garde
experimental theater workshops:
As a model, then, the workshop is generally understood in avant-garde theater as it was
years ago, when it only referred to small handcraft workshops. Implicit in this early
definition of the workshop was that it was a place where one experimented with
materials and shared construction of ideas with close friends and family. Ultimately, it
was a closed system in which craft was taught by trial and error in a special workspace
designated for that purpose. The skills taught were individualistic and the teaching
personal and practical. Historically, the theater workshop was organized within a loosely
structured performing group; the workshop itself functioned in two basic capacities:
first and foremost, as a way to get away from dogmatic acting classes in order to explore
new ideas, and second, as a practical way to make a production that could reflect the
personal values of the group, rather than standard theatrical values of commercial
theatre.
67

67
Ron Argelander, “Performance Workshops: Three Types,” TDR: The Drama Review Volume 22, no. 4. (December
1978): 4.

35
Argelander compares theater workshops to historical guilds or “small handcraft shops”
as intimate sites of experimentation with materials and ideas. Although closed systems, they
became open work spaces for “trial and error” and focused on personalized teaching of
individual skills. He also cites how the “loose performing group” avoids the status quo and
explores personal rather than commercial values. While he is writing about avant-garde
theatre workshops, one can easily draw parallels to Halprin’s SFDW studio or Kaprow’s and
Knowles’s courses as sites for a loosely assembled group in an intimate space for
experimentation; individualized, nondogmatic teaching; and making performances in a
noncommercial context.
The thrust of Argelander’s article is that avant-garde performance workshops each had
a distinctive style, emphasis, and purpose, which he codifies into three different typologies:
skill-based workshops that originate with the historical models described above, production-
oriented workshops to create performances, and those focused on the processes of self-
exploration.
68
He also notes that the “teaching workshop” emerged as separate entity that
combined skills and self-exploration: rather than the acting class, workshops became the
primary way of learning skills or exchanging ideas with the genre.
69

These noncommercial, independent avant-garde theater workshops evaded the
commercial theater system, just as artists making events, happenings, and other intermedia
performances often worked outside traditional art galleries and museums and formulated
their own teaching methods in studios, classrooms, and nontraditional sites. While Halprin’s,
Kaprow’s, and Knowles’s courses do not necessarily fit neatly into Argelander’s three discrete

68
Ibid., 8.
69
Ibid., 5 -6.

36
categories, they are definitely “teaching workshops” in which each artist developed individual
pedagogical formats that combine, or complicate, the concepts of skills, production, and self-
exploration.
Halprin’s SFDW had existed for almost twenty years before Argelander’s article. Her
early teaching there focused on a clear understanding of task-based improvisation, but she
rejected the insistence that modern dance required particular movements and an inflexible
skill set. The scoring methodology that she developed and taught in the early to mid-1960s
resulted in the production of live events; however, their improvised, chance-oriented
spontaneity eliminated any prior understanding of what a performance might look like. Finally,
beginning in the 1970s Halprin’s workshops became large-scale, community-based
collaborative events focused on self-exploration and specific issues, a format that continues
today.
While Kaprow’s large-scale Happenings of the late 1950s first occurred within the
contexts of galleries or quasi-public spaces, in the later 1960s he started to produce smaller
events with specific groups—often introducing college and university students to this new
form. As the 1960s progressed and Kaprow became more interested in how Happenings could
be deployed in experimental educational programs, they were scaled back to be more
manageable in classroom contexts. His class workshops gradually developed into his Activities,
“micro-events” in which participants engaged in close observation or charted self-exploration
in very small groups or individually. Likewise, while at CalArts, Knowles preferred to engage
more intimate groups of students, whether on field trips or on campus within the House of
Dust. Ultimately, Halprin, Kaprow, and Knowles accessed each typology as needed: the

37
workshop as atelier, whether a studio, a classroom, or a nontraditional, site-specific space; the
idea of “workshopping” as a means to a final artistic production that may or may not
eventually be performed publicly; and the workshop as a format for experiential learning and
different types of exploration.

Experiments in Art Schools
In their pedagogy, Halprin, Kaprow, and Knowles carried on the legacy of experimental
art schools such as the Bauhaus and Black Mountain College, which served a models for
CalArts. Their teaching also reflected ideas about experimental education and school reform
that flourished in the 1960s. Founded in 1919 as one of the first schools devoted specifically to
art and design, the Bauhaus revolutionized art education with its effort to mend the divide
between art and production. To accomplish this, its first director, Walter Gropius, hired a
faculty of artists, architects, designers, and craftsmen and created a two-part curriculum. First,
the Vorkurs, or foundation course, taught students the basics of visual design, formal
principles of abstraction, and how to understanding materials. No longer working from models
or making academic life drawings, they engaged with subjects and materials grounded in the
real world. Only after completing the foundation course could students matriculate to the next
step: studies in Bauhaus workshops, each headed by a master craftsman and an artist,
encompassing craft, design, and fine arts disciplines.
70
With a modernist, utopian agenda
aimed to develop exemplary designs to improve human society in the future, the Bauhaus

70
Bauhaus workshops included ceramics, weaving, carpentry, metal, graphics, printing and advertising,
photography, glass, wall painting, stone, wood, and theater.

38
functioned as a school to train future designers, and as such it became a site for production,
problem solving, and both aesthetic and social discourse.
For this study, the Bauhaus workshop model is most relevant to Halprin: she moved to
Boston to join her husband, Lawrence, when he was studying with Gropius at Harvard. Gropius
allowed her to audit his design seminar, and in exchange she taught dance workshops to
architecture and design students. In his seminar she learned about the Bauhaus methodology
and curriculum, and she would later apply these ideas to her own workshop. For instance,
since Halprin often worked with students who did not have dance backgrounds, she would
engage them in a kind of foundation course of ordinary movement before they could proceed
to more rigorous improvisations. She also appreciated the Bauhaus methodology of striking a
balance between teaching fundamentals and experimentation.
71
This resonated with her
approach to choreography, combining the fundamentals of kinesthetics and body mechanics
with more experimental free-form improvisation.
The Bauhaus inspired the most significant educational experiment in mid-twentieth
century, Black Mountain College, which opened in 1933, the very year the German school
closed. When Josef Albers and his wife, Anni, who both taught at the Bauhaus, became exiles
from Nazi Germany, they came to Black Mountain College. As Eve Diaz discusses in her
introduction to The Experimenters, Albers insisted on the idea that “art is not an object, it is an
experience.”
72
He carried this belief into his classroom, where he emphasized formal
arrangements and underlying structures in “a laboratory-like educational environment that

71
Kathleen James Chakraborty, “Introduction,” Kathleen James Chakraborty, ed. Bauhaus Culture: From Weimar to
Cold War (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), xiv.
72
Josef Albers, “Seeing Art,” Josef Albers Yale Papers, MS 32, Box 25, Folder 249.

39
promoted forms of experimentation and learning in action that could dynamically change
routines of seeing.”
73

This language privileging experience over materiality and laboratory-like
experimentation is directly analogous to that of John Dewey’s pragmatist educational
philosophy: Dewey’s theories on arts training, student-centered learning, and experimentation
influenced Black Mountain’s pedagogy, and he became an adviser to the school. As Diaz also
discusses, even though it was not specifically an art school, artistic experimentation was the
key theme of Black Mountain College. As a result, administrators such as the poet Charles
Olson insisted on hiring “working artists” who were at the forefront experimenting with new
forms.
74
Students determined a significant amount of the curriculum themselves: a student
could propose a course of study to the teachers, find a teacher suitable for that proposal, and
then create a course similar to an independent study.
As Diaz notes, “Whether in the context of education, community, visual art or music,
many aspirations became attached to experimental practices: collaboration and
interdisciplinary, counter-cultural ambitions, artistic avant-gardism, cultural improvement and
political progressiveness.”
75
All of these aspirations toward “experimentation,” as well as the
nonhierarchical faculty-student relationships, recall the language used at the new California
institute of the Arts when Kaprow and Knowles taught there during its formative years. CalArts

73
Eve Diaz, The Experimenters: Chance and Design at Black Mountain College (Chicago and London: University of
Chicago Press, 2015), 1. Experimentation is also the single thread that Diaz pulls throughout her study, which
focuses on three exemplars: Josef Albers, John Cage and Buckminster Fuller.
74
Anca Cristofovici and Barbara Montefalcone, eds. The Art of Collaboration: Poets, Artists, Books (Houston:
Cuneiform Press, 2015), 64.
75
Diaz, 3.

40
referred to itself as a “community of the arts,” faculty called students “collaborators,”
76
and
teachers also served as ”mentors” for independent studies. As will be discussed in later
chapters, CalArts quite consciously referenced the lineage of both the Bauhaus and Black
Mountain in its literature.
Cage’s famous Untitled Event (1952) Black Mountain is arguably the first intermedia
Happening and as such, it became a touchstone for artists like Halprin, Kaprow and Knowles.
Consisting of time scripts for unrelated activities in dance, music, film and slides, phonographic
records, poetry readings, a lecture, and a piano, the event was performed by Cage, Merce
Cunningham, Charles Olson, the visual artists Robert Rauschenberg and M. C. Richards, and
the composer/pianist David Tudor. Although titled Theater Piece No. 1: Solos in Song Books
and Dialogue: Variations on Small-Group Simultaneities) none of these disparate
“simultaneities” could be perceived together, and Cage cryptically commented that it
represented “the centricity with each event and its non-dependence on other events.”
77

Recollections of the participants and spectators vary considerably, but this event is also
significant to this study as it took place with the context of an experimental art school.
78

As the 1960s progressed into the 1970s, there were many attempts to reprogram
higher education from a top-down didactic experience into a reciprocal exchange
of ideas in which teachers and students might meet in the same communal or
collaborative space that was seen as a corrective to ossified hierarchical structures.
No venue was more shaped by this ethos than the newly established CalArts.
79

76
CalArts Admission Bulletin, 1969-70, Series 12.1, CalArts Publications 1963-87, CalArts Archive, California
Institute of the Arts, Valencia, CA.
77
Diaz, 7.
78
Michael Kirby and Richard Schechner. Interview with John Cage, Happenings and Other Acts, ed. Mariellen
Sanford (London and New York: Routledge, 1995), 51-71. For new scholarship on Black Mountain College, see
Helen Molesworth, Leap Before You Look, Black Mountain College 1933-1957 (New Haven: Yale University Press,
2015).
79
Andrew Blauvelt, “The Barricade and the Dance Floor: Aesthetic Radicalism and the Counterculture,” in Hippie
Modernism: The Struggle for Utopia, ed. Andrew Blauvelt (Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 2015), 54.

41

Founded to continue the educational ethos of experimental art schools like the Bauhaus
and Black Mountain, CalArts was established in 1968, funded by the estate of Walt Disney.
80

Conceived by the entertainment magnate as a state of the art institute for all disciplines,
pedagogically, CalArts fulfilled Disney’s vision of a holistic arts environment with schools of art,
music, theater, dance, film and video, and critical studies. Aimed to create “interdisciplinary
experiences and to foster an interaction of visual experience, performing arts and humanities”
81

it became a highly experimental, democratic, communal and collaborative environment that
earned the moniker “Mickeymaushaus.”
82

While it can be argued that CalArts did become the quintessential experimental art
school, Disney would have been surprised by the faculty, steeped in the most challenging,
avant-garde practices, and the students, immersed in counterculture ideas with few interested
in commercial art. After Disney’s death, his conservative heirs did not approve of the campus’
highly experimental curriculum, alternative lifestyles, and radical politics
83
and in spite of this,
CalArts became a place of “high expectation and unfettered experimentation.”
84

Dr. Robert Corrigan, a former art dean at NYU, became CalArts’ first president in 1968
and hired prominent individuals such as Maurice Stein, an urban sociologist from Brandeis

80
First incorporated in 1961, CalArts resulted from the merger between the Chouinard Art Institute (1921) and Los
Angeles Conservatory of Music (1883) The temporary campus at Villa Cabrini Catholic Girl's School in Burbank was
established in 1970, and the permanent facility opened in Valencia in 1971.
81
James Real, "It Was Disney's Dream," Change, January–February 1971, 24, and "Disney's Dream School,"
Newsweek magazine, November 8, 1971, 67. Both articles use the phrase "dream school.”
82
Janet Sarbanes, “The Poiegg and Mickeymaushaus: Pedagogy and Spatial Politics at the California Institute of
the Arts,” in Art, Architecture, Pedagogy: Experiments in Learning, ed. Ken Ehrlich (Valencia: Viral.net, Center for
Integrated Media, California Institute of the Arts, 2007), 11.
83
Problems with the Disney heirs were well-documented in the previously cited popular press and also in Judith
Adler’s previously cited scholarly study, Artists in Offices.
84
Jeff Kelley, Childsplay: The Art of Allan Kaprow (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2004),
147.

42
University, as Dean of Critical Studies; Herbert Blau of Lincoln Center Repertory Company as
Dean of Theater; and painter Paul Brach as Dean of the School of Art. These deans hired now
well established artists such as Kaprow, John Baldessari, and Nam June Paik; composers Mel
Powell and Morton Subotnick; sitarist Ravi Shankar; ethnomusicologist Nicholas England;
designers Peter and Sheila DeBretteville; director Alexander Mackendrick; media theorist Gene
Youngblood; experimental filmmaker Pat O'Neill; and animation artist Jules Engel.
85

In his statement upon accepting the CalArts presidency, Corrigan set the tone for the
discovery-based, experimental and contemporary focus of the new institute:
I have often described that artist as the seismograph of his age. He is the rabbit in the
submarine or the canary in the coal mine. And what he creates is an act of discovery, an
act of discovery which simultaneously reveals and reflects the reality of the present
moment. But on this occasion I should like to describe him somewhat differently. I
want to think of the artist as the maker of maps. Whether we talk about Watts or the
Watusi, Methedrine or the moon, our everyday experience underscores the fact that we
are constantly moving into uncharted areas of experience which are as difficult for us to
travel as the frontier wilderness was for our forefathers…The artist is an explorer, and
through his explorations, he brings us in touch with the naked landscape.
86

Corrigan’s ideas around “acts of discovery” that “reveal and reflect the present” and artists as
“makers of maps” moving “uncharted territories” may sound overly idealistic or even trite
today; however, they explain his hiring of leading avant-garde contemporary artists and
thinkers. His call for discovery-based explorations that “bring us in touch with the naked
landscape” quite literally describes Kaprow’s Happenings and Alison Knowles’ events for
students to mine, map, and learn from everyday experiences discussed in the next chapters.

85
“California Institute of the Arts: History,” CalArts website https://calarts.edu/about/history (accessed January
12, 2016).
86
Robert W. Corrigan, “Statement upon Acceptance of the Presidency of CalArts,” California Institute of the Arts:
Prologue to a Community Arts in Society, guest edited by Sheila de Bretteville, Barry Hyams, and Marianne
Partridge, Vol. 7, no. 3 (Fall–Winter 1970). Unpaginated.

43
Experimental Education
In addition to experimental arts education, by the mid-1960s efforts to improve schools
at all levels occurred throughout the United States. In conjunction with Lyndon Johnson’s
Great Society and the “war on poverty” declared in 1964, the government sponsored many
new social and education programs, including the Civil Rights Act, the Economic Opportunity
Act, and the Elementary and Secondary School Act to provide additional major funding for
public schools.
As the historian Arthur Marwick discusses in his book The Sixties, the year 1964 became
a watershed moment for education reform with the publication of several books that criticized
the authoritarian and unimaginative nature of American education.
87
Among these he cites
Paul Goodman’s Compulsory Miseducation (1964), a biting critique of formal education in
which the author argues that misguided and insincere social values impose an education
system that is class-based and detrimental to students. Goodman suggests alternatives,
including closing traditional schools and replacing them with experiential apprenticeships and
travel programs.
88
John Holt’s How Children Fail (1964) discusses how children are bored and
feel uninspired in the classroom, are fearful of grading and testing, and do not trust authority,
and he advocates education reform. Marwick intimates that these two books may have
impacted the passage of the Elementary and Secondary School Act. Additionally, he cites 36
Children (1967), a book in which Herbert Kohl, a well-known proponent of open education,

87
Arthur Marwick, The Sixties: Cultural Revolution in Britain, France, Italy and the United States, c. 1958-c. 1974
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 502-503.
88
Ivan Ilich, Deschooling Society (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), xix. In discussing his theory of “de-schooling”
Ilich goes even further than most advocates of progressive education, stating, “universal education through
schooling is not feasible and would be no more feasible if it were attempted by means of alternative institutions
built on the style of present schools.”

44
discusses his progressive education experiment in Harlem. Kohl would apply his experiences to
Project Other Ways in Berkeley, his collaboration with Kaprow, supported through a Carnegie
grant, to be discussed at length in chapter 3.
In 1967 the British government finished a multiyear assessment of the education system
called the Plowden Report, which evaluated the schools quite critically as “too traditional; no
changes in the past decade, fragmented knowledge; creative work very limited, too much time
on teaching, few questions for children, too many exercises, too many rules, too many
punishments, and concentration.”
89
The report also called for schools to counteract these
problems through child-centered learning and “open education.”
As a type of experimental education, “open education” derives from the progressive
theories of John Dewey and the educational psychologist Jean Piaget, in which students are
encouraged to exercise their own agency and have more opportunities for direct, hands-on,
and collaborative learning. When the American journalist Joseph Featherstone visited England
and wrote about the success of this British school reform in the New Republic, open education
became better known in the United States. As Marwick notes, within a few years twenty study
teams went to England to learn about this new methodology, which was already well known to
Halprin and Kaprow, who attended progressive schools and would later work in experimental
education contexts.
90

The same wave of experimental education that occurred at the secondary level also
took root in California colleges and universities. In 1960 the Regents of the University of

89
Marwick, 499. As Marwick notes, Children and their Primary Schools (1967), the official name of the report,
became known as the Plowden Report because it was published the English Central Advisory Council for Education,
chaired by Lady Bridget Plowden.
90
Ibid., 503.

45
California drafted the California Master Plan for Higher Education, which would provide low-
cost college options for every high school graduate in the state. The three-tiered system
consisted of two-year community colleges open to all applicants, four-year state colleges for
the top third of high school classes, and six University of California campuses for those ranked
in the top eighth of their graduating class. Several of the public universities implemented
experimental programs. San Francisco State College’s Experimental College, at its Lake Merced
campus, supplemented the general education requirements with collaboratively taught
alternative courses that were open to all, students and nonstudents.
As part of the Master Plan, the Regents authorized the establishment of three new
campuses at Irvine, San Diego, and Santa Cruz. UC Santa Cruz, created by the visionary
educator and political scientist Dean McHenry, was originally a ranch in the redwoods, owned
by the family of Henry Cowell, the avant-garde musician with whom Cage studied.
91
Modeled
loosely after the residential colleges at Oxford and Cambridge, when UC Santa Cruz opened in
1965, it became the first college to offer pass/no pass and narrative evaluations in lieu of letter
grades. Known as the most “experimental” UC campus, it attracted high-quality, alternative-
minded students and faculty. Fluxus artist Robert Watts implemented the Experimental Arts
Workshop, based on the proposal he wrote with Brecht and Kaprow at Rutgers that used
discovery-based event scores for its curriculum as UCSC became known as “the cynosure of
counter culture.”
92
UCSC is a microcosm of the huge influence of hippiedom and psychedelia,

91
Robert McG. Thomas, Jr., “Dean E. McHenry, Dies at 87; Developed U.C. Santa Cruz,” New York Times, March 30,
1998, C20.
92
Ibid. Theodore Roszak first coined the phrase “counter culture” in The Making of a Counter Culture: Reflections
on a Technocratic Society and its Youthful Opposition, (Garden City: Doubleday, 1969).

46
sexual liberation and experimental lifestyles, utopian ideals and Eastern philosophies, that
dominated in California and permeated alternative education sites in this dissertation.
Arguably, by the late 1960s when Halprin, Kaprow, and Knowles forged their own
educational experiments in California, the state was the country’s epicenter country for social
change, beginning with the 1964 Free Speech Movement at the University of California,
Berkeley followed by anti-war protests and demands for social, educational and institutional
reform. While the three artists engaged with politics in varying degrees, as I will demonstrate,
using event-based performances and pedagogical experiments in more experiential, engaged
and open forms of education has its own radical implications that may serve as models today.

47
CHAPTER 2
Anna Halprin

For Anna’s aesthetic is deeply pedagogical in conception, ambition and scale.
She is foremost a dance educator—primarily focused on others’ responses
to prompts to generate movement and often, dances. —Janice Ross
93

Recognized as a dancer, choreographer, and innovator of improvised, event-based
performance, Anna Halprin is described above by Janice Ross, her primary biographer, as
“foremost a dance educator.” While some might find this descriptor of “dance educator”
pejorative, preferring to be called an artist, a dancer, or a choreographer, the 90 year-old
Halprin stated in a recent interview that she “loves teaching more than anything.”
94
I concur
with Ross that her score-based events since 1960s have resulted from “prompts to others,”
primarily, the participants in the San Francisco Dancer’s Workshop (SFDW). In this chapter I
trace how Halprin progresses from a performance-oriented background in modern dance to
her own “deeply pedagogical” based practice with SFDW, using improvised. task-based
movements. The collaborative scores from these exercises did elicit live events, but I believe
that her artistic practice came to its full fruition in the pedagogical workshop methodology she
developed in the 1960s that continues today. I will demonstrate that for Halprin teaching and
dancing, instruction and choreography, pedagogy and performance, all became inextricably
linked.
As Emma Forbes observed in her recent thesis: “Anna Halprin’s dance practice
emphasizes process over performance, experience over appearance and improvisation over

93
Ross, Anna Halprin: Experience as Dance, xv. I am indebted to Ross as her book remains most comprehensive
monograph to date and is the only source with details about Halprin’s biography, education, teaching, and
performances that are relevant to this study.
94
Wendy Perron, “Teacher’s Wisdom: Anna Halprin,” Dance Magazine (August 9, 2011).
http://dancemagazine.com/news/teachers_wisdom_anna_halprin/ (accessed June 16, 2015).

48
imitation.”
95
With her emphasis on process over performance, Halprin specifically privileges
the process of learning in a workshop over a given performance on a stage. While Halprin’s
dancers are given precise instructions, her open scores give performers latitude to respond in
the moment of an event that culminates a pedagogical process that pivots on physical,
embodied, and sensory learning. Her collaborative methodology and pedagogy define both
her artistic process and her performances, ultimately collapsing her workshop and her work.
This chapter traces Halprin’s education and teaching trajectory in detail to underscore
how workshops became the primary site for her dance training and the development of her
own pedagogy and performances. I elucidate how Halprin’s approach to kinesthetic
movement, embodied sensory improvisation, and chance-oriented dance notation all emanate
directly from her Workshop. I also demonstrate how her innovative improvisation and scoring
methods translated into select SFDW performances by focusing on Parades and Changes
(1965), her most important and enduring work, that has been rediscovered in the 2000s.
Finally, I will analyze Anna and Lawrence’s joint workshops, Experiments in the Environment
(1968–72), and their RSVP Cycle, that functions as a rubric or score for collaboration. This will
further support my argument how smaller, more intimate workshops have become the
fulcrum of Halprin’s experimental, event-based performance practice and her teaching
pedagogy for almost sixty years.
96

95
Forbes, 6.
96
The Dancer’s Workshop is referred to as the Workshop or as the San Francisco Dancer’s Workshop with acronym
SFDW. In all other instances, “workshop” connotes the format of a given dance class.

49
Halprin’s Education and Early Dance Training
Ann Schuman was raised in Wilmette, Illinois, until her family moved to nearby
Winnetka, a community known for having a progressive public school system.
97
The
“Winnetka Plan,” an individualized, experiential learning program, formed the core of a
curriculum developed by educator Carlton Washburne between 1919 and the late 1930s.
Attending Washburne’s schools from first grade through junior high school, Halprin’s
progressive education focused not just on the intellectual, but also on the emotional and the
physical.
98
The emphasis placed on the study of art in the classroom, especially drama,
introduced her to performance at a very young age. Washburne’s belief that the arts could be
“training for life, as a tool for learning about the world,” echoes Dewey’s progressive
experiential learning theories that Halprin would value later in her own education.
Additionally, another key element of the Washburne curriculum—that spontaneous learning
should take place outside the classroom, especially in nature—also influenced Halprin, who
would do much of her teaching on her outdoor dance deck.
Halprin’s childhood dance education began with classical ballet, however, her mother
recognized that she needed less structure and enrolled her in a class based on the approach of
modern choreographer Isadora Duncan.
99
This more “interpretive” form of dance also allowed
for more physically free and emotionally expressive movement. Halprin then began to study
at a school that brought in instructors from the innovative Denishawn School, founded in 1905
by Ruth St. Denis and Ted Shawn, both of whom had influenced Martha Graham and Isadora

97
While I use her birth name here, I will refer to Anna Halprin as Anna or by her last name, Halprin. To avoid any
confusion when I mention Halprin’s husband, I will use his first name Lawrence.
98
Ross, 10-11.
99
Ibid., 16.

50
Duncan. The workshops she took combined ballet and early 20th century modern movement
mechanics with non-Western dance rituals using musical visualizations, drapery manipulation,
and decorative poses. These exercises utilized Ruth St. Denis’ method of writing “dance
notes”:
Walk forward—back though veil.
Bend forward in pity.
Hands in teaching attitude. Hands in prayer.
Take veil in right hand, wrap around right wrist.
Pose right hand, then left.
100

This was Halprin’s first exposure to instructions for actions or dance scores that would later
become pivotal to her choreography and teaching.
At the age fifteen took a master workshop at Northwestern University from Doris
Humphrey, one of the “Big Four” modern choreographers along with Martha Graham, Hanya
Holm, and Charles Weidman. In 1938, she was the youngest participant in the Bennington
School of Dance, a four-week summer program of classes, workshops, student demonstrations
and a professional dance festival with Graham, Humphrey, Holm, and Weidman. The program
not only introduced Halprin to these major American choreographers and their performances,
it also gave her a chance to perform. At the end of the summer she did a duet with another
student, Jean Hayes: they crawled on all fours across the floor for three-minutes in silence,
except for the sounds of their knees—a primal action intended to satirize highly structured,
formal modern dance. It is interesting they chose crawling––as it foreshadows the everyday,
free-form pedestrian movement that would later become intrinsic to Halprin’s choreography,
just as the ambient sound made during silence looks forward to her interest in Cage.

100
Ibid.

51
Studies with Margaret H’Doubler
In the fall of 1938, Halprin went to study dance improvisation and kinesiology at the
University of Wisconsin at Madison that offered the country’s first Bachelor of Science in
dance in 1926 and where Margaret H’Doubler was the most important educator in the field.
101

H’Doubler studied education and philosophy for a year at Teacher’s College at Columbia
University, where she became influenced by Dewey’s pragmatist philosophy, beliefs in
Progressive education, and mind/body connections. H’Doubler eventually obtained a degree
in biology with a minor in chemistry and philosophy at the University of Wisconsin, where she
stayed to teach. Although never a dancer herself, her teaching methodology combined
education theory, the scientific method, and mind/body connections.
In stark contrast to Bennington’s emphasis on the modern dance world, H’Doubler
focused more on dance education—for her, teaching rather than performing was the ultimate
profession.
102
Rather than preparing students to become professional dancers, she trained
students to become teachers and to fully understand the capabilities of their own bodies, not
a particular style of choreography. At the core of H’Doubler’s pedagogy was her goal to
educate “the thinking dancer” who could access the physical, the intellectual, and the
emotional—a goal she articulated in her major publication, Dance: A Creative Art Experience,
which she started while Halprin was at Wisconsin.
103

101
Ibid., 28.
102
Ibid.
103
Margaret H’Doubler, Dance: A Creative Art Experience 2nd ed. (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1957).

52
Clearly, H’Doubler’s approach reflects ideas she learned in Dewey’s seminar at
Columbia, which was based on his book Art and Experience (1934).
104
In his seminal work,
Dewey compared the artistic process to the scientific method: both have the “same pattern of
steps” one must engage in an investigation and both test different solutions to a problem to
find the best possible resolution.
105
H’Doubler put these theories into practice by having her
students constantly engage in tests, such as measuring each other’s range of motion, to
attempt to resolve the problems she posed to them. Another aspect of H’Doubler’s approach
that reveals the influence of Dewey is the inextricable link between the body and the mind,
the corporeal and the intellectual. The primacy of the body/mind connection to H’Doubler is
evidenced by Halprin’s description of what happened when she first took one of her classes:
H‘Doubler’s dance curriculum also included physiology, kinesiology, and a class in
anatomy. H’Doubler kept a full skeleton and muscular charts in her class room and students
dissected cadavers—a study that is now referred to as “Experiential Anatomy.”
106
As a result,
Halprin gained a keen understanding of the mechanics and movement of the human body,
which she described in a 1967 interview:
In a very convincing way she grounded me in a more biological approach to movement–
movement that is more natural to the nervous system, to the bone structure, to the
muscle action. I found that in my training with her, the stress in movement was in
understanding the body as action and, at the same time, being able to appreciate
feedback so that the relationship of the feeling to the movement was complete.
107

104
John Dewey delivered this text as the first William James Lecture at Harvard University in 1932. It was then
published as Art as Experience.
105
This idea of patterning in the scientific method is further articulated a few years later in Dewey’s “The Pattern
of Inquiry,” in Logic: The Theory of Inquiry (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1938), 101-119.
106
Ibid., 31.
107
Vera Maletic, “The Process is the Purpose: An Interview with Anna Halprin,” Dance Scope 4, no. 1. (Fall-Winter
1967-1968): 11-18.

53
Not only does this emphasize H’Doubler’s “biological” approach, it introduces two very critical
aspects of Halprin’s choreography and pedagogy: that dance is a kinetic action and that the
relationship between movement and emotions creates affect. The concept of “understanding
the body in action” underlines the importance Halprin places on the process of learning,
knowing, and, by extension, teaching kinetic forms of dance. Her articulation of “feedback”
seems not to imply critique, but rather the loop created between feeling and movement,
something that both she and H’Doubler learned from Mabel E. Todd’s book The Thinking Body
(1929), which explores a unified psychophysical theory that inspired not only them, but many
future generations of dancers.
108

Because H’Doubler was not a performer herself, she did not do demonstrations in class.
Instead, she would ask her students to lie on the floor as she called out instructions for
movements, such as: “shift weight along the torso and legs” or “roll from back to stomach.”
She would also ask the students to use different props; for instance, asking them to wear
kneepads and crawl around on the floor. With that particular exercise, which harked back to
“Reaction to Bennington,” Halprin also realized that the act of crawling is the most primal
moment of coordination that a human experiences. H’Doubler also gave students blindfolds
to wear so that they would focus on how they felt their movement rather than thinking about
it or visually observing each other or themselves in a mirror. Later in her own workshops,
Halprin would also use blindfolds and would cover the mirrors in her studio to shift the
dancers’ sensory perceptions from the external and visual to the internal and tactile.

108
Mabel Todd, The Thinking Body: A Study of the Balancing Forces of Dynamic Man, (Brooklyn: Dance Horizons,
1937). The importance of this source to Halprin is also cited in Land, Schorn, and Wittman, 18–19.

54
H’Doubler’s most important contribution to Halprin’s training was her knowledge of
physiology, kinesiology, and anatomy. Like her mentor, Halprin would not teach specific
movement techniques, rather, she would “encourage a physical unpeeling of the body’s
habituated responses until one reached a core truth,” a rigorous trial and error process
reminiscent of Dewey’s experiential learning.
109
Ultimately, Halprin retained these lessons—
she would successfully combine Deweyan experience and H’Doubler’s emphasis on
biologically-based dance education into her own kinesthetic choreography and workshops.

The Bauhaus in Cambridge
During her studies at the University of Wisconsin, Halprin met Lawrence Halprin, a
graduate student and researcher in the horticulture department, and they married in 1940.
That year the Halprins visited Taliesen, the home and studio of architect Frank Lloyd Wright,
and Lawrence became very inspired by the architecture and grounds. When he returned to
Madison he did some research and discovered the University had a small department in
landscape architecture. He applied and was admitted, but then he received a scholarship to
attend a more prestigious program at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design (GSD).
In the fall of 1941 when Lawrence started studying at Harvard’s GSD, the Design faculty
included Christopher Tunnard, the leading landscape architect of that period, as well as Marcel
Breuer and Walter Gropius, prominent architects associated with the Bauhaus, who had left
Europe because of World War II. The students in Lawrence’s cohort group included Edward
Larabee Barnes, Philip Johnson, I.M. Pei, and Paul Rudolph, all of whom would become

109
Ross, 31.

55
distinguished modern architects. Only one year after Lawrence arrived, Tunnard left to fight in
the war, so he sought out critiques from Gropius, Breuer, and also Lazlo Moholy-Nagy, another
Bauhaus artist who also lectured at Harvard.
Gropius, who arrived at Harvard in 1937, viewed the school as a space for collaboration
and integration of the disparate disciplines of architecture, landscape architecture, and urban
planning. This echoed the Bauhaus ethos that attempted to unify art and architecture and to
erase the boundaries between fine arts and applied arts, artist and craftsman. Gropius
advocated for a Bauhaus model of “a school that was the servant of the workshop,” by making
smaller-scale production-oriented classes integral to the curriculum. The Halprins both
became very influenced by Gropius’ Bauhaus and Harvard-inspired workshop––both the name
and his teaching format––and would later appropriate their learning into their respective
practices.
Initially unfamiliar with Bauhaus’ history, its architects and artists, Halprin sat in on
Lawrence’s General Design seminar to become more exposed to Gropius’ Bauhaus pedagogy.
In this intellectually stimulating environment that integrated different artistic practices and
aesthetic positions, she quickly realized the limitations of her own Midwestern education:
It was an approach to dance and art that was totally new for me. My approach to dance
at Wisconsin, had been on a scientific level because H’Doubler was a biologist, she
wasn’t a dancer. I didn’t have any conception of the total scope of dance in relationship
to theater, to space, to architecture and all the other arts…It was like looking at the
whole universe and seeing dance in the perspective of a much broader context.
110

This quote reveals Halprin’s new awareness of dance as a practice that is integral and equal to
other forms of artistic production. At Harvard she also became cognizant of Richard Wagner’s

110
Ibid., 53.

56
concept of the gesamtkunstwerk, the “total artwork” that synthesizes different forms or media
into a cohesive whole—a term often used in reference to the Bauhaus.
111
Borrowing this
concept, Halprin would later refer to her own San Francisco Dancer’s Workshop as “kinetic
theater” or “total theater.”
112
Finally, in addition to these more formal concerns, Halprin
understood Gropius’ Bauhaus educational mandate to link artistic production with social
change. The idea that art actions could potentially alter one’s life resonated with her, and she
perceived this as a new educational model in which social concerns could potentially balance
out her “physical” pedagogical training.
In Cambridge Halprin taught at a private school called Winsor and integrated what she
had learned in the GDS seminar about architecture and space into her classes.
113
Her “Visual
Design and Dance” curriculum had an exercise for participants to “bring back forms from
nature they found exciting because of a design feeling. Bark, stone, twigs, foliage, fungi.”
114

First they sketched what they found in nature (an actual Bauhaus assignment), then Halprin
asked them to move based on their reaction to the objects. This simple exercise involving
visual rendering, dance movement, and a thorough investigation of a particular space—in this
case, a natural environment—would form the foundation of her future teaching.
By incorporating the Bauhaus-inspired exercises and methods of spatial analysis into her
teaching, she began to problematize movement within various types of physical spaces.

111
This term is associated with Richard Wagner as it appears in his essays “Art and Revolution” and “Artwork of the
Future” from 1849, but it is first used in reference to German Romanticism, cited in Karl Friedrich Eusebius
Trahndorff, Kunst Aesthetik oder Lehre von der Weltanschauung und (Berlin: Maurer, 1827).
112
Halprin, Moving Toward Life: Five Decades of Transformational Dance, 256. Michael Kirby, Happenings: An
Illustrated Anthology (New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., 1965) also uses “total theater” to describe Halprin’s work.
113
Ross, 59.
114
Ibid.

57
Halprin continued to explore dance and architecture when she taught a workshop in
her own Cambridge studio for the Harvard design students in 1943. She would set up a
problem-solving situation in which she asked the students to use the existing furniture and
objects in the room to create a new spatial environment and to then “move” within it,
considering how this spatial configuration “felt.” Combining Dewey’s problem-solving process,
H’Doubler’s emphasis on the physical body, and Halprin’s own interests in spatial relations and
emotions, this exercise utilized improvisation and ordinary, task-oriented movements, two key
aspects of her burgeoning pedagogical process. Gropius strongly supported Halprin’s
workshop with the architects and told her that it recalled Oskar Schlemmer’s Bauhaus Triadic
Ballet experiments with the stage as an “architectonic-spatial organism.”
115
Additionally, these
classes foreshadowed the joint summer workshops that she and Lawrence would later teach
for architects, artists, and dancers in their future home, California: Bauhaus/Harvard-inspired,
interdisciplinary explorations of everyday movement in both outdoor and indoor spaces.
116

Move to California and Early Teaching
After graduating from Harvard, Lawrence did his military service in the South Pacific.
However, his ship was torpedoed and he was transferred to San Francisco for survivor’s leave.
The Halprins became attracted to the city’s natural beauty, openness, and postwar bohemian
cultural climate and decided to make it their permanent home. At this time, in the mid-1940s,
San Francisco did not have a cohesive dance community and this appealed to Halprin:

115
Ibid., 61.
116
The workshops that took place between 1968 and 1971 will be discussed in detail later in this chapter.

58
It gave me more space to develop my own point of view and my own vision.
Although I wasn’t appreciative of that in the beginning I learned to appreciate the
challenge. The isolation I put myself into required me to re-investigate what dance was,
what was the meaning of dance, what was the purpose of dance, why was I dancing,
and so it put me through a kind of quest that was a very healthy experience to go
through.
117

By intentionally removing herself from New York, the epicenter of modern dance, Halprin
could forge ahead with her own re-investigation of dance in a new locale. Ross has referred to
this as a “radical repositioning of dance,” stating that Halprin would try to forge a “new
relationship between her art and nature and society, envisioning dance as a performance
practice somewhere between the stage, the environment and the home.”
118

Halprin rented a small studio in North Beach where she serendipitously met Welland
Lathrop, a dancer who had toured with Martha Graham and had taught at the Cornish School
in Seattle, where Merce Cunningham studied dance. They immediately became friends and
decided to start what the first school of contemporary dance in San Francisco, located in an
old Victorian building on Union Street. Halprin’s classes did not follow the established norms of
modern dance or the presumed authority of the teacher. Following Dewey’s notions of
Progressive education that she had absorbed from H’Doubler, she offered a “student-centered
curriculum” in which her young dancers took an active role in choosing and designing their
dances, costumes, music, and stories. According to one of Halprin’s students, the class
combined different forms of movement, music, and drawing: it began with tumbling,
somersaults, and cartwheels, stretching and running, leaping or galloping across the floor.
119

Halprin accompanied with a drum and a gong on the sidelines, while the students played

116
Ibid., 71.
118
Ibid., 77.
119
Gale Randall Chrisman, as quoted by Ross, 84.

59
percussion instruments and classes culminated with drawing to music. She allowed the
students to improvise their own dances, wear their own play clothes, and invent their own
themes. The former student also recalled Halprin’s squiggly line drawings pinned on the walls
that traced the footprints of the students’ movement—a rudimentary form of dance notation.
Not only did Halprin’s teaching exemplify Dewey’s student-centered curriculum, it
emphasized free-form, everyday movement that could be accomplished by anyone. During its
first three years, the studio attracted hundreds of students ranging from children to adults
who wanted to dance as a form of recreation. A San Francisco Chronicle feature cited Halprin
as “one of a group of young artists throughout the country with a new and vital approach to
the dance—a conception of it as something belonging to everyone, not just to virtuosos.”
120

The Halprin-Lathrop Studio, however, did not only cater to children and novices: it also
attracted more advanced students and teachers. Beginning in 1948, the studio offered a
seven-week intensive summer session in “dance and related arts.”
121
Halprin required the
teachers to teach in a local school and she also she assigned them readings such as John
Dewey’s theories on Progressive education and writings by Herbert Read, the British poet and
literary critic who became known at that time for his book on the role of art in education,
entitled Education Through Art (1943).
122

As a result of this 1948 summer session, the Halprin-Lathrop studio began to publish
Impulse Magazine (later called Impulse: Annual of Contemporary Dance), the first dance

120
“Dancer Ann Halprin’s Art is a Philosophy of Life, Too,” San Francisco Chronicle, dated 1950 on a clipping in the
Anna Halprin Papers, Museum of Performance + Design, San Francisco.
121
Impulse Annual of Contemporary Dance Volume 2. (1949): 1.
122
Herbert Read, Education through Art (London: Faber & Faber, 1943). Read presented a lecture, “Education
Through Art: A Revolutionary Policy,” a re-thinking of his book, at University College, London on January 3, 1965.

60
journal on the West Coast.
123
This hand-typed and illustrated magazine aimed to “erase some
of the mysticism that generally surrounds modern dance” and “communicate to the
community the activities in a dance school.”
124
With articles contributed by students and
faculty, and writing by both Halprin and her husband, the reception to the first issue was very
strong. In 1949 the studio published a more elaborate second issue that included such articles
as “Teaching Dance” by Halprin and “Modern Dance” by Lathrop, along with articles on dance
education by several advanced dancers and a text outlining the summer curriculum.
125
While
the inaugural issue primarily documented the summer session, with this second issue Impulse
Magazine began to “fill the demand for more information” about dance performance and
pedagogy.
A curious addition to the first page of the second issue alludes to contributions by “The
Workshop Group, comprising students interested in doing and performing their own
choreography, [that] has been working on dance programs, putting their ideas into
practice.”
126
This is significant as it is the first time Halprin uses the name “workshop” in
reference to her studio and teaching. Harking back to her own dance education and exposure
to the Bauhaus methodology at Harvard, the workshop format would become the fulcrum for
Halprin’s hybridized teaching and performance career and foreshadows the formation of her
San Francisco Dancer’s Workshop.

123
Except for this 1948 inaugural issue, all subsequent volumes from 1949–1970 are archived as the Impulse Dance
Annuals at Temple University Digital Library, http://digital.library.temple.edu/cdm/search/collection/p15037coll4.
124
Ross, 86.
125
Lore Landis, “Preface,” Impulse: Annual of Contemporary Dance Volume 2. (1949): 1.
126
Ibid.

61
By 1951 the Halprins needed a larger residence and found land in Kentfield, Marin
County, below Mount Tamalpais, with sweeping views of the San Francisco Bay.
127
The couple
hired the architecture firm Wurster, Bernardi and Emmos, proponents of the Bay Region style,
to build a redwood and glass home on the property. Two years later, Lawrence hired architect
and theater lighting designer Arch Lauterer to work with him on what became the “dance
deck” (fig. 2.1a-d and 2.22a-b)—a major inspiration for Halprin’s teaching and practice. The
steep, heavily forested hillside demanded that the deck be site-responsive; built a half-foot
from ground level and 30 feet above the ground at its highest point, it appeared to be free-
floating.
128
A pair of Madrones formed a natural proscenium arch, creating a stage-like setting
that fully blended into the environment. Halprin described the openness and spatial effects of
her open-air deck:
Being outside, you naturally expand. My deck meanders among the redwoods, so
there’s no front, back, side, side. There is no center; you are the center. There are no
boundaries unless you make them. Our boundaries aren’t just the ends of our fingers or
the tops our heads. There are energetic forces moving out through our bodies.
129

Most importantly, Halprin noticed how the deck “removed the usual restrictions and added
elements of nature and chance, and, with them, a lack of control and predictability.”
130
The
expanse of the dance deck increased not only the physical space but the duration of
workshops that would often encompass the entire day and, in the summer, continue into the
night. This idyllic outdoor theatrical space—with its variable, uncontrollable natural

127
The Halprins had two daughters Daria, born in 1948, and Rana, in 1951, who would both work closely with
Halprin.
128
Lawrence Halprin and Ann Halprin, “Dance Deck in the Woods,” Impulse: Annual of Contemporary Dance,
Volume 8 (1956): 21- 25.
129
Ibid.
130
Anna Halprin, “Expanding Spaces,” Dance Volume 15, no. 9. (1988): 1-7.

62
conditions—would become the most critical testing ground for Halprin’s research, teaching,
and performance.
One of the first visitors to the newly completed dance deck in 1954 was Martha
Graham. Visiting California for her company’s performance at Mills College in Oakland,
Graham was also auditioning dancers for the American Dance Festival Series at the American
National Theater and Academy (ANTA) in New York.
131
Initially, she had come to the Halprin-
Lathrop Studio to see Lathrop dance and he invited Halprin to perform with him. After this
performance, Graham passed on Lathrop but asked to see more solo work by
Halprin. In spite of the resulting awkwardness this caused, Halprin invited Graham to the
dance deck to see her perform The Prophetess, a 1947 dance based on the biblical heroine
Deborah. A few weeks later Halprin was invited to perform at ANTA.
While Halprin’s performances garnered positive critical reviews, she became very
disillusioned by what she saw in New York: direct imitations of Graham, Holm, Humphrey, and
Weidmann. “All of the dancers looked like imitations of the leading choreographers. I wasn’t
able to connect. I felt depressed, discouraged, distrustful and I knew that my career as a
modern dancer had just died.”
132
Even though she had been skeptical of some of the highly
stylized and dramatic aspects of modern dance, she relished its anti-establishment,
experimental, and individual spirit. At this point however, she felt there was no connection
between her own life and work and the dances she saw at ANTA. Halprin’s realization of her
estrangement from the New York dance world and her need to assert her individuality
precipitated a major decision: when she returned to San Francisco, she ended her partnership

131
Ross, 110–11.
132
Anna Halprin, “Discovering Dance,” Lomi School Bulletin (Summer 1981): 14–18.

63
with Lathrop. Not only did she dissolve the studio, Halprin also broke away from modern
dance, refuted the hegemony of New York, and focused on her work at the Kentfield dance
deck, stating: “I left the city and began to dance in this invigorating outdoor environment. I
cut my ties with modern dance and began to search for new directions.”
133

San Francisco Dancer’s Workshop and Its Methodology
To forge her new direction, Halprin invited her longtime students John Graham, A. A.
Leath, and Jenny Hunter Groat to experiment on the deck and to “eliminate the stereotyped
ways of reacting and traditions of modern dance.”
134
Others joined them in Marin and this
informal group became known as the “Dancer’s Workshop,” a name Halprin selected to
reference the experimental, interdisciplinary, and collaborative workshops of the Bauhaus.
Halprin invited other artists—musicians, actors, architects, poets, and filmmakers—to achieve
an interdisciplinary and collaborative learning environment in the Workshop that she
articulated in a statement on a poster:
The Dancer’s Workshop is a place where students, teachers and artists can work
together. The basic assumption of the Dancer’s Workshop is that the synthesis of art,
education and performance will heighten the process of individual learning and artistic
creation. Each of us has a different background and is at a different stage of
development. But the common desire is to enlarge, strengthen, and integrate our
diverse talents as human beings.
135

133
Halprin, Moving Toward Life: Five Decades of Transformational Dance, xi.
134
Ross, 77.
135
Excerpted from the text on a Dancer’s Workshop poster, 1968, Anna Halprin Papers, Series V: Education, Sub-
series III: San Francisco Dancers’ Workshop, Museum of Performance + Design, San Francisco.

64
Here Halprin emphasizes not only the interdisciplinary, collaborative practices of the
invited artists, she also clearly states the synthesis of “art, education and performance” that
formed the foundation of her pedagogical approach to the Dancer’s Workshop.
At this nascent stage, she also discusses: “At Dancer’s Workshop we were looking for
ways to rediscover the basic nature of our materials free of preconceived associations and
concepts. We were interested in avoiding the predictability of cause and effect.” To achieve
this, Halprin and the Dancer’s Workshop focused on improvisations that intentionally broke
down “pre-conceived associations” of the predictable, stylized modernist vocabulary.
Eschewing the artificial, dramatic gestures of this aesthetic, through improvisation they would
develop more spontaneous movements and an interdisciplinary process for events, rather
than following pre-determined choreography to make dances.
136

In her article “Intuition and Improvisation,” written for Impulse, Halprin describes
improvisation as a two-fold process: first and foremost, the dancer must have no other factor
but the kinesthetic sense to rely on to improvise, and second, there must be “absolutely no
pre-conceived notion to direct the action,” in contrast to modernist dance training.
137
She also
cites how she used her experiments in improvisation as a way to develop what she called
“organic choreography” in contrast to the “representational choreography” of modern
dance.
138
Halprin claims that the intuitive sense is the seed that motivates more organic
choreography and it must be deeply imbedded in the kinesthetic life of every gesture.
139

136
Anna Halprin Biography (undated), Anna Halprin Papers, Series 1: Biographical. Sub-series I: Background and
Achievements, Museum Performance + Design, San Francisco.
137
Anna Halprin, “Intuition and Improvisation in Dance,” Impulse: Annual of Contemporary Dance Volume 7.
(1955): 11.
138
Ibid., 10.
139
Ibid.

65
She continues to comment that representational choreography may “please the eye alone” as
she quotes Martha Graham, who once said: “I am a fanatic about what we see, it is not enough
to feel.”
140
Clearly, Halprin was questioning the privileging of the visual, the formal, and the
narrative tendencies of modern dance, asserting her own preference for a more kinesthetic,
intuitive, and multi-sensory approach to improvised movement.
141

To emphasize this multi-sensory and kinesthetic approach, Halprin drew upon the
“Fundamental Movements” she had learned from Margaret H’Doubler to create her own
four-part series of Workshop warm-up exercises entitled Movement Rituals.
142
Aimed to
encompass a range of ordinary body movements, the goal was for the participants to focus on
feeling rather than seeing the movement; to foreground kinesthesia, rather than just visual
perception. In the introduction to the book, Halprin proposes an experiment in which the
reader lists their senses in the order they come to mind, then provides the following list:
1. Sight
2. Sound
3. Smell
4. Touch
5. Taste

She asks if the reader’s list resembles hers and then points to something very crucial that is
missing: the kinesthetic sense, part of the proprioceptive nervous system. She explains:
“The kinesthetic sense has nerve endings in our muscles, tendons, ligaments, bones and
joints that make it possible for us to have any awareness of our movement, allowing us to

140
Ibid., 11.
141
Ross, 90, notes that although musicians, especially those playing jazz, relied on improvisation and valued its
virtuosity, in the early 1950s it was almost unheard of in dance training.
142
Ann Halprin, Movement Ritual I, San Francisco Dancer’s Workshop, 1975, reprinted in Halprin, Moving Toward
Life: Five Decades of Transformational Dance, 31–45.

66
know our body placement in space and our body directions.”
143
This exercise reveals a
primary tenet of Halprin’s pedagogy and practice: to avoid privileging the sense of sight
that impedes a sensitivity to the haptic and kinesthetic senses, both of which are integral to
our understanding of our body’s ability to orient and navigate within a space or an
environment.
While Halprin first developed Movement Rituals early in her teaching, they were not
published until 1975, with hand-drawn images by Charlene Koonce (fig. 2.3a-b) that illustrate
the progression of the movements.
144
Movement Ritual I begins with lying down with eyes
closed, focusing on breath, gradually assuming a seated position and standing upright;
Movement Ritual II emanates from the standing position, but adds falls, lifts, swings, rebound,
and balance; Movement Ritual III is performed by moving through space, walking, running,
crawling, leaping, and shifting body weight in space and Movement Ritual IV, combines the
various possibilities of the other three, is a more free-form improvisation.
All of the Movement Rituals are precise or “closed” scores, because as Halprin
explains: “trying to alter a state of consciousness depends on repetition and on reconditioning
the body into proper usage.”
145
Halprin would deliver the instructions in the book verbally to
the Workshop, but adamantly stated that “as a teacher or director of the group I never told
anybody what a movement should be or how it should look. In that sense, too, they had to
build their own technique.”
146
She also insisted that the schematic figurative drawings are

143
Halprin, Moving Toward Life: Five Decades of Transformational Dance, 21.
144
The drawings only include Movement Ritual I and the subsequent sections have not been published.
145
Ibid., 49.
146
“Yvonne Rainer Interviews Anna Halprin,” in Moving Toward Life: Five Decades of Transformational Dance, 77.

67
merely to suggest possible movement and that kinesthetic experience is always
individualized.
Simone Forti, who participated in the Dancer’s Workshop beginning in 1956, recalls how
sometimes Movement Rituals would lead to durational forms of movement:
[Ann] had us walk in a circle, not single-file but simply all moving in the same direction
around a general circular path. She asked us to follow the speed of the flow of the circle,
and not to initiate any changes. We started out very slow, and over a period of an hour
gradually picked up more and more speed until we were running. We ran for some time
and then started to slow down…We finally came to a stop and collapsed on the
ground.
147

Halprin’s physical exercises of ordinary movement, which she subsequently called “tasks,”
became the building blocks of her improvisations. In the 1960s, “tasks” became known as
“pedestrian movement” in burgeoning forms of postmodern dance innovated by Forti and
other students of Halprin who participated in her Summer Workshop of 1960, discussed later
in this chapter.
Halprin clearly preferred a more student-centered “learning by doing” inherent to
Dewey’s Progressive education: “As the teacher or director of the group, I never told anybody
what a movement should be or how it should look. In that sense, they had to build their own
technique.”
148
She described the Workshop pedagogy as “a way of learning that shifts
emphasis from the individual-to-teacher configuration to a situation in which individuals
interact in a group process with the teacher acting as participant and guide.”
149
This language
echoes the Deweyan principle of a less authoritarian type of teaching and also calls for a

147
Simone Forti, Handbook in Motion: An Account of Ongoing Personal Discourse and Its Manifestations in Dance
(Halifax and New York: Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design and New York University, 1974), 29.
148
“Yvonne Rainer Interviews Anna Halprin,” in Moving Toward Life: Five Decades of Transformational Dance, 77.
149
What is a Workshop? (undated) Anna Halprin Papers, Series V: Education, Sub-series: III, San Francisco Dancers’
Workshop, Museum of Performance + Design, San Francisco

68
collaborative model of learning. In this handout, Halprin also enumerated three distinct
components of the Workshop methodology:
1. Physical activity, shaped by the expressive mind, in touch with feeling states, is the
awareness that transforms ordinary movements into a dance experience.
2. Each person, and every group of persons, forms a unique organization of
impressions, intuitions, values and lifestyles which interprets all experience…
3. Collective creation and total involvement is a culminating and ongoing attitude
throughout the workshop.

The first point emphasizes how it is the combined forces of physical activity, mind, and the
emotions that transform ordinary, improvised movement into choreographed dance. In the
second point, Halprin speaks to the diversity of Workshop members who each bring different
vantage points to interpret “all experience.” Finally, Halprin uses the term “collective
creation” to emphasize artistic collaboration and involvement of all participants, which
became integral to the ethos of her workshops. Ultimately, she also acknowledges the social
nature of a group experience and how, rather than functioning as an ensemble that carries out
her vision, they all co-create the workshop choreography.
Initially, the Dancer’s Workshop took place on the Halprins’ dance deck in Kentfield,
but after a year of working in this bucolic but isolated space, they sought out new sites:
We found ourselves developing events (later in the east called Happenings) in the
woods, on beaches, on mountaintops, in meadows and in the city: in streets, parks, bus
stops…midnight noon, dawn, anytime of the day or night was possible and any length of
time from 24 hours to 30 seconds, equally possible. Whoever happened to be at these
places became our audiences. With the diversity of personal and artistic disciplines in
the Workshop intermingling, it became unimportant to decide if we were dancers, or
just people who moved, talked, sang, built constructions…with a strong orientation to
movement, sound, light, space and community.
150

150
Ann Halprin, History of the Dancer’s Workshop of San Francisco (undated typescript), Series V: Education, Sub-
series III: Dancer’s Workshop, Anna Halprin Papers, Museum of Performance + Design, San Francisco.

69
Significantly, Halprin uses the term “events” to describe the Dancer’s Workshop’s
improvisatory interventions into these non-traditional, everyday public sites. Although
undated, this text was written retrospectively as Halprin specifically explains how her early-to-
mid-1950s events preceded Allan Kaprow’s Happenings, a term he first used in Cage’s New
School class in 1957–58, a year prior to his presentation of 18 Happenings in 6 Parts at the
Reuben Gallery in 1959.
151
What is also interesting about these events occurring at any time
and any place for various durations in public contexts, is how they found incidental audiences
that transformed workshop improvisations into spontaneous performances for spectators.
Perhaps in response to these excursions into urban public space, in 1955 the Workshop
moved to the city, opened a studio on Divisidero Street (fig. 2.4) became known as San
Francisco Dancer’s Workshop, and embarked on its five-year focus on improvisational
workshops and body awareness:
If you are totally aware of what has happened with your body, then you realize that
your corporeal responses come directly from the nervous system…If your mind
interferes and tries to produce “beautiful movement” you’re not improvising any more.
For four years we worked on concentrating uniquely on certain articulations, one after
the other. Everyone should make their own, whatever allows them to develop their own
techniques and their own unique approach to the body.
152

Here Halprin speaks directly to avoiding mental interference and aestheticized movement in
favor of improvisations where the body and nervous systems become primary instruments. To
concentrate on “certain articulations,” she utilized the kinesthetic exercises she learned from
Margaret H’Doubler to explore movements of specific body parts such as limbs, improvising

151
While 18 Happenings in 6 Parts is considered his first major public Happening, Kaprow did two earlier
Happenings in 1958: an untitled Happening, Communication at Douglass College at Rutgers University and a spring
Happening, Pastorale at George Segal’s farm in South Brunswick, New Jersey.
152
Anna Halprin, as quoted by Jacqueline Caux, “Introduction,” in Parades and Changes, Festival D’Automne
Program Notes, Paris (2007), unpaginated.

70
with rotation, flexion, and other anatomical structures.
153
These improvisations also
demanded that the dancers react proprioceptively in the immediate space between one
another, forcing them to navigate the environment through coordination and collaboration.
According to Jacqueline Caux, Halprin’s Dancer’s Workshop demanded a different way
of perceiving the body that relates to how composers John Cage and La Monte Young taught
people to “listen differently,” as their musical scores produced not only sound but also a
bodily, corporeal action, resulting in a spatial, performative event.
154
Just as they wanted to
engage the body and space in their compositions, Halprin became increasingly interested in
the potential of sound in dance, encouraging not only improvised movement, but also voice
and dialogue improvisations. In her interview with Yvonne Rainer, Halprin stated: “Free
association became part of the work. This would often manifest itself in dialogue. We began
to deal with ourselves as people, not dancers.” When Workshop participants freely associated
in this physical, verbal, and very intrapersonal manner, she specifically referred to this as a
“dance-dialogue.”
155

Art historian Tusa Shea has argued that a dialogical approach existed in many event-
based works by American interdisciplinary artists during the late 1950s and 1960s, especially
those of Halprin, on whom she focuses in her dissertation.
156
Referring to the SFDW dancers’
verbal and interpersonal improvisations as a “dialogical tool,” Shea amplifies Halprin’s
comment about how the dancers began to deal with themselves as people, by stating that
recognizing themselves as subjects rather than objects, they became increasingly aware of not

153
“Yvonne Rainer Interviews Anna Halprin,” 79.
154
Caux, n.p.
155
Ibid.
156
Shea, 160.

71
only each other but also of the audience.
157
What is most significant is that this more
“dialogical approach” occurs at the pivotal moment when SFDW begins to translate their
improvisations into performances for the public and the stage.

From the Dance Deck to the Stage
Occasionally, when working on the Kentfield dance deck, Halprin would invite
audiences to come to see the Workshop’s improvisations. As she explained in her introduction
to one of these wholly improvised events:
As the performers get under way, various facets of improvisation will take place
between dancers and musicians. By improvisation we mean literally making up music
and dance completely spontaneously. Nothing that happens tonight had ever happened
before, nor are we concerned at this time with the preservation of a finished product.

Clearly, Halprin felt the need to provide this “pedagogical” prelude to instruct the audience
about the nature of improvisation, underlining that because it is completely spontaneous,
what they will witness as spectators will be unique to that evening. Halprin ended by pointing
out that the Workshop is not concerned about a finished product for future performance, as
the nature of improvisational dance prevents it from becoming part of their repertoire or ever
repeated exactly the same. Even with the invited audience, the workshop exercises seamlessly
transformed into a performance intended to have the process supersede the product.
After four years of improvisational work and these occasional events for audiences,
SFDW started to develop performances for the stage. Derived directly from their workshops,
these unscripted improvisations using tasks, sounds, everyday objects, and costumes unfolded
without any pre-determined outcome.

157
Ibid.

72
One of their earliest stage improvisations, Trunk Dance (1959) (fig. 2.5a-b), evolved into
a nonsensical, Dada-like performance.
158
It commenced with A.A. Leath, clad in a conductor’s
cap and leather jacket, crawling backwards and rolling into a fetal position. In response, John
Graham skittered onto the stage running in different directions while chattering about trains,
buttons, and sneezes. Simone Forti then pushed a wooden trunk onto the stage and Halprin
suddenly appeared, climbed inside, and closed the lid as the other dancers moved around
pretending not to see her or one another. In another part, Leath did a shoulder stand against
the trunk as Ann sat on top of it, her head covered by a veil. She laid down on the trunk and
moved close to Leath as they rocked slowly into different positions.
Developed entirely through chance, the dance movements, the quasi-narrative, the
comedy, and the poignancy all emerge in the moment of improvisation driven by bodily
awareness and impulse. As Ross notes, even if at times the Trunk Dance became somewhat
prosaic and even chaotic, it felt “authentic” to the dancers because of the years they had
already committed to learning improvisation techniques in the Workshop.
159
Forti has also
commented: “An improviser will be following thoughts and exploring forms and possibilities of
movement while in performance. In dance improvisation you ready yourself, you ready your
imagination, you ready the issues you are working with, and then you work them in the
moment,”
160
which is exactly what SFDW did in Trunk Dance.
Later in 1959, following this performance, Halprin met La Monte Young, a composer
studying experimental music at the University of California, Berkeley. That summer, Young

158
Ross, 135.
159
Ibid., 36.
160
Simone Forti quoted in “Between the Conceptual and the Vibrational—Dorit Cypis Speaks with Simone Forti,”
X-Tra Volume 6, no. 4. (Summer 2004): 7.

73
had traveled to Germany to attend the Darmstadt Festival for New Music, where he took a
composition seminar from Karlheinz Stockhausen and first learned about John Cage. He began
to correspond with Cage, who suggested that he contact Anna Halprin. Young did and when
they met, she was very attracted to his improvised compositions with everyday and electronic
sounds. When Young performed some of Cage’s work at UC Berkeley, this piqued the interest
of one of his classmates, Terry Riley. They quickly became friendly and Young introduced Riley
to Halprin. By 1960, both Young and Riley joined the Workshop and became its musical
directors.
161

The first Workshop dances that Young and Riley scored, Still Point and Visions (1960),
explored solo, improvised movements using objects and props with some odd restrictions. In
reaction to the completely random, chaotic performances of the preceding year, these
restrictions posed specific challenges: for instance, one dancer could only dance along the
railing of the deck, while others wore headdresses or had fabric stuffed into their leotards or
tights.
162
Halprin gave Young and Riley complete freedom to improvise live sound for the
experiments using everyday objects, rather than taped or electronic music.
After these experiments, Halprin and the Workshop did their first hour-long dance
consisting of improvisations of the previous two years called Birds of America or Gardens
Without Walls (1960).
163
(fig. 2.6a-b) In order to combine these complex improvisations into a
single work, Halprin created her first choreographic chart with a list of seven directives or
instructions, each with specific sub-tasks, the names of who would perform them and what

161
Ross, 143.
162
Ross, 139.
163
The Dancer’s Workshop premiered Birds of America or Gardens Without Walls at the San Francisco
Contemporary Dance Theater, and subsequently at the International Avant-Garde Arts Festival in Vancouver and
the famous Fenice Opera House in Venice, gaining their first international recognition.

74
props they would use for each action. Five dancers appeared on the chart according to their
age and size: first, her young daughters, Rana (age 8) and Daria (age 11), then Halprin herself,
and finally, her two male Workshop dancers, A.A. Leath and John Graham. Rana had simple
assignments such as carrying beach balls on and off the stage, while Daria and Graham
performed the directive “Child and Tall Man, Lifting and Carrying” with lists of sub-tasks such
as “lie down, stand, sit, be lifted, roll, still.” The 6-foot-tall Graham also performed with Rana,
in movements that accentuated the extreme contrast of their body sizes and genders.
Just moments before the first performance, Halprin suddenly decided to give each
dancer a long bamboo pole that required immediate self-awareness and a kinesthetic
response by each performer.
164
Halprin’s spontaneous alteration recalls a Cagean “chance
operation” and his use of everyday objects to alter music as with his prepared pianos. While
she had known Cage since she lived in New York in 1940, her gesture may also have been
spurred by La Monte Young, who was very influenced by the composer at this moment.
Additionally, the score Halprin selected for the performance was Young’s Trio for Strings
(1958), that he described as “a series of single sounds, each surrounded by silence and
produced independently of melody,” also clearly influenced by Cage.
165

Because of its improvisational structure and the chance element of navigating the poles
on a variety of stage sites, every iteration became a new learning experience. As Diane Homan
observed: “Each performance piece was designed as a learning situation where different skills
such as the trained use of the voice or of acrobatic stunts were incorporated, and after the

164
Ross, 146.
165
Ibid.

75
skills ware mastered by the group, the piece was left behind and a new learning process was
begun... Dancer’s Workshop was process rather than product-oriented.”
166

For the next seven years, SFDW toured nationally and internationally. However, as
Homan pointed out, the Workshop remained very process-oriented, entirely unconcerned
about preserving, repeating, or recording a process. Instead, they continued to rely on
experimenting with new movements learned right up until the moment of each performance.
Rather than building a set repertoire, SFDW’s core of improvisation functioned as a continuum,
extending exercises developed in the workshops to the live “learning experiences” in their
stage performances.

The Summer Workshop of 1960
The same year SFDW premiered Birds of America, Halprin hosted the Summer
Workshop of 1960 on her dance deck. Described as a “deeply educational and wildly radical
enterprise,”
167
the Summer Workshop is now recognized as a landmark in contemporary dance
history. A primary reason for this is that it facilitated an exchange between up-and-coming
young avant-garde artists and performers from both the West and East Coasts; in addition to
Halprin and some ongoing SFDW members, the Summer Workshop included Young and Riley,
who continued to serve as musical directors, and dancers Simone Forti, Trisha Brown, and
Yvonne Rainer.
168
(fig. 2.7) These young composers and choreographers would learn specific

157
Dianne Homan, “Ritualistic Implications in the Works of Halprin, Hay, Dean, and Takei” (master’s thesis,
University of Oregon, 1985).
167
Ross, 147.
168
The known roster of participants included: Sunni Boland, Trisha Brown, June Ekman, Ruth Emerson, Simone
Forti, Jerrie Glover, John Graham, A.A. Leath, Paul Pera, Yvonne Rainer, Shirley Ririe, Lisa Strauss, and Willis Ward.

76
improvisational and task-based methods from Halprin and subsequently incorporate them into
their postmodernist dance, experimental music, and minimal art in New York a few years later.
Simone Forti (then Simone Morris), who had first become a visiting artist at SFDW in
1956, returned to New York in 1960 and then reconnected with Nancy Meehan who had
studied at the Halprin-Lathrop Studio from 1953 to 1956. Meehan introduced her to Yvonne
Rainer, and the three began to meet for weekly improvisation. Forti invited her husband,
visual artist Robert Morris, Rainer, and another student, Ruth Emerson, to Halprin’s 1960
Summer Workshop.
169

The Summer Workshop consisted of movement exercises with Halprin in the morning,
followed by afternoon music sessions with La Monte Young that reinforced their overlapping
and mutually influential ideas about improvising with ordinary movement and sound.
170
In the
morning session, Halprin first led the Workshop participants through a series of floor exercises
followed by individual explorations of movement. As Rainer recalls: “Ann also had us explore
something that might be called structured improvisation, assigning tasks for voice and body… I
did an improvisation using my voice to utter fragments of words while emptying the contents
of my bag, including a tampon and other personal items.”
171
Rainer’s comfort in speaking in
fragmentary words and unveiling very personal objects attests to the Workshop’s open,
experimental, and intimate environment.
Young taught the afternoon sessions and discussed his conceptual, movement-oriented
compositions from earlier that year, such as Composition #2 (5/5/60) (fig. 2.8):

Robert Morris accompanied Forti, but was more of an observer than a participant. Two others participated;
however, their names are not known.
169
Ross, 144 notes that Morris accompanied Forti, but was not actually part of the Workshop.
170
Ibid., 145.
171
Yvonne Rainer as quoted in Ross, 147.

77
Build a fire in front of the audience. Preferably, use wood although other combustibles
may be used as necessary for starting the fire or controlling the kind of smoke. The fire
may be of any size but it should not be the kind which is associated with another object
such as a candle or a cigarette lighter. The lights may be turned out. After the fire is
burning the builder(s) may sit by and watch it for the duration of the composition;
however, he (they) should not sit between the fire and the audience in order that its
members will be able to see and enjoy the fire. The composition may be of any duration.
In the event that the performance is broadcast, the microphone may be brought up
close to the fire.

Young’s score provides instructions for a builder to execute a very mundane, everyday task as
a performance that produces a multi-sensory experience specifically for an audience. It invites
the spectators to enjoy the fire—its visual glow, smoky scent, and crackling sounds—to engage
their senses of sight, sound and smell, rather than just listening to a traditional musical score.
While the sounds of the fire can be heard live by the audience, Young also makes a point to say
it can be amplified if it is broadcast to a wider public, however, they would not be able to
experience the full extent of this multi-sensory event. Finally, the score is precise, but also
open with variables allowed for different materials, size, and duration.
The second score, Composition #5 (6/8/60), (fig. 2.8) is arguably Young’s most well-
known of this period:
Turn a butterfly (or any number of butterflies) loose in the performance area.
When the composition is over, be sure to allow the butterfly to fly away outside.
The composition may be of any length but if an unlimited amount of time is available,
the doors and windows may be opened before the butterfly is turned loose and the
composition may be considered finished when the butterfly flies away.

Conceptualized during an outing to Mount Tamalpais near Halprin’s studio with Beat poet
Diane Wakoski, this score provides instructions to capture a butterfly (or butterflies), then
observe the insect(s) in a particular time and place for an undetermined amount of time, until
they fly away. Like Composition #2, this score provides an instruction for a simple, everyday

78
action that is then observed or perceived, but not necessarily heard by or for an audience, and
while visually engaging, it is a sonically imperceptible composition.
While Young explicitly refers to these language-based scores as musical compositions,
they easily could be instructions for a dance or performance as they parallel the “ordinary”
task-based movement and engagement with nature in Halprin‘s workshops, as Ross observes:
In both Ann’s dances and Young’s compositions of this period, the goal is to fuse visual
aesthetics with the semiotics of contemporary reality and the natural world.
The result is an art of the world, situated in the world, where the critical factor is the
frame. Its boundaries determine what slice of life is held up for our aesthetic regard.
172

Young’s intent to utilize an everyday action and fuse it with the natural world for aesthetic and
sensory engagement, underscored by a Zen-like sense of ephemerality and irony, mirrors the
early minimalist instruction-based scores pioneered by Fluxus artist George Brecht and others
who took Cage’s composition class at The New School.
Yvonne Rainer commented retrospectively that she felt that Young’s presence “pushed
the work in the direction of Cage’s idea: the aleatory, the task, sounds and actions outside of
the traditional art nexus, the gap between art and life and what came to be known as Fluxus
ideas.”
173
It is clear that Halprin had already been working at the “boundaries of the art/life
nexus” long before she held the Summer Workshop, however, the overlay of these Cagean
aesthetics seemed to “legitimize her own investigations.”
174
This may have been especially
true for the participants like Rainier who came from New York, some of whom had been
working at the Merce Cunningham Studio and all of whom were well aware of Cage.

172
Ibid.
173
Ross, 144.
174
Ibid.

79
While Young may have been a conduit for bringing Cage’s ideas into Halprin’s
workshop, she reciprocated by exposing Riley and Young to her own improvisation methods in
a completely open environment that facilitated the expansion of the boundaries of their own
music and compositions.
175
As the dancers worked on their movement improvisations, she
encouraged them to create friction with everyday objects through actions such as dragging
metal objects along plate glass studio windows or rolling steel ball bearings across the sound
board of an upright spinet piano. During the Summer Workshop, they experimented with
extended single noises and tones. As Young noted: “Sometimes we produced sounds that
lasted over an hour… These experiences were very rewarding and perhaps help to explain
what I mean when I say that I like to get inside of a sound… I began to see how each sound was
its own world and that we experienced it through our bodies.”
176

The year following the Summer 1960 Workshop Young and Riley moved to New York,
where they both became central figures of experimental and minimal music. Young soon
collaborated with Jackson MacLow and George Maciunas on the bold collection of
indeterminate scores, essays and images known as An Anthology (1961) (fig. 2.9a-b), the first
artists’ publication by those would become associated with Fluxus. Additionally, both Young
and Riley performed them at Toshi Ichiyanagi and Yoko Ono’s Chambers Street loft series.
177

175
Ibid., 146.
176
La Monte Young, “Lecture,” delivered at the Summer Workshop 1960. Young recorded some of the sounds from
this period for Halprin and eventually re-purposed them in a tape composition that later accompanied Merce
Cunningham’s dance, Winterbranch (1964).
177
Poet Jackson Mac Low co-published and George Maciunas designed the book that is fully titled: An Anthology of
Chance Operations Concept Art Anti-Art Indeterminacy Improvisation Meaningless Work Natural Disasters Plans of
Action Stories Diagrams Music Poetry Essays Dance Constructions Mathematics Compositions. Ichiyanagi and Ono’s
series also featured composers Joseph Byrd, Henry Flynt, Terry Jennings and Richard Maxfield; poetry by Mac Low;
dance by Simone Forti; and an environment by sculptor Robert Morris. The series is documented in printed
programs in the Jean Brown Collection at the Getty Research Institute.

80
While the Summer Workshop experience for Riley and Young proved expansive, some
students found its openness and intensity both daunting and overwhelming. Trisha Brown,
who had graduated from Mills College in 1958 and was teaching at Reed College, came to
Halprin’s Summer Workshop to expand her own pedagogy and commented: “I didn’t have a
sense that there was a curriculum or a structure or a sequence in the class that was intending
to lead to something, some understanding of what we could do through improvisations…”
178

Halprin’s methodology involved giving each student an ordinary task as an improvisational
prompt that would lead back into choreography. Brown was assigned to sweep the dance
deck for hours and she approached it as a repetitive dance structure, but Halprin’s intent was
for her to experience this ordinary task as a Zen-like meditation. Brown, was displeased: “I
wanted to make dances. It bothered me that all of this material was going into the ether… The
improvisations were so rich and so wild and went through so much material. I had a sense of
being lost, of not knowing where any of this was going.”
179

Simone Forti expressed a similar, more visceral reaction to the Summer Workshop in her
Handbook in Motion (1974): “I think improvisation was really beginning to pain me… I can
remember saying that my inner ear could no longer take those limitless seas. There just
seemed to be all this turmoil and turning of image upon image.” But she also praised Halprin
for teaching her “how to achieve a state of receptivity in which the stream of consciousness
could still spill out unhampered”
180
and later called this an “unconscious flow with

178
Ross, 148.
179
Ibid.
180
Forti, Handbook in Motion: An Account of Ongoing Personal Discourse and Its Manifestations in Dance, 32.

81
consciousness.”
181
Forti recalled how Halprin’s Summer Workshop helped students to
problem-solve and find resolution: “It was a process in which the teacher gave the student a
point of departure for an exploration… The teacher’s instructions would… provide a focus
(sometimes called a “problem”) and he or she had to find their own solution.”
182

Yvonne Rainer has stated that the most important thing she learned in the Summer
Workshop was “finding ways of generating movement outside the body” using objects in
combination with the task-like activities.”
183
She also reminisced about how, in Halprin’s
introductions to her ideas and during the class discussions, she: “seemed very present and
dynamic… She didn’t represent a style of dancing; she was interested in exploration. She is a
great educator and that is undeniable.”
184

Ultimately, Brown, Forti, and Rainer would take what they learned in the Summer
Workshop and find their own ways of infusing improvisation with more form and structure in
their own respective iterations of pedestrian movement. Brown and Rainer would join Robert
Dunn’s choreography class at the Merce Cunningham Studio and subsequently become
members of the Judson Dance Theatre, where Forti and Morris also danced. Beginning in
1962, Forti began to collaborate on more theatrical happenings with her husband Robert
Whitman.
While Forti and Rainer have acknowledged Halprin’s influence, specific pieces such as
Rainer’s Ordinary Dance literally references Halprin’s phrase—ordinary tasks—and she uses
the random everyday movement and verbal narrative learned in the Summer Workshop. As

181
Karen Moss, interview by author with Simone Forti. Los Angeles, June 2, 2014.
182
Simone Forti, “Animate Dancing: a Practice in Improvisation,” in Taken by Surprise: A Dance Improvisation
Reader, ed. Ann Cooper Albright and David Gere (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2003), 57.
183
Ross, 150.
184
Ibid., 151.

82
Emma Forbes astutely notes, Ordinary Dance and the entire A Concert of Dance [No. 1] at the
Judson Dance Theatre (1962) is credited by scholars such as Sally Banes, Ramsay Burt, and
Carrie Lambert-Beatty as a key breakthrough in postmodern dance, but Anna Halprin’s
influence is overlooked. This relationship is also not addressed by Halprin dance scholars
Kaplan, Poynor, and Worth.
185
Only Ross cites a letter that poet Diane Wakoski wrote to the
editor of the Floating Bear, the journal that reviewed Rainer’s dance, to demand that Halprin’s
influence on both Rainer and Forti be acknowledged:
Being a West coaster (from California) I am aware that Miss Rainer’s methods of dance
composition, while delightful and engaging in the way she uses them, are not original
with her. The idea she uses for constructing dances through an improvisatory and
associative manner, using her own voice as an instrument, is a technique which was
developed by the Ann Halprin Dance Company (San Francisco, California) and which
was really most extensively used and elaborated on by a dancer named Simone [Forti]
Morris… Now, don’t get me wrong. I approve of Yvonne Rainer’s dancing––very much.
Like it. Admire it. But like any good Californian I hate to see credit given where it is not
due and of course feel wretched when it’s not given to those who deserve it.
186

In her recent thesis, Harmony Wolfe agrees that Brown, Rainer, Forti, Young, and even
Morris (who observed but did not participate) learned methods from Halprin’s Summer
Workshop of 1960 that resonated in their subsequent work. However, her primary argument
is more about how Halprin’s work fits into the larger context of avant-garde, event-based
performance; she believes that the most important aspect of the Summer Workshop was how
it encouraged a circulation of ideas through scoring and task-based improvisation that was in
concert with the avant-garde practices of Allan Kaprow’s Happenings, Fluxus performance,

185
Emma Forbes, 9, cites these omissions in Sally Banes’ Democracy’s Body, as well as other publications by the
same author, Ramsay Burt’s Judson Dance Theatre, and Carrie Lambert-Beatty’s Being Watched: Yvonne Rainer
and the 1960s.
186
Diane Wakoski, “Letter to the Editor,” reprinted in The Floating Bear: A Newsletter Issue 25. (1962): 252,
quoted in Ross, 166–167.

83
Judson Dance Theatre, minimalism, and postwar experimental music. She views the Workshop
as a laboratory, an experimental site for interdisciplinary practices that challenged media
specificity in the arts.
Each of these authors cites critical contributions of the 1960 Summer Workshop. While
Ross tries to recuperate Halprin’s omission from postmodern dance scholarship and Wolfe
focuses on Halprin’s conceptual strategies and their relationship to the larger nexus of
contemporary avant-garde performance, I would argue that it was also Halprin’s
improvisational methodology and pedagogical process that clearly influenced the younger
chorographers. What is critical to both Halprin’s performance and to her pedagogy is how she
transformed unbridled improvised movements into instruction-based events by further
developing her own scoring methodology.

Parades and Changes: From Workshop to Score
As the SFDW continued to incorporate music, vocals, language, and objects into
improvised movement, Halprin had to expand upon the rudimentary choreographic charting
system that she had developed for Birds of America. Initially, she would chart possible
anatomical combinations of movements on sheets of paper, give them each a number, then
randomly pick elements to make a pattern, resulting in “the wildest combinations of
movements, things I could never have conceived myself.”
187
The SFDW would experiment
with these new possibilities of movement and different combinations of dancers as they
continued to improvise. By combining chance-oriented technique with improvisation, Halprin

187

Halprin, Moving Toward Life: Five Decades of Transformational Dance, 81.

84
continued to transcend cause and effect relationships in her events. However, as the
performances became more complex, she needed a new way to find form and communicate it
to her dancers:
At a certain point I realized that I needed some other ways for helping people develop
this material more fully. It wasn’t enough to have a momentary movement image. What
do you do with it? Where does it go? And that’s when scoring came in,
which opened up a lot of new creative possibilities. That was the most freeing, most
liberating experience of my life.
188

Halprin’s early scores provided a set of general instructions and simple graphics for
participants to comprehend the timing, place, and physical activity for a performance.
Conceptually, she preferred “open scores,” as they allowed for constant shifting and far
greater flexibility, spontaneity, and variation from performance to performance.
189
She was
acquainted with the open and variable scoring techniques of avant-garde musicians ranging
from Cage’s random, chance operations and Young’s poetic, minimal scores to Morton
Subotnick’s more structured musical notation using a “cell block” system that he developed at
the San Francisco Tape Music Center.
190

When Halprin and Subotnick had an opportunity to work together in 1963 on Parades
and Changes (1965), SFDW’s first full-scale and most well-known performance of this period,
they collaborated on the complex score using a system of colored index cards to compose cell
blocks for the performance. First, they established a set of six tracks for each disciplinary area:
visual, sound, environment/set, lights, props, and movement, then they created a series of cell

188
Ibid.
189
Anna Halprin Biography (undated), Anna Halprin Papers, Series 1: Biographical. Sub-series I: Background and
Achievements, Museum of Performance + Design, San Francisco.
190
Ross, 184.

85
blocks for the different variations within each track.
191
For instance, the music could include
live everyday sounds, vocals, magnetic tape, a Bach cantata, or a live radio broadcast of 1960s
pop songs.
192
The movement section included blocks with different tasks and instructions: 1)
stomping (wearing unisex clothes and heavy work shoes); 2) unrolling sheets of plastic (down
aisles, up the stage, draping sheets on scaffolds, playing them like instruments); 3) talking to
the audience; 4) dressing up from rows of props; 5) undressing and dressing (three times
slowly—on the fourth time, undressing to perform the last task nude); and 6) paper-tearing
(each act of tearing created the dancer’s movements).
193

Operating independently from one another, these contrasting cell blocks could be
selected and combined in different sequences, orders, and relationships depending on the
location of each performance, evolving an entirely new version of Parades and Changes at
each venue.
After two previews in California at San Francisco State University and in Fresno,
Parades and Changes premiered at the Stockholm Contemporary Music Festival (fig. 2.10a-b)
in September 1965.
194
About twenty minutes prior to the performance, Halprin went
backstage to shuffle the index cards with all of the names of the dance sections.
Simultaneously, lighting designer Patric Hickey, Folke Rabe (Morton Subotnick’s former
student who stood in for him), and set designer Jo Landor all shuffled cards for each of their
areas. Halprin then posted the cards to determine the overarching score for that

191
Poyner and Worth, 15–16. Alice Rutowski, in “Development, Definition, and Demonstration of the Halprin
Art/Life Process in Dance Education,“ unpublished dissertation, International College, Los Angeles, 1984, 29–30,
first uses the term “tracks” and clarifies their relationship to the cell blocks.
192
“Yvonne Rainer Interviews Anna Halprin,” in Ross, 95.
193
Ross, 184.
194
After Fresno, San Francisco, and Stockholm, Parades and Changes was performed in Warsaw. When SFDW
returned to the US, it was presented at UC Berkley, UCLA, and Hunter College in New York.

86
performance. Because of language difficulties in Sweden, Lawrence Halprin assisted the
process: once the cards were posted, he drew diagrams of the scores according to each of the
different areas: movement, environment, lighting, and music/sound that facilitated the entire
process of learning the performance.
Since the dancers would not know the precise order of the performance, the exact
type of music, or the specific arrangements of props and sets until the cards had been posted,
they had little time to rehearse. Instead, they would have to learn the new parameters
immediately, relying upon their Workshop training in improvisation, problem-solving, and
collaboration. Halprin described how this flexible scoring allowed for a different combinations
of events:
The scores provided for complete independence so that a movement event, a sound
event, a light event, an environmental event can be in many different combinations.
Each performance can become then a completely new experience by the very way in
which these independent events are combined, overlapped, or given a sequential order.
The scoring systems also provided complete flexibility so each performance can be
different depending on the order of events and their interrelationships which can be
planned according to the physical architecture of the theater.
195

This scoring system allowed these disparate “events” to coalesce into one larger
interdisciplinary event that was site-responsive but also allowed for spontaneous alterations—
what Halprin called “unarmored moments” within each of six parameters.
196

Parades and Changes, as the title implies, is a “parade” or progression of everyday tasks:
executed in real time, they are live, everyday actions and not theatrical representations.
These ordinary movements no longer functioned as just a tool for the SFDW dancers to

195
Anna Halprin, “Scores as a Collective Form,” typewritten handout, unpaginated. Series V:; Education, Sub-series
VII: Compositions and Scoring. Anna Halprin Papers, Museum of Performance + Design, San Francisco.
196
Ross, 184.

87
understand the kinesthetic, sensory aspects of dance; instead, the specific tasks now dictated
the choreography. No matter the selection of sequencing or time allotments, the score for
Parades and Changes still created a dynamic balance between specifically scored and
improvised movement.
Halprin also wrote more explicit instructions for certain sections of Parades and
Changes, such as the final section referred to as the “paper dance”:
Make ten single sounds on the paper. Crumple the paper for sixty counts, then tear
continuously, listening to your sounds. When you have had enough, collect as large a
bundle of paper as you can, and exit.

As one may see from photographs of the “paper dance,” (fig 2.10a-b) each dancer is at
first engrossed in exploring the sounds of the paper on his or her own.
197
As the performance
progresses, the dancer’s bodies and movements overlap and seem to struggle as flesh and
paper intertwine into athletic poses and dramatic configurations. Finally, after the dancers
gather the paper into bundles, they stand together before exiting the stage. This is one
example of how Halprin translated a specific Workshop exercise—experimenting with
different materials to evoke diverse sounds—into the parameters of a performance. It is likely
that the original impetus for this exercise harked back to 1959–60, possibly even to the
Summer Workshop when Young and Riley led explorations of ordinary sounds.
While Halprin and Martin Subotnick first started collaborating on Parades and Changes
as early as 1963, the concept for the paper dance may also be related to another

197
To best illustrate different sections of Parades and Changes, the images are photographs from both the original
performances in the 1960s and a few later presentations in the 2000s, some of which will be discussed later in this
chapter.

88
source.
198
In March 1964, Halprin participated in Allan Kaprow’s Paper (A Happening) for UC
Berkeley’s All Student Art Festival.
199
(fig. 2.11a-b) Kaprow’s score described the setting:
Street level of a three-tiered parking lot opposite residence halls.
During Monday afternoon and Tuesday, each participant should crumple the sheets
of a full newspaper and strew it over the eastern half of the lot. A record player is near
the center and ten metal barrels are place in line along the western end.
200

Ten “Events” follow, beginning with: “Twist gal arrives, puts on rock-and-roll records, dances,”
then a chaotic interaction with mock violence ensues between sweepers (25 men), barrel men
(25 men), women (25), and cars and drivers (25). At one point, the women’s bodies are
“dumped” into the trash, but they jump up triumphantly from the piles of paper, eventually
fighting, overcoming the sweepers, then twisting, loading trash, and driving away. This rivalry
between the groups of men and women in a setting with motor vehicles anticipated Kaprow’s
Household, which took place two months later, in May 1964 at Cornell University. For that
happening, male and female students engaged in a battle of the sexes set in a junkyard: the
women licked strawberry jam off a car and tore off their shirts, while the men built a tower,
demolished cars, then set them on fire.
201

Because of the dearth of information on Paper (A Happening)––there is only the score
and a few photos in Allan Kaprow’s archive and a listing on the SFDW chronology––the images
of bodies immersed in newspaper seem to echo those in “paper dance,” however, there is no

198
Halprin lists the date of Parades and Changes variously in her papers, from 1963 when she started working with
Subotnick, to the actual performance in 1965.
199
On her SFDW chronology listing this appears as: “Anna Halprin, Allan Kaprow and Lawrence Ferlinghetti
participated in a “Happening” called Paper as part of the Spring Arts Festival,” but there is no other information in
the literature and only a thin folder in Allan Kaprow’s Papers at the Getty archives.
200
Score for Paper Dance, Allan Kaprow Papers, Getty Research Institute, 980063, Series III: Project Files, Box 9,
Folder 3.
201
SFDW also performed this strawberry jam sequence in San Francisco as part of a Fluxfest event at the
Longshoreman’s Hall, San Francisco, in 1967.

89
sense of embattlement or struggle between the genders. Conversely, specific sections of
Parades and Changes call for more intimate interactions that focus quite directly on
vulnerability, nudity, and sensuality. In two specific sections, “Embrace” and “Dress and
Undress,” Halprin added more explicit directions and texts:
Embrace. (Dictionary definition: A close encircling with arms and pressure to the bosom,
especially in the intimacies of love; i. to clasp in the arms, as with affection;
ii. to take in hand; to take to heart; to receive readily; to welcome; to accept; iii. to
include as parts of a whole.) Go as far as you can (and get away with). Maintain this
focus and relax it only when your action is interrupted.

Dress and Undress. Focus on the audience and begin slowly and steadily to take off your
clothes. When you are naked, notice your breathing, then put on your clothes. Focus on
someone in the group and repeat the action. Repeat a third time.

While SFDW did perform nude on the dance deck in Kentfield, the live performances of
Parades and Changes were the first time the SFDW dancers appeared nude in public. In the
Summer Workshop of 1965, Halprin specifically had the participants experiment with modes of
dressing and undressing; once again, this ordinary movement was extracted from specific
workshop exercises. Now she instructed her dancers to “notice your breathing” and “focus on
someone in the group.” As Poynor has noted:
The unwavering focus of the eye is one of the most powerful elements in the dance. It
magnifies the act of looking and being looked at which is crucial to all live performance,
while also suggesting its centrality in all of our daily life encounters. It is unnerving in its
intensity and its simplicity. The focus of their eyes means that the dancers are relying
solely on touch to perform the undressing and dressing…”
202

This quote suggests the power of the dancer’s extended gaze—not just for spectators, but
more crucially for the dancers themselves, since their intense visual focus requires that they
engage their tactile sense to complete their task. This also relates back to Halprin’s standard

202
Poynor and Worth, 77.

90
SFDW exercises where she blindfolded dancers and covered mirrors to allow them to focus on
their kinesthetic and tactile senses.
When Parades and Changes first previewed in California, the reviews were generally
favorable and the frank nudity did not cause any particular controversy. Similarly, when it
premiered in Stockholm, Rabe assured Halprin that Sweden had no laws forbidding nudity, and
the performance was generally well received. The dance critic Madeline Kats, who wrote for
Stockholm’s daily paper, called Parades and Changes “…90 concentrated minutes of pure
theater… Not for a second is the tension between audience and performer broken…”
203
while
the art critic Bengt OIvang wrote in the Tidinignen that:
Total theater can become something of a convention, but the openly vivid performance
put on by the Dancer’s Workshop at the Municipal Theater on Sunday evening had all
the freshness, sensualism and inventiveness to make one convinced that we are not
only heading towards a new theatre but that we already have an articulate expression
for its spirit…”
204

SFDW performed Parades and Changes at Hunter College in April 1967 and during the
intervening two years their roster of dancers had changed with several younger dancers
recruited from San Francisco State University.
205
This time Halprin started the program with
the undressing sequence, including a solo section in which she also disrobed and bathed
herself from a bowl of water.
206
Some members of the audience expressed shock at this and

203
Ross, 188.
204
Paludan, 145.
205
Ibid.
206
Ross, 192.

91
the New York Police Department remained backstage during the performance prepared to
issue a warrant for public indecency, but this did not transpire.
207

Although Halprin has said that she could hear comments from members of the
audience who were aghast, by the end of the performance, SFDW received a standing ovation.
Douglas Davis described the dance as "hypnotic and beautiful" in Newsweek
208
while Doris
Deron of Dance Magazine called it "engaging" and "understated, almost ritualistic."
209
Clive
Barnes’ New York Times review, however, titled “Dance: The Ultimate in Bare Stages,” was
mixed. He sarcastically stated that the “boys and girls together are as rip-roaring naked as
berries” and referred to it as the “no pants dance from San Francisco,”
210
but he praised the
paper dance: “Fantastic shapes evolve, paper sculpture mingling fascinating with nude bodies.
The result is not only beautiful, but somehow liberating as well.”
211
Beyond the critics,
Parades and Changes experimental theater directors Richard Schechner, who saw the Hunter
performance said he was “significantly affected” by it and as a result, he invited Halprin to
work with his Performance Group in New York the following year.
212

Halprin has remained adamant that the dressing and undressing sequence is a simple,
chaste, everyday ritual and while she has alluded to the liberating qualities Barnes noted, she
has rejected pejorative references to the sequence as strip tease: “There is a way of
removing your clothes and appearing totally vulnerable—open and

207
Halprin, Moving Through Life, 6, notes police were present and presumably had a warrant, however, she was
never officially arrested. Halprin noted this incident did prevent SFDW from performing in some places, and when
they performed in Poland, they added pieces of clothing rather than taking off their clothes.
112
Douglas Davis, Review, Newsweek, 22 November 1971, 137.
209
Doris Hering, "Dancer’s Workshop of San Francisco: Parades and Changes,” Dance Magazine, June 1967, 37.
210
Clive Barnes, “Dance: The Ultimate in Bare Stages,” New York Times, April 24, 1967, 38.
211
Ibid.
212
Ross, 194.

92
vulnerable.”
213
The fact that the dressing and undressing sequence is culled directly from the
Workshop exercises and consists of Halprin’s vocabulary of her ordinary, everyday tasks would
seem to support her assertion of the chastity and vulnerability of the nudity in Parades and
Changes; however, it has also been interpreted in other ways.
Emma Forbes describes the nudity in Parades and Changes as “a hyper-sexual
gesture” and makes the case that the dancers’ “confrontational gaze cannot be interpreted in
a completely non-sexual manner.”
214
While in her score Halprin instructed the dancers to
“focus on someone in the group,” she did not tell them how or where to direct their gaze.
Additionally, she has mentioned how she told her dancers to “respond in the moment” to the
tenor of each particular situation, which included making direct eye contact with their
audiences. I believe that in attempting to interpret the dancers’ gaze or their nudity as
“hyper-sexual” in these early performances of Parades and Changes becomes particularly
problematic when using archival documentation rather than first-hand observation. As
discussed in the introduction, when referring to documentation of dance and performance art
from the 1960s, it is difficult to read a series of de-contextualized images or inferior video,
especially when trying to interpret subtleties of gaze, the ambience of the venue, or its
reception in a particular context. This is particularly true with Parades and Changes, so I will
know cite a few examples of personal, eye-witness accounts of the performance.
In 1970, Peter Selz director of the new University Art Museum (UAM) in Berkeley
invited Halprin and SFDW to perform Parades and Changes for the opening to “christen” the
new museum––a brutalist concrete building with cascading geometric balconies and ramps.

213
Ross, 194.
214
Forbes, 11.

93
Appropriately titled “Invocation of the Cement Spirit” (fig. 2.12-2.13) Ross’ recounted her
personal experience of this event:
I can remember pressing to the edge of the spiraling ramps of the museum along with a
mass of my fellow students to gaze down upon the ritualistic neutrality of the dancers’
matter-of-fact nudity. The visual and emotional images were both startling and deeply
memorable in their directness and simplicity. This seemed to me the perfect dance
statement for this moment of the body-against-the-machine anti-war demonstrations
and quest for open disclosure and meaningful engagement.
215

Ross’ reading of the 1970 event, concurrent to student anti-war protests at UC Berkeley and
the tragic murder of Kent State University students by police, extends the “matter-of-fact”
nudity into a more sociopolitical dimension: the open, honest exposure of able bodies as a sign
of agency and empowerment for those demonstrating against the Viet Nam war. Her
interpretation of nudity in Parades and Changes as a positive expression of strength, renders
the body as a political subject, rather than a spectacle. In contrast to the women on the
program notes, (fig.2.12) a photograph of the UAM performance reveals writhing bodies with
a central male figure raising a flag emerging from the chaos and conveying a triumphant
gesture of power and agency.
216
(fig 2.13)
Since the inception of the Dancer’s Workshop, Halprin focused her pedagogy on
everyday tasks and life experience, teaching dancers to integrate mind and body and find
harmony with the natural environment. Intuitively, she gravitated toward a Zen-like ethos to
“live in the moment.” In 1964 she met Fritz Perls, who had trained as a psychoanalyst in
Germany, but rebelled against strict Freudian psychoanalysis. In the early 1950s, he became

215
Ibid., xiv-xv.
216
The composition and layering of bodies in the photographic documentation is oddly reminiscent of Eugene
Delacroix’s epic allegorical painting, Liberty Leading the People (1830), which commemorates the July Revolution
of 1930 and the overthrow of Charles X.

94
one of the proponents of Gestalt therapy and by the early 1960s had studied Zen in Japan. He
then moved to California where he taught at the Esalen Institute, the epicenter of the human
potential movement.
217
Perls’ methodology, a hybrid of Gestalt and Zen, encouraged people
to focus attention on the present moment to release their preoccupations and freely display
their emotions and desires.
218

Introduced to Perls by Paul Baum, one of her former students, Halprin first participated
in a Perls group therapy session in early 1964. In the group, she encountered a man who
appeared very conservative, and she felt compelled to take off her clothes to shock him.
219

She then sat in a chair, crossed her legs tightly, and unconsciously conveyed her own
inhibitions. She later commented: “I wasn’t thinking of that as therapy, I was thinking of it as
theater.”
220
Perls called her out on this gesture, questioning her posture and the efficacy of
her performance. She appreciated this critique and they quickly became friends.

Halprin has said that this spontaneous stripping incident inspired the “dressing and
undressing” sequence in Parades and Changes, supporting the idea that she wanted it to
reveal the “direct, natural openness” of nudity, rather than something either shameful or
sexualized. Perls’ Gestalt approach also influenced her focus on the immediate present and
authentic everyday life as she explained:
Fritz Perls based his experimental approach on staying in the NOW. We learned in our
work together through many workshops with Fritz, and other Gestalt practitioners, to
get in touch with our feeling so we could be in the Now in our performance. We wanted
to live an authentic situation, not to play-act with being authentic.
221

217
Martin Shepard’s Fritz (London: Franklin Watts, 1980) is the primary source for biography of Fritz Perls.
218
Ross, 175.
219
Shepard, 66, and also relayed in Halprin, Moving Through Life, 111–112.
220
Ross, 176.
221
Halprin, Moving Through Life, 111.

95
Perls’ approach reaffirmed Halprin’s own vision of creating an inextricable link between
“theatrical experience and life experience” and influenced the “now” quality of Parades and
Changes. Ultimately, Halprin would incorporate some of Perls’ workshop exercises, based on
role-playing and games, into her own subsequent teaching in a series of “break-through
movements,” aimed to release not only physical but also emotional tensions.
222
Halprin
developed her own Gestalt diagram (fig 2.14) that emphasized not just formal aspects of
dance, but also emotions and environment that influence her subsequent work and the
collaborative workshops she did with Lawrence.

The Halprin Collaborations: Experiments in the Environment and RSVP Cycles
…the workshop was a catalyst, was an education, was a trip into my future, was an art
form, was a lifestyle, was a freestyle life race, was groove… –Chip Lord
223

The short excerpt above from artist/architect Chip Lord’s letter to Anna and Lawrence
Halprin evidences the significant impact of their Experiments in the Environment. While at he
workshop Lord and his friend artist Doug Michals became so inspired, they decided to form
AntFarm, a group devoted to their own experiments in architecture, media and
performance.
224
Between 1966 and 1971, Lawrence and Anna organized four interdisciplinary
Experiments in the Environment summer workshops, held at their home in Kentfield, at the

222
Ibid., 112.
223
Chip Lord, letter to Anna and Lawrence Halprin, October 5, 1968, Anna Halprin Papers, Series IV: Dance and
Environment, box 11 folder 6, Museum of Performance + Design, San Francisco. Lord and Michals initially formed
AntFarm and were later joined by Hudson Marquez and Curtis Schreier, with Doug Hall as a collaborator on
performances.
224
Elissa Auther and Adam Lerner, eds., West of Center: Art and the Counterculture Experiment in America, Denver:
Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver and Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012): xvii.

96
San Francisco studio, and at their house at Sea Ranch in Mendocino.
225
The 30 participants in
the first month-long workshop in 1966 included architects, artists, dancers, environmental
designers, artists, sociologists, and therapists working in a process designed to facilitate
collaboration and “collective creativity” through new approaches to environmental
awareness.
226
Encompassing the urban context of San Francisco , the studio and its environs in
Kentfield and the rural coast of Sea Ranch in Mendecino County. the Halprins’ first
collaborative workshop combined Anna’s task-oriented movement with Lawrence’s interests
in how people navigate different spaces and become sensitized and react emotionally to
various landscapes. The evoke Guy Debord’s definition of “psychogeography” as “the study of
the specific effects of the environment (whether consciously organized or not) on the
emotions and behaviors of individuals.”
227

The Halprins each approached location differently: Lawrence regarded the
environment as a series of constraints that prompted “Happening-like” events, while Anna
regarded sites as inspiration for future commissions or sources for themes and gestures in her
dances.
228
The two devised loosely structured, open scores to engage participants in a series
of tasks and a multi-sensory, emotional process:

225
Lawrence developed the Master Plan for Sea Ranch (1962–67) and designed the Halprins’ home along with
architects Charles Moore and William Turnbull (1965–66), cited in Experiments in Environment: The Halprin
Workshops, 1966–1971, Graham Foundation, Chicago, September 19, 2004–December 13, 2014, exhibition
website, http://www.grahamfoundation.org/public_exhibitions/5241-experiments-in-environment-the-halprin-
workshops-1966-1971(accessed June 11, 2015).
226
Ibid. “Collective creativity,” the Halprin’s own term for collaboration appears throughout their texts.
227
Guy Debord, “Definitions,” Internationiale Situationiste #1 (June 1958). While they also explore the
psychological reactions to urban and rural environments, the Halprin’s exercises are more conscious and
structured than the free-form Debordian derive.
228
Ross, 204–20

97
The basis of our workshop is a sensory, emotional experience process, which uses all of
the senses…[and] on the ideas of experience, interaction, and communication, not just
talking. They become more profound because this approach knocks out the usual
seminaring and lecturing process that gets in the way of most creativity, because it
informs people, rather than allow[ing] them to discover through personal experience.
229

Reflecting the Halprins’ mutual interest in the multi-sensory, emotional, and
experiential, they preferred interactive and dialogical processes that allowed them to
“discover through personal experience” rather than more academic “seminaring and
lecturing,” as Lawrence notes. The emphasis on awareness, discovery, and affect not only
reflects the Halprins’ pedagogy, it demonstrates the influence of aspects of Perls’ Gestalt
psychology and their own burgeoning ideas about collective creativity.
Accordingly, site-specific scores for each part of the workshop maximized participants’
engagement through senses, feelings, and actions. In San Francisco, participants went on
choreographed journeys—psychogeographic excavations–– to observe how people occupy the
built environment and to diagram pedestrians’ movements on Market Street. (fig. 2.15a). In
Kentfield, participants engaged in kinesthetic movement sessions with Anna in the studio
(fig. 2.15b) and outdoors as in their blindfolded nature walks through the forested landscape
to amplify their non-visual senses. (fig. 2.16c) On the Mendocino Coast, Charles Moore, one of
the architects of Sea Ranch, and the Halprins co-organized a building project using driftwood
to make playful structures.
230
(figs. 2.15d-e)
Lawrence’s Scores for Driftwood Villages 1 and 2 (fig. 2.16f-g)––a four-square grid with
a schematic map below—lists the specific directions for each part on the left side in his cursive

229
Randolph T. Hester and Dee Mullen, “Interview with Lawrence Halprin,” Places Journal (Volume 12, no. 2:
1999).
230
Ross, 205.

98
handwriting (with a drawing of an eye to signify visual observation) while on the right, the
available resources are enumerated: the natural materials, the number of people, and their
motivations, needs, and interests. The first exercise entails initial contact and alteration of the
environment by individuals, while the second calls for them to give up the initial structure and
start anew by building a different environment as a collective community. A second scroll-like
printed document (fig.2.16g ) provides the overarching score the entire series of workshops.
Both the writing of the scores and the process of the collaboration are precursors to
the Halprins’ own burgeoning methodology for “collective creativity” that they called the RSVP
Cycles. Directly after the 1968 Experiments in the Environment, the Halprins revisited
Lawrence’s sketches and diagrams for directing the workshop process along with Anna’s
exercises aimed at helping participants to understand the individual emotions and values they
expressed through performances. At this point the two mutually agreed that they needed to
codify their workshop process, which combined Lawrence’s strengths in design and planning
with Anna’s keen understanding of movement and affect. Together they co-authored the
RSVP Cycles, using “RSVP” as an acronym for the four steps that in their collaborative process:
R = Resources, which are what you have to work with. These include human and
environmental resources and their motivations and aims.
S = Score, which is any set of directions or instructions that describe the process l leading
to the performance. These can be in varying degrees Open (variable) or Closed(fixed)
V=Valuaction, assess the value of the resources that were collected, the score that was
written, the actions that were completed in the performance, and the efficiency of
going through the cycle as a whole. The “Valuaction” analyzes the results of collective
decision-making, and as its name suggests, addresses the “action-oriented as well as the
decision-oriented aspects of the cycle
P =Performance is the result of the scores and the ‘style’ of the process
.231

231
From “Score for Writing and RSVP Cycle,” a typewritten Workshop handout, Anna Halprin Papers, Museum of
Performance + Design, San Francisco. The Halprins did their Experiments in the Environment, 1966–71.

99
Embedded within this acronym and text, one finds the essence of Halprin’s workshop
methodology and pedagogical approach. The first component, Resources, as seen in
Lawrence’s diagram (fig. 2.16f) includes the objective physical conditions (landscape,
geography, geology, etc.), economic and demographics aspects of the site, available materials
and subjective elements such as participants’ attitudes, emotions, “hang-ups,” hopes, and
fears. The Score, which may be open/flexible or closed/fixed, is the core direction for the
activity that is written (and illustrated) in advance for every aspect of the workshop.
Valuaction, a neologism the Halprins invented, encourages participants to share, evaluate and
act upon their own perceptions. Lawrence referred to this as the “most interesting and
difficult part of the workshop;” but, it is not intended as a critique of the leaders; rather it is
designed for self-assessment:
We don’t criticize in our workshops…And we don’t tell people how they’ve done…
They are very different than what occurs in architecture school crits. A lot of people
confuse our workshops with charettes or crits. What happens in value-action is that
each person in the group puts together some material on the wall, describes it and tells us
what their feelings are about it. People then ask questions or interact on a different level.
As a workshop leader, I would say: why don’t you tell me what you think first?
232

The Score, whether open or closed, is the only aspect of the RSVP Cycle in which
workshop leaders retain authorship, authority, and control. Both Resources and Valuaction
emphasize the subjective reactions of the participants, and as Halprin notes, this contrasts
with traditional critiques where an authoritative leader exerts critical opinions about
participants. This emphasis on self-assessment is characteristic of “individualized learning,”
which gained favor in experimental education in the late 1960s and recalls the notion of
“student-centered” learning that came out of Dewey’s Progressive education models, which

232
Ibid.

100
Anna Halprin had experienced in her own education and regularly utilized in her own teaching.
Performance, the final phase of the RSVP Cycle, constitutes the results or the product of the
Score; however, it does not necessarily connote a performed event. This is because, in their
collaborative workshops, the Halprins not only de-emphasized an authoritarian stance to
provide an egalitarian space for their temporary community, they clearly emphasized process
over product as they articulated succinctly on their written handout: “A Workshop is a way of
releasing and revitalizing the creative process. It is a way of learning that shifts the emphasis
from the individual-to-teacher configuration to a situation in which individuals interact in a
group process. The group process is a microcosm of the community process. Workshops are
process, rather than goal-oriented.
233
The Halprins’ sensory-engaged, discovery-based, and
process-oriented Experiments in the Environment and RSVP Cycle, a rubric for learning about
collaboration, became the overarching “score” for their pedagogical process and workshop
methodology. The process-orientation and collective creation of the temporary communities
they formed in their joint workshops carried into Anna Halprin’s concurrent work with SFDW,
which was evolving into participatory and socially-engaged projects.
Concurrent to the Experiments in the Environment, Halprin pursued more ritualistic,
community-based, collaborative events. In a series of consecutive workshops Myths (1967-68),
dancers, non-dancers, and students explored scores and physical environments on ten
themes: creation, atonement, trails, totem, maze, dreams, carry, masks, storytelling and
ome.
234
For Ceremony of US (1969), James Woods invited Halprin and SFDW to do a workshop
with his with his Studio Watts, juxtaposing his all-African American dance group with her all-

233
Ibid.
234
See Shea’s previously cited dissertation for a full analysis of the ten Myths.

101
white SFDW. In the wake of the civil unrest in Watts, this intense workshop confronted racial
relations through movement and culminated in a performance at the Mark Taper Forum in Los
Angeles.
235
Halprin also continued to use scores as templates for publically sited projects such
as City Dance (1976-77), a durational, large-scale movement and dance workshop with
hundreds of participants, held from sunrise to sunset along Market Street in San Francisco.
236

I used to believe the popular saying about artists: “If you can’t ‘do’ it, teach it.”
I was wrong…Contrary to the old saying, teaching became a wonderful research
laboratory where over these many years I have been inspired by the creativity of others
and in turn my own artistic vision [has] continually expanded…Instead of working with
only dancers, I collaborated with young musician, painters, filmmakers, actors,
architects and poets... ––Anna Halprin
237

The quote above, written by Halprin at age of 83, is from her acceptance speech when
she received an honorary doctorate from CalArts (2003)
238
counters the old adage that
teaching is for those who cannot “do” their art or profession. Calling teaching a “research
laboratory” where others—often non-dancers––inspired her to “expand her own artistic
vision” underline what I have argued about the link between her performance and pedagogy.
In her performance practice she eschewed the rigidity of modern dance in favor of task-based
improvisation and ordinary movement, key predecessors to pedestrian and post-modern
dance. In her workshops with both avant-garde performers and untrained novices, she
revitalized choreography through collaborative, chance-oriented scoring that elicited event-

235
Amanda Courtney, “Anna Halprin’s Ceremony of Us: Pedagogy for Collective Movement and Embodiment,”
M.A. Thesis, University of Southern California, 2014 is a thorough analysis of this project, that discusses how
Halprins’ embodied improvisation created a tense confrontation but also a riveting performance with the two
different groups and how it prompted her to transform SFDW into a more diverse, inclusive, multi-racial company.
236
SFDW also performed City Dance 1960-69, but not as such a large-scale public event and Halprin has presented
it in New Orleans, Portland, England, Germany, Holland, Israel and Japan, according to her chronology,
https://www.annahalprin.org/about_chronology_60.html (accessed February 22, 2016).
237
Anna Halprin, “Commencement Speech for Receiving Honorary Doctorate,” California Institute of the Arts
commencement, 2003, Ann Halprin Papers, Series box 28, folder 36, Museum of Performance + Design, San
Francisco. Anna and Lawrence Halprin also received honorary doctorates from San Francisco Art Institute in 2003.
238
This somewhat ironic as she is the only artist in this study who did not teach at CalArts.

102
based performances such as Parades and Changes. Rejecting the proscenium stage, Halprin
preferred more intimate sites of her dance deck or the expanse of the natural environment, to
“explore, experiment and discover new ideas.”
As she merged the processes she describes above-––research and production–– her
workshops focused on different types of learning hat promoted several multiple intelligences
described by the education theorist, Howard Gardner.
239
Most clearly in her choreography and
pedagogy Halprin promoted kinesthetic intelligence that enables dancers and athletes to be
fully attuned to the potential of their physical bodies. With her emphasis on events in outdoor
environment, her students acquire naturalist intelligence attuned to observing, distinguishing
and sensing element in natures. With her insistence on collaboration and “creative collectivity”
Halprin also instills interpersonal intelligence: the ability to recognize and understand others
within group dynamics.
240
Throughout the years Halprin has collapsed her performance and
her pedagogy into her own Life/Art process that continues to imbue students with kinesthetic
awareness, experiential learning and new forms of intelligence.

239
Howard Gardner, Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences, (New York: Basic Books, 1983). A
Harvard University educator, Gardner developed a theory of six multiple intelligences that relate not just to an
individual’s singular intellectual abilities, but to multiple intelligence and learning modalities. I use his descriptive
categories here to further elucidate types of learning in Halprin’s work and that of the other artists in this study.
Robert Sternberg, What Is Intelligence? Contemporary Viewpoints on its Nature and Definition, Norwood, NJ,
Ablex, 1997) first critiqued Gardner’s definitions for being too arbitrary, preferring his own “triarchical model”
based on more traditional, less descriptive categories of analytical, creative and practical intelligence. Gardner
continues to update and refine his categories that have become widely accepted in progressive education.
240
Ibid. In Gardner’s second edition of Frames of Mind (1999) and in The disciplined mind: What all students should
understand. (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1999) he adds the naturalist intelligence to the original six multiple
intelligences.

103
CHAPTER 3
Allan Kaprow

Many artists support and/or amplify their art by engaging in different occupations.
However, art history often views this as peripheral to the specific act of making art.
In the case of Allan Kaprow, the integration of several occupations contributes to,
and may indeed, be the very key to the meaning of his work.
241
––Kathy O’Dell

As Kathy O’Dell observes above in the introduction to her previously mentioned thesis,
throughout his entire career Allan Kaprow assumed a hybridized role as an
artist/teacher/writer by simultaneously by pursuing his own artistic production, taking on
academic positions, and becoming a prolific writer. While O’Dell notes it is not at all unusual
for artists to engage in these other occupations, she alludes to how Kaprow’s particular
integration of his disparate practices provides a “key” or access to the meaning of his work,
more specifically, his Happenings and Activities. O’Dell observes how these scored events
“function as systems, which when entered into and played out provide an enhanced
knowledge of the life issues on which they are based.”
242
Kaprow’s carefully written
instructions direct audiences in how to actively participate (“enter in”) and perform (“play
out”) everyday scenarios in the real world. Furthermore, she asserts that “it is this
coalescence of language and action which binds Kaprow’s art to the field of education,”
243
or
more specifically, the score becomes a linguistic prompt for a performance—often embodied
action—that instigates a learning process.
While O’Dell notes that Kaprow’s art is neither “academic” nor “didactic,” she
references two major theorists who were important to his development. First is John Dewey,

241
Kathy O’Dell, previously cited master’s thesis, 1.
242
Ibid., 2.
243
Ibid.

104
whose idea of education as a “laboratory in which philosophic distinctions become concrete
and are tested”
244
was a great influence on Kaprow. As discussed previously, Dewey’s
Progressive ideals is his belief in the scientific method: education, and more specifically,
schools, are laboratories or sites for hypothesizing, testing, and proving the results of
experiments.
245
This is especially relevant to Happenings, which are research-based,
processes-oriented, and exploratory without predictable outcomes, just like scientific
experiments. Kaprow commented to O’Dell that although Dewey’s thinking was “flawed” and
the systems he proposed were “not precise,” he was still significantly influenced by the
philosopher’s writings on both aesthetics and education, which will be discussed later in this
chapter.
246

Second, O’Dell cites Jean Piaget’s structuralist theory of cognitive development that
underlines how both language and action each become integral to the learning process:
“language plays an important role in mental growth and will be used most effectively when
allied to action in the physical environment.”
247
This is pertinent to Kaprow’s durational
Happenings and Activities, which demand both mental acuity and physical activity and are
often situated outdoors within both natural and urban environments. It is this “mental
growth”—acquiring knowledge and learning about the everyday world—that prompted
Kaprow to use Happenings for his teaching in various educational contexts.
I will argue that ultimately, Kaprow’s simultaneous activities of making art, teaching,
and writing all inform the development of both his performance practices and his pedagogical

244
Ibid.
245
This also references Dewey’s University of Chicago Elementary School, called the “Lab School.”
246
O’Dell, 49.
247
Ibid., 3.

105
positions. One may see from his earliest Happenings how the written score––instructions for
participation in quotidian activities or problem-solving scenarios ––elicited different learning
experiences. Likewise, Kaprow’s writings on Happenings attempted to instruct the reader by
defining the practice, constructing rules for engagement, and theorizing the ontology and
reception of the new form. As he became less interested in making large-scale Happenings
and more involved with re-thinking the role of the artist in experimental education in the late
1960s, his own performances shifted.
Kaprow re-tooled Happenings into pared-down events that became sources for inquiry
and experiential learning in his teaching in Project Other Ways in the Berkeley Public Schools
(1969–70) and at the California Institute of the Arts (1970-74). Working with students to
create and perform scores for Happenings and task-oriented, discovery-based events, he
promoted Dewey’s concept of “learning by doing,” which instigated existential questions
about everyday life, experience and environment. As I will demonstrate Kaprow’s teaching in
these contexts, using distinctly non-art activities, coincided with the writing of the first
segment of his three-part article, “The Education of the Un-Artist,” which codifies his definition
of un-art and the role of the “un-artist.” To undergird this trajectory, I begin this chapter by
tracing Kaprow’s own early life and education, his undergraduate work in art and philosophy at
New York University, his M.A. in art history at Columbia supervised by Meyer Schapiro, and
studies with two eminent artists: painting with Hans Hofmann and composition with John
Cage. By examining Kaprow’s education and training in a chronological, detailed manner, one
may see how his own varied educational experiences and exposure to mentors had an impact
on his own pedagogy in his simultaneous roles as artist, teacher, and writer.

106
Early Education and High School
Allan Kaprow’s childhood and education, quite atypical for a middle-class boy born in
New York City in the late 1920s, were crucial to the shaping of his ideas about sense of place,
everyday activities, and popular cultural rituals as sources for learning.
248
After he developed
severe asthma at age five, his parents sent him west to avoid the inclement East Coast
weather. He first spent a year at Crouch Ranch outside of Tucson, Arizona, where his mother
initially stayed with him, before attending the Arizona Sunshine Boarding School from age six
to eleven.
Kaprow returned to New York to attend the Walden School on the Upper West Side,
founded in 1914 by Margaret Naumburg, an educator who had studied with John Dewey at
Columbia Teacher’s College, then later became an art therapist.
249
The school’s curriculum
emulated some of the key tenets of Dewey’s Progressive education philosophy: encouraging
creative expression and self-motivated learning with an emphasis on the visual and performing
arts.
250
Additionally, the school did not have grades and fostered noncompetitive
achievement, particularly an “individual transformation” through art. Given Kaprow’s
background and budding interests, this Progressive art-oriented environment suited him.
However, when his asthma did not dissipate, he had to return to Arizona to attend junior high
school at the Brandes School, located on an old pueblo in Tucson.

248
Kelley, Childsplay, 8–12. I am indebted here to Kelley’s research, which provides the only detailed account of
Kaprow’s early biography and education that quite clearly inform his later art and teaching.
249
Daniel Schugrensky, History of Education: Selected Moments of the 20
th
Century: 1914-Margaret Naumburg
promotes art therapy at Walden School, Ontario Studies for Education, University of Toronto.
http://schugurensky.faculty.asu.edu/moments/1914naumburg.html. (accessed September 24, 2015)
250
Ibid.

107
The Brandes School’s brochure (fig. 3.1) pictured and described Tucson’s rich history,
diverse culture, and natural, healthful environment. Its promotional text boasted about this
idealized site of the warm and wild West that could “build” health and strength, functioning
simultaneously as a learning environment and an institution for chronically ill students.
While Kaprow continued to suffer from frequent asthma attacks, he took advantage of cultural
and outdoor experiences in Arizona whenever he was healthy. Wearing a cowboy hat and
dungarees (fig. 3.2) he would participate in ranch life by attending cowboy rodeos and Native
American festivals on a nearby reservation.
These large-scale, outdoor performance events impressed Kaprow and Kelley has
further observed how fast-paced, melodramatic, often-dangerous cowboy rodeos, and more
solemn pow-wow ceremonies, utilized scales of space similar those in his future
Happenings.
251
Expanding upon this idea, I believe early experiences also prefigure two quite
different types of Kaprow’s performances: the larger, more “grand” Happenings from the late
1950s are reminiscent of the more theatrical and spectacular rodeos, while his post-1966
events, including his workshops in educational contexts and the later Activities, recall more
focused, everyday rituals.
Although disconnected from a more urban (and urbane) life in New York, Kaprow
learned several different kinds of artistic and life skills while in Arizona. When healthy, he
participated in everyday aspects of ranch life, such playing outdoors, and riding his horses to
class. When too ill to participate in the outdoor Western events, Kaprow would stay in bed and
construct small, often utilitarian objects often with found material–– a self-induced art

251
Kelley, 8–9.

108
therapy––and listen to the “The Lone Ranger.”
252
He trained himself to use his visual
imagination to “picture” the dramatic narrative in his head and to do “close listening.”
253

Also, to cope with his frail condition, he had to become hyper-aware of minute fluctuations in
his own bodily functions and vital signs (temperature, breathing, pulse, etc.) to try to detect an
incipient asthma attack. Years later, he would turn this vigilance and self-monitoring into
playful, imaginative scores for self-awareness, such as the body-oriented exercises of his
Activities.
By high school, Kaprow would outgrow the asthma attacks and return to New York. His
years of self-initiated art-making in Arizona and his brief formal exposure to the arts at Walden
School facilitated his entry to the prestigious High School of Music and Art. Among Kaprow’s
school friends was Rachel Rosenthal, an award-winning student in art and Spanish who went
on to dance with Merce Cunningham and become a well-known performance artist and
educator.
254
Wolf Kahn, who became an Abstract Expressionist painter, was another close
friend. During their senior year, both Kahn and Kaprow started to work in commercial
illustration, a popular vocation for young artists of their generation. This brief exposure to
commercial art and a more practical kind of experience served him well before he started his
undergraduate studies at New York University to pursue his career in fine arts.

252
Ibid.
253
Ibid.
254
High School of Music and Art Graduation Publication, 1945, Allan Kaprow Papers, Series I: Education,
1940–96, Box 1, Folder 2, Getty Research Institute Special Collections, Los Angeles.

109
Higher Education: Hans Hofmann, John Dewey, and Meyer Schapiro
Kaprow started his undergraduate education in 1946 as a double major in art and
music, at New York University where he found the programs uninteresting––“well-meaning,
but extremely inadequate.”
255
In his first article on teaching art in the Art Journal, he
described some of his college art courses as “mild versions of Impressionism, mixed
indiscriminately with remnants of American Scene Painting of the ‘30s.”
256
Additionally, he
sarcastically characterized some of his professors: a cubist with a certain “social sympathy and
social weariness”; a “folksy primitivist who seemed not to grasp the difference between early
Colonials, Grandma Moses and Henri Rousseau”; and a geometric abstractionist who “admired
all the right masters for the wrong reasons.”
257

Clearly, the young Kaprow craved more challenging, contemporary courses and more
experienced, professional teaching than NYU offered at that time. Fortunately, his high school
friend Wolf Kahn invited him to attend a critique session at the Hans Hofmann School of Fine
Arts. Already a major figure in modern abstraction and equally renowned for his role as an
influential theorist and teacher, Hofmann had temporarily left Germany in the early 1930s to
teach at UC Berkeley, then permanently relocated to New York to start his school in 1934.
These critique sessions impressed Kaprow so much, that during his second year at NYU (1947–
48), he enrolled simultaneously at Hofmann’s school.
With his deep knowledge of European modernism and highly structured painting
pedagogy, Hofmann became an important influence on Kaprow. Hofmann’s “push/pull”

255
Ibid., 7.
256
Allan Kaprow, “The Effect of Recent Art Upon the Teaching of Art,” Art Journal, Volume 23, no. 2 (Winter 1963–
64) 136.
257
Ibid.

110
theory––the idea that interdependent relationships between form, color, and space
simultaneously produce both a recession back into the canvas and a projection forward,
creating movement, tension, and rhythm in painting—had particular impact.
258
Training in this
theory facilitated Kaprow’s later transition from modernist two-dimensional easel paintings
like Figures in a Landscape (1953) (fig. 3a) to abstract collages such as Caged Pheasant (1956),
(fig. 3b) and finally into the more three-dimensional, large-scale assemblages with moveable
parts of Re-arrangeable Panels – kiosk configuration (1957) (fig. 3c). The concept of
movement in the painting also implied a transition into the fourth temporal dimension critical
to Kaprow’s later Environments, and eventually, his Happenings, which he described as
“collages of events in certain spans of time and in certain spaces.”
259

Kaprow’s experience at the Hofmann School also introduced him to a community of
emerging and established artists in an intimate studio where he first became exposed to a more
rigorous group critique process with peer-to-peer interaction. As he later noted: “At one time
or another you’d see Pollock or de Kooning or Rothko, as well as all the younger people who are
now all well-known…It was an astonishing period and I think we all learned from one another as
much as we learned from Hofmann…”
260
Kaprow found this environment so much more
stimulating than his studies at NYU. He contemplated quitting, but Hofmann urged him to
continue his formal college education. Kaprow’s lasting impression of Hofmann’s strict
formalist and modernist pedagogy are evident in a paper he presented at a 1965 arts
conference:

258
In 1963, Kaprow did a Happening entitled Push and Pull: A Furniture Comedy for Hans Hofmann, a score that
called for the physical re-arrangement of furniture in a room divided by specific colors—a kind of homage to the
movement and tension of Hofmann’s painting theory.
259
Allan Kaprow, Assemblages, Environments and Happenings, 185.
260
Seckler, Interview, 7.

111
In its general fundamentals, I find the Hofmann curriculum eminently applicable to the
present. Its historicity, its systematic disciplines, its awareness of and insistence on a
modern art, its professionalism––are all quite in keeping with the changes that have
taken place in art education in the last decade. These are changes that have reflected in
turn certain changes in art, as well as in artists.
261

When Kaprow first became a professor a decade after studying with Hofmann, arts education
was transitioning away from private classes and studios to university art departments and
professional art schools. While Kaprow’s own experience at NYU was less than satisfactory, his
very disciplined, rigorous training in studio art, history, and pedagogy with Hofmann served
him well in university art departments that demanded new curricula for avant-garde practices.
Hofmann’s role model as a professional and a pedagogue may have ultimately influenced
Kaprow more than anything, especially when he first started to develop his own experimental
arts pedagogy in the mid-1960s, to be discussed later in this chapter.
In his senior year at NYU, Kaprow decided drop art as an academic pursuit, taking up
the study of philosophy instead. Initially he took basic classes in the history of philosophy,
followed by more in-depth courses entitled Aesthetics and Ethics, which he found the most
relevant as an artist. Because of his interest in processes that focused upon immediate
experience, he gravitated towards Pragmatists such as William James and John Dewey, and in
these classes first read Dewey’s Experience and Nature (1925) and Art as Experience (1934).
262

Kaprow’s course notebooks contain handwritten analyses of particular philosophical
methodologies as well as ruminations or more informal notes written to himself.
263
Many of

261
Allan Kaprow, notes for “A Creation of Art the Creation of Art Education,” for Seminar on Research and
Curriculum Development, Pennsylvania State University, August 30–September 9, 1965, in the Allan Kaprow
Papers, Getty Research Institute, Box 47, folder 3.
262
Seckler, Interview, 9.
263
Aesthetics and Ethics Course Notebooks, New York University, 1946-49, Allan Kaprow Papers, Series I:
Education, 1940–96, Box 1, Folder 3, Getty Research Institute Special Collections, Los Angeles. These notebooks

112
these notes interrogate the nature of experience and theories of knowledge. For instance, in
his notes on epistemology, Kaprow poses the question: “What ways do humans acquire
knowledge?” His response draws from the empiricist idea that “all knowledge ultimately
depends on experience.”
264
Later in the same notebook, Kaprow paraphrases Dewey’s ideas
from the first chapter of Experience and Nature, which focuses on how we can understand
experience in the same way that we understand nature, and concludes: “Experience is a
method, an activity and an exploration.”
265
This foreshadows Kaprow’s extended engagement
with both nature and experience as sources for art-making. In particular, this seems to inform
the development of Happenings, which quite literally are methods, activities, and explorations
for participants to experience and acquire knowledge about the everyday world. Kaprow also
makes notes on the fifth chapter of Experience and Nature about communication:
What the nature of communication is—language and symbols.
Mind is a growth of experience.
Dewey tries to bring mind and body together. This is mediated by emphasizing the social
interrelationships of man…
We get to the mind through the social relationships of communication.
266

This passage reveals Kaprow’s interest in Dewey’s discussion of language as the source for
symbols or forms, his anti-Cartesian ideas about the inextricable link between the mind and
the body, and the social nature of man and human communication. These themes relate to
the procedures of Kaprow’s early Happenings: writing text-based scores to construct loose
narratives, using the quotidian and the vernacular as symbolic forms and creating embodied

have writings titled “met anal” which I interpret as an abbreviation for “methodological analysis” of various
assigned readings. Although often written in a kind of shorthand, these notes are significant as they convey what
aspects of Dewey’s philosophy interested Kaprow at this early point in his career.
264
Ibid.
265
Ibid.
266
Ibid.

113
experiences, and generating participation and social communication through chance elements
and unpredictable human interaction.
Under the heading “Aesthetics” are Kaprow’s notes on Dewey, most likely based on Art
and Experience:
Art is a part of life. Breaks down dualities. Art is most highly organized kind of
awareness. All experience is awareness. Breaks down distinction of means and ends.
Means are ends and ends are means to further end. Would like to make work play—as
art. Enjoyable. Free of tendency to make art as mere extension of his [Dewey’s]
philosophy.
267

This text reveals a concept that is central to Kaprow’s practice: that art is intrinsic to life,
breaking down both boundaries and “dualities.” Kaprow also equates experience with
awareness; this implies both perception and consciousness, both essential to the processes of
thinking and learning. At the end, Kaprow’s disjointed “notes to self” reveal his desire to
“make work play” and be “enjoyable”––a critical component of his Happenings and Activities.
Finally, he implies that this ludic quality frees him from making art that is “merely” an
extension of Dewey’s philosophy. In his introduction to Kaprow’s Essays on the Blurring of Art
and Life, Jeff Kelley recalls the artist’s notes in the margins of Art and Experience: “art is not
separate from experience… what is an authentic experience… environment is a process of
interaction…” Kelley suggests these notes read as “sub-headings for pages not yet written.”
These snippets of notes imply that even at this early stage, Kaprow started to ruminate about
an important precept of Dewey’s Pragmatism: that art should not be exclusive, isolated, or
private, but integrated into the real experiences and spaces of daily life.

267
Ibid.

114
Critic and poet David Antin, Kaprow’s colleague at UCSD, has written about how
Dewey’s theories of experience also imply the construction of narrative and the achievement
of resolution:
For Dewey, all experiences have a common form, a narrative form, because as he sees it
an experience is not a continuous or instantaneous, but an articulated whole with a
beginning and an end, that enclose a sequence of engagements between a desiring
subject and a resisting object that come to some kind of resolution. It is this common
form of what Dewey calls true experiences that lets him argue that all experiences have
an aesthetic component.
268

As Antin describes above, Dewey’s theory implies that experience is not continuous or
spontaneous but has a structure or “sequences of engagements between a desiring subject
and a resisting object.” This idea seems particularly relevant to Kaprow’s scores for
Happenings, which function as series of disparate, spontaneous activities––often a set of tasks
or a staged encounter between an audience and objects in everyday situations. These
scenarios form a loose, overarching narrative, in which ordinary activities are undertaken and
problems resolved—these events are a learning process for participants and fulfill Dewey’s
notion of “true experiences” that are quotidian, but also aesthetic.
After finishing his undergraduate studies, Kaprow initially intended to continue at NYU
with graduate studies in philosophy, but his principal teacher, Albert Hofstadter, suggested he
consider studying art history at Columbia University with his colleague, the leading art
historian Meyer Schapiro.
269
Kaprow took Hofstadter’s advice and enrolled at Columbia from
1950 to 1952, to continue his studies of both art and philosophy. At Columbia, Kaprow took an
array of art history courses, but his coursework focused on Medieval and Modern Art,

268
David Antin, “Allan at Work,” in Kelley, xi.
269
Seckler, Interview, 9.

115
Schapiro’s areas of specialization. This afforded Kaprow the unusual opportunity of obtaining
a scholarly foundation in an historical area of study while also taking advantage of his mentor’s
significant interest in modern and contemporary art.
Kaprow’s master’s thesis, titled “Piet Mondrian: A Study in Seeing,” was an intensive
analysis of the optical effects in Mondrian’s paintings as they correlated to the Dutch artist’s
writings. At that time, the literature on Mondrian in English was quite limited; in his thesis,
Kaprow relied on his own visual perceptions and his hybrid art history/philosophy background.
The first part, clearly insisted on a specific type of viewing, which Kaprow explained to Richard
Kostelanetz in a 1968 interview:
I conceived of him as a philosophical artist––a painter who used painting to destroy
painting, in order to arrive at an essentially mystical state of awareness…
if you sight Mondrian as I think it is necessary to do––with a fixed eye, unblinkingly, for
long periods of time, where you begin to see the pictorial cancellations operating, then
you arrive at a point where finally the whole canvas seems to eliminate itself and
become an oscillating cipher. You [the viewer] become just another relation to its ever-
changing proportions… I think this is what he was after; and as I’ve interpreted his
writing, it seems pretty clear to him, too. The paradox was––it’s not a contradiction––
that he had to use painting to do it. Like so many artists he was obviously interested in
the work as a form of investigation of reality and a testing of reality at the same time.
For him, painting was a kind of ontological tool; it wasn’t mere aesthetics.
270

Kaprow’s reading of “the philosophical artist” Mondrian proposes a “correct” way of seeing his
paintings: an extended viewing of the primary-colored shapes and black orthogonal lines until
any semblance of a pictorial image becomes unreadable—an obliteration or destruction
followed by some kind of transcendence that Mondrian considered mystical and universal, but
also objective.
271
Ultimately, however, for Kaprow, this act of viewing was a philosophical

270
Richard Kostelanetz, “Conversation with Allan Kaprow (1968),” re-printed in Theater of Mixed Means (New
York: Pitman, 1970): 103.
271
Ibid.

116
experiment, an “ontological test” of the very existence of the painting.
272
It is interesting to
note that Kaprow was writing his thesis on Mondrian’s paintings and thinking about their
philosophical and transcendent qualities, he also took a class on the history of Zen Buddhism
with the Eastern philosopher D. T. Suzuki, who taught at Columbia from 1952 to 1957.
273

Just as Hofmann’s mentorship influenced not just Kaprow’s studio practice but also his
sense of pedagogy, Schapiro’s influence extended beyond art history and aesthetics into social
philosophy. While at Columbia, Kaprow read Schapiro’s paper “The Social Bases of Art,”
presented at the proceedings of the First Artists’ Congress in 1936.
274
In this paper, Schapiro
urged artists to realize that their art derived from social conditions. He expressed his concern
for formalism in “art of the studio” and the isolationism of artists “committed to aesthetic
moments of life, to spectacles designed for passive detached individuals,” pleading with them
to acquire the courage to act on and change society by redirecting their concerns to the world
around them, its actions and conflicts.
275
This call to action highlights Schapiro’s Marxist-
inspired social philosophy, with its antipathy towards purely aesthetic, privatized art and its
critique of capitalist leisure and art production as nonproductive, purposeless labor.
276
While
Kaprow initially read this paper in the early 1950s, Schapiro’s ideas would resonate for him a

272
The interest in the ontology of painting is also explored in a previous essay Kaprow wrote for Schapiro on
Jackson Pollock, a precursor to his “The Legacy of Jackson Pollock,” discussed later in this chapter.
273
Suzuki was also a scholar of Egon, the intellectual explication of the Zen experience, which is a Japanese
transmission of the Huayan school of Chinese Buddhism.
274
The congress was formed by New York artists and critics in response to escalating fascism and the threat of war
in Europe. For a full account, see Artists Against War and Fascism: The Papers of the First American Artists’
Congress, Matthew Baigell and Julia Williams, eds. (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1986).
275
Robert E. Haywood, "Critique of Instrumental Labor: Meyer Schapiro's and Allan Kaprow's Theory of Avant-
Garde Art,” in Experiments in the Everyday exhibition catalogue (New York: Columbia University, 1999), 29.
276
Haywood, 28–29.

117
decade later when he became immersed in developing and theorizing Happenings, and
assessing his own role as an “artist of the world.”
277

In addition to teaching art history, Schapiro periodically critiqued Kaprow work and the
professor encouraged him to continue his artistic practice. Although Kaprow had intended to
continue his art history studies in the PhD program at Columbia, taking Schapiro sage advice,
Kaprow decided not enroll and started to more actively pursue his artist career, painting
almost full time. In 1952, he co-founded a cooperative exhibition space in New York with a
group of young artists who had all studied together under Hans Hofmann.
278
The Hansa
Gallery, named after their teacher, required that every member present at least one solo
exhibition per season. Kaprow first exhibited at Hansa in the fall of 1952, showing constructed
painted with broken, irregular surfaces, which preceded the “action collages” and large-scale
assemblages that would become the precursors to his first Environments.

Rutgers University, John Cage, and Early Happenings
While Kaprow was still completing his MA thesis, Meyer Schapiro recommended him
for his first teaching position, Assistant Professor in the Fine Arts Department at Rutgers
University in New Brunswick, New Jersey. Starting at Rutgers in 1953, he primarily taught art
history courses, but also some studio art classes. Soon he met other faculty—George Brecht,
George Segal, and Robert Watts, artists also engaged with exploring experimental art and
media—who would become his close colleagues. Kaprow would still go to New York City for

277
Allan Kaprow, “The Artist as a Man of the World,” Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life,46-58.
278
The co-founders included Jacques Beckwith, Barbara Forst, Miles Forst, Jane Wilson Gruen, John Gruen, Wolf
Kahn, Jan Müller, Felix Pasilis, and Richard Stankewicz.

118
exhibitions at the Hansa Gallery and to take John Cage’s composition course at the New School
for Social Research,
279
but he found New Jersey to be a desolate yet somehow authentic site
that provided him with a necessary isolation from the city:
I, for one became attached to New Jersey. It seemed significant that it was imbedded in
the strip city running between Washington and Boston, something had to happen there.
Perhaps the others felt the same. Desolation revealed and stood for the authentic…
But the difference for us was that if we were also active in the New York studio and
gallery world, we lived just far enough away from the loft parties and bars, and from
each other as well, to develop independently… If the new art in general was dedicated
to that ideal, New Jersey made it easier to practice than did New York.
280

Amid this isolation in New Jersey, Kaprow had time to pursue his own artwork and also his
critical writing, which during this period became inextricably linked. As we shall see, when he
quits easel painting to make assemblages and then Environments, he turns to materials and
media that reflect the everyday world, which he also writes about in his seminal article on
Jackson Pollock. Likewise, his exploration of new media and technologies coincides with his
co-writing of a major proposal for an experimental arts program, “The Project in Multiple
Dimensions” (1958).
By 1957, Kaprow’s painted collages and sculptural assemblages no longer hung
directly on the walls, as he started to make Environments—immersive installations of a
profusion of hanging strips that also included electric lights and sound-making devices. While
working on his second untitled Environment, he experienced some challenges with everyday
sound elements, so he consulted his colleague George Brecht, who suggested that he meet
John Cage. Kaprow had been aware of Cage’s untitled event from Black Mountain College and

279
Cage’s started teaching at the New School in 1950 and became a faculty member in 1956 when he first taught
his famous Composition class, which he re-named “Experiment Composition” in 1958.
280
Allan Kaprow, introduction to Ten from Rutgers exhibition catalogue (New York: Bianchini Gallery, 1965), n.p.

119
had attended the 1952 performance 4’33” at Carnegie Hall, which impressed him, as he later
described:
And then I heard the air-conditioning system. I heard the elevators moving, a lot of
people’s laughter, creaky chairs and coughing. I heard police sirens and cars down
below. It was like the shadows in Bob Rauschenberg’s pictures. That is to say there is
not making of the boundary of the artwork or the boundary of everyday life. They
merge.
281

Even before meeting Cage, Kaprow clearly understood how ambient sound activated by

random actions in the everyday world broke the veritable silence of 4’33”, comparing

this to how viewer’s shadows defined the images of Rauschenberg’s monochromes.

He struggled, however, with how to make the everyday sounds in his work appear more

random and when he asked Cage about, the composer invited him to come to his class.

From this initial meeting, Kaprow learned how to make “tape music” using micro-switches and
multiple loudspeakers to make more randomized sounds. Soon he would do the weekly
assignments that entailed composing a short piece in which Cage and the whole class would
participate. Most often, these compositions would consist of using everyday objects, found
sounds, and/or altered or provisional instruments to create a short event.
The first compositional process that Kaprow learned in Cage’s class was how to write
graphic scores, which he used for most of his short pieces. According to Kaprow, Cage never
used traditional musical staff lines; instead, he would write his scores as a series of numbered
tasks in a left-to-right orientation, first indicating the sound or object used, followed by a line
that determined the duration in minutes and seconds, and finally, the placement, sometimes
with a sketch.

281
Marder, ed. Off Limits: Rutgers University and the Avant-garde, 1957–1963, 132.

120
One of Kaprow’s early untitled scores from Cage’s class is a four-part event using
everyday objects to make specific sounds or gestures. (fig. 3.4) The first part includes making
sounds with different objects—pulling a fork tong, twirling a rattle, striking specific notes on
the keys of a piano, sustaining the tick of a clock. The second part includes scratching a screen,
blowing or striking blue and green bottles, striking a knife blade on wood, and inserting the
knife into the wood, making a twanging sculptural object that eventually fades. The third part
includes both sounds and visual gestures: a toy dog with the sound of a cat’s meow, a voice
uttering an uninflected “tock,” moving an Easter egg, striking a match, and holding up signs—
one side red, the other blue. Finally, in the fourth part, there is the ringing of an alarm clock,
the striking of wood blocks, the squeaking of a rubber duck, the striking of a bell, and a ticking
clock.
Kaprow’s score visualizes all the details of the duration of each sequence, using both
diagrams and language instructions to transform everyday gestures, ordinary sound, and
multi-sensory experiences into performative events. Aimed not only at facilitating students’
compositions, imbedded within Cage’s methodology is the notion that the scores are rubrics
for completely new ways to learn from everyday experience—producing not only a series of
sounds, but also teachable moments.
The other major aspect of the class that Kaprow found compelling was Cage’s method of
chance operations, which, at that time, consisted of throwing coffee beans onto a big graph on
the floor that was marked with a chart of time, frequency, and duration. While Cage would
later also use I Ching sticks or coins, the aleatory procedures achieved the same goal: to
relinquish control within an apparent system—in other words, to allow chance to disrupt any

121
clear sense of orchestration. As Kaprow commented: “The system was actually an anti-system
system. One which we would call a randomizer system, and which later computers would do
with more sophistication. That was the system that I used: it wasn’t carefully orchestrated, it
was carefully de-orchestrated.”
282

Another crucial aspect of what Kaprow learned from Cage’s class was the notion that a
composition could be not just performative, but also spatialized. Cage encouraged Kaprow to
move around into different spaces when he performed his short compositions—leaving the
room, going outside into the hallway or to other places. Through this, Kaprow learned a
spatial “choreography” to create a change of scenery and a new visual frame for the
participants. Here he anticipates the trajectory of his own work as he moved from single site
Environments into Happenings, which involved moving through space and time at multiple
sites.
As Robert E. Haywood has observed, what Kaprow learned through Cage’s composition
class augmented his already significant understanding of art theory:
Although scholars have acknowledged the enormous importance of Cage to Kaprow’s
conceptions of happenings, they have failed to consider that he began his studies with
Cage already armed with a powerful theory of art. Over the next decade he would seek
to merge Schapiro’s “social philosophy of art” with Cage’s forceful critique of a
mystifying individualistic aesthetic grounded in interior self.
283

Ultimately, thanks to both Schapiro and Cage, Kaprow’s education extended into philosophical
inquiry via his Happenings––events grounded in the real world––that would promote both
external social communication and interaction as well as individual self-awareness. For Kaprow

282
Marter, 183
283
Interview with Allan Kaprow as quoted in Haywood, 38.

122
this inspired him to contemplate—and play with-- larger questions of life. As he wrote about
in his notebooks: “The challenge of the present: That is where all the hard work lies; to assess
all the options, all the real conditions, what the real problems are as against the superficially
attractive ones…Questions like that began to really beg me at that time. And since I devoted
most of the time to thinking rather than working, I played around with them.”
284

Proposing New Pedagogies: “Project in Multiple Directions”
Concurrent to their study in Cage’s class, Brecht and Kaprow, along with their Rutgers
colleague Roberts Watts, co-authored the “Project in Multiple Dimensions” (1957–58), an
ambitious proposal to the Carnegie Corporation to integrate a radical experimental arts
program into a higher education arts curriculum.
285
While Kaprow’s training encompassed art
and philosophy, both Brecht and Watts studied science—the former chemistry and the latter
mechanical engineering. In their joint text, the three artists argued that research funding to
support the most advanced forms of avant-garde art should be comparable to the support
structure for theoretical scientific investigation. Asserting that “the true artist is also a
discoverer,”

Brecht, Kaprow, and Watts stated in their proposal: “Both scientists and artists
have become very aware, for the first time in many years, that basic concepts for discovery
and invention are common to both, and that many conclusions possess similar ingredients.”
286

284
Seckler, Interview, 11.
285
George Brecht, Allan Kaprow, and Robert Watts, “Project in Multiple Dimensions,” unpublished manuscript
from the Robert Watts Papers 2006.M.27, Getty Research Institute, Series IV: Work Files, Box 11. Folder 5. Special
thanks to Larry Miller and Sarah Seagull, original custodians of the Watts Archive, who kindly made this available to
me before it was acquired by the Getty. The entire text is printed in Off Limits: Rutgers University and the Avant-
Garde, 1957–1963, Joan Marter, ed. (Newark, New Jersey: The Newark Museum, 1999), 153–160, published to
accompany the exhibition of the same name at the Newark Museum, February 18–May 16, 1999. `
286
Marter, 153.

123
Acknowledging that art and science share the processes of discovery and invention,
their proposal included a “research lab” with “electro and electro-mechanical devices, sound
and recording devices, tools, etc.” at Rutgers’ New Jersey campus and a space in New York City
where they would organize exhibitions and public programs such as concerts with avant-garde
composers John Cage, Morton Feldman, and Karlheinz Stockhausen, and experiments with
new sound and light technologies.”
287

Brecht, Kaprow, and Watts define “multi-dimensional” media simply as “the use of more
than one medium for the production of new aesthetic experiences”—a description that echoes
the concept of intermedia that Brecht and Kaprow were learning in Cage’s composition
class.
288
Appealing to their potential corporate sponsor, they underscored their need for new
scientific materials and technologies to make work that is more truly experimental:
Modern science and technology have already produced and are producing equipment
and materials that have not yet found their way into artists’ usage. Great strides in
electronic equipment make it possible to create and structure sound, light, color, space
and movement in totally undreamed of ways. A fantastic new range of materials,
especially synthetics of many varieties, can be utilized to elaborate and complement
these possibilities. Experimental work over the past forty years or so mainly has ignore
the possible new ranges for creative expression. Certain new materials have been used,
but often within the limitations of old forms.
289

Dividing their proposed activities into the categories of sound, light, space, and “other,”
Brecht, Kaprow, and Watts combined the language of experimental art and science to describe
“continuous sound spectrums, electronically produced,” “formulation of time-space-

287
Ibid. Larry Miller and Sara Seagull, “Grounds for Experiment: Robert Watts and the Experimental Workshop,” in
Critical Mass: Happenings, Fluxus, Performance, Intermedia and Rutgers University 1958–1972, Geoff Hendricks,
ed. (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Mason Gross Art Galleries, Rutgers University, and Amherst, Massachusetts:
Mead Art Museum, Amherst College, 2003), 23.
288
Ibid, 154. This idea of multi-dimensionality prefigures the more complex definition of intermedia issued by their
composition classmate Dick Higgins in his “Statement on Intermedia” in 1968.
289
Off-Limits, 154.

124
movement spectra,” “examination of sound and light as space dimensions,” “formulation of
tactile and olfactory spectra,” “audience-activated devices,” “examination of the whole field of
pyrotechnics and explosives,” and “examination of synthetic space to natural space (out-of-
doors).”
290
Despite the trio’s ambition, vision, and determination to garner support for
experimental art practices on par with the sciences, the “Project in Multiple Dimensions” did
not get funded in 1958, perhaps in part because the proposal was ahead of its time.
After Brecht and Kaprow left Rutgers, Watts took some of concepts in the original
proposal and re-submitted them to Carnegie, receiving a study grant in 1965 for a pilot project
at Rutgers titled “Art Seminar and the Experimental Workshop.”
291
Subsequently, this
curriculum coalesced into an “Experimental Workshop” at the new University of California,
Santa Cruz (1968–69), where the curriculum consisted of scores by Watts and his students that
resulted in discovery-based events, excursions, and “test flights.” For this program, Watts
acquired new media and technologies, and funds to invite many avant-garde artists to come to
Santa Cruz. The UCSC Workshop actualized the aspirations of the 1958 proposal and also
coincided with other art and technology exhibitions and projects that emerged in the late
1960s.
292

Co-writing the “Project in Multiple Dimensions” certainly seemed to fuel Kaprow’s
interests in experimental curricula that would continue into the 1960s and 1970s. More

290
Ibid.
291
Proposals for Art Education, Edmund Carpenter, ed. (UC Santa Cruz, 1970), is the report and case history of the
year-long Carnegie funded Experimental Arts Workshop, located in Special Collections at UCSC’s McHenry Library.
292
Examples in include Experiments in Art and Technology (EAT) launched by Bill Kluver and Fred Waldhauer with
artists Robert Rauschenberg and Robert Whitman founded in New York in 1967 that had a branch in Pasadena, CA
and exhibitions such as Art and Technology Program, Los Angeles County Museum of Art (1969-1971), curated by
Maurice Tuchman; Information, Museum of Modern Art (1970), curated by Kynaston McShine and Software:
Information Technology: Its New Meaning for Art, Jewish Museum (1970) curated by Jack Burnham.

125
immediately, however, the proposal’s specific references to audience participation, multi-
sensory perception, and the use of everyday and natural materials, especially in outdoor
environments, all hark back to aspects of John Dewey’s aesthetics. These are also the very
same concepts Kaprow was beginning to grapple with in his own work at that time, his early
Environments and Happenings, which also became disseminated through his critical writing.

Making Early Environments and Theorizing Happenings
In 1958, while working on the “Project in Multiple Dimensions” and studying with Cage,
Kaprow exhibited two untitled Environments at the Hansa Gallery. The first, shown in the
spring consisted of rows of large pieces of translucent plastic, painted red, blue, and black, and
suspended from the ceiling along with strips of cloth, tinfoil, wires, and carbon paper. The
accompanying score (fig. 3.5) called for sounds from a bouncing ball, whistling kettle, and
Japanese toys that was recorded by Kaprow. Spectators navigating through this thicket of
materials could be seen through the plastic as their corporeal presence became integrated into
this multi-sensory environment that was at once visual, sonic, and tactile:
Substances like electric light and sound-making devices filled the entire gallery
so one could walk into the work. I had an idea of using the image of Einsteinian space
that was a total field, a united field––nothing had a boundary. Neither my ideas nor my
physical presence was the end of the artwork. It was a field in which events
interpenetrated.
293

In describing this early Environment, Kaprow liberally borrows the language of physics,
equating the space with Einstein’s “unified field” that included interpenetrating “events.”

293
Marter, ed., Off Limits, Rutgers University and the Avant-Garde, 1957–1963, 132.

126
Although this installation received mixed reviews from critics, Kaprow installed a more
“intensified” environment in the fall that included strips of raffia, Christmas lights, a wall of
broken mirrors framed by spotlights pointed at the spectator, and more randomized everyday
sounds, inspired by Cage.
294
He also added both pleasant and unpleasant scents to the room
that he circulated with an electric fan. While this produced what some described as a “nasty
smell,” Kaprow succeeded in expanding the sensory reception of the environment to
encompass smelling as well as seeing, touching, and hearing—an unusual experience in an art
gallery that must have flummoxed and annoyed some visitors.
295

Kaprow recognized the need to provide additional information for the viewer to better
understand this environment and wanted to create a discourse with the public, so he
published an informative brochure entitled Allan Kaprow: An Exhibition.
296
In a section called
“Notes on the Creation of a Total Art,” he explained exactly how he thought the environment
should be experienced:
In the present exhibition we do not come to look at things. We simply enter, are
surrounded and become part of what surrounds us, passively or actively, according to
our talent for “engagement”… We ourselves are shapes… We have different colored
clothing; can move, feel, speak, and observe others variously and will constantly change
the meaning of the work by so doing…”
297

Here Kaprow emphasizes the importance of the viewers’ own actions as they enter and
encounter the environment, with their bodies, clothing, movement, feeling, and speech all
becoming part of the work. Most notable is the didactic tone of this brochure—Kaprow wants
to teach the spectator how to respond to these new environmental works as they encounter

294
Jeff Kelley, Childsplay: The Art of Allan Kaprow, 21.
295
Ursprung, 21.

296
Allan Kaprow: An Exhibition, New York: Hansa Gallery, 1958.
297
Allan Kaprow, “Notes on the Creation of a Total Art,” Allan Kaprow: An Exhibition (New York: Hansa Gallery,
November 25–December 13, 1959), reprinted in Kaprow, 1993, 10–12.

127
them in real physical space and time. Furthermore, he wants audiences to learn about how to
respond to the works—not just visually, but with the full realm of their perceptual abilities,
including the haptic, sonic, and olfactory senses. Kaprow’s acknowledgment of the audience’s
response, whether passive or more actively engaged, is also absolutely critical to its positive
reception:
I believe this form places a much greater responsibility on visitors than they have had
before. The “success” of a work depends on them as well as the artist. If we admit that
work that succeeds on some days, fails on other days, we may seem to disregard the
enduring and strong and to place emphasis on the fragile and the impermanent. But
one can insist, as many have, that only the changing is really enduring and all else is
whistling in the dark.
298

In this essay, not only does Kaprow attempt to explicate the project, he also muses about the
relative and variable success of the work and the need to appreciate—or at least recognize—
its ephemerality and mutability.
Most of Kaprow’s early Happenings and events were attended and experienced by
relatively small audiences—predominantly artists and others in avant-garde circles. Only a
semblance of the live action or event can be reconstructed through archival materials, photo
documentation, and writing. Until quite recently, the same dozen or so images from some of
the more celebrated early works circulated in a limited number of books—mostly surveys on
Happenings, or publications related to specific exhibitions.
299
Therefore, Kaprow’s prolific
writings, aimed at various audiences ranging from novices to scholars depending on the art
publication or venue, become analogues to his live events.

298
Ibid., 12.

299
The number of scholarly dissertations, anthologies, and long-format exhibition publications about Kaprow have
increased relatively recently, with many published posthumously. For this dissertation, Kaprow’s own handwritten
scores, articles, and educational texts from the Allan Kaprow Papers in Special Collections at the Getty Research
Institute are primary sources for understanding the relationship of his work to his pedagogy and teaching.

128
Richard Bellamy, who directed the Hansa Gallery at that time, recalled that Kaprow
realized it would be unlikely that he could sell this work, but hoped that it would encourage
academic and art institutions to provide grants or other funding to allow him to continue his
experimentation.
300
This evidences how Kaprow saw his own practice as research akin to that
of an academic experimentation, rather than a production of commodity objects. This does
not refute that Kaprow did care about his own notoriety and the critical/public reception of his
work. Not only did he write didactics for his untitled Environments, he also expanded his ideas
in a more in-depth article for Art News that was specifically timed to go to print while his
second Hansa Gallery exhibition was on view.
In Kaprow’s “Legacy of Jackson Pollock,” (1958) he aligns his own work with Pollock’s
destruction of easel painting, he calls for an art with new concepts of space, performativity,
and connections to everyday life.
301
Harking back to Pollock’s description of being “in the
painting” and Harold Rosenberg’s idea of painting as an “act,” in “American Action Painters,”
Kaprow instantiates Pollock’s role as an actor and the performativity of his painting .
302
Most
important for Kaprow’s work and teaching are the essay’s passages on art and the sensory
experiences of everyday life:
Pollock, as I see him, left us at the point where we must become preoccupied with and even
dazzled by the space and objects of our everyday life, with our bodies, clothes, or, if need be,
the vastness of Forty-second Street. Not satisfied with the suggestion through paint of our
other senses, we shall utilize the specific substance of sight, sounds, movement, people, odors,
touch. Objects of every sort are material for the new art: paint, chairs, food, electric and neon
lights, smoke, water, old socks, a dog, movies, a thousand other things will be discovered by the
present generation of artists…

300
Richard Bellamy as quoted in Philip Ursprung, Allan Kaprow, Robert Smithson and the Limits of Art (Berkeley and
Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2003), 21.

301
Allan Kaprow, “The Legacy of Jackson Pollock,” 2. Ursprung, 23, note 14 states that Kaprow claimed he wrote
this article just after Pollock’s death in 1956, two years prior to its publication in Art News,
302
Harold Rosenberg, “American Actions Painters,” Art News 51 no. 8 (December 1952): 48-72.

129
Young artists of today need no longer to say, I am a “painter” or a “poet” or a “dancer.” They
are simply “artists.” All of life will be open to them. They will discover out of ordinary things the
meaning of ordinariness. They will not try to make them extraordinary but will only state their
real meaning. But out of nothing they will devise the extraordinary and then maybe
nothingness as well. People will be delighted or horrified, critics will be confused or amused,
but these, I am certain, will be the alchemies of the 1960s.
303

Here Kaprow calls for an art of the everyday in which the materials of urban life and popular
culture are received through multiple senses so that audiences may fully experience the reality
of the ordinary and maybe even the extraordinary.
304
Eschewing discipline-based labels,
“artists” will produce work that is not media-specific and is no longer in the domain of the
pictorial, but in the actual. For Kaprow, the legacy of Jackson Pollock is the “alchemies of the
1960s,” which reside in the real and are fueled by action in his Happenings. This article was
the first time Kaprow actually used the word “Happening,” but his later commentary reveals
that this was less important than using action as a ritual in real life:
It occurred in a paragraph toward the end of the article, which was about the presumed
legacy of that artist, who had died shortly before then, in which I said there are two
directions in which the legacy could go. One is to continue into and develop an action
kind of painting, which was what he was doing, and the other was to take advantage of
the action itself, implicit as a kind of dance ritual. Instead of making ritualistic actions,
which might be one of the directions someone could take, I was proposing the hop right
into real life…
305

Because Kaprow’s degree was in art history rather than studio art, his artistic production
alone could not be considered as his academic research, therefore, he continued publishing his
critical writing. In the early 1960s, he wrote several other texts about the development and

303
Allan Kaprow, “The Legacy of Jackson Pollock,” 2.
304
Curator Donna de Salvo also refers to this passage as a “manifesto of Pop” in her essay for Hand Painted Pop,
Museum of Contemporary Art and Whitney Museum, 1998, 73.
305
Kaprow as quoted by Dirk Johan Stromberg, “Interview with Allan Kaprow,” (accessed October 28, 2015). This is
a transcription of Stromberg’s videotaped interview with Kaprow in conjunction with his exhibition, Proceedings
(1988) at University of Texas, Arlington, curated by Jeff Kelley.

130
reception of these events, such as “Happening on the New York Scene” (1961).
306
In this text,
one of the first to discuss Happenings in detail, Kaprow uses language that at first is more
colloquial than professorial, beginning with a description of how one may experience a
Happening in a cold, downtown New York loft. At the end of this introduction, he underlines
the seriousness of his endeavor: “So much for the flavor. Now I would like to describe the
nature of Happenings in a different manner, analytically, noting their purpose and place.”
307

Kaprow attempts to codify and contextualize the new form by identifying three crucial
qualities.
308
First is context: the “place of conception and enactment” (lofts, basements, stores,
natural surroundings, and the street) and the “lack of separation between audience and
play.”
309
Second is spontaneity: since they are unrehearsed and “just happen,” these events
“have no plot, obvious philosophy and are materialized in an improvisatory fashion like jazz.”
310

Third is the importance of chance: “the third and most problematical quality found in
Happenings” that “rarely occurs in conventional theater” and “implies risk and fear,” as the
“artists who directly utilize chance hazard failure.”
311
Kaprow adds another quality––the
“impermanence” of Happenings and how they defy reproduction—and concludes his article
with the following:

306
Allan Kaprow, “Happenings in the New York Scene,” ARTnews, Volume 60, no. 3 (1961): 36–52, reproduced in
Kaprow, Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life, 15–26. This and all further notes are from this publication.
307
Ibid, 16.
308
At this point, Kaprow himself had made less than one dozen Happenings. See Annette Leddy, “Chronology,” in
Allan Kaprow––Art as Life, Eva Meyer Hermann, Andrew Perchuk, and Stephanie Rosenthal, eds. (Los Angeles: The
Getty Research Institute), 2008, 92–340, for a thorough, illustrated compendium of Kaprow’s paintings, collages,
sculptures, assemblages, scores, Environments, Happenings, Activities, Activity Booklets, videos and films.
309
Kaprow, Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life, 17.
310
Ibid. 18.
311
Ibid. 19.

131
To the extent that a Happening is not a commodity but a brief event, from the standpoint
of any publicity it may receive, it may become a state of mind. Who will have been there
at that event? It may become like the sea monsters of the past of the flying saucers of
yesterday. I shouldn’t really mind, for as the new myth grows on its own, without
reference to anything in particular, the artist may achieve privacy, famed for something
purely imaginary while free to explore something nobody will notice.
312

In his final rumination, Kaprow reiterates the ephemeral and experiential qualities of
Happenings, but notes the tension between the potential publicizing and mythologizing of his
Happenings, and the romantic belief that he might achieve fame for something “purely
imaginary,” be “free to explore something nobody will notice,” and “achieve privacy.” Even at
this early stage, the artist already seems ambivalent about the critical and public reception of
his new practice.
In 1966, after making at least fifteen new Happenings in the intervening five years,
Kaprow wrote his next article, “The Happenings Are Dead, Long Live Happenings,” in
Artforum.
313
In the introductory paragraph, he states: “Happenings are today’s only
underground avant-garde. The end of the Happenings has been announced regularly since
1958—always by those who have never come near one.”
314
Kaprow asserts the efficacy of
Happenings as the only avant-garde and chastises those who have not experienced them and
yet predict their demise.
315
He continues: “The Happening are the one art activity that can
escape the inevitable death-by-publicity to which all other art is condemned, because,
designed for a brief life, they can never be overexposed; they are dead, quite literally, every

312
Ibid. 25–26.
313
Allan Kaprow, “The Happenings Are Dead, Long Live Happenings,” Artforum 4, no. 7 (1966): 36–39.
314
Ibid., 36.
315
Ibid. In particular, Kaprow refers to an Esquire magazine article that put Happenings on their “what’s out”
list, one of the first instances in the press that reduced the form to trivial, pop culture.

132
time they happen.” He then re-states the quote above, to re-emphasize their non-commodity
status as “events.”
Here Kaprow re-iterates the ephemerality and the “otherness” of his non-art oriented,
everyday Happenings, trying to convince the reader (and perhaps himself) that they are
exempt from over-exposure of publicity and the market forces of “standard” arts. However,
this is only a prelude to the real intent of his article—to write a set of what he later called
“guidelines” that clearly articulate the true, intrinsic characteristics of his Happenings:
1. The line between art and life should be kept as fluid, and perhaps indistinct as
possible.
2. Themes, materials, actions, and the associations they invoke are to be gotten from
anywhere except from the arts, their derivatives and their milieu.
3. The Happening should be dispersed over several widely spaced, sometimes moving
and changing, locales.
4. Time, closely bound up with things and spaces, should be variable and independent
of the conventions of continuity.
5. The composition of all materials, actions, images, and their times and spaces should
be undertaken in as artless and, again, practical a way as possible.
6. Happenings should be unrehearsed and performed by nonprofessionals, once only.
7. It follows that there should not be (and usually cannot be) an audience or audiences
to watch a Happening.
316

More than just a set of rules, the guidelines function as a rubric; not necessarily a set
standard for performance, but an overarching score for production and reception, as they also
perform a pedagogical function to instruct the reader about the major tenets of Happenings.
In short, these include merging art and life; using “non-art” actions and materials; engaging
dispersed, multiple sites; varying time and duration; making compositions that are not artful, but
practical; allowing no rehearsals or professionals; avoiding repetition; and of course, the
elimination of the audience if all who attend participate in the Happening.

316
Ibid., 62–64.

133
In 1966, a variation of these guidelines (using different language and alphabetical letters,
not numbers) appeared in Kaprow’s Assemblages, Environments and Happenings (fig.3.6 ) one of
the first publications to document these burgeoning art forms.
317
With its burlap cover, type that
looked hand-made, and full-page folios of photographs, artists’ statements, and Kaprow’s own
essay, it remained the most comprehensive publication on these practices for decades.
Ultimately, the guidelines did always remain a fixed set of rules to be followed strictly,
especially number 6: “Happenings should only be performed once.” Kaprow acknowledged that
he broke this rule in his “re-inventions”—the word he used to describe the re-presentations of his
Happenings that occurred during his lifetime and posthumously, often performed by professional
artists.
318
However, as he reiterates in the paragraph following the guidelines, no Happenings
can ever be the same, given fluctuations in site, context, and other conditions at the moment
that it is presented.
In his final article on the subject, “Pinpointing Happenings” (1967), Kaprow begins with
the misuse of “happening”: “From now on, who would write or speak intelligently about
Happenings must declare what sort of phenomenon they are referring to. Happening is a
household word, yet it means almost anything to the households that use it.”
319
He then
recites a litany of its misusage: “Bobby Kennedy is a Happening,” “Christmas is a Happening,”
“WOR-FM is ‘The Happening Station,’” “That was a Happening—by Revlon,” etc. He continues:

317
Allan Kaprow, Assemblages, Environments and Happenings, (New York: Harry Abrams), 1966. The same year
Kaprow made a 24-minute audio recording, a variant on the guidelines entitled How to Make a Happening, an
album released by Mass Art Inc. with a silkscreened cover with a photo from his Happening Household (1964).
318
Kaprow did a series of installations of seven classic 1960s Happenings, once on each floor at the Fondazione
Mudima in Milan in 1992. When I interviewed him the following year in Los Angeles, he told me he regretted
making these static representations and vowed not to make them in this manner again.
319
Allan Kaprow, “Pinpointing Happenings,” ARTnews Volume 6, no. 6 (1967): 46-47, reprinted in Kaprow, Essays,
84.

134
“Hippie groups, discotheques, PTA meetings, Rotary Club meetings, a popular rock and roll
band, a hit record by the Supremes, a party game kit, and at least two regular-running
movies—are all called Happenings.
320
Kaprow lamented this ubiquitous appropriation of his
term into popular culture via mass media, and alluded to this in previous articles. It became a
self-fulfilling prophecy; he was not annoyed only by the misuse of the word, he resented how
Happenings became misrepresented as a spectacular, entertaining type of performance.
Somewhat ironically, Kaprow attempts in the remainder of the article to “pin-point”
(and perhaps also justify) Happenings by once again codifying them into different categories.
Among them are “the Event,” in which an audience seated in a theater watches a brief, Zen-
like occurrence (as in a Fluxus festival or performance),
321
and “Idea art” and “Literary
Suggestion,” which are entirely “mental” or conceptual and written down in short notes (as in
Fluxus scores).
322
Conversely, the “Guided Tour” or “Pied Piper Happening” occurs when “a
select group of people are led around the countryside or a city... they observe things, are given
instructions, are lectured to, discover things happening to them…”
323
Finally, the “Activity” is
something that is directly involved in the everyday, without the structure of theaters and
audiences, and is more active than meditative.
324

Clearly, the last two categories are self-referential, describing the artist’s own work.
First, the “Pied Piper”-led multi-person, multi-site Happenings in which people observe,
discover, and learn; and second, the simpler, pared-down, self-generated, quotidian Activities.
Kaprow had just started making these the preceding year, in 1966, in part because of the

320
Ibid.
321
Ibid., 87.
322
Ibid., 86.
323
Ibid.
324
Ibid., 87.

135
chronic misperception of Happenings as spectacles by the mass media, the popular press, art
critics, and other writers and professionals.
In this series of early articles on Happenings, Kaprow further defined their form and
ontology, theorizing a range of practices including his own. Not only did his writings fulfill
academic obligations and contribute to the overall critical discourse, they also helped him to
work through new ideas, mine motivations, and ultimately, historicize his own practice. Once
again, he performed multiple roles as art historian, art practitioner, and writer, and these
corollary texts served a didactic function as an index or lexicon of how his theoretical ideas
specifically related to his work.
At this point, in 1967, Kaprow had come to somewhat of an impasse. He had written
extensively on Happenings, but became disillusioned with the pervasive misunderstanding
around them. This prompted him to reconsider their scale, sites, and audiences, resulting in a
shift to the more modest Events and Activities. While he continued to do some larger-scale
Happenings at public sites, as part of Festivals, and through a few museum commissions, going
forward he would focus on the smaller-scale, process-oriented Events and Activities, executed
with smaller groups, with scores intended for specific tasks or forms of observation, discovery,
and learning. I believe this precise shift also rekindled his desire to pursue more substantive
research and writing in the arena of experimental, interdisciplinary art education, which he
had started with “Project in Multiple Dimensions” at Rutgers. It is therefore not a coincidence
that in the later 1960s, Kaprow also renewed his engagement with experimental art programs
at art schools and universities––another opportunity for him to merge his practice and his
pedagogy.

136
Happenings in Urban and Educational Environments

While Kaprow performed several of his seminal Happenings in gallery spaces—Untitled
Happening (1958) at Hansa Gallery, 18 Happenings in 6 Parts (1959) (fig. 3.7) at the Reuben
Gallery Apple Shrine (1960) at the Judson Church Gallery, and Yard (1961) (fig. 3.8) at Martha
Jackson Gallery—he soon became interested in exploring alternative sites for his events.
325

For instance, between 1962 and 1966, Kaprow situated his Happenings in many non-
traditional and public sites, in both rural and urban environments, ranging from caves to
department stores.
Mushroom (1962) at the Lehman Mushroom Caves in Saint Paul, Minnesota, and Tree
(1963) at George Segal’s farm in New Jersey involved explorations of aspects of nature. Other
projects consisted of scores for everyday activities performed within specific urban
environments: Bon Marché (1963) at the famed Paris department store; Push Pull: An
Environment for Hans Hofmann (1963) at the Santini Brothers Warehouse in New York, Orange
(1964) in an unused citrus warehouse, and Eat (1964) in the former Ebling Brewery in the
South Bronx.
326
The participants in the majority of these early Happenings consisted of artists,
friends, and close art world acquaintances of Kaprow’s, or incidental audiences of the general
public that would gather at the specific site.
By the mid to late 1960s, somewhat ironically, Kaprow started to receive specific
commissions for his decidedly non-art Happenings from established arts organizations and

325
Annette Leddy, “Chronology of Selected Drawings, Paintings, Collages, Sculptures, Assemblages, Scores,
Environments, Happenings, Activity Booklets, Videos and Films,” in Allan Kaprow: Art as Life, 93–340 is the most
comprehensive source for Kaprow’s production, from these early Happenings to later re-inventions of his work.
326
Although not discussed here, Kaprow’s Happenings became part of festivals such as the Ergo Suits Festival in
Bridgehampton and Woodstock (1962), the Yam Festival in New Jersey (1963) organized by George Brecht and
Roberts Watts, and the New York Avant-Garde Festival (1964 and 1965) organized by Charlotte Moorman.

137
museums. Two of these commissions are significant to this study, as they would bring Kaprow
to California for the very first time.
In 1962, the late Walter Hopps became the curator of the Pasadena Art Museum (PAM),
initiated a program of exhibitions of both established and emerging avant-garde artists that
was unprecedented in California, if not the country. In keeping with his agenda, Hopps invited
Kaprow to PAM in 1966 to realize one segment of his three-part, three-city Happening, Self-
Service. Described by Kaprow as a “piece without spectators,” the score included 31 activities
executed at specific times over the course of four months, from June to September, in three
cities: New York, Boston, and Los Angeles. (fig. 3.9) Each city had a separate score for a list of
activities determined by a chance operation. Unlike previous Happenings, Kaprow “cast” Self-
Service with a pre-determined group of participants who selected the activities—each had to
pick at least one, although doing all of them was preferable. The details of time and place
could be flexible, choices could overlap, and activities would occur simultaneously in the city,
but in each locale, Kaprow hosted a meeting or workshop for all the participants before they
enacted their chosen activities.
The scores called for activities within the city, some mundane and vague, others quite
fantastic and and even impossible. The Los Angeles score included “Photographs of
supermarket and washerette are sent to everyone” and “Photos of supermarket and
washerette are projected onto clouds, into the air.” Other activities included “People enter
phone booths, eat sandwiches and soft drinks, look out at world” and “Many shoppers begin to
whistle in aisles of supermarket”; these called for playful disruptions in public spaces, achieving
Kaprow’s goal for people to experience their urban environment in fresh new ways.

138
As the title Self-Service implies, it was incumbent upon each individual to enact the
activities. In spite of Kaprow’s meticulously detailed instructions to participants, he noted:
“Self-Service will not suffer at all from indifference or laxity on the part of those who have
elected to enter into it. There is nothing to harm. Put positively, there is everything to gain by
giving the best one has to whatever one does. No one will take attendance and no grades will
be given.”
327
Ever the educator, Kaprow once again provided explicit instructions, but allowed
for chance and for things to just happen. This process of selecting a particular group, hosting a
workshop, and instructing participants to explore sites or perform tasks to make temporary
interventions into the city prefigures the procedures Kaprow would soon deploy in his teaching
in California. These exploratory activities also instantiate his belief that experiences of art must
be drawn from everyday life, ordinary experience and city spaces.
When Walter Hopps left PAM the following year, critic and photographer John Coplans
became the curator and invited Kaprow back do his first major exhibition at the museum.
328
In
the introduction to the exhibition publication, Kaprow expressed his ambivalence about this, as
he harshly critiqued the museum as an inappropriate site at which to display new forms of
living, contemporary art, such as his own Happenings:
I am put off by museum in general; they reek of a holy death which offends my sense of
reality. Moreover, apart from my personal view, most advanced art of the last half-
dozen years is, in my view, inappropriate for museum display. It is an art of the world:
enormous scale, environmental scope, mixed media, spectator participation.
Technology, themes drawn from the daily milieu, and so forth. Museums do more than
isolate such work from life, they subtly sanctify and thus kill it.
329

327
Allan Kaprow, “Notes,” from Self-Service, Allan Kaprow Papers, 980063, Getty Research Institute, Series III:
Project Files, Box 8 Folder 8.
328
Allan Kaprow, exhibition at the Pasadena Museum of Art, September 15–October 22, 1967.
329
James T. Demetrion, Allan Kaprow (Pasadena, California: The Castle Press, 1967), 10.

139
After this vitriolic accusation that institutions “sanctify” and “kill” live art projects, Kaprow goes
on to state that he would have “preferred a factory, storage yard or outdoor site” for his work
and that he will “try to camouflage the museum environment as much as possible.” He
reveals, however, that one new Happening will indeed be presented during his exhibition.
330

For Fluids (1967), Kaprow and his collaborators built seven enormous ice-block
structures throughout the urban environment of Pasadena and Los Angeles using this simple
score that appeared on a poster (fig. 3.10 ):
During three days, about twenty rectangular enclosures of ice blocks
(measuring about 30 feet long, 10 wide and 8 high) are built throughout the city.
Their walls are unbroken. They are left to melt.
331

While preparing this Happening, Kaprow stayed at the home of art philanthropist Peggy Phelps,
a board member at the Pasadena Art Museum as well as at the Pasadena Art Alliance, an
organization of women patrons who had helped to fund Fluids.
332
Kaprow built the prototype
at Phelps’ home, and she recruited a large group of volunteers even before Kaprow had
decided on the seven different locations for the structures.
With ice provided by the Union Ice Company, the sites included, among others, a gas
station, a McDonald’s parking lot, and a spot near the Colorado Avenue bridge. (fig. 3.11a-b)
Kaprow and his team worked to install the seven structures, which lasted only a short time in
the warm October weather of Los Angeles. As with other Happenings, the overarching
process—the organization, construction, sheer physical labor, and exertion as well as the

330
Ibid.
331
Fluids poster, October 1967, Allan Kaprow Papers, 980063, Getty Research Institute, Series III: Project Files, Box
13, Folder 4.
332
Special thanks to Peggy Phelps and other women from the Pasadena Art Alliance, whom I interviewed in
spring 1993 in Pasadena about their experiences with Kaprow and their support for this project.

140
relational aspects of collaboration became just as important as the final product. As Annette
Leddy has observed: “Focused on issues of labor, participation, and the ephemeral, Kaprow’s
project uses the fantasy of communal work as a means to dissolve the walls between
individuals.”
333
Long after the walls of the structure melted, the personal memories lingered in
the minds of the participants. Only grainy photographs have entered archives as the official,
but static, documents of the live event.
Both Self-Service and Fluids, located within the city and executed by selected teams,
contrast with the earlier Happenings. In each, the participants are performing specific tasks—
whether the mundane activities in supermarkets and launderettes of the former, or the hard
labor used to build ice structures in the latter. At the core of both projects are the process-
oriented Deweyan idea of experiencing the everyday and learning by doing, and Cage’s idea of
“purposeful purposelessness.”
334
Working with volunteers and students on these two projects
foreshadowed what Kaprow would do in the next few years: deploy Happenings in the urban
environment as the fulcrum of an experimental art education curriculum.
Concurrent to these projects sited in cities, Kaprow also presented Happenings and
Environments in colleges and universities—a different type of engagement that had specific
audiences consisting primarily of students. He had produced many of his early works within
academic environments. For instance, his very first Happening, Communication (1958), took
place in the Voorhees Chapel at Douglass College, Rutgers University (1958). The Environment
Words (1962), initially produced at the Smolin Gallery, was re-installed later that year at the

333
Annette Leddy, “Intimate: The Allan Kaprow Papers,” in Allan Kaprow—Art as Life, Eve Neyer-Hermann, Andrew
Perchuk, and Stephanie Rosenthal, eds. (Los Angeles: Getty Research Insitute, 2009), 45.
334
Cage, “Experimental Music,” 5.

141
Fine Arts Department of the State University of New York (SUNY) at Stony Brook, just after
Kaprow was appointed as an Associate Professor. Subsequently, Kaprow organized Birds
(1964), a Happening in the woods near Southern Carbondale University; Paper (1964), the
previously mentioned Happening in the UC Berkeley parking garage; and Household (1964), a
Happening with Cornell University students at the Ithaca city dump.
As a short-term visiting artist at an academic institution, Kaprow could work for a longer
period of time with a limited number artists and students, for whom he wrote very detailed
scores for different kinds of collaborative events. Involving direct encounters with natural
landscapes or explorations of urban sites, these scenarios consisted of process-oriented,
everyday tasks. Some were absurd and ludic, others arduous and challenging, but all were
focused on problem-solving and more experiential, embodied learning through discovery,
labor, and play. After doing so many of these visiting artists’ events at colleges and
universities, Kaprow started to think about how the format of more intimate, interdisciplinary
workshops with Happenings could be integrated into his regular day-to-day teaching and
become the modus operandi for more experimental education.
Kaprow’s interest in more experimental forms of education prompted him to write
“Happenings for Schools,” a proposal to the Carnegie Corporation for a new seminar-workshop
at SUNY Stony Brook.
335
During 1967–68, the pioneering video artist Nam June Paik and
experimental filmmaker Stan Vanderbeek came to the SUNY Stony Brook campus through a
Rockefeller grant: Vanderbeek conducted a film workshop with teachers as part of a
Continuing Education program, while Paik worked in Instructional Services in a laboratory

335
Allan Kaprow, “Happenings for Schools,” undated proposal, Allan Kaprow Papers, 980063 Getty Research
Institute, Series VI: Teaching Files, Box 57-A, Folder 4.

142
exploring television art and communication.
336
Inspired by his colleagues, Kaprow proposed
his own educational project that pivoted around Happenings:
The Happening in its many forms, has already begun to be introduced in pilot elementary
and secondary experiments around the country, with reportedly stimulating results. Its
organic, environmental and multi-media character, close to life and devoid of
professionalism, appears to have not only fresh creative potentials for youngsters
“tuned-in” to the age of television, rapid travel and discotheques, it may offer, as well,
untapped social insights for educators.

Echoing the organic, environmental, everyday quality of Happenings and their relevancy to the
fast-paced, “tuned-in” 1960s television generation, Kaprow proposed to bring together young
college artists who expected to teach and seasoned public school schoolteachers who sought
innovation in their own pedagogy. In his multi-generational concept, the young artists’ zeal
would inspire mid-career teachers, who would be their mentors and take new inspiration back
into their classrooms. Kaprow would lead their participation in Happenings, an “important
artery of contemporary creative endeavor” and “a way to share in the making of works of art,”
combining new pedagogical processes with event-based performance.
While Kaprow received $80,000 from the Carnegie, the art department at SUNY Stony
Brook rejected the funding. He pitched it to the New York City public schools, but they also
declined. Margaret Mahoney, a Carnegie program officer, believed in Kaprow’s program and
introduced him to Herbert Kohl, a leader in experimental education at UC Berkeley.

When
they met, they found that their respective backgrounds and interests seemed compatible, and
the Berkeley Unified School District subsequently accepted the Carnegie’s funds for an
experimental pilot program.

336
Paik and Vanderbeek started their respective projects at SUNY in 1967, so it is likely that Kaprow’s proposal was
written at this time, however, this is not clear from the typescript.

143
Project Other Ways: Happenings for Public Schools
Happening offers a method, that of play––for freshly involving students in a host of
standard curricula. The intent is to develop a very professional workshop in the study,
creation and educational application of the Happening. ––Allan Kaprow
337

What school children need is a Pied Piper, lots of Pied Pipers, not social workers or lab
technicians. The Pied Piper had magic and this is what is important about his story.
Like magicians, artist deal in a sort of magic and it us proposed here that some of them
can double as Pied Pipers and lead school children along the roads they are pressured to
avoid and soon forget. ––Allan Kaprow
338

Kaprow and Kohl’s experimental education program for the Berkeley public schools,
Project Other Ways, started in September 1968. With a goal to develop alternative methods,
or “other ways” to learn––their student-centered curriculum emphasized engagement with
the everyday world, language, and play. To achieve this, Kaprow led students in playful,
learning experiences in a series of public Happenings throughout the city and became a “Pied
Piper,” while Kohl’s educational expertise came from years of teaching language arts and
writing about public schools. Although the men had each been involved in quite different
levels of instruction—higher education and primary school, respectively—they had two
important things in common: they had both studied with Progressive educators in their early
school years, and they had become immersed in the writing and theory of John Dewey as
undergraduate philosophy majors.
339

After spending a year at Oxford and another at the graduate philosophy department of
Columbia, Kohl became an elementary school teacher and a writer who was well known for 36

337
Ibid.
338
Allan Kaprow, “The Creation of Art and the Creation of Art Education,” typescript, 1965, Allan Kaprow Papers,
980063, Getty Research Institute, Series VI: Teaching Files, Box 47, Folder 3.
339
This and all further biographical information is from Herbert Kohl, “Some thoughts on my education and my
work,” an undated essay posted at www.herbertkohleducator.com (accessed January 2, 2016).

144
Children (1967), a book based on his year of teaching in Harlem, where he succeeded in
“teaching the unteachable.”
340
Subsequently, Kohl had become one of the founders of the
“Open School Movement,” which advocated for more student-centered learning, documented
in his publication, The Open Class Room: A Practical Guide to a New Way of Teaching (1969).
341

Kaprow and Kohl’s Other Ways has historical precedents in Progressivist education of
the 1920s. In a publication on “child centered” schools, a chapter entitled “The Creative Artist
Enters the Classroom” includes the following passage:
Only painters, sculptors, dances, musician, poets, who combined great vision
of their art with an equal vision of the child’s potential were sensitive through
their own creative travails to the requirement of the creative sprit. They could
truly understand the philosophy and aims of the child-centered school.
342

This romanticized notion that artists possess a unique ability to understand children prevailed,
as “creative self-expression” remained a core value of Progressive schools like the ones both
Kaprow and Anna Halprin attended.

During World War II and the postwar era, when the
military-industrial complex simultaneously demanded practical vocational training as well as
highly technical, scientific education, artists were absent from the classrooms. By the mid- to
late 1960s, however, when fervent social and political movements prompted the
reconsideration of power structures and establishment institutions including schools,
alternative programs such as Kaprow and Kohl’s started to become more prevalent again.
343

340
Herbert Kohl, 36 Children (New York: Signet/New American Library, 1967).
341
Herbert Kohl, The Open Class Room: A Practical Guide to a New Way of Teaching (New York: Random House,
1969). Student-centered learning in Open Schools of the 1960s emanated from Dewey’s Pragmatism and
Progressivism, but also from the theories of Jean Piaget, Maria Montessori, and Lev Vygotsky.
342
The Child-Centered School: An Appraisal of the New Education, Harold Ordway Rugg and Ann Shumaker, eds.
(Yonkers-on-Hudson: World Book, 1928), 28.
343
National Endowment for the Arts’ Brief Chronology of the Federal Support for the Arts, 1967 -2000,
https://www.arts.gov/sites/default/files/NEAChronWeb.pdf (accessed January 16, 2016) indicates the same year

145
Kohl had worked with students who vehemently rejected the standard teaching
practices of lectures, rote memorization, and textbooks, which forced him to develop new
pedagogical strategies: attempting to create a community of learners, providing students with
choices, inspiring them to think in new ways, and most importantly, trying to ascertain what
they cared about and what they found interesting.
344
Mixing up the standard singular
classroom, he taught individuals, groups, and full classes over the course of a single day. He
crossed disciplinary boundaries by introducing theater, the visual arts, technology, storytelling,
reading, and research into the curriculum. Most significantly for this study, he encouraged
students to draw upon their own experiences and get to know their immediate community.
While these innovations may seem naturalized today, Kohl’s methodology was just as new and
experimental for education as Kaprow’s practice was for art.
The terms of the Other Ways grant stipulated that Kaprow and Kohl fulfill three
requirements: 1) conduct teacher training seminars; 2) develop teacher training and
curriculum materials for other class rooms; and 3) attempt to create models for change in the
public schools in Berkeley.
345
To fulfill the first two, they organized Monday open houses and
distributed training and curricular materials. They also held discussions about the strategies
and politics of changing schools and legal rights for teachers, as well as dramatic
improvisations and poetry readings.
346
They encouraged teachers to take over the sessions
and to share their problems with each other.

Other Ways launched In 1969, the NEA started their first funding initiative, Artists-in-the-Schools. By 1980 this
became the Artists-in-Education Program that re-granted support back to state arts agencies.
344
Kohl, previously cited biographical essay.
345
Allan Kaprow, “Other Ways Chronology,” Allan Kaprow Papers, 980063,Getty Research Institute, Box 57-A,
Folder 4.
346
Ibid.

146
While the program initially revolved around teacher training and development, the next
semester found Kohl and Kaprow focusing on the 75 junior and senior high school students
ages 12 to 18 and the student-centered curriculum to create new models for change. To
achieve this, Kaprow and Kohl brought together administrators, teachers, and students and
paired them with artists, actors, and poets to construct their own cross-disciplinary curriculum.
With artists from around the Bay Area, African-Americans comprised one-half of the staff to
mirror the demographics of the student body; the co-directors were adamant that diversity
within the program was imperative to make effective changes in public school education.
347

To situate the program within the community, the school district assigned Other Ways a
downtown storefront on Grove Street—rather than using school facilities, they had their own
space on the street to use as an experimental environment. Essentially, Kaprow and Kohl
developed a new, alternative open school within a pre-existing public school system with its
own prospectus and logo to differentiate the program from the standard curriculum. (3.12a)
In a progress report on the program, Kaprow also stated the co-directors’ belief that
learning generally improved when “imaginativeness and self-fulfillment” replaced “grades and
specialized skills,” emphasizing the self-expression and individuality inherent to student-
centered education.
348
Kaprow described how they planned some of the curriculum in
advance while some of it was “happily spontaneous,” an “organic, on-going affair that takes
pleasure in its own playing”—evoking the ethos of his own Happenings.
349
Their document, “A
Pedagogic Object,” with numbered items resembling a score for a Happening, served as a

347
Allan Kaprow, “Current Program of Project Other Ways, ’68–’69,” n.d., Allan Kaprow Papers, 980063, Getty
Research Institute, Box 57-A, Folder 4.
348
Ibid.
349
Ibid.

147
rubric for curriculum.
350
Kaprow and Kohl took these ideas for materials, media, activities, and
pedagogies and created a poster for their program, with a series of hypotheticals, entitled
Suppose (fig. 3.12b):
SUPPOSE… You could find architecture in a junk yard. You had to make music with only
a rubber band. You were given the element of a game and had to create the rules. You
wrote your own Dick and Jane. You discovered the mythology of everyday life. You
used graffiti as a textbook. You saw hotrods and dragsters as moving sculptures. You
couldn’t write and could only take pictures. You saw a basketball as a dance.
351

Suppose invited students and teachers to potentially think or see differently, to work within a
set of limitations or parameters, to make new discoveries, and crucially, to use their own
creativity to experiment or invent new things. Considering these hypotheticals as a
curriculum, Kaprow then wrote an “event plan” to replace conventional teacher’s lesson plans
for both formal learning in the classrooms and informal learning via excursions throughout the
city.
352

All classes included mutual participation by all staff, students, and teachers, but each of
the directors devised assignments according to their own interests and strengths. Kohl, whose
particular expertise was teaching writing to children, developed activities for students to
illustrate personal books, invent contemporary myths out of advertisements, and construct
word games using language as a source for critique and play. (fig. 3.12c) Some of Kaprow’s
activities for students—making musical instruments and playing them in concerts using tape
recorders, or editing films using footage collected from the floors of professional studios—
recall Cagean exercises with found objects and chance elements. Much of Kaprow’s

350
Ibid.
351
Ibid.
352
Allan Kaprow as quoted in Thomas Albright, “Project Other Ways: What Would Happen If…,” San Francisco
Examiner and Chronicle, May 18, 1969, 37.

148
curriculum, however, focused on explorations outside the classroom, in the “laboratory” of the
city—photographing the city’s graffiti with box cameras, making impromptu pocket parks in
Oakland, and most prominently, creating score-based Happenings throughout the Bay Area.
353

For Six Ordinary Happenings (1960), Kaprow wrote scores with students for ephemeral,
everyday activities to be executed throughout Berkeley from March to May 1960. The poster
for the event (fig. 3.13a) recruited additional potential participants who attended a meeting
one day prior to each event; it also became a document of the project. The first score of the
series, titled Charity (fig. 3.13b), reads as follows:
CHARITY
BUYING PILES OF OLD CLOTHES
WASHING THEM
IN ALL-NIGHT LAUNDROMATS
GIVING THEM BACK TO USED-CLOTHES STORES
(MARCH 7)

While initially it seems completely absurd to buy and wash clothes, then return them to the
same used clothing store, this action fits into Cage’s idea of “purposeful purposelessness.”
354

The participants experience the time and labor involved in an everyday domestic task, enact a
process of recycling, and learn about the value of “giving back,” as the title Charity implies.
Another Happening was actually called Giveaway (fig. 3.13c):
GIVEAWAY
STACKS OF DISHES LEFT ON CORNERS
PHOTOGRAPHED
NEXT DAY, PHOTOGRAPHED
(MAY 2)

353
While I will focus here on the Happenings rather than other Activities, see Kelley, Child’s Play, 146, for a
discussion of the pocket parks in the Oakland neighborhoods and another park that was going to be on an empty
lot in Berkeley until it was seized by activists and dubbed “People’s Park.”
354
John Cage, Lecture on “Experimental Music,” 5.

149
Rather than taking the dishes to a store to be re-sold like the clothing, participants left them in
a pile directly on the street, returning to the scene the next day to observe what had
happened. Some dishes were stolen, some damaged, some even had food on them. The
participants documented whatever residue resulted from their action.
355

An activity that also initially seemed purposeless, is literally called Purpose (fig. 3.13d):

PURPOSE
MAKING A MOUNTAIN OF SANDMOVING IT REPEATEDLY
UNTIL THERE IS NO MORE MOUNTAIN
RECORDING THE WORK SOUNDSUNTIL THERE IS NO SOUND OF THE WORK
LISTENING TO THE TAPES
(MAY 28)

Making a mountain out of sand that gradually disappears seems futile. However, this Zen-like
task requires both concentration and physical agility to construct and move the sculpture to
different locations throughout the city. The audio recording demands further concentration
and acute activation of the senses to “hear” its ever-diminishing sound.

Other Happenings in this series focused more specifically on photographing the
participants’ physical presence in the environment, such as Pose (fig. 3.13e):
POSE
CARRYING CHAIRS THROUGH THE CITY
SITTING DOWN HERE AND THERE
PHOTOGRAPHED PIX LEFT ON SPOT
GOING ON
(MARCH 21)

Participants performed a laborious task carrying their chairs to different places around the city,
from landscapes to industrial sites, photographing their temporary positions with Kodak
Instamatic cameras and leaving the “pix” at the site for an unsuspecting person to find.

355
Albright, 37.

150
The participants’ presence in the Happening Shape (figs. 3.13f-g) was documented in a
different manner, as it was traced directly onto the street or the landscape:
SHAPE
SHOES, BODIES
ON STREETS, SIDEWALKS, FIELDS
SPRAY PAINTING THEIR SILHOUETTES
REPORTS AND PHOTOS IN NEWSPAPER
(APRIL 18)

Some followed the score by spray-painting the shape of their shoes, objects, and bodies onto
the streets in water-soluble paint, while others rendered silhouettes with flour. These
tracings, intended to enable students to make their mark within the city, took on other
connotations in the context of Berkeley in volatile 1969: photographs show puzzled bystanders
looking at chalk drawings that resemble outline of bodies from crime scenes, while figures on
top of the plastic used in the flour silhouettes alluded to body bags. After this Happening, the
students became citizen journalists; they sent out a report and a press release with
photographs, yielding articles in the two major Bay Area papers and elevating the events into a
newsworthy story.
356

Ultimately, both Pose and Shape are about both presence and absence within the city.
A photograph of Kaprow’s shadow form in Pose and the process of making tracings and
silhouettes in Shape directly inspired Dial (1969) (fig. 3.14h-i) another Happening that Kaprow
did with students at the San Francisco Art Institute.
357
As the students stood at pay phone
booths on Columbus Avenue in North Beach, Kaprow would call them every fifteen minutes
with instructions to use chalk to trace the shadow of the nearest telephone pole on the

356
Noel Lieberman, “Hard Lessons the Easy Way,” Oakland Tribune, June 4, 1969, n.p., and the previously cited
Albright article in the San Francisco Chronicle.
357
Kaprow repeated this event in May 1974 at California Institute of the Arts, Valencia.

151
sidewalk and write down the time. Recalling Situationist Guy Debord’s concept of a
psychogeography––to explore and map the city––each participant left a trace of a fleeting
moment of their presence within the urban environment.
358

The final event in the Six Ordinary Happenings series was entitled Fine! (fig. 3.13j) and
resulted in mischievous behavior, aimed at authority:
FINE!
PARKING CARS IN RESTRICTED ZONES
WAITING NEARBY FOR COP
SNAPSHOT OF GETTING TICKET
DETAILED REPORT
SENDING PIX, REPORTS, FINE TO COPS
(APRIL 4)

Participants observed the police writing tickets in photographs, and then reported in a
detective-like fashion, tracking their usual and customary duty as though it was somehow
suspicious. Returning this “official” documentation with the requisite payment—a rather
sarcastic and mischievous gesture—would have undoubtedly surprised, annoyed, and possibly
even amused the unsuspecting recipient at the police department.
Clearly the Six Ordinary Happenings recall aspects of Kaprow’s previous events, such as
Self-Service. Using everyday actions in three urban environments and the performance of
construction and labor in Fluids, however, they also became incorporated into his future work.
Just after Other Ways, Kaprow received a commission from the Museum of Modern Art for a
calendar entitled Days Off (1970) (fig. 3.14).
359
Printed on newsprint with photographs and
written scores in the same format as the Berkeley poster, the calendar featured Happenings of
the mid- to late 1960s, including the Other Ways events. Not only did Kaprow integrate the

358
Guy Debord, “Definitions,” Internationiale Situationiste #1 (June 1958).
359
The project was officially commissioned by the museum’s Junior Council, but approved by its curators.

152
student project into this major museum commission, he also showed original, photo-collaged
documentation of some of the student projects in his exhibition at the John Gibson Gallery in
New York (fig. 3.15) demonstrating another instance of how he integrated his Happenings for
teaching into his own artistic production, as he considered his scores for pedagogical
assignments concomitant with and valuable to the rest of his practice.
360

Ultimately, Six Ordinary Happenings functioned pedagogically on different levels. In
these interventions into the urban environment, participants made their marks in public by
documenting their bodily presence or tracing their existence in the city. They engaged in labor
and performed tasks that required manual dexterity, focused attention, and activated senses.
They acquired the skills necessary to document their observations in writing and to elicit a
potential exchange or surprise from an unassuming recipient, exercising a sense of the absurd
or an ironic humor. Finally, framed as Happenings, these very ordinary, seemingly pointless
activities became extraordinary learning experiences.
Kaprow commented on this pedagogical strategy in both newspaper articles. He told
critic Thomas Albright that “As an artist, I’m concerned with Happenings because of their
pointlessness, but as an educator, I recognize their point.”
361
In the Oakland Tribune, he
explained how Happenings offered students an opportunity to experience the real world:
Our whole culture is very verbal… but experience is far more communicative without being
verbal. The only way to learn what is real in our environment is to experience it. And of course,
there’s nothing wrong with talking about our experiences later: that’s when words take on real
meaning… The students who took part in our happenings have had a whole range of human
emotions as well as environmental experiences… They really got to know and see the town as
most people don’t. They never really had looked at it, felt it, or smelled it before, even though
they may have walked or driven through it a million times.
362

360
Allan Kaprow Days Off: A Calendar of Happenings, October 4–31, John Gibson Commissions, Inc., New York.
361
Allan Kaprow as quoted by Thomas Albright, San Francisco Chronicle, 37.
362
Lieberman, n.p.

153

Kaprow’s quote attests to the value and primacy of direct experience that creates a multi-

sensory memory, an effect that strengthened the post-event conversation integral to the

project. In the article, he also expressed his strong opinion that “such open-ended experiences

are more educational than classroom discussion of traditional subjects and must become a

central part of the school systems in the United States.”
363

While the two co-directors agreed about the efficacy of experiential education, they had
their ideological differences. Kaprow, the artist, advocated for even more open-endedness
and less structure, wanting artists to disrupt usual and customary regimes through free play;
Kohl was more concerned with larger social and systemic problems of school reform,
especially the plight of teachers, outmoded instruction, and bureaucracy, which he attempted
to resolve through 1960s “encounter group” meetings. Kohl also became annoyed by
Kaprow’s constant traveling and his purchases of materials for Happenings that he thought
were too costly and might even seem wasteful to students living in dire economic
circumstances.
364

Jeff Kelley described the discrepancies between the two co-directors: “Kaprow wanting
artists who would play in the schools, and Kohl wanted artists who would radicalize education.
Kaprow’s was a benign vision, Kohl’s was a revolutionary one… Berkeley was Kaprow’s
playground at the moment it was everyone else’s battleground.”
365
In her dissertation,
Suzanne Lacy explains these differences in even greater detail:

363
Ibid.
364
O’Dell notes how, in a 1982 interview, Herbert Kohl referred to Kaprow’s more extravagant Happenings as
“money-obsessed,” but also indicated that the students found them wonderful and surreal.
365
Kelley, Child’s Play, 144–45.

154

Eventually however, Kaprow and Kohl parted ways, given their fundamental difference
in temperament and goals. No doubt their tensions reflected a clash of very different
worlds, the New York intellectual avant-garde of which Kaprow was an acclaimed, if
idiosyncratic figure, and the Oakland/Berkeley streets––radicalized by the Black
Panthers, the Free Speech Movement and a long history of labor organizing—to which
Kohl was drawn… high art culture was perceived as elitist by the left and on-the-ground
organizers and although Kaprow strained against this elitism, the two men located their
rebellion differently, a difference also reflected in the political art from that time. Their
work together called for a reconciliation of complicated idea from the visual arts avant-
garde with the pragmatic needs of the social and political transformation as perceived
by activists.
366

As Lacy indicates, steeped in his leftist positions on race, class, and systemic social problems,
Kohl may have thought Kaprow’s avant-garde attitude lacked enough political engagement.
But as she astutely observes about Kaprow: “For him the question was: in what ways is art
meaningful to society? In the beginning of his career he advocated for art’s potential radical
and transformative usefulness to education.”
367

In his own “idiosyncratic” way, Kaprow exercised a different radical politic in learning
through art, and in Project Other Ways, by teaching with Happenings. The Berkeley Public
Schools did not extend the program for 1970–71, and shortly thereafter, Kaprow received an
invitation to teach at the brand new experimental art school, California Institute of the Arts
(CalArts), an offer that he simply could not refuse.

366
Suzanne Lacy, Imperfect Art: Working in Public: A Case Study of the Oakland Projects, PhD diss. Robert Gordon
University Aberdeen, Scotland, 2014. 144.
367
Lacy, 143.

155
CalArts: Disney’s Dream School
The talents of musicians, the self expression of the actor, the techniques and
applications of fine and commercial artists are being used more and more in today’s
businesses, industry, entertainment and communications––not by themselves, but
rather in close association with each other. What we must have, then, is a completely
new approach to training in the arts––an entirely new educational concept which will
properly prepare artists and give them the vital tools so necessary for working in and
drawing from every field of creativity and performance.
––Walt Disney
368

Endowed by the entertainment magnate, CalArts quickly became nicknamed “Walt
Disney's Dream School,” because of his highly idealized notion of a school fostering what he
called “community of artists” who would benefit from a new approach to training in the
arts.”
369
From his quote above, it is clear that Disney’s largesse was not entirely altruistic; it
emanated from his thinly veiled desire to start a school that would ultimately serve “business,
industry, entertainment and communications”—in other words, an academy aimed at
producing a plethora of first-rate animators and filmmakers for his company and Disney could
not have imagined what really ensued
During this nascent stage of CalArts’ development, administrators devoted considerable
effort to articulate its mission, philosophy, and curriculum in different publications. Dean of
Critical Studies Maury Stein and his assistant Larry Miller brought their Blueprint for Counter
Education from Brandeis University to CalArts.
370
(fig. 3.16a) Subtitled as “curriculum,
handbook, wall decoration, and shooting script,” the cover’s inscription read:

368
Walt Disney as cited in California Institute of the Arts: Prologue to a Community Arts in Society, guest edited by
Sheila de Bretteville, Barry Hyams, and Marianne Partridge, Volume 7, no. 3 (Fall–Winter 1970): 8.
369
James Real, "It Was Disney's Dream," Change, January–February 1971, 23–25, and "Disney's Dream School,"
Newsweek magazine, November 8, 1971, 67. Both articles use the phrase "dream school.”
370
Maurice R. Stein and Larry Miller, Blueprint for Counter Education, (New York: Doubleday, 1970).

156
Inside this box are three charts and a book, the tools for creating a new educational
environment. This counter-university makes obsolete the traditional university process.
Surrounded by charts, the participant will be confronted by ideas and issues that will
compel him to interact with everything going on around him from movies to riots to
political campaigns. There is no text book, no syllabus, no final exam; and the faculty
includes Marcuse, McLuhan, Eldridge Cleaver and Jean-Luc Godard.
371

The intention here is for the receiver of this pedagogical toolkit or portable learning
environment is for the receiver to engage with materials physically, “surrounded” and
“confronted” by the ideas and issues. The three red, white, and black collaged charts or “mind
maps” (fig. 3.16b) assembled by both faculty and students, to contemplate various theories
and philosophies: one juxtaposes ideas about modernism and postmodernism, another
collages the names of great artists and thinkers such Valéry and Focillon, John Dewey and Alan
Watts. This reflected the desire to align CalArts with avant-garde art and cultural discourses,
progressive philosophical positions and radical socio-political ideologies.
Stein circulated these materials throughout the CalArts community, asking staff, faculty,
and students to contribute their own ideas for the new school. This resulted in a curious
collection of drawings, charts, notes, and graphics assembled in a cardboard box, resembling a
Fluxus publication. The title Box (a quarterly), vol. 1 no. 1, (fig.3.16c) indicates it was originally
intended to be a serial publication, but this never transpired.
372

A third and more public vehicle celebrating the birth of the new school was California
Institute of the Arts: Prologue to a Community, planned, written, designed, and produced by

371
Ibid.
372
The cover resembles Kaprow’s Purpose poster from the Berkeley project, (fig.3.12b) however, it is not authored
by anyone in particular. Coco Halversen, a former CalArts librarian, told me in 2009 that the “box” was used as a
planning tool in the early years, but was lost in the in the library in the mid-1970s, but rediscovered in the 1994
earthquake clean-up.

157
the CalArts faculty, staff, and even some students.
373
A special edition of Arts in Society, the
journal’s corrugated cardboard cover bore Day-glow orange letters and bound together multi-
colored paper stocks that made it look like an artists’ book. (fig. 3.17a) Including critical essays
about art, aesthetics, and education; photographs, collages and news clippings; casual notes
and internal school memos, and even student applications the volume unveiled aspects of
CalArts’ early institutional formation.
Kaprow’s contribution, Roundtrip through LA between home and the Institute
(fig. 3.17b) ––a sequence of photographs taken from his car during his daily commute––filled
the pages like a series of vertical film strips, implying the passage of both time and distance.
374

Most significantly, Kaprow also wrote a two-page essay ruminating on “the experimental” and
the artist as an “experimenter”:
For the experimenter, being at the outer limits is an important condition for jarring into
focus attention upon urgent issues, but the experimenter’s issues are philosophical
rather than esthetic. They speak to questions of Being rather than to matters of Art…
The temporary ambiguity of experimental action is quite appropriate, for in leaving art,
nothing is really escaped from; as it is suppressed, it emerges in disguise…
Experimental art is never tragic. It is a prelude.
375

Kaprow positions the artist as “experimenter,” at the “outer limits”—as one who focuses upon
philosophical rather then aesthetic issues, traversing the boundary between art and everything
else. He implies that leaving art is the art one does not necessarily escape the realm of art

373
California Institute of the Arts: Prologue to a Community Arts in Society, was guest edited by Sheila de
Bretteville, Barry Hyams, and Marianne Partridge, Vol. 7, no. 3 (Fall–Winter 1970).
374
Ibid., 62. This photographic series recalls Ed Ruscha’s earlier fan-folded artist book, Every Building on Sunset
Strip (1966) which he shot from a camera mounted on his truck.
375
Ibid.

158
entirely, as it “emerges in disguise” in other “non-art” ways.
376
The concept of the artist as
experimenter pursuing “non-art,” parallels the language of Kaprow’s concurrent critical
writing: his epic three-part article, “The Education of the Un-Artist.”
377

Just as he accepted his position at CalArts in 1969, Kaprow started the first installment
of this article in which he states: “to escape from the traps of art, it is not enough to be against
museum, or to stop producing marketable objects. The artist of the future must learn how to
evade his profession.”
378
He calls for artists to remake themselves, initially as “non-artists”
and then, more permanently, as “un-artists” and proposes way that how un-artists can shift
their language and practices from ART to non-art activities, instructs them to focus on play
rather than work, then concludes with a litany of work by contemporary artists that is derived
less from art historical precedents rather than from their everyday lives. Kaprow’s pedagogical
strategies in Other Ways–– engaging the world in as non-aesthetic a manner as possible, using
humor and play, and discovering the extraordinary in the ordinary is precisely what he would
continue to do at CalArts.

Teaching with Happenings at CalArts
When Dean of Theater Herbert Blau and Dean of the School of Art Paul Brach first met
with Kaprow to discuss his role at CalArts, they decided that during the first year or so, he
would be the Associate Dean and work closely with Brach to develop the visual arts. Soon
afterwards, he could “focus on his professional area of Happenings as a clear part of the

376
Allan Kaprow, “Preface to the Expanded Edition: On the Way to Un-Art,” ed. Kelley, Blurring the Boundaries,
xxix. Here Kaprow says “Leaving art is the art. But you must have it to leave it” to infer non-art must come from art.
non-art identified.”
377
Previously cited articles by Kaprow, “The Education of the Un-Artist, Part I, II and III.”
378
Kaprow, The Education of the Un-Artist, Part I,” 27.

159
curriculum.”
379
To accomplish this, Kaprow proposed a three-part instructional program that
commenced with a master class in Happenings, aimed towards “studying and utilizing the
everyday environment,” working with 10 to 12 students from various artistic backgrounds in
the new context of an art school.

Second, he would organize a series of symposia about the
arts inviting non-artists working across disciplines (“ecologists, anthropologists, physicists,
philosophers, critics and social revolutionaries”), rekindling his vision from “Project in Multiple
Dimensions.”
380
Finally, he wanted to continue his current work in “public school education
and community life” that he had started in Berkeley and in the Los Angeles area.
Kaprow’s described his own primary seminar, “Happenings as Programmed Activity,” as
follows:
A course in non-theatrical modes of “doing things.” Philosophical background and social
implications of ordinary activities, i.e. what’s special about nothing special. Activity as
play. Play as recreation. Learning to play. Play versus gaming. Methods of doing things.
Focusing on the vernacular. Become a professional un-professional… Use of the common
environment. Flexibility of places and durations. Activity in motions (as on the freeway).
Role of participation. (participants as own audience). Individual, group and anonymous
authorship. Impermanence and non-repeatability. Indeterminate and determinate
forms. Techniques of change, and symmetry (feedback). Preparation of verbal and non-
verbal “programs” plans of action. Use of “media” as activity, and information about the
activity (publicity).

Practicalities: social and environmental responsibilities (mores, laws, and ecologies);
financial and physical limitations (working with what you have, whom you’re with and
where you are). Criterion of do-ability. Possibility of application to public school
programs and community needs. A series of activities are planned in conjunction with
the above seminar work.
381

379
This and all further references in this paragraph derive from correspondence between Allan Kaprow and
Herbert Blau regarding Kaprow’s hiring at CalArts. Allan Kaprow Papers, 980063, Getty Research Institute, Series
VI: Teaching, Box 56, Folder 8.
380
Ibid.
381
Ibid.

160
This course description functions as a “mini-manifesto” to reiterate Kaprow’s key tenets of
Happenings: executing non-theatrical, non-rehearsed events of everyday activities; finding the
extraordinary in the ordinary; the importance of play (both learning to play and learning
through play); the idea of non–professionals or “un-artists” who become collective rather than
individual authors; the role of indeterminacy and ephemerality; language and media,
communication and feedback. He alludes to the “philosophical background and social
implications” such as influences of Dewey’s Pragmatism, Cage’s chance procedures and Meyer
Schapiro’s social theory. Finally, he cites “practicalities” of making Happenings—social codes,
legalities, or environmental issues, the feasibility of an event and its application to a school or
a particular community—all of which would became an intrinsic part of his courses.
382

This text also demonstrates the confluence of Kaprow’s performance and pedagogy––at
this stage as he moved farther away from Happenings into more intimate, focused events as
the line between his practice and his teaching continued to blur. Because of his increasing
antipathy towards museums and institutions, he needed to find other sites and methods of
executing his work, as classes and small group settings increasingly became a primary site for
his production as students became his participants.
383
As Jeff Kelley observed:
At CalArts, Kaprow began thinking of his works as forms of teaching. Unlike the
Happenings of the previous decade that were enacted for a public audience, the works
in and around CalArts were tailored for a select group of students in an educational
experiment…At CalArts he found himself in an experimental milieu that encouraged
such forms of creative research as play and meaningless work. More like a laboratory
than a lecture hall, his “classroom” often spilled into the hills, gullies streambeds, and
subdivisions adjacent to the Burbank and Valencia campuses….
384

382
Ibid.
383
Lacy, 144.
384
Kelley, 157.

161
Kaprow divided his seminar into two workshops, one for those with art or performance
experience and one for other students.
385
Each week different students wrote scores and
presented performances for the whole class and instructor to participate in, followed by
intense, lengthy discussion. Kaprow students recall reading specific texts by Richard Schechner,
including Environmental Theatre (1973) with his “Six Axioms of Environmental Theater,”
analogous to Kaprow’s own rules for Happenings, and exercises from avant-garde theatre
Meyerhold, Brecht, Grotowski, and non-Western genres.
386
Students also read Erving Goffman’s
The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life is a seminal sociology text that analyzed the
relationship between performance and life.
387
More specifically, Goffman uses theatrical
performance as a metaphor for human interaction: the “acts” that people play out in their daily
lives on various “stages” in the social sphere and how we “perform” our own self-presentation.
Kaprow’s art meets life agenda, his use of non-theatrical performance and his preference
to work outside mainstream art institutions appealed to some of the students who
participated in CalArts’ Feminist Art Program started Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro in
1971.
388
Filmmaker and performance artist Susan Mogul recalls: “Allan's teaching style was
about creating a space for people to do these non-performance activities. The performances
were non-audience pieces where we were all participants. I never thought of him as having a

385
He titled these the “Professional” and the “General” Workshops which is ironic given his often stated antipathy
towards professionalism.
386
Richard Schechner, Environmental Theater, (New York: Hawthorne Books, 1973). This reference is from
Kaprow’s previously cited letter to Herbert Blau about his Happenings seminar in his papers at the Getty.
387
Erving Goffman, The Performance of Self in Everyday Life, (Garden City: Doubleday, 1959). Special thanks to
Susan Mogul for recalling this reading from Kaprow’s CalArts seminar.
388
Chicago moved her Feminist Art Program from Fresno State College to Cal Arts in 1971 and asked artist Miriam
Schapiro to be her co-director. Some faculty and students in the Feminist Art Program preferred women-only
classes and mentors, which will be discussed later in the chapter on Alison Knowles.

162
large personality. Or actually teaching per se.”
389
Mogul implies that Kaprow acquiesced his
authority as the teacher to the student organizing the performance on a given day. For
instance, Mogul’s remembers her score for a Happening in which she led the class to in an off-
site outing to Canter’s delicatessen in Los Angeles where everyone was instructed to order and
eat the same dish. Her idea explored a full range of group dynamics and decision-making:
determining where to sit and how to reach a consensus about what to eat, the collective
action of consuming food together and participating in the meal-time conversation. This
performance reveals the subtlety of “casual learning” in simple everyday activities generated
by Kaprow’s students.
Suzanne Lacy discussed her experiences with Kaprow in an interview with Moira Roth:
Allan’s teaching methodology was cool, discursive, anything was possible, everything
was interesting to discuss...I think he was struggling with how to handle not only the
move to the West Coast but the move from the grand, expressive gesture to a different
kind of concern…What I learned from him was not only that there is always an intimate
psychological connection but also a level of self-investigation that goes on in most art.
He also was the first person to introduce me to nontheatrical performance.
390

For one of Lacy’s Happenings in Kaprow’s Maps (1974) she gave everyone in the class
butcher-wrapped meat organs and asked them to nail each on in its proper anatomical place
on the outline of a lamb on the wall (fig. 3.18a) She then instructed them to repack the organs
into brown bags and gave them a map for an off-campus excursion. At the first stop––a
hospital for patients with developmental disorders in Pomona––they parked in different
parking lots and went to the cafeteria where they quietly ate lunch from another brown paper

389
Susan Mogul, email to the author, January 2, 2016.
390
Moira Roth, “Suzanne Lacy and the Feminist Art Program at Fresno State and CalArts, East of Borneo, December
15, 2011, http://www.eastofborneo.org/articles/suzanne-lacy-on-the-feminist-program-at-fresno-state-and-
calarts (accessed March 30, 2015).

163
bag. From there, they drove to their final destination––an abandoned meat-packing plant in
Vernon near downtown Los Angeles. (figs. 3.18b) Each person received a meat packer’s gown
wrapped in blue laundry paper to wear as they toured through the slaughterhouse. Finally, in
the back of the plant where they left their brown-bagged lamb organs tied to a fence,
reassembled in correct anatomical order of organs in a live animal. (fig.3.18c)
A precursor to Lacy’s larger series entitled Anatomy Lessons (1973-75) this Happening
utilizes her previous studies as a pre-med student and her ongoing interests in physiology,
psychology, and the body. She begins with an actual lesson asking everyone to accurately nail
the organs of the lamb organs in the classroom. Next she the group goes to a hospital where
they eat in the dining hall with strangers in a potentially unsettling situation. Finally, they tour
and witness remains of the meat-packing plant, trying to reconstruct the lamb by placing the
organs on the fence, in an attempt to make it whole again. While Lacy references social issues
such as the institutionalization of mentally challenge individuals or the brutal slaughtering
animals, I would argue that Lacy’s score is more about a process of learning and investigation
to experience different conditions and cycles of life, that underscore the “intimate
psychological connections” and “self investigation” that she learned from Kaprow.
To further demonstrate exactly how Kaprow continued to merge his practice with his
pedagogy at CalArts, I will discuss one larger-scale Happening that recalls those of the early
1960s and a few smaller, more intimate events that represented the direction he would
continue to follow into the 1970s. The first semester Kaprow taught at CalArts, Herbert Blau
asked him to stage a Happening as a “public relations” event for the school. In light of his
ambivalence towards spectacular Happenings and their dubious reception discussed

164
previously, initially he did not want to do this, but then considered that it would serve a larger
pedagogical objective: to mobilize CalArts student artists from different disciplines to work
together in a large-scale public action.
391

Publicity (1970) also called The Happening at Vasquez Rock on the poster (fig. 3.19a)
took place at the well-known site of sandstone formations north of Los Angeles used by the
film industry to shoot commercials and movies, particularly Westerns. Kaprow divided 100
students into teams of one dozen participants to engage in what he called a “Work Routine,”
in this case, using two-by-four lumber to make wooden structures in the desert. (fig 3.19b)
While they worked they also competed for the attention of the cameramen (including Nam
June Paik, Shuya Abe and Paul Challacombe) who filmed their activities using Portapak video
cameras, then immediately played back the footage on small monitors. (fig. 3.19c) Kaprow’s
interest pivoted on how the cameras reflected the participants (an update of using mirrors in
his Environments) and who they responded to seeing their progress: they quickly learned how
to generate “new ideas, change, reconstructions” and “more recordings.”
392

Publicity is the type of task-based Happening that Kaprow had done previously in which a
group to engage in particular actions with specific materials to perform a Routine as specific
form of labor. On one level, it is literally about the process and product of work; however, with
the omnipresent video cameras, this Happening was also about surveillance and spectacle. The
participants quite self-consciously performed their actions before the camera, saw themselves
in the replay on the monitors, then shifted their behavior or improve their work productivity.
Publicity not only promoted instruction and experience of a labor process, but also a “learned”

391
Kelley, 148.
392
Ibid.

165
behavior in response to their instant video image. Kaprow’s Happening references the rapid
proliferation of images with the new Portapack and play-back technologies. Kelley commented
it evokes Susan Sontag’s idea of “The Image World” from her On Photography (1977) and I
would add that it is a prescient reference to Rosalind Krauss’ discourse on the inherent
narcissistic tendencies of video art (and artists) in her landmark article, “ Video Aesthetics of
Narcissism” (1976).
393

Publicity also mirrored how the advertising and entertainment industries used this
picturesque location for decades–– organizing teams of workers to perform a role then
disseminating the images to the public. With myriad tee-pee like structures in the desert
landscape, Publicity appeared like a “cowboy and Indian encounter” from the Lone Ranger
television episodes of Kaprow’s youth, but it ended with students drumming sticks on empty
trash cans, a spontaneous, celebratory, “tribal” improvisation that recalled a
contemporaneous pop cultural event––the concert at Woodstock.
394

Following this large-scale spectacle, Kaprow organized more intimate events with his first
Happenings course. Tracts (1970) involved constructing, deconstructing then burying a series
parallel cement footings on a hillside above CalArts’ Burbank campus (fig. 3.20a-b).
395
Kaprow
and a dozen students built wood forms, poured cement into them and when they dried, they
broke the concrete into pieces, mixed it with a batch of fresh concrete and used it on a new
set of footings. The score called for the second set of footings to be exactly twice as long and
twice as far apart as the first, then the next set would be half as long and half as far apart as

393
Kelley, 151. Susan Sontag “The Image World,” from On Photography (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux,
1977): 153-80 and Rosalind Krauss, “Video Aesthetics of Narcissism,” October, Vol. 1. (Spring, 1976): 50-64.
394
Kelley, 153.
395
Ibid., 159-161.

166
the second, and so on. While the score specified these distance between the footings, it did
not indicate the exact measurements or total distance—this was left up to the group to decide
amongst themselves.
This deceptively simple construction project required not only intense physical labor, but
logistical thinking, mathematical calculations and total cooperation among the participants.
The group not only had to learn the basic skills inherent to any construction project, they also
had to endure unpredictable conditions, hot weather and extreme fatigue.
When everyone agreed they could no longer continue the cyclical process, they broke up
all of the footings, buried the rubble in the trenches and leveled the ground, hiding their work
in the landscape. Tracts functioned as an extreme object lesson for Kaprow’s students to
“learn by doing” as they gained practical skills, engaged in logistical thinking and experienced
both physical and psychological endurance. Their final action of completely obliterating their
efforts, clearly manifests the ideas of pursuing Cage’s previously mentioned idea of
“purposeful purposelessness” and making “un-art” in by using non-aesthetic everyday
materials to make structures that could easily have been mistaken for a campus construction
project. In contrast to the Happening, Publicity ––a highly visible event and grand gesture––
Tracts points towards Kaprow’s desire to pare-down and even eradicate evidence of artistic
production.
As Kelley has noted Tracts makes multiple references: it is an area of indefinite extent,
such as the hillside they worked on; a specific plot of land for a home, referring to the rampant
construction and housing boom at that time in Burbank, and it is also a treatise, that points
towards the many texts CalArts issued at that time to articulate its mission and vision. Finally,

167
the very function of a footing is to support a foundation: this relates to the founding of CalArts,
and to concepts of hard labor, distance, cyclical processes and enduring difficulties that
Kaprow was experiencing in his role as an associate dean at the fledging art school. In light of
this, Tracts could be construed as metaphor, and even as a subtle form of institutional critique.
In another event for Kaprow’s class the following year, the site actually did resemble a
construction zone. In February 1971, the extreme jolt of the Sylmar earthquake rocked the
CalArts Burbank campus, located only 12 miles away from the epicenter. Given the extensive
damage to the brick buildings of the Villa Cabrini, students and classes had to be re-located to
the new Valencia campus, a rambling, brut modern building that was still under construction.
For the Happening, Scales (1971) (fig. 3.21) Kaprow and his students enacted this constant
construction activity with the following score:
placing cement blocks on step on the 1
st
floor stairway to form new steps going up, climbing them
placing cement blocks on step on the 2
nd
floor stairway to form new steps going up, climbing them
placing cement blocks on step on the 3
rd
floor stairway to form new steps going up, climbing them
carrying the cement blocks to different 3
rd
floor stairway to form new steps going up, placing
them on steps going down
descending them
carrying the cement blocks to different 2
rd
floor stairway to form new steps going up, placing
them on steps going down
descending them
396

In order for Kaprow, artists Rachel Vaughan and Tony Ramos plus a dozen students to enact
this score, they had to work closely together—both literally and figuratively–– to avoid
colliding. To do so, they placed blocks on only one-half of the staircase so they would have
more room to work their way up, then file back to down to the first step. Together they
developed a pathway to follow each other in sequence, place blocks, walk on them, pickup the
same blocks and move them to the new location to repeat the entire process again: a highly

396
Ibid., 166.

168
logical, cerebral process to locate themselves in the convoluted building and to resolve a
problem with a specific system.
397

Like Tracts, the title of this activity is also a double entendre referencing the physical
scaling or climbing the stairs and also sonic repetition in both traditional musical scales and in
the everyday Cagean soundtrack of cement blocks hitting the wall when participants placed
the blocks the stairs.
398
It required a certain amount of physical labor and a cooperative group
problem-solving process but this time instead of just moving construction materials, Scales
involved complex choreography to move bodies through time and space in a carefully
orchestrated manner, as they “played” an architectural elements of the new building. Also,
much like an Anna Halprin improvisation of ordinary movement, Scales demanded that each
player be aware of proprioception––understanding one’s own body in relation to others.
399

This idea of engaging in a specific sequence of tasks involving the body prefigured an
activity in Kaprow’s class at a dry stream bed the following year, Easy (1972) (fig.3.22a-c):
wetting a stone
carrying it downstream until dry
dropping it
choosing another stone there
wetting it
carrying it upstream until dry
dropping it
400

Written for a dry streambed near CalArts Kaprow’s instructions to select a stone, moisten it,
take it upstream until it was dry and then drop it was much less arduous than toting lumber,
transporting cement rubble or scaling many stairs. Participants selected their own special

397
Ibid., 166-167.
398
Ibid., 167.
399
Kaprow also performed a version of Scales at the University of Southern California, 1972.
400
Ibid., 168.

169
stone and decided how to make it wet: most students put them in their mouths, while some
used other bodily fluids, such as perspiration or urine. Working with what they found on site
and their own bodies, Easy, as the name implies, was simple, direct, economical and
expedient. Each participant had the authority to choose his or her own microcosm of nature,
to decide how to transform it and when/where to return it to the environment. Easy was a
minimal Zen-like gesture, an informal experiment and a short-lived experience of nature.
With each step activated by an individual rather than the group, Easy represents
Kaprow’s continuing transition into more intimate Activities. One year after his class enacted
Easy, he published a photo-text version of the score in the summer issue of Art and
America.
401
This inspired Kaprow to make “Activity booklets”–– publications with photographs
and lowercase captions to illustrate how to do events, rather than to document them––and as
such, he considered them as pedagogical tools and teaching aids.
402
Easy also inspired Kaprow
to make an Activity booklet for Air Conditioning (1973) which instructs a person to wet a part
of their body, waits for it to dry, then repeat the process on another part of the body again and
again until his or her mouth is to dry to do this any longer. This clearly demonstrates how one
of Kaprow’s class project collapsed into his own work as it directly instigated a journal article, a
new publication format as well as a type of bodily action. Kaprow referred to these self-
contained Activities that could be performed anywhere by anyone as “privacy pieces” and
“routines” these would predominate in his practice and his teaching into the 1970s.

401
Allan Kaprow, “Easy,” Art in America, July-August 1974, 62, no.4: 73-75
402
Kelley, pg. # notes that between 1973 and 1979 he published eighteen booklets, each designed in the same
format.

170
During the next year Kaprow was becoming weary of the myriad problems at CalArts
which included increasing discord with the Disney family, the overly idealistic leftist
utopianism of some deans and quarrels between departments and faculty. In 1974 he decided
to accept his final and most sustained teaching appointment, as professor of Visual Arts at the
University of California, San Diego (UCSD) where he also served as the department chair from
1985 until his retirement in 1993, when he became professor emeritus.
At UCSD, as at CalArts, Kaprow continued to utilize his Activity booklets as a curricular
score for classes and workshops. Increasingly, his Activities aimed to produce or measure
different kinds of physical phenomena or sensory engagement or proposed inter-personal
interactions that focused on psychological states or emotional affect. In San Diego Kaprow
became increasingly involved with meditation and studies in Zen Buddhism, which added
elements of focused attention and spirituality to both his practice and his teaching.
403

As one of Kaprow’s UCSD colleagues, Steve Fagin commented in a posthumous eulogy:
Allan walked a tightrope, not only between art and life, but between grandeur and
intimacy…He was a great teacher who reminded one, at the most unexpected moments,
that the sacred had a banal streak and the secular reeked of the divine.”
404

With his preference for modest, private Activities and involvement with Zen, some
perceived Kaprow’s tenure at UCSD as a retreat from the artworld, or in his own words,
“leaving art”; however, he continued to make events and workshops, publish a collection of his
writing and collaborate on a major monograph, and most significantly, to become important
mentor to several generations of young artists.

403
Kaprow studied Zen Buddhism in San Diego with the noted teacher Charlotte Joko Beck beginning in 1989
404
Steve Fagin as quoted in Inge Kiderra, “Memorial Happening to be held for Allan Kaprow,” May 26, 2006,
http://ucsdnews.ucsd.edu/archive/thisweek/2006/may/05_30_kaprow.asp
(accessed January 16, 2016).

171
As I have argued in this chapter, Kaprow’s innovative artistic practices and invention of
the Happenings are inextricably linked to his roles as an educator and writer. Kelley has noted
that writing is so instrumental to Kaprow’s practice that can be thought of as “notes on the
margins of an experimental career”
405
and I would amplify this by asserting that it is the
discursive “adhesive” for his performance and his pedagogy. In his early critical writing he
theorized about the ontology of Happenings and the role of the experimental artist, and as I
have discussed, his three-part essays on the education of the “unartist,” coincided directly
with his teaching in experimental education in Berkeley and at CalArts and solidified his
pedagogical positions. As I also have demonstrated, at this same moment Kaprow abandoned
his more ambitious Happenings that became public spectacles and started to use smaller-scale
and events as the fulcrum of his teaching curricula.
I believe that this transition in the scale of Kaprow’s work (from large-scale Happenings
into more intimate events and Activities) the method and site of production (collaborating with
students in educational contexts) and the reception (from larger public audiences to artists and
students) significantly changed the presentation and the purpose of his own art. As he
progressively integrated his performance and pedagogy, Kaprow continued to experiment with
everyday materials and to explore daily life in different environments as he did in his early
Happenings, but rather than executing one-off events, educational contexts provided a
continuing platform for deeper, more focused discovery and inquiry: in his scores for task-
oriented labor and playful research, students experience became contiguous with learning.
With Kaprow’s methodology of deploying progressively more simple activities and events,

405
Ibid.

172
augmented by readings in performance theory and Dewey’s pragmatism, he encouraged
students to contemplate more philosophical questions about art, life and everyday existence.
Kaprow’s score-based experimental pedagogy involved embodied or sensory experiences
and problem-solving activities enabled students to acquire new forms of knowledge. More
specifically, they inculcated a range Gardner’s multiple intelligences: logical-mathematical
intelligence of thinking conceptually, abstractly and discerning logic; bodily-kinesthetic ability
to control one’s body and to handle objects skillfully; the intra-personal capacity to be self-
aware and understand one’s own thinking and feeling and perhaps most importantly for
Kaprow, existential intelligence––the sensitivity to ask and challenging questions about human
existence the meaning of life, and art, the crux of his practice and pedagogy.
406

406
Gardner, 1999. In this second major publication of his theories, Gardner added existential intelligence to his
previous list of seven intelligences.

173
CHAPTER 4
Alison Knowles

In the early 1960s, after becoming acquainted with John Cage and the artists who
would later form Fluxus, she rejected her traditional training in painting and print-making: her
practice incorporating everyday found objects and chance operations. Central to Knowles’
practice are her simple, participatory “propositions” that she started to write and perform
when she became involved with Fluxus in 1962. As she As Julia Robinson observed:
The brevity and openness of Knowles’ textual “proposition” allows for great
freedom in the realization of a piece and includes the audience form the outset.
Although it was Marcel Duchamp who argued the audience completes the work,
It was the sphere of performance and the radical scoring practices of John Cage that
provide the impetus for Knowles and her peers to incorporate duration and experience
into the very conception of the works they created. Disavowing convention and
sacrificing structure they made experience a kind of medium, as important as any
other.
407

Synthesizing Duchamp’s ideas of the readymade and the importance of the spectator, Cage’s
chance and indeterminacy and what Robinson calls “experience as a medium” Knowles’ early
propositions to engage with food and everyday materials are minimal scores that provoke
maximal experiences of the body, multiple senses and the mind. A Fluxus score, no matter
how abbreviated is intrinsically informational: it provides an instruction towards a physical
action and/or engagement with an object, or a combination of both. While many scores are
open and others put forth a set of parameters, all require reading and contemplation before
the performer undertakes a bodily action or engages in the proposed event and it is up to
them to interpret the given score.

407
Julia Robinson, “The Sculpture of Indeterminacy: Alison Knowles's Beans and Variations” Art Journal;
Winter (2004): 97.

174
As Hannah Higgins notes in her preface to Fluxus Experience, the interpretation of a given
score is always bounder to the “experiencer”: her invitations and instructions present, rather
than represent the world in what she has described as “primary experience.”
408

I argue that with Knowles’ insistence on both an artistic practice and teaching method
undergirded by everyday experience, she demands that we concentrate on seemingly
mundane activities or engage our senses and spark our minds to learn about he world in
entirely new ways. Her score-based events train us to appreciate the overlooked aspects of
our domestic life, environment, our physical bodies and sensory perception, as she
problematizes the idea that Fluxus is “an art of insignificance,” instructing us to find
significance in what appears to be insignificant, and to construct meaning from the object
lessons she presents through everyday activities and rituals. This chapter will discuss specific
aspects Knowles’ diverse, interdisciplinary activities––from her early Fluxus events and
multiples issues by George Maciunas to her own artists’ books, sound sculptures, and
intermedia installations––but will focus primarily on how her own artistic production from the
late 1960s to the 1970s dovetailed with the pedagogical formats she developed with students
while teaching at CalArts.

408
Hannah Higgins, Fluxus Experience, 3.

175
Education and Artistic Background

Born in New York and raised in the suburb of Scarsdale, Knowles’ mother was an avid
reader and home-maker and her father a professor of literature who studied the work of
Thomas Shelton, the first translator of Don Quixote. As a result, her early life pivoted around
books and when she first attended Middlebury College in Vermont from 1952-54, she majored
in French and literature, then started to pursue painting. Although she had received a
scholarship, after two years she left the college: she was bored and homesick for New York
City where she could study for free at Pratt Institute where her father taught English and
General Studies.
409
While at Pratt, from 1954 – 1956, Knowles studied painting, primarily with
the director of the program, Richard Lindner, but also with Abstract Expressionist Adolph
Gottlieb. As was typical with art students of this era, she made gestural paintings with
multicolored patches across the canvas reminiscent of Abstract Expressionist painting by Hans
Hoffman and Philip Guston.
In 1956, the very same year she graduated with honors from Pratt, Knowles moved into
a loft on Canal and Broadway in Soho at a moment when artists began to populate the former
garment district adjacent to Greenwich Village. Living in this close-knit community she became
acquainted with a diverse range of visual and performance artists, several of whom would
later become associated with Fluxus and Happenings. Most significantly, she became
acquainted with Cage, who was teaching his influential Composition class at the New School,
where her future husband, Dick Higgins, was one of his students.

409
Woods, 23, note 22.

176
As noted previously, Knowles did not take the class, however, she developed her own
friendship with Cage and became interested in his chance-oriented and emphasis on the
everyday, lived experience. This began a life-long relationship with the composer with whom
she would later collaborate, both in performance events and on Notations (1969) a
compilation of annotated graphical scores and compositions by more than 200 composers
published by Something Else Press.
410
Crucially, as Woods notes Knowles “credited Cage with
dislodging her idea of what it meant to be a painter in the post-war era.”
411

Knowles’ first exhibition in New York at the Nonagon Gallery in 1958 (fig. 4.1) was
generally well-received, but a lone critic derided her work, concluding that she had failed to
deliver “acceptable abstraction,” a rather nebulous and ridiculous comment.
412
The following
summer she decided to take a graduate course at Syracuse University with the legendary but
strict Josef Albers, who had the reputation as a very strict professor. When Knowles seemed
disengaged from one of his lectures on abstraction and color theory, Albers banished her to
the basement where she rebelled by making her first artworks from chance: she threw dice
onto the canvas to determine the composition of the painting.
413
About this same time, she
also took a piece of canvas, folded it and the put numbers in seven areas, then would throw
dice to determine the color of each section.
414

Woods has noted in her dissertation how chance procedures assisted Knowles in her
paintings:

410
John Cage and Alison Knowles, Notations, (New York: Something Else Press, 1999).
411
Woods, 23, note 21.
412
R. Warren Dash, “Alison Knowles,” Arts vol. 32, no. 8 (May, 1958): 56. According to Knowles’ daughter and the
introduction to Judith Olch Richards’ previously cited Oral History interview with Alison Knowles,” the artist
subsequently burned all but one of her paintings in the Nonagon exhibition.
413
Woods, 26.
414
Rahmani, 24.

177
Knowles felt she could move beyond the impasse of painting by refashioning herself as a
visual poet of chance. Deploying the procedures advocated by the composer in his own
experimental music, such as using the ancient Chinese numerical text of chance, the I-
Ching as a generator of unintentional outcomes—Knowles would quickly master and
then move beyond, for example, the throwing of dice in order to structure her painterly
choices.
415

Following these initial experiments with aleatory procedures in painting and her burgeoning
friendship with Cage, Knowles started to the realize the importance of his seminal theories
about chance and indeterminacy as she gradually abandoned Abstract Expressionist painting.
As Woods further noted, Knowles found this liberating, particularly because of the male-
dominated, sexist and hegemonic status of the New York School: “For Knowles, the
incorporation of chance operations was an infinitely generative apparatus that liberated her
from certain artistic and practical limitations she deduced as a female painter working in the
(often unrelentingly misogynist) realm of abstract expressionists in the late 1950s.”
416

In 1961 Knowles rejected her formal training in the arts and decided to stop painting
entirely.
417
At this point she consciously decided that she wanted to develop her work in a new
direction to engage directly with more openness, everyday objects and “found sounds.” To
accomplish she would rely on the Cagean notions of indeterminacy and chance procedures,
but would also become interested in the potential of minimal, reductive event scores that
artists were developing in Cage’s Composition course.
Knowles explained in an interview with her former student Aviva Rahmani: “I wasn’t in
the class, my connection was through Dick Higgins, but the mechanisms and structure

415
Woods, 14.
416
Ibid., 16.
417
In her interview with Judith Olch Richards, Knowles states that she burned her paintings after the Nonagon
exhibition and in my conversation with Hannah Higgins in Los Angeles on March 8, 2016 she confirmed that only
one survives today.

178
discussed in that class helped me escape the ravening jaws of Abstract Expressionism.”
418

While Cage taught his own visual scoring system to the students, Knowles learned about even
scores through osmosis from Higgins, particularly those innovated by his classmate George
Brecht, whose minimal texts called for everyday actions such as Drip Music (1959):
For single or multiple performance. A source of dripping water
and an empty vessel are arranged so that the water falls into the vessel.

This open score could be interpreted variously by any receiver, using any type of object in any
context. at anytime. For instance, Dick Higgins performed Drip Music in 1962 at an early Fluxus
Festival using a ladder, a pitcher and a metal tub (fig. 4.2). Brecht wrote his scores on “Event
cards,” that became the prototypes for Fluxus objects and Fluxkit multiples, first published in
1963. Concurrently, La Monte Young, another member of the Cage class, wrote slightly longer,
narrative event scores such as those he performed in the summer of 1960 while at Anna
Halprin’s studio, discussed previously on chapter 2.
In her introduction to Fluxus Experience, Hannah Higgins questions why the formats of
the score-based events and the objects of Fluxkit multiples are important:
The minimal and prosaic basis of both the Fluxkit and the Event, initially seems puzzling.
Why were such utterly simple gestures considered important enough to leave the
classroom of the New School as a performance art form with the given name: Event?...
What is the relationship between the Event and the Fluxkit? These experiments must
have mattered to some degree for the artists and audiences who saw them, but how?
And why? I will argue the answer lies in the immediate quality of the experience offered
by both.
419

418
Aviva Rahmani, “Alison Knowles: An Interview,” M/E/A/N/I/N/G: Contemporary Art Issues, no. 10, (Nov. 1991):
21 – 25. This is reproduced in M/E/A/N/I/N/G: An Anthology of Artists’ Writings, eds. Susan Bee and Mira Schor,
(Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2000): 362-368.
419
Hannah Higgins, Fluxus Experience, 12.

179
Higgins’ argument pivots around the idea that the event score and the multiple are the
purveyors of information and experience. She focuses on the idea that “Fluxus works create a
diverse experiential framework one characterized by the dissolution of boundaries dear to
Western epistemology, including the traditional distinction between the subject and object on
what much of Western philosophy is based” which results in what scholar Owen Smith’s
reference to as Fluxus’ “non-hierarchical density of experience.”
420

These ideas specifically relate to a discussion of Knowles’ work on several levels. First.
the score is not only a form of information that one receives and reads, it is also an instruction,
to gain experience and learn, not just intellectually, but also through perception and sensory
exploration. Second, is the multiple, containing or referring to objects with which the receiver
will perform a gesture or bodily action. Using intellectual, physical and sensory systems to
enact a Fluxus work, the performer avoids the Western subject/object distinctions, or the
Cartesian mind/body split and posits a “diverse non-hierarchical experience.”

Event Scores and Festivals, Multiples and Books
The very first score Knowles composed after abandoning painting demonstrated her
desire to venture into events with actions and sounds grounded in everyday, ordinary
experience. Shuffle (1961) (fig. 4.3) read as follows:
The performer or performers shuffle into the performance area
and away from it, above, behind, around or through the audience.
They perform as a group or solo, but quietly.

This score consists of a very simple action, shuffling one’s feet, but instructs the performer or

420
Ibid.

180
performers to start in the designated performance area, then to meander away, above,
behind, around or through the audience. This event inevitably interrupts the spectators’ visual
field or physical space and even if the shufflers follow the scores directions to be quiet, their
shoes create some kind of sound, no matter how subtle. Knowles’ first performs her open
event scores in a seminal series of Fluxus concerts that took place in Europe during 1962-63. It
is critical to note that she became a core Fluxus artist and was, at that time, the only woman
to participate in these early concerts. Before discussing her work in these Festivals, I will briefly
recount this history of the founding of Fluxus.
George Maciunas, the organizer and promoter of the cadre of artists who worked under
the aegis of Fluxus, immigrated from Lithuania to the United States with his family following
World War II.
421
After taking coursework in design and engineering at the Cooper Union and
the Carnegie Institute of Technology, he studied modern art history at the New York University
Institute of Fine Arts. Proclaiming himself as the “Chairman” of Fluxus, from 1960 until his
death in 1978, he organized events and festivals, published posters, newspapers, yearbooks,
and other multiples of art objects.
In October 1960, Maciunas, chose “fluxus” as the name for a journal of avant-garde
work by experimental artists, musicians and writers that he intended to publish. Derived from
the Latin fluere “to flow,” connoting fluidity, mutability, and continuous change, this word
seemed appropriate to describe the interdisciplinary, intermdedial activities he wanted to
document in the journal. Maciunas and his Lithuanian compatriot, Almus Salcius, owned the

421
Owen Smith’s previously cited dissertation “George Maciunas and a History of Fluxus; or, The Art Movement
That Never Existed” is the most detailed account of Maciunas’ biography and the founding of Fluxus. Another
source is Mr. Fluxus: A Collective Portrait of George Maciunas, 1931-1978, edited by Emmett Williams and Ann
Noel, London: Thames and Hudson, 1997.

181
AG Gallery on Madison Avenue where they organized a benefit concert, Musica Antiqua et
Nova in 1961, as the name implies, showcasing both ancient and very new music including
electronic and tape music by veteran composers such as John Cage and Richard Maxfield,
younger New York artists Dick Higgins, Ray Johnson and Jackson MacLow, and recent California
transplants such as Walter de Maria and La Monte Young.
Shortly after this series of benefit concerts, Maciunas left New York in the fall of 1961 to
work as a designer for the United States Air Force in Germany

where he met German artists
and musicians Mary Baumesiter, Karlheinz Stockhausen, and Wolf Vostell, Americans Benjamin
Patterson, a composer and Emmett Williams, a concrete poet and Korean artist Nam June
Paik.
422
Paik organized The Neo-Dada in der Musik (Neo-Dada in Music), in Düsseldorf a
program that consisted of jarring performances such as his One for Violin Solo, a singular
action of smashing a brand new violin, and Paper Music, in which George Brecht's crunched
heavy brown paper in front of a microphone.
423
The artists began to refer to these short,
sudden events as “action music”–– an obvious reference back to “action painting”
––
but they
also paralleled new forms of performance developed in reaction to Abstract Expressionism
such as the Japanese Gutai group, the Nouveaux Réalistes in France, the Vienna Aktionists and
numerous artists in the United States.
424

422
In the 1950s German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen taught in Darmstadt and worked at the electronic music
studio of radio station Westdeutscher Rundfunk (WDR). He started performing in Cologne in the atelier of his
wife, artist Mary Baumeister, where artists such as Patterson and Paik joined their concerts.
423
This festival took place at the Kammerspiele on June 16,
,
1962.
424
Owen Smith "Fluxus: A Brief History and Other Fictions," In the Spirit of Fluxus, 30, note 11, explains since most
of these artists trained as musicians, they called their events "concerts" and referred to their pieces as "action
music.” See another important exhibition publication about the nascence of these practices, Out of Actions:
Between the Object and Performance, Russell Ferguson, ed. (Los Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art, 1998).

182
As a direct result of his exposure to these artists, Maciunas decided to present a series
of performance festivals throughout Europe, ostensibly to promote his Fluxus publication. On
September 23rd, 1962 he organized the Fluxus Internationale Festspiele Neuester Musik
(International Festival of the Newest Music) in Wiesbaden, the birthdate for Fluxus.
425

The Wiesbaden festival featured a program of short events based on simple scores for
piano and other instruments or voices, taped music, concrete music, and films. Nam June Paik
interpreted La Monte Young's now-famous Composition #1 (1960), "Draw a straight line and
follow it," in his own Zen for Head, dipping his head in a vat of ink and tomato juice, then
dragged it along a paper scroll. (fig. 4.4a) Resembling a calligraphic brush painting, the “scroll”
is a permanent artifact of enactment of the score. Philip Corner's Piano Activities (fig. 4.4b)
called for a group of artists to alter, dismantle and auction off the pieces of a grand piano and
in a photo of this event, one sees Alison Knowles in background. (fig. 4.4c).

These anarchistic piece shocked the staunch German audiences, who were particularly
perturbed by the destruction of the piano, and a major newspaper published a biting political
cartoon of the chaotic scene in the newspaper, captioned "When the artists rule," in Politiken,
(fig.4.4d) and on the right side of this cartoon, is a bespectacled Alison Knowles participating in
the sole woman participant in the choas, even though in the photograph she is seen in the
background.
426
In addition to participating in Corner’s piece, Knowles preformed Dick Higgins’

425
After Wiesbaden, Maciunas organized other European festivals in 1962 in Amsterdam October 5; Institute of
Contemporary Art, London, October 23 and 25; Copenhagen, November 23 - 28 and the American Center in
Paris, December 3- 8, and in Dusseldorf in February 2 and 3, 1963.
426
In a conversation with Hannah Higgins in Los Angeles on March 9, 2016, she told me that Knowles’ role in this
event was unclear, but that her mother “always disliked Piano Activities,” either indicating her distaste for the
chaos or, perhaps, her exclusion from the front line of the action.

183
Danger Music Number Two (fig. 4.5) by shaving her husband’s head on stage which German
audiences found equally confusing and shocking.

Propositions for Participation
Knowles started to write her own event scores during the European Fluxus Festivals
and at the Institute of Contemporary Art in London, she debuted Proposition #2 (1962), an
event with as very simple score that read: “Make a Salad.”
427
(figs 4.6) As Knowles prepared
the salad the sounds of chopping the vegetables and serving the food to the audience became
the music, just as the ambient noises in the room constituted the concert in Cage’s 4’33”.
Knowles’ intentional use of the word “proposition” underscores her intent to invite the even
audience to participate in her gesture of hospitality by consuming the salad together, but also
a proposition in the sense of an asserting an argument—i.e. proposing a new way of thinking
about what defines music and how a live performative event can also function as art.
What appealed to Knowles was not just the way these events transformed traditional
definitions of artistic production, but also this possibility of interacting with the audience and
performing/distributing her work in a new public context. Proposition #2, however, does not
require a public presentation or an audience at all: ostensibly, one can read the score and
enjoy the process of making and eating a salad on their own, as countless people do everyday.
Knowles’ concern is to frame this everyday action as art, irrespective of whether it is an
isolated individual act or in a formal cultural context, but there is a productive tension the
presentation of her work in private, domestic spaces and within the public sphere.

427
by Alison Knowles, Great Bear Pamphlet (New York: Something Else Press, 1965): 4.

184
Knowles’ next score, Proposition #3: Nivea Cream Piece for O. Williams (1962)
instructed performers to engage in tactile action that also became a sound event:
First performer comes on stage with a bottle of Nivea Cream or (If none is available)
with a bottle of hand cream labeled “Nivea Cream.” He pours the cream onto his hands
and massages them in front of the microphone. Other performers enter, one by one,
and do the same things. Then they join together in front of the microphone, to make a
mass of massaging hands. They leave in the reverse of the order of which they entered
on a signal from the first performer.
428

Knowles variation on this score instructed the performers to each have a large jar and first to
apply the moisturizer to themselves and then to their colleagues in a “fragrant pig-pile.” Based
on a mundane action, in each version the performer must engage multiple senses: he or she
smells the distinct aroma of the white moisturizer, uses touch to massage it into their hands,
sees the cream emulsifying and then hears the highly exaggerated sounds of it squishing
between their hands and fingers. Knowles elevates something completely banal and ordinary
to art and in so doing instigates the performer to focus on usually unnoticed sensory elements.
While typically Fluxus artists performed in a deadpan style, the amplified squishing of
the Nivea in Proposition #3 must have amused (and possibly annoyed) audiences attending the
concert, while one can only imagine the reception to raucous, group grope of the “pig pile”
version. Knowles’ instructions to “forge” a Nivea label on a jar of another hand cream if the
preferred lotion was unavailable, is also funny and a bit curious: this not brand loyalty but an
ironic gesture to subject a ubiquitous, well-known, trusted commodity to this slapstick event.
Knowles returned to more reductive event scores with Variation #1 on Proposition
(1964) that simply read: “Make a Soup.” (fig. 4.3) With a similar intent to Proposition 2: Make
A Salad, this score but posed a greater challenge in a public performance context––hot liquid

428
Knowles, Great Bear Pamphlet, 5.

185
broth is more precarious to serve and prone to unexpected possibly unwelcome elements of
chance. As Nicole Woods observed, Knowles understood that using “chance oriented scores
did not automatically mean a devaluation of art to the unskilled, the unserious, or the simply
improvisational,” instead, she argues that Knowles reductive event scores “bespeak a rigor,
even philosophical mode of inquiry, regarding the possibility of the unplanned.”
429

Fluxus Multiples and Artists’ Books
After the New York Fluxus Festival ended in 1964 Maciunas began to focus his attention
on his original goal to produce publications. Fluxus I (1965), issued under the authorship of the
“Fluxus Collective,”

the wooden box contained scores and documentation of the European
festivals, was intended to be the first of an annual edition.
430
Soon Maciunas would begin
issuing scores by individual artists who would write a score that he would then design, print and
package in small plastic boxes, each with a label bearing their own logotype in his idiosyncratic
typography influenced by modern avant-garde and anachronistic typefaces. (fig. 4.7) Maciunas
presented individual Fluxus works together in a Fluxkit, that contained an array of objects,
multiples, and scores in a suitcase derived from Marcel Duchamp’s Boîte en Valise (1940).
Inexpensive Fluxus multiples could be purchased in person at the Flux Shop on Canal Street, or
through a Fluxus Mail Order Catalogue. Using this alternative system to sell affordable objects
mitigated against the presumed preciousness of the art object and created a more democratic,
decentralizing the distribution of art.

429
Woods, 17.
430
Jon Hendricks, Fluxus Codex, 40, notes that originally Maciunas planned a series of seven boxes, but only
produced two.

186
For the first Fluxkit, Maciunas published Knowles Bean Rolls (1963), a tea tin filled with
beans and fourteen paper scrolls imprinted with text culled from Knowles extensive research
about the legume at the New York Public Library. Unfurling the rolls in this three-dimensional
book, one could read information ranging from the historical facts about the origins of beans,
to more mundane lists of people named Bean and even advertisements from the department
store LL Bean. When picking up the Bean Rolls one would hear sounds of the beans hitting the
tin and when shaken, this very ordinary object could become a rhythmic instrument. Knowles
has spoken about her use of ordinary objects:
The objects that I investigate in my work are found in the street or are very
familiar and come from daily use.
the more real and ordinary they are, the more interesting they become to me.
they offer clues to reality and have become the stuff of my art.
I observe, examine and collect.
I present no specific meanings or theories about these little things that come my
way…. that are just waiting for me to pick them up.
431

Finding the most interest in the most mundane objects, the verbs Knowles uses in this
statement–how she “observes, examines and collects,” describes her process of how she sets
up her research makes her investigation, then transmits this knowledge in a direct,
unassuming manner, leaving the exact interpretation of the text up to the receiver, as it
becomes a pedagogical object. Not only is does this inventive “book” become a vehicle for
learning, it is also object that invites physical interactivity and sensory perception as the
participant becomes a performer of an event of Cagean “found sounds.”
Bean Rolls is also significant because as with Proposition #2 (Make a Salad) and
Variation on Proposition #2 (Make a Soup) it uses food as a primary material, although in this

431
”Invitation for Objects in Hand,” presented at De Appel, Amsterdam, May 1976, The Getty Research Institute,
Jean Brown Papers, Box 28, Folder 38.

187
instance, it is not immediately consumable. This use of a natural commodity associated with
the domestic activity of cooking and nourishing, differs considerably from the most mass
produced or detritus used by her male counterparts in their Fluxus events and contributions to
Fluxkits.
432
Additionally, the multiple initiated Knowles’ life-long interest in the bean as a
recurring motif in her sound sculptures, environments, performances and artists books.
Beginning with Bean Rolls, Knowles engaged further with artists’ books in different
formats and scale, both very small and extremely large. Knowles’ husband Higgins, dissatisfied
with Maciunas’ procrastination in issuing Fluxus publications and motivated by his far reaching
literary and intellectual interests, wanted to start publishing the works of avant-garde artists,
writers and philosophers. Initially, he wanted to call his endeavor the “Shirtsleeves Press,” but
Knowles did not like this and suggested he “call it something else.”
433
Higgins took this quite
literally and started the Something Else Press in 1963; it became an important avant-garde
publishing imprint in the United States. Knowles published several two books in Something
Else’s series of The Great Bear Pamphlets––an artists book, The Four Suits (the T Dictionary)
(1965) and a compendium of her early scores, by Alison Knowles (1966).
In the later 1960s, Knowles moved from the minimal task-oriented Propositions and
smaller scale artists’ books into more expansive works such as larger intermedia installations
and longer, more durational performance events. In 1967, she would “scaled-up” her work as
she embarked on her project aptly titled, the Big Book (fig. 4.8a-c) an eight- foot tall book

432
See Julia Robinson’s previously cited article for a full discussion of these works.
433
From the previously cited author 1992 interview with Dick Higgins that coincided with his participation in the
Getty Research Institute’s Art of the Book conference, in which he repeated this anecdote.

188
“environment” organized around a spine.
434
Knowles’ life-scale, walk-in “book” was a
microcosm of her domestic environment replete with elements extracted directly from
everyday life including a stove, a teakettle, a chair and a toilet. The “reader” could walk
through this environment and interact with “the pages” that formed a narrative using objects,
texts, photographs and prints. Inspired by immediate surroundings, this immersive
environment invited spectators to engage with this microcosm of Knowles New York loft life.
Presenting snippets of her personal effects in an installation dislocated from their original site,
the viewer had to re-assemble the fragments to construct meaning–– another example of
Knowles proposing a learning experience for the spectator/participant. On one level the Big
Book can be read as an auto-biography inscribe within a larger-than-life installation.
435

The Identical Lunch
Food is a substance that nourishes. When we see it being used as art, we
examine it more intensely. We enrich our lives because we encounter this
food again in life. The nonverbal energy that happens when I perform with
food interests me. —Alison Knowles
436

In 1967, the same year Knowles made her Big Book project, she commenced her
longest, event-based performance, Identical Lunch in which she intentionally ate the same
lunch at Riss Foods Diner in Chelsea at the same time each day for two consecutive years.
437

434
Premiered at the Frankfurter Buchmesse, the Big Book traveled throughout Europe then to California, where it
was exhibited at the University of California San Diego in 1968.
435
Later, Knowles produced a second large-scale book, The Book of Bean (1982) with the help of Franklin Furnace
in New York.
436
Linda Montano, “Alison Knowles, interview with Linda Montano,“ Performance Artists Talking in the Eighties:
Sex, Food,Money/Fame, Ritual/Death, (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University
of California Press, 2000): 173-74.
437
Published as a score in the Great Bear Pamphlet, by Something Else Press, there is a dispute about the date of
the work: historian Kristine Stiles suggests 1969, when Corner suggested the score, but Knowles says it started

189
Calling this daily ritual, a “meditation,” frequently she dined with her friend and studio mate,
composer Philip Corner, who noted her intentional repetition of this daily ritual and suggested
this was a Fluxus event.
438
The resulting score the Identical Lunch read as follows: “Eat a tuna
fish sandwich on wheat toast with lettuce and butter, no mayo and a large glass of buttermilk
or a cup of soup.” (fig. 4.9a-b) Knowles later spoke about framing a diurnal ritual, the
consumption of food, post facto as “performance art” and its reception by the diner staff:
At that point we realized that I was somehow involved in a performance.
I usually had four or five people come and eat the lunch. The respect that I had
for that hour and for the people I ate with had to do with the fact that we were
doing mutual work as artists and writers. The reactions and the way people ate
it and how they felt about it were extremely different. I found it very
interesting that Florence and the other waitresses took considerable interest
and questioned what I was doing, always having this tuna fish sandwich. For
me to say, “It's actually a piece of performance art, “ made me a completely
mysterious object to them.
439

Knowles formed a temporary community with those who frequented and worked as that
diner, and although they did not eat together, they became audience participants in the mis
en scène. With Corner’s prompting, Knowles came to understand Identical Lunch, as a
somewhat inadvertent art practice that she considered a repeated ritual like a Zen meditation.
In his M.A. thesis David Doris makes the following observation about Fluxus and Zen:
What the two [Zen and Fluxus] hold in common is an insistent attitude of
questioning: a revelation of the codes by which we come to frame the world,
by which we come to receive the world as given and immutable. This
questioning, unfolding through demonstration rather than discourse,
indicates a cognitive shift away from the modernist understanding of the self
as the inviolate center of being.
30

in 1967, as noted in Higgins, Fluxus Experience 46.
438
Alison Knowles as quoted in Stephanie Smith, Feast: Radical Hospitality in Contemporary Art, (Chicago: Smart
Museum of Art, University of Chicago, 2010)

190
This idea of “questioning and demonstration” in Zen are implicit in Identical Lunch in
the present, the moment act of eating and its affect on the body––is the subject of
the work: it becomes both an inquiry and a physical manifestation of the body.
As the participant performs the score, they focus their full attention on this bodily
process that engage all of the senses: viewing the food that is served, smelling the pungent
aroma, touching the sandwich, tasting the fishy dish and hearing the process of chewing while
enjoying their meal and engaging in convivial conversation with their lunch companion. In this
way their sensory perceptions are foregrounded as they experience the physiology and the
pleasure of eating. In her master’s thesis Lucia Fabio observes that:
In Knowles’ work that uses edible objects, the viewer is required to ingest rather than
simply view the objects, and by ingesting them, the act of participation deviates from
normative art experiences as the focus shifts to the consumption of food… Knowles’
project shows an appreciation of the quotidian and attention to the simple actions of
life. When the body becomes a consuming force, then there is an added awareness of
ones’ surroundings. The full body becomes activated when eating.”
440

Soon Knowles invited other people to join her and asked her collaborators to each to
write about their experiences of consuming the Identical Lunch. The first publication of the
performance was Knowles’ own account of the meal with all of the “characters” of the
performance written in short hand in the Outsider publication in the spring of 1968.
31
Knowles’ The Journal of the Identical Lunch (1971) (fig. 4.9c), is an artists book documenting
the collective consumption of the meals with by her meal-time collaborators, photographs
and their restaurant checks.
441
Their candid, anecdotal writings reveal different details about

440
Lucia Fabio, “Alison Knowles' Make a Salad and Identical Lunch: Communal and Sensory Performance through
Open Scores,” unpublished M.A. thesis, USC Roski School of Fine Arts, 2014, 20-21.
441
Alison Knowles, Journal of the Identical Lunch, San Francisco: Nova Broadcast Press, 1971.Some of the
contributors included Fluxus artists Philip Corner, Dick Higgins, Bici Hendricks and poet John Giorno. Corner
published his own version Identical Lunch several years after Knowles published hers.

191
their individual eating experiences that revolve around not just the meal and their sensory
perceptions of the food, but their reactions to the environment and the other diners.
Ultimately, the Identical Lunch is not just about consumption of food or the
appropriation of a diurnal task into a performance, it is about the total experience of the
action and the environment: from the ordering of the meal with the server, the economic
transaction of purchasing of the food, the labor in cooking and serving the tuna fish
sandwich, the ambient sounds of the room and of course, the sensory and gustatory
experience. In both the live enactment of the score and in its published documentation,
Knowles invited participants to explore the total realm of our senses as they contemplated
and learned from this everyday experience. A few years Later, Knowles would expand this
original iteration of the Identical Lunch, score into a large-scale performative installation,
one of her many collaborations with students in her new post at the CalArts.

Teaching at California Institute of the Arts

I had taught only sporadically. I had taught things like a workshop or a summer program,
but Fluxus, once I got into it, really took us all over the place and gave me a kind of
credential for teaching … I never thought I’d be teaching, really, but then I began to feel
that teaching should have to do with the real experience of the teacher rather than only
book learning…And Cal Arts offered that. It offered positions to people who didn’t
necessarily have a [MFA] degree background. And so, since I had been traveling with the
Fluxus group and had some opinions about new forms, I was able to jump in and enjoy
teaching in Allan Kaprow and Paul Brach’s department.
442
––Alison Knowles
443

As mentioned in the previous chapter, immediately after hiring Allan Kaprow, Paul Brach,
Dean of the School of Art, asked him to recommend people to teach at CalArts. Given the

442
Ibid.
443
Janet Sarbanes, “A School Based on What Artists Wanted to Do: Alison Knowles on Cal Arts, East of Borneo,
August 7, 2012, 2
http://www.eastofborneos.org/articless/a-school-based-on-what-artists-wanted-t-do-alison-knowles-on-cal-arts
(accessed September 13, 2015).

192
experimental and interdisciplinary nature of the new CalArts curriculum, Kaprow suggested
that Brach hire his longtime New York colleagues, a group of artists associated with Fluxus—
Alison Knowles and her then husband Dick Higgins, Emmett Williams, Nam June Paik, and
James Tenney––all of whom accepted the invitation to teach at the fledging art school during
the years of 1970–72.
444

Brach first went to New York to meet with Knowles and Higgins about the possibility of
teaching at CalArts. In a recent interview, however, Knowles recalled this initial meeting,
according to Knowles, she thought it was Kaprow, who had the vision for a school based on
“what artists wanted to do rather than what the school wanted them to do,” which is why she
and Higgins found this opportunity so compelling.
445
As Knowles notes, unlike many of her
male counterparts, “I had never been offered a real wage like that or been considered a real
teacher like that or been able to do exactly what I wanted with people to do actions.”
446
This
is a critical point for two reasons: first, because it speaks to the dearth or teaching
opportunities for women at that time: a very small percentage had Master’s of Arts degrees.
Secondly, it underscores Knowles primary desire to work with people “to do actions,” or the
term that she often preferred, events.
Since Knowles had less formal teaching experience than many other artists at Cal Arts,
she relied on her already well established artistic practice drawing upon her years of
experience making Fluxus events to formulate the core of her teaching methodology. Using
event scores in conjunction with found objects, she would construct different types of

444
Author’s interview with Dick Higgins, July 7, 1992, in Santa Monica.
445
Janet Sarbanes, “A School Based on What Artists Wanted to Do: Alison Knowles on Cal Arts,” 2.
446
Ibid., 4.

193
everyday, participatory events, that she deployed in her workshops, experimental print-
making lab and in socially interactive installations. Most often her process entailed giving
students open scores that proposed instructions for a simple activity that could be interpreted
in any number of ways. In addition to her teaching, Knowles did her own performances and
produced two large scale projects––sculpture installations and “automatic” poetry conceived
with new computer technologies as she explored spatio-temporal realms in public sites.
447

When the cohort of New York Fluxus artists arrived at CalArts, they had free reign to
develop their individual courses to complement the interdisciplinary, experimental focus of the
curriculum. As Sarbanes has observed in her writing about the radical pedagogy at CalArts: “The
Fluxus artists’ interests in a more open-ended, experienced-based pedagogy and their
experiments with temporality and alternative uses of space dovetailed nicely with
administrators desire to buck the bureaucratic conventions of schooling.”
448
Working within
their own preferred media and forms of artistic production, the titles and descriptions reflect
their cumulative and varied interdisciplinary interests. Dick Higgins, a visual artist, performer
and founder of the Something Else Press, offered three different courses: "Events, Happenings
and Other Performance Structures," which reviewed different performance methodologies;
“Wild Foods/Botany Ecology" that explored the ecology of the landscape surrounding Cal Arts
and a "Publishing Workshop," that issued books, broadsides, magazines, records, and other
publications.
449
Video artist Nam June Paik's courses, "Everything You Were Afraid to Do About
Television" and "Who Is Afraid of Johnny Carson," emphasized "not the present art form, but a

447
Author’s interview with Alison Knowles at her Spring Street loft, July, 1993.
448
Sarbanes, “A Community of Artists: Radical Pedagogy at Cal Arts, 1969-72,” East of Borneo, 6.
449

All information that appears in this paragraph derives from class schedules and course descriptions of the 1970s
in the California Institute of the Arts Archival Collection, Valencia, California, Series 8: Faculty and Staff, 1962-1986.

194
future art form, not the present, gallery/museum art, but the future art society, based on cable
TV and videocassette." Visual and graphic artist Peter Van Riper offered an "Art Experience
Course," based specifically on the writings of John Dewey. Concrete poet Emmett Williams'
"Some Current Trends in Literature," included poetry and graphics; animated poetry and
cumulative prose, while James Tenney, taught "Introduction to Musical Acoustics" and the
"Music of John Cage.”
Brach hired Knowles to teach in the School of Art and because she had trained as
master printer, he asked her to establish and operate the new Graphics Print Lab at Cal Arts. At
the lab Knowles and Peter Van Riper co-taught photo-silkscreen printing, however, most of her
other classes focused on small workshops simply titled “Events.”
450
Additionally, Knowles
became a “mentor”–– the Cal Arts terminology for a teacher who works one-on-one with
individual students and supervises independent studies and each semester she mentored
approximately fifteen students each semester through the 1972-73 academic year.
451

In Knowles’ capacity as the director the Graphics Print Lab, she was obliged to offer a
practical course called “The Black and White Camera: Graphics Problems.” graphics camera and
darkroom procedures, more specifically, she offered “problems and useful ideas presented in
the form of solution in the camera and by silk-screen making and off-set printing.”
452
Because
Knowles trained as a master printer and possessed superior technical abilities, het method was
to teach students how to grapple with problems in the camera, using a process-oriented

450
Ibid.
451
While several of the New York Fluxus artists left CalArts in 1972, Knowles stayed on another full academic year.
452
Previously cited course descriptions from CalArts Archive.

195
approach to discover solutions through different printmaking and graphics techniques.
453
The
Graphics Workshop course Knowles co-taught with Peter Van Riper was more experimental:
The emphasis of the workshop is on printed images, particularly photographic reaching in to the
film and video fields with taking still image prints from these fields. The other aspect of the shop
is its concern with events and happenings, relating two dimensional art to an experience art.
Proposals of this nature for the coming term include:Recycling Event: An object or image is
taken from the environment, its reality transformed and then returned in its transformed state
to the environment. Swap Meet Event: We will be transforming images from the real world
(photos, etc.) into a two-dimensional image--and replace them in a public, commercial realm.
We plan to cover both the Saugus Swap meet and the Rose Bowl Meet.
We plot New Art experiences deriving from a base in graphics.
454

Utilizing this “base in graphics” Knowles and Van Riper’s workshop taught students how
to transform their two-dimensional, photographic and photo-silkscreened images into time-
based media, such as video, or events and happenings in public space. The Recycling Event to
replace one object with another recalls Knowles’ 99 Red apple exchange, while the the Swap
Meet event, juxtaposes two-dimensional images of objects in dialogue with actual goods for
sale. Since Swap Meets are informal, alternative income generators involving low-cost items,
this event seemed to be less about the inherent monetary value of the images/objects and
more about a representation of the everyday and its ironic intervention into the “real world.”
In addition to these graphic arts classes, Knowles other ongoing course did not have a
specific description, just a simple phrase: “House of Dust sculpture: 5 tons of fiberglass form
conceived as a base for changing environments and performances,”
455
a reference to her
ongoing project— a score-based event, monumental sculpture and interactive installation––
that would become a pivotal pedagogical space for her teaching and students at Cal Arts.

453
Starting in the late 1950s Knowles’ worked as a lay-out designer and printer at Prince Street Productions in
Soho and later acquired additional graphics skills working with Dick Higgins on Something Else Press.
454
Alison Knowles, Graphics Workshop notes, California Institute of the Arts Archive, Course Descriptions, Series 2,
Subseries 2.10.
455
Knowles made this reference in her “Events” course description from the previously cited Cal Arts archive.

196
House of Dust: Computer Poem, Sculptural Installation and Helicopter Event
Knowles’ multi-faceted project, House of Dust, predated her tenure at CalArts by several
years. She first started working when she and Dick Higgins hosted a workshop in the living
room of their loft in 1967 with the avant-garde composer James Tenney.
456
First introduced
to him through their friend artist Carolee Schneeman, Tenney had recently been an artist-in-
residence at Bell Telephone Labs in New Jersey. At Bell Labs he learned about state-of-the-art
mainframe computers and an early version of the IBM programming language, Formula
Translation (FORTRAN)
457
which had a unique capacity to produce a logarithmic rate of
“chance operations” for compositions and could facilitate intermedia production. He agreed to
do the intimate workshop to share his knowledge with a small group of artists and composers
including Higgins and Knowles, John Cage, Nam June Paik, Philip Corner, and Steve Reich.
After the workshop, in 1967 Knowles and Tenney had begun to work together at the
Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute (BPI) where they created what is considered one of the very first
computer generated poems. First, Knowles composed a series of four lists to be programmed
into the computer to compose the largest number of quatrains possible before anything
repeated. Her lists included: 1) seventeen materials to build a house; 2) twenty-five sites; 3)
four different light sources, and 4) twenty-three possible inhabitants. Tenney then put these

456
Hannah Higgins, “An Introduction to Alison Knowles’s The House of Dust,” Mainframe Experimentalism, Hannah
Higgins and Douglas Kahn, eds. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2012) 195. In the
acknowledgments the authors dedicate the book to Tenney that they note was inspired by a UC Davis conference
about his 1967 Workshop held in 2002, prior to the composer’s death in 2006.
457
Tenney was in residence at the same time that Billy Kluver, an employee there, was starting the New York
Branch of the Experiments in Art and Technology (EAT) Program.

197
lists into the mainframe computer and used FORTRAN-IV to randomly select and process
every possible combination of phrases generating 400 quatrains before one repeated.
458

In an article on House of Dust, Benjamin Buchloh refers to Knowles’ lists as indexical,
anti-literary, anti-poetic “ready-made” comparing them to concurrent lists by conceptualists
Ed Ruscha, Dan Graham, Richard Serra and Lawrence Weiner.
459
In particular, he notes how
Knowles’ use of passive voice, the absence of a subject or authorial presence in the language
and her mundane, eccentric word choices recall many of Weiner’s lists in his Statements.
Buchloh also considers how The House of Dust actively displaces the usual and customary
conventions of poetry, relating this to Conceptual art’s dismantling of forms of visual art: “The
House of Dust is one of the foundational works in the formulation of a conceptual aesthetic of
language and considered the displacement of the conventional promises of poetry to be
among its primary functions, in the same manner that conceptual art insisted on the
dismantling of traditional forms of visuality in painting and sculpture.”
460

Printed out on green-and-white striped, accordion-folded computer paper with holes on
each side to fit into the printer’s sprockets, the lengthy poem reads like a scroll and Buchloh
likens it to an open-ended book that refuses to be bound and this also accentuates the idea
that it is a series of seemingly endless permutations.
461
(fig 4.10a-b) The long expanse of paper
forces one to reorient how they read the poem which is an exhausting task, although the

458
Higgins, Mainframe Experimentalism, 196.
459
Benjamin Buchloh, “The Book of the Future Alison Knowles’s House of Dust, in Mainframe Experimentalism,
Hannah Higgins and Douglas Kahn, eds. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2012): 203.
460
Ibid, 204.
461
Ibid.

198
original print-out could be folded up completely into its own plastic pouch that transformed it
into more easily portable object.
462

Examining a page from the original computerized score one may see how the quatrains
range from the poetic to the absurd:

A HOUSE OF DUST
ON AN ISLAND
USING ELECTRICITY
INHABITED BY FRIENDS AND ENEMIES

A HOUSE OF LEAVES
ON THE SEA
USING NATURAL LIGHT
INHABITED BY VARIOUS BIRDS AND FISH

A HOUSE OF BROKEN DISHES
AMONG OTHER HOUSES
USING ALL AVAILABLE LIGHT
INHABITED BY PEOPLE WHO LOVE TO READ
463

Knowles and Tenney originally titled their poem, Proposition No. 2 for Emmett Williams
however, but she changed the name to House of Dust when she published a series of
postcards in 1968 (4.11a-b) Knowles used a photograph of bright light emanating from a
window into a blurred gray abyss, with a dark shadow for the quatrain:
A HOUSE OF LEAVES
IN A COLD WINDY CLIMATE
USING ALL AVAILABLE LIGHTING
INHABITED BY PEOPLE WHO SLEEP ALMOST ALL THE TIME
464

While this dreamy image seemed like an apt illustration for that ethereal quatrain, in other
postcards, she made more ironic juxtapositions that had absolutely no relationship to the
image, such as a procession of horses in front of a lake for the following quatrain:

462
Knowles’ The House of Dust, a computer printout with a plastic cover and silkscreen label, was published by
Walther and Kaspar König in Cologne in 1969.
463
Jean Brown papers Getty Research Institute Special Collections, number 890164, Series 28, Folder 38.
464
The House of Dust off-set lithographic postcards (Cologne-New York: Verlag König, 1968).

199
A HOUSE OF BROKEN DISHES
IN DENSE WOODS
USING ELECTRICITY
INHABITED BY VEGETARIANS

In yet another card, there is simple photograph of a pair of dice for the poetic quatrain:
A HOUSE OF WOOD
BY A RIVER
USING ELECTRICITY
INHABITED BY LOVERS

The photograph on this card has no relationship to the quatrain. however, it a direct reference
to a Cagean chance operations that were sometimes implemented with dice. In the House of
Dust this aleatory procedure is updated by the FORTRAN IV software that “composes” new
indeterminant, permutations of poetry in each quatrain. Knowles was fascinated by these
shifts and the odd results: “The most important thing to emphasize is the changing nature of
the poem... [It] is about dwellings, types of people and situations that sometimes do and
sometimes don’t get together.”
465

The specific objects, materials and locales she input into the computer align with her
interests in ordinary things and mundane places, but the language and meaning become
dislocated during the computer processing. Whether using technology to generate the poem
or her own hand to make the postcards, the context and content of Knowles’ original lists are
transformed and randomized, creating new word associations that are sublime and surreal.
The year after Tenney and Knowles first did the computerized poem, Knowles received
a Guggenheim Foundation grant to realize the sculptural component of House of Dust, and
used the following quatrain of the computer poem as her score:

465
Alison Knowles and Charlie Morrow, “A Dialogue: The House of Dust,” New Wilderness Newsletter no. 17 (May
1980): 21.

200
A HOUSE OF PLASTIC
IN A METROPOLIS
USING NATURAL LIGHT
INHABITED BY PEOPLE FROM ALL WALKS OF LIFE

From this score, Knowles initially produced a small-scale biomorphic plaster maquette that she
had cast in full-scale in fiberglass by the George Krier Foundry in Philadelphia.
466
Knowles also
commissioned composer Max Neuhaus to write an audio composition for the piece translated
through thermal circuits activated by sun to produce a sound like “like waving grass.”
467

Knowles originally installed this interactive public sculpture in Chelsea near 8
th
Avenue
and 28
th
Street at the Penn South Housing Co-op, a subsidized housing unit funded by the
International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU).
468
The Board of Directors of the ILGWU
approved the placement of not just one, but two domed, cave-like structures made of
Fiberglas covered with limestone that weighed a total of three tons.
Unfortunately, when construction began on the lawn of the Co-op some residents
protested that the sculpture obstructed their views and “disturbed the peace” as they did not
appreciate the bizarre sounds of Newhouse’s composition. While Knowles met with the Co-op
members and tried to involve artists and children in the building of the work and emphasized
the possibilities for interacting with the work, she was not successful in allaying their concerns.
In her dissertation Woods described what ensued:

466
Higgins, Mainframe Experimentalism, 197.
467
Ibid.
468
Alison Knowles, “House of Dust History,” typed summary, Alison Knowles Studio Archive, New York. I am also
indebted to Nicole Woods’ dissertation interviews with Knowles that provide additional details not in this original
summary.

201
The frustration reached a boiling point when, in the early morning of October 23, 1969,
the gardener of the ILGWU was bribed to drench the house with kerosene and throw a
torch, effectively destroying the work. A few days later, Knowles received a color
photograph of the blaze in the mail, though the exact perpetrator was never discovered
or a convicted of arson. Fearing the work was irretrievably damaged she set the project
aside in shock and disappointment.
469

Following devastating act of arson, Knowles sent the House of Dust back to Philadelphia
for repair and soon after that both she and Tenney received their offers to teach at California
Institute of the Arts. As part of her teaching agreement Knowles arranged to have the
installation sent from New York to California and she also secured a grassy, plot of land to
place it at the campus. Using the balance of her Guggenheim award, Knowles fortified the
original wood and fiberglass forms with concrete and gray sand to create two new, biomorphic
structures: a “large house” (approximately 23 x 12 feet) and a “small house” (approximately 12
x 4 feet) (fig. 4.12a-b) each with adequate space to accommodate groups of students.
470

Knowles considered the House of Dust as a physical manifestation of the poems: the
score emanated from computerized quatrain that dictated the materials for its production,
therefore, the sculpture and poem became integrated into one intermedia installation. With
the hostile reception to the project in New York, she recognized that in the context of the new
art school, these “environmental poems” would have to become “active” spaces that students
and faculty could inhabit for artistic production, discussion and community exchange.
471

When asked to contribute to California Institute of the Arts: Prologue to a Community,
the special edition of Arts in Society, Knowles submitted an image of a small rock from her

469
Woods note 280, from an interview with the artist, December 2007, New York City. She also notes that the
remains were shipped by flatbed truck back to Philadelphia and re-dipped in fiberglass. This arson was also
covered in “Sculpture Is Burned on Penn South Lawn,” Chelsea Clinton News, December 25, 1968, a neighborhood
newspaper.
470
Alison Knowles, “House of Dust: A Chronicle,” New Wilderness Newsletter, 17.
471
Ibid., 18.

202
House of Dust, with a handwritten text that said: “Here is a Stone From What I’m Doing Now”
(fig. 4.12c) to demonstrate her preoccupation of what would become the locus for Knowles
classes––a pedagogical, domestic space for work and play. (4.12d) In addition to her teaching,
House of Dust became a site for informal meetings, happenings and performances, poetry
readings, film screenings, and communal celebrations such as a Thai pig roast on an open spit
when it was moved to the new Cal Arts campus in Valencia.
472

The events students made in Knowles course responded directly to both the structure
and the computerized poem of House of Dust. Michael Bell used the house for Meditations at
Dawn Event (1971) (fig. 4.12e) a sunrise meditations series accompanied by voice and stringed
instruments.
473
A student named Andrew Schloss devised a score with a set of numbers,
materials, colors and cardinal directions and sent this to a friend at Bennington College who
used FORTRAN to print up a new computerized score for using the exterior spaces surrounding
the two houses.
474
This “Schloss sequence” generated scores for other students: Matt
Mullican who used it for 5 Yellow North, an event in which he parked his car near the House of
Dust every day at exactly 5 pm for a week. Another student, Jeff Raskin, had a new printout of
the original computer poem generated by some friends of his at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory
at the California Institute of Technology. Raskin’s new printout elicited a more spectacular
event that he did in collaboration with Knowles and two other students, Norman Kaplan and
Richard Bank. For the Computer Poem Drop postcard (fig. 4.13a) Knowles silkscreened House
of Dust and 99 Red North on the front and a score on the back:

472
Woods, 175.
473
Michael Bell, et.al. “The House of Dust by Alison Knowles,” Experiments in Art and Technology: Los Angeles
Survey: no. 7 (January 1971), n.p.
474
Higgins, Mainframe Experimentalism, 197.

203
COMPUTER POEM DROP:
An Event by Norman Kaplan
OVER THE HOUSE OF DUST
Sculpture by Alison Knowles
1000 feet of poem dropped from the skies
2 P.M. May 20, 1971

A house of dust
Way out there
Lighted by candles
Inhabited by fisherman and their families
475

To execute the event, they hired a helicopter to drop the mile-plus long paper over the House
of Dust, as Knowles directed from the ground below (figs. 4.13b-c) Not only was the original
score for House of Dust one of the first computer-generated poems, the Computer Poem Drop
event was a pioneering “air-borne” poem performance.
Like most Fluxus event scores Computer Poem Drop was rather quick and simple action,
with more spectators and spectacle. For those not part of the Cal Arts campus who could still
see the event, it must have been a curious disruption and an uncanny moment in their
everyday existence. It is this sensibility of a quixotic moment, an interpenetration of an
unusual and uncanny artistic action into quotidian life that is so integral to Knowles practice
and her Fluxus background.
Knowles herself also used the “Schloss Sequence” to generate a new installation event
of her own using concepts of exchange and anonymous giving as she did with the assignments
for the course she co-taught with Peter Van Riper. For 99 Red North (also known as Apple
Event) (fig. 4.14a) she placed 99 similarly sized red apples on the grounds near the House of
Dust on a red quadrant of the tennis court. At the campus and anonymous visitors could take

475
Alison Knowles, House of Dust postcard, courtesy of the Alison Knowles Studio. This postcard advertising the
event addressed to Emmett Williams from Knowles is also at the Getty Research Institute, Jean Brown Papers
1916-1995, Emmett Williams Artists File, Box 55, Folder 14.

204
one of the pieces of fruit by replacing it with one of their own possessions in the same exact
location. As Knowles explained in an interview: “I lined up 99 apples, not all in one line but in
three lines, and the idea was that you could take an apple if you put something in its place. So I
have a wonderful slide of someone who left his car keys because he’d always wanted to walk
to work.
476
(fig. 4.14b) To transition from a static installation into an event, 99 Red North
required activation by CalArts students, staff and faculty, therefore, it was not just a
collaboration with her student Andrew Schloss whose generated the score, but also a
collaboration with the entire community who performed the socially interactive event.
Knowles’ convivial event providing sustenance in exchange for an ordinary object has
its roots in her early work, such as her first food score, Proposition 2, in which she makes the
salad and offers it to the audience and who eat it to complete the event.
477
Also, the concept
of anonymous giving harks back to Street Piece (1962-63) (fig. 4.15a) with a score that reads:
“Make something in the street and give it away,” a durational event she engaged in from
October 1962 to March 1963 and her later Color Music series (fig. 4.15b) in which she left silk-
screen prints made with various materials on Canal Street.
478

Knowles’ also used scores about generosity and sharing in her course, like Gift Event II,
which instructed everyone to bring a thing to eat or a thing to present in class.

She has noted
how these events encouraged students to mine their own ideas and everyday lives:

476
Sarbanes, 3.
477
Knowles also used the Schloss sequence to generate Proposition IV (Squid) a score for five performers to make
fire, water, paper, and air events, later published in More (New York: Printed Editions, 1979).
478
A variation on this, #16 Giveaway Construction (1963?) is reproduced in by Alison Knowles.

205
The students, at least in my situation were engendering their own ideas about what to
do, whether it was events at the House of Dust or the zoo in LA or whatever it was they
conceived as a project. What distinguished them, I think, was a real push into their own
lives. If the didn’t wish to do Gift Event II, they weren’t required to, although they might
be required to come up with something of their own to offer the group.
479

Here Knowles emphasizes the student-centered, non-hierarchical nature of her teaching at Cal
Arts: using open scores as a call to evoke different responses, but allowing students to
determine their own actions, sites for investigation and class participation.
The concepts of generosity and exchange intrinsic to 99 Red North and Gift Event II
prefigure contemporary art practices involving participation and social interaction as well as
alternative, barter-based and sharing economies that exist today.
480
In his introduction to
Relational Aesthetics (1998) Nicolas Bourriaud foregrounds his cooking project Thai Curry
(1990-present). While Bourriaud more generally credits Fluxus and Happenings for theorizing
the spectator participation that had became a common feature of contemporary art,
481
he
does not cite any specific examples of these artists participatory and relational practices, such
as the communal Flux Banquets or Flux Meals.
482
Furthermore, what is completely absent from
his discourse are historical examples of collaborative, socially interactive projects by women
artists in the late 1960s and 1970s, often performances involving, food, hospitality, and
conviviality, such as Knowles’ events or those by the feminist artists also working at Cal Arts. In
her very critical article “Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics,” Claire Bishop chastises
Bourriaud for distancing himself from historical precedents and points out that using works of

479
Ibid., 7.
480
Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, (les presses du réel, 1998): 25.
481
Bourraud also ignores other important relational practices by Brazilian artists such as Lygia Clark and Hélio
Oiticica.
482
Jon Hendricks, Fluxus Codex (New York: Harry Abrams, 1988) catalogues the numerous Flux Banquets and Flux
Meals that took place throughout the 1970s.

206
as a potential trigger for participation is hardly new, as she specifically cites Happenings, Fluxus
instructions and 1970s performance art.
483

It is important to discuss here how Knowles’ teaching at CalArts coincided with Judy
Chicago and Miriam Schapiro’s establishment of the Feminist Art Program in 1971.
484
Knowles
recalled how she initially welcomed greater access to female contemporaries:
I had been working alone, as most women artists did then. It was new and exciting to
work visually along with others […] I hadn’t had access to women of that stature.
All the artists I had worked with were men… {but} I found women working everywhere.
It forced me to take a harder look at myself and what my own history had been.
485

Shortly after the program started in the fall of 1971 the FAP organized their well-known
project, Womanhouse, a month-long collaborative installation/intervention into an abandoned
house on Mariposa Street in Hollywood. Using domesticity and homemaking as their theme,
they transformed the space into a series of surreal installations and performance events that
addressed female subjects, subjectivities and bodies. This feminist agenda––essentializing in
many ways––constructed a narrative with a biting critique against domestic life and labor.
486

According to art historian, Moira Roth, the Womanhouse project echoed the deep sentiments,
anger and despair of other women performance artists in Los Angeles and it spawned the
establishments of several other feminist spaces and organizations.
487

483
Claire Bishop, “Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics,” October 110, (Fall 2004): 52-79.
484
Chicago had established the Feminist Art Program at Fresno State College one year earlier in 1970 with her
students including Suzanne Lacy and then moved it to Cal Arts.
485
Knowles as quoted in Rahmani, 364.
486
When Cal Arts hosted the West Coast Women Artists’ Conference in January 1972 with participants from
around the country, it started with a with a tour of Womanhouse followed by performances in its living room.
The next morning for the official proceedings, women artists gave talks, showed slides of artwork, and discussed
the exclusion of women from major museum exhibits and gallery spaces.
487
Moira Roth, The Amazing Decade: Women and Performance Art in America, 1970–1980, Los Angeles: Astro
Artz, 1983, 108–109, describes this project in detail. The space had a dining table filled with platters of food; a pink
Nuturant Kitchen with wall-to-ceiling breasts that became fried eggs; and a nude torso that appeared to be

207
While Knowles House of Dust and the FAP’s Womanhouse are both domestic spaces,
they constructed very different narratives for disparate audiences. Knowles’ project, a score-
based installation and social space for production, conversation, and contemplation,
functioned as a tabula rasa for the projection of different ideas and functions from students
throughout the Cal Arts community. Conversely, Womanhouse, produced exclusively by and
for women and open to the public, sent a message of female empowerment to a much larger
audience off campus in the center of Los Angeles. When I interviewed Knowles, she indicated
that she told Chicago and Schapiro she wanted to participate in the project, but they snubbed
her because they perceived her as “non-political” and she welcomed both men and women
into her CalArts classes which contrasted to the FAP’s strict separatist policy.
488

Knowles also indicated during my interview with her that when she first arrived at
CalArts, she found some of the feminists unsettling, not just because of their essentialism and
separatism, but because she did not share their aesthetic sensibilities. With her more minimal
and measured approach, her artistic production at Cal Arts included domestic themes, food
and everyday rituals to promote hospitality and communality; to dissolve the boundaries
between private and the public, and to focus attention more on bodily processes and sensory
awareness, rather than on issues of gender sexuality and the body politic. With her Zen-like,
pared-down aesthetics and ascetic personality, Knowles’ practice revolved around discovering
and contemplating the everyday with mindfulness, rather than critique and judgment.

trapped in a linen closet. Live on-site performances featured women obsessively engaged in household activities
such as Sandy Orgel’s Ironing and Chris Rush’s Scrubbing.
488
In the previously cited interview with the author, Knowles told m when she first arrived at Cal Arts someone
outrageously suggested that not reveal she was a wife and mother or she would lose the respect the feminists on
campus. This is also recounted in more recent interviews with Nicole Woods.

208
Knowles work, therefore, contrasted sharply to the activist agenda of the FAP and their
more dramatic, visceral artistic production. This aesthetic difference recalls the discrepancy
between Knowles’ austere, reductive, task-oriented Fluxus events of the early 1960s and more
the theatrical, expressionistic, and sensual Happenings such as Carolee Schneeman’s Meatjoy
(1965). It is understandable that radical feminists equated Knowles subtler work and modest
persona with political apathy.
I believe that in her own way Knowles did challenge the status quo in both her artistic
practice and personal life. I concur with Woods that as one of the only women in Fluxus and an
artist engaged in live-art performance, her work was already always political, even if she
refused dogma, ideology and overt activism.
489
The strong presence of feminism at CalArts did
prompt Knowles to reconsider her marriage, her role as a mother and her career in ways that
she found liberating and she asserted her independence by staying in California after her
family returned to the East Coast.
490

The House of Dust–– both a pedagogical site and a domestic space on the CalArts
campus––functioned as the fulcrum for events by Knowles’ students and became a source for
her to produce her own work, as she merged her teaching and her artistic practice. Perfectly
suited for CalArts’ mandate to teach experimental, interdisciplinary art, this intermedia project
constantly shifted between disciplines, as it provided different kinds of learning opportunities
and types of social interaction. As Hannah Higgins has observed:

489
Woods, 9.
490
This assertion is based on my personal interviews with Knowles in the 1990s and more recent conversations
with her daughter Hannah Higgins. While at CalArts Dick Higgins and Alison Knowles separated and he took their
young twins back to the East Coast, while Knowles went to live on a commune and continued to teach at CalArts
for another year.

209
The poem slides across disciplines, from list, to program to poem to sculpture, to
performance work and back––activating relationship among the arts and between the
arts and computer programming. In interacting with the work, through the people’s
medium of choice, social entanglements, friendships, and entirely new artworks became
possible.
491

Higgins’ comment underscores how House of Dust elicited trans-disciplinary artistic production
in visual art and performance, as well as poetry and writing (in English and FORTRAN), but also
how its interactivity facilitated new kinds of interpersonal experience.
When Knowles left CalArts in 1972, she donated House of Dust to the school, however,
it was in such a state of disrepair by 1976 it had to be removed. Knowles investigated the
possibility of having it installed at the Oakland Museum of Art’s new building which had a large
sculpture courtyard, but it was too expensive to transport. Finally, in 1981 she donated the
small house (fig. 4.16) to a preschool at the Early Childhood Education Program at College of
the Canyons in Santa Clarita near CalArts.
492
With the solar sensors removed and replaced by
blue and yellow circles, subsequent generations of college students and children have
continued to learned and played in this interactive, intermedia project.

Homage to Duchamp: A CalArts/UC Irvine Collaboration
In November 1971, Knowles participated in the Duchamp Festival at the University of
California at Irvine. Founded in 1965, the UC Irvine (UCI) Studio Art Department, became an
important school for experimental art–– Conceptualism, installation, performance, and video–
–taught by faculty such as Michael Asher, Vija Celmins, and Robert Irwin, among others, who

491
Higgins, Mainframe Experimentalism, 198.
492
Knowles explained this to me in my 1993 interview. She received an NEA grant and this enabled her to move
the smaller house to Santa Clarita by helicopter and kindly sent me a photograph in a letter of April, 1999.

210
clearly comprehended the important legacy of Marcel Duchamp. Critic Barbara Rose and art
historian Moira Roth, both teaching at UCI at that time, thought that this atmosphere of the
campus, the support of the Los Angeles art community and a collaboration with the newly
formed Cal Arts would be pivotal to the festival’s success.
493

This month-long project consisted of an exhibition of works by Duchamp and his
followers in the main UCI University Gallery; a two-day symposium organized by Roth and Rose
featuring prominent art critics and historians such as Robert Hughes, Annette Michelson,
Richard Hamilton, and Walter Hopps among others, and a series of Happenings and events
orchestrated by the students. While the series of events attracted noted Duchamp scholars
from the United State and Europe, according to Roth, its purpose was not be an academic
conference per se, but to be “more of a dialogue with Duchamp rather than a scholarly study
of him,” with an opportunity for artists to perform their “own imaginative acts.”
494

In the galleries Knowles showed a silkscreen print, Cœurs volants (1967) (fig.4.17a-b)
on which she had collaborated with Duchamp. First made in 1936 for cover of the French art
magazine, Cahiers d'Art,
495
Duchamp’s concentric hearts produce a pulse-like optical vibration
between the red orange and blue colors and because they are slightly off-kilter. In 1967 Daniel
Spoerri had introduced Knowles to Duchamp to make a special silkscreen edition of Coeurs
volant to be issued by Something Else Press. This edition of twenty-five prints with the hearts
floating and “beating” on a solid black background, is the final version of this image as
Duchamp passed away later in 1968.

493
Moira Roth, “Appendix B: Duchamp Festival, University of California, Irvine, 1971,” West Coast Duchamp, ed.
Bonnie Clearwater (Grassfield Press, Miami Beach, FL: 1991): 116-11.
494
Ibid., 116.
495
In 1959 a new edition of Coeurs volants was inserted into Robert Lebel, Marcel Duchamp, (New York: Penguin
Books, 1967), the first monograph on the artist which included important texts in English for the first time.

211
Knowles’ most important contribution to the Duchamp Festival, however, was a new
installation and event based on her Identical Lunch. While she was teaching at Cal Arts,
Knowles lived on a commune where she met a student named Josef Bogdanovich, whose
grandfather founded the Starkist Tuna company. The preceding year Bogdanovich had helped
Knowles to get the company’s support for a limited edition of Identical Lunch photo-silkscreens
(1970) (fig. 4.18) that she produced with participants, Shigeko Kubota and George Maciunas.
These close-up, grainy images of the artists eating their tuna fish sandwiches are interrupted
by the Starkist logotype and credit right in the center of the image that the donor insisted
upon, adding an odd commercial element to the silk-screen.
496
The Star-Kist company also
agreed to donate a crate of tuna fish for the Identical Lunch that Knowles and her student,
Bogdonavich co-organized at the Duchamp Festival. Unlike the previous iterations of the
event that had taken place in the Riss Diner or as private meals, this version of the Identical
Lunch occurred in UCI’s University Art Gallery. As Knowles describes in a video of the event:
The performance began at noon in the main gallery of the University. All the paintings
had been removed and the walls were hung with eight foot blueprints concerning the
score: sepia and blue blueprints eight feet high of such subjects as the statistics of the
tuna fish [sic] industry in 1946, photo studies of the founder of the Starkist [sic] industry,
many studies of fish, albacore, blue-fin, etc., slides of situations and things having to do
with the score... Tables [were] outfitted with the mixed tuna fish, lettuce, pitchers of
buttermilk and toasters. Assistants began making up the sandwiches as the audience
arrive[d]. In a side gallery holograms of the score [were] viewed. These were made in
San Francisco by Peter Van Riper and show the sandwich being eaten.
The room [was] lighted by the single laser used to view the holograms. A tape is playing
that was contributed to THE IDENTICAL LUNCH collection by Josef Bogdanovich....
497

496
In the interview with the author, Knowles explained to me that she reluctantly agreed to use the Starkist
corporate logo. Later she wanted to make a film at Starkist, but they refused because they thought she was a spy
from the Bumblebee Tuna company.
497
Woods dissertation, 130. This description is derived from Alison Knowles, “The Identical Lunch for Video,” a
typed proposal, dated 1973 from the Alison Knowles Studio Archive. For more details, see Woods analysis of The
Identical Lunch, 123-133.

212
As with any Fluxus performance, the score always is a text that remains consistent, it is
the context of the site and the audience reception that shifts the parameters and
interpretation of the event. Here The Identical Lunch “collection” became a more fully
articulated installation with prints, photographs, holograms, and sound to augment the event
score. As noted, some of the materials had nothing to do with the score, such as the
information and statistics about the tuna industry fisheries hung in a grid, recalling the type of
documentation in Conceptual art projects.
498
These more didactic elements contrast both
formally and conceptually to the 3-D holograms in the side gallery and the beaming lasers
lights like those used at rock concerts, which reflect 1970s popular culture and an obsession
with emerging technologies. Knowles’ description conjures up an image of a dense
environment filled with a plethora of images usually absent from more sedate and spare
presentations of her work.
Most significantly, this event differs from previous iterations in that the audience
served themselves the food and therefore, this was not about the process and sensations of
two companions eating and conversing together. Rather, it was about mass consumption of a
communal meal. Knowles did use chance procedures to decide at what intervals the lunch
would be consumed, but the realization of the event depended on the actions of the audience
and the labor of her collaborators, the students who helped to make and serve the food.
Knowles, while still the author of the score, relinquishes her own physical involvement and
control over the outcome of the event.

498
Woods, 131.

213
The Identical Lunch at UCI’s Duchamp Festival, the largest and boldest iteration of
Knowles’ brief score, framed a simple everyday action as art that was entirely dependent on
spectator participation and reception. This recalls Duchamp’s reference to the “art co-
efficient” and his comment on spectatorship in his famous short paper, “The Creative Act”:
“All in all, the creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work in
contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualifications and
thus adds his contribution to the creative act.”
499
The primary role of the audience in
completing and assessing this version of the Identical Lunch made it an appropriate choice for
a festival in honor of Duchamp.
The collaborative conception, planning and execution of this version of The Identical
Lunch with participants from UCI and Cal Arts extended Knowles’ role of producer and teacher
into a new locale. Additionally, the “expanded installation” of Identical Lunch amplified the
score with new content and modes of display, while the sheer scale of the event shifted the
private, sensory-oriented act of eating to a large-scale, communal public meal. In this regard in
Identical Lunch Knowles increases our awareness not only of the only the sensory and bodily
process of consuming food, but also the social nature of eating. As Nicole Woods observes, for
Knowles food is a “literal and metaphorical substance of everyday life” and a vital component
of her art that calls attention to “the practice of eating not only as a process of the body, but
also as a procedure for art.”
500

499
Marcel Duchamp, “The Creative Act,” delivered at the Convention of the American Federation of Arts in
Houston, Texas, April, 1957.
500
Woods, 132.

214
Cal Arts Coda

Art is a calling based on need. It’s based on what people need and on
knowing. It may be a problem that people go to school to discover that and
make art, but then we have to be somewhere to make connections.
Art schools provide these resources […] We each notice thing so differently as we
examine touch materials. We each have such different distances from the body, the
object and the self. […] My context is local to the immediate environment, but not
autobiographical, per se. We look at materials as we walk along the streets, eat our
food, look into the woods.
501

This slightly rambling quote of Knowles from Rahmani’s 1991 interview merits
unpacking as embedded within it are some clues about the relationship between her art and
her teaching. First, she articulates her view that art as a calling based on people’s need to
“know” and “discover,” underlining its inherently pedagogical nature. She speculates that,
while it might be problematic to have to go to an an art institution to do this (a very mild
institutional critique) she concedes that art schools provide resources and a place to make
connections, two of the benefit of her time at CalArts. Knowles then discusses how we each
observe and notice materials differently using our haptic sense and have “different distances”
–or perceptions from our bodies, minds and self-hood. Defining her own context as the local,
her “immediate environment,” she intimates that the materials we observe the street, the
food we eat and how we experience nature become the sources for art.
What is most revealing in this quote is how Knowles describes processes of sensing,
discovering and learning, using the proverbial “we” and is not explicit as to where she is
referring to her own artistic process, her work, or the procedures that she used when teaching,
working with students. This conflation supports my argument that during the time she was at
CalArts Knowles completely merged her event-based performance with her teaching

501
Rahmani, previously cited interview, 21.

215
pedagogy. This is further substantiated in an interview about her years at CalArts with Janet
Sarbanes which she gave twenty-five years after she had left the institution. When asked
about the specific relationship between her teaching and her art practice, Knowles said:
For me they are not that distinct. As I said, I have no credentials to teach […]
Again, I have no formal way to present—say, as Allan would having taught for years.
But I listen, I like to listen what people have to say back to me and it helps me to
make new work that they say they have a reaction to.
502

With some historical distance, Knowles states that her teaching and art are “not that distinct,”
implying that they overlap and converge. While she makes a self-effacing remark about her
lack of a degree or a “formal” way to “present” or teach as Kaprow had honed in his many
years as a professor, she does assert her ability to listen. While once again she is not entirely
explicit, she implies that her listening abilities promoted a reciprocal, dialogical approach with
her students and that their responses helped her to make her own new work.
Later in this same interview Knowles expressed some concern about staying at Cal Arts:
“… I was beginning to wonder about whether I wanted to go on being a teacher or whether in
fact I was losing track of my own work.”
503
This recollection may indicate her consternation
about the possibilities of her work becoming subsumed into her teaching or losing her identity,
but arguably, there were several other overriding factors forced her to reconsider how long
she would stay at Cal Arts.
During the first two years of the new art school tension escalated with the Trustees
about the open-ended, left-leaning curriculum resulted in the dismissal of the Provost Herbert

502
Ibid., 8.
503
Sarbanes, 8.

216
Blau in 1972 and a few years later they replaced the president, Robert Corrigan with interim
president from the Disney family.
504
As Knowles commented:
I think those trustees were really hoping from the beginning that the students would be
directed into Disney’s work. And when they discovered that was the furthest thing from
our minds, they became more and more churlish and disappointed in us. And I certainly
didn’t want to stay any longer than I did because I felt them all closed in… I mean, just
the mindset––not there. And so I was not surprised that finally we were all gone.
505

For a Fluxus artist like Knowles who came to CalArts specifically because of the open,
interdisciplinary curriculum, the Trustees attack on this “mindset” became problematic.
Additionally, after the devastating 1971 Sylmar earthquake, most of her Fluxus colleagues and
her own immediate family had relocated back to the East Coast, and this also contributed to
her decision to return to New York.
506

Ultimately, Knowles’ teaching experience at Cal Arts, in the balance, proved to benefit
not only her students but also her own career The courses she taught, particularly the score-
based events she did with students in and around the House of Dust, provided a foundation for
her to innovate her own workshops which have become an integral part of her practice for 40
years. While she did not teach again in a formal educational context, Knowles’ frequent visits
to art schools and universities or to museums to participate in Fluxus festivals and public
programs have provided innumerable opportunities for informal types learning experiences in
these institutions.
More specifically, Knowles’ idiosyncratic event structures and performances allow
students and other participants to experience the everyday world and to acquire different

504
The problems with the Disney family are well-documented in the previously cited articles on the early years of
Cal Arts by James Real and in Judith Adler’s dissertation.
505
Sarbanes, 6.
506
Of all the Fluxus artists hired by Brach and Kaprow, only composer James Tenney remained at CalArts after 1974
and he taught there until his death in 2006.

217
multiple intelligences identified by Howard Gardner.
507
Her poetic scores and written texts,
artists’ books and installations stimulate the reader’s interpretation of ideas through language,
fostering a verbal-linguistic intelligence. She also invites participants to produce everyday
sounds through Propositions, or by engaging with the sonic aspects of her sculptural objects
and installations, stimulating an understanding of tonal and rhythmic patterns, pitch and
timber that characterizes musical intelligence. Finally, Knowles’ collaborative process with
students and other audience members in events, particularly those requiring co-operation to
execute a given score or to create part of a whole project, emphasizes intra-personal
intelligence. These are just a few example of how Knowles developed experiential and sensory
learning in her event-based performance and pedagogical workshops in the 1970s, strategies
that she continues today.

507
Gardner’s previously cited works describe the verbal/linguistic, musical and interpersonal intelligences
discussed here in reference to Knowles.

218
CHAPTER 5
Conclusion

In this dissertation I have argued how Halprin, Kaprow and Knowles integrated their
event-based performances into their teaching in experimental contexts and imbricated
pedagogy into their practices. Each of the artists following a particular trajectory. Halprin forged
her own pathway independently: she established SFDW as the fulcrum for her avant-garde
events and teaching in the 1950s and 1960s, engaged in large-scale community-based
collaborations into the 1970s until she started the Tamalpa Institute in 1978. Conversely,
Kaprow’s career revolved around institutions: university art departments, a public school, and
an art college. His scores for Happenings in public sites formed the core curriculum for the
experimental Project Other Ways in Berkeley public schools in 1969-70 and while at his art and
teaching evolved into smaller, tasked-based Work Routines. By 1974, when he went to UCSD,
his Activity booklets provided instructions for intimate group events or a do-it-yourself, self-
generated exercises. Knowles’ pathway began with Fluxus events in the 1960s in which she
innovated her own Propositions her tenure at CalArts allowed her to teach for the first time and
to develop both event-based workshops that subsequently became intrinsic to her practice.
As I have demonstrated, at the core of Halprin, Kaprow and Knowles’ performative and
pedagogical experiments are event scores, which are not just “words to be read and actions to
be performed,”
508
but are rubrics that promote learning through experience. Each develop his
or her own open scoring typologies that allowed students to perform and often co-create
events. In so doing they produce what Umberto Eco referred to as the opera aperta or “open

508
Kotz, 57.

219
work,” in which the artist decides to leave the arrangement of some aspects to chance, to the
public, or in this case, to participants and students.
509

Halprin’s scores emanated from her dance notation, but were entirely open to
kinesthetic improvisations by performers or students in her workshops, which she then
incorporated in live, staged events. While Kaprow directed and wrote scenarios for his
Happenings himself, when he started teaching with scores he collaborated with students on
both the writing and performing of the events. Knowles authored her own Propositions and
Fluxus open event scores that could potentially be enacted by anyone, anytime, anyplace, but
in the context of teaching workshops and live events she would take on the role of a
“conductor” to keep time and orchestrate the performances. In these pedagogical
environments the artist acquiesced some of their authority and authorship to shift their
relationship to their classes and allow for participatory, student-centered, experiential learning.
As discussed throughout this study, Cagean chance operations and indeterminacy were
integral to both Halprin, Kaprow and Knowles’ events and teaching. Halprin first shuffled index
cards to randomize her score for Parades and Change and foreground the importance of
chance in her workshops. Cage also introduced her to LaMonte Young and Terry Riley, her
musical director for the Summer Workshop of 1960, that would influence their minimal music
and Brown, Forti, and Rainer’s pedestrian, postmodern choreography. Kaprow’s experiences in
Cage’s Composition class–learning about chance procedures, graphic scoring, found sounds,
and the importance of play permeated his events and teaching for the remainder of his career.
Knowles, who initially assimilated Cage’s curriculum though Higgins and then became a friend

509
Umberto Eco, The Open Work, trans. Anna Cangoni Cambridge, MA; Harvard University Press, 1989).

220
and collaborator of the composer, tested aleatory procedures in her paintings, then used
chance, indeterminacy and everyday sounds in her own art and her workshops.
Intrinsic to Cage’s influential philosophy was his insistent, unwavering focus on the
everyday. This is apparent in Halprin’s ordinary, task-based movements, her kinesthetic
exercises and her choreographed parade of daily life. Kaprow’s non-art activities and Routines
Kaprow call for everyday labors that require both physical stamina and mental problem solving.
Knowles scores combine everyday objects and sounds, as she frames the quotidian and the
domestic as art. The artists all examine what sociologist Pierre Bourdieu refers to as the
“habitus of everyday life,” customs, dispositions or habits acquired through the social world.
510

Created through a social, rather than individual processes, “habitus” leads to behavior patterns
that are non-permanent, can be changed in unexpected situations and are transferrable from
one context to another.
511
This explains why Halprin, Kaprow and Knowles’ events using the
“habitus of everyday” are particularly conducive to teaching: their social nature facilitates
collaboration, while the patterns and “learned” behaviors are transferrable, non-fixed and can
respond to chance or change, all elements conducive to more open forms of education in the
classroom or in other sites.
Not all of Halprin, Kaprow and Knowles event scores are inherently social: Halprin’s
studio-based movement rituals, designed to engage the whole body and the motor-sensory
system, could be performed collectively in a classroom setting or in private. Similarly, the
intimate events in Kaprow’s instructional Activity booklets could be enacted by small groups or

510
Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, tarns. Richard Nice, (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1984).
511
Zander Navarro, “In Search of Cultural Interpretation of Power: The Contribution of Pierre Bourdieu,” IDS
Bulletin 37, (2006): 16.

221
as self-generated performances. Knowles propositions, such as Make a Salad or Identical lunch
can be a private solo experience or performed in public. In any context, these scores are for
everyday actions that results in experiential learning whether––they are early examples of
“do-it-yourself” performances, antecedents to the now omnipresent DIY ethos and forms of
participatory art that re-emerged in the 1990s.
512

Halprin, Kaprow and Knowles’ event scores in experimental teaching evoke Dewey’s
Pragmatist ideas of more holistic aesthetic experience that informs experiential education and
promotes embodied, sensory experience as a form of learning. For Halprin, Dewey’s ideas
transmitted through H’Doubler inspired SFDW activities to promote and sensory engagement,
particularly of the non-visual and often in outdoor environments. Kaprow’s non-art oriented
activities in Happenings and Work Routines use the physical body to make a discovery or to
perform a labor, but also require the use of all of the other senses for participants to work
together to accomplish the task. The spare actions of Knowles’ events propose minimal physical
actions, but her food-based events are maximal sensory experiences, particularly in their
engagement of olfactory and gustatory systems.
In these instances, physical embodiment and sensory engagement work with mental
processes, the inextricable mind/body link critical for learning. Cognition results through a
dynamic relationship between the subject and his or her environment through enaction, a term
Jerome Bruner first defined in his book Toward a Theory of Instruction (1974).
513
Bruner used
this term as a corollary to Dewey’s concept of “learning by doing” as he started to consider

512
Anna Dezeuze, ed. The Do-it-yourself Artwork: Participation from Fluxus to New Media, (Cambridge: MIT Press,
2010) provides a comprehensive overview of self-initiated and participatory practices.
513
Jerome Bruner, Toward a Theory of Instruction, (Cambridge, MA; Harvard University Press, 1974. Bruner also
wrote The Process of Education (1960), The Relevance of Education (1971) and was the teacher of Howard
Gardner. There is no specific evidence the artists read his work, but he was widely known in the 1960s and 1970s.

222
environment and experience as critical factors in education and began to think of learners as
“problem solvers.” As Halprin, Kaprow and Knowles scores are enacted, they invite more
experiential, phenomenological and playful approaches to accomplish a task or to solve a
problem and they parallel more informal learning methodologies in experimental education
Halprin, Kaprow and Knowles’ experiments in education occurred in California at a
moment when social and political activism and conditions demanded alternatives to rigid,
outmoded institutions, particularly schools. Programs such as Project Other Ways in Berkeley
and CalArts formed in response to this critique of status quo and crisis in education, but starting
experimental arts programs during the tumultuous late 1960s was not an easy endeavor.
Kaprow left Project Other Ways, in part, because his Happenings took place in the Berkeley
streets which were filled at that time with constant, sometimes violent, anti-war
demonstrations. When he went to Cal Arts, he and Knowles experienced the culture clash
between the conservatism of the founding Disney family and Trustees and the leftist politics of
faculty and students almost closed the new institute.
With the relative paucity of art galleries, museums or other cultural institutions in
California, independent artists’ studios, art schools and universities became important sites for
experimental education and artistic production. Halprin, Kaprow and Knowles’ pedagogical
experiments in alternative studios and experimental art schools provided new sites for
production and reception of pedagogical event-based performances. While they eventually left
these contexts, the legacy of their experiments have become important models for artists of
subsequent generations and have been revisited in recent literature.
514

514
See the previously cited articles by Janet Sarbanes and Felicity Allen, ed. Education, (Cambridge: MIT Press

223
Given the the evolution of education since the 1960s and 1970s, what what are the
possibilities for experimental arts programs like Halprin, Kaprow and Knowles’ today?
Surprisingly few programs today place artists directly into education contexts except a for a few
funded by government, foundations or, in some instances, when artists are “outsourced” by
museum education programs to schools.
515

The reason for this lack experimental art programs in the schools since that pivotal,
experimental era, educational environments and socio-economic conditions have changed
significantly. State schools in the U.S. and Great Britain that once supported progressive
education have moved towards more “industrial models” where people are educated to
become good workers rather than creative individual or critical thinkers.
516
With the rise of
neo-liberalism in the post-digital era, schools at all levels have been incentivized by industry to
emphasize science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) curriculum to fill the increasing
need for future computer programmers and knowledge workers. In K-12 schools, arts programs
have been cut drastically and in higher education, liberal and humanities have proportionately
lower funding and smaller programs. Additionally, chronic budget cuts from economic
recessions, increasing income inequality and escalating tuition have resulted in budget scarcity
for schools and financial precarity for students.
In public K-12 schools in the United States, the rebellion against quantitative evaluation
and the pervasive problem of “teaching to tests” resulted in the repeal of the much derided No

and London: Whitechapel Gallery, 2011) an anthology with articles by Kaprow and Lacy.
515
Los Angeles County Museum of Art has outsourced artists to schools courtesy of the Annenberg Foundation.
516
Ken Robinson, “Changing Education Paradigms,” talk given at Royal Society of the Arts, Animate Series, October
14, 2010; http://sirkenrobinson.com/rsa-animate-changing-education-paradigms/ accessed March 3, 2016. This
talk is from Robinson’s new book, Creative Schools: The Grassroots Revolution That’s Transforming Education (New
York: Viking, 2015).

224
Child Left Behind Act (2001), now replaced by the Every Student Succeeds Act (2015). While
one would hope this would signal more student-centered education, what is problematic is the
emphasis is still on success and result rather than a qualitative experience or the learning
process of education.
This problematic focus on success and productivity, industry and market forces,
instigated by neoliberal ideology has occurred in academies and art schools internationally,
particularly in Europe with the Bologna Process to standardize higher education.
517
The
response to this and other threats since the early 2000s has coalesced in the so-called
“pedagogical turn” in education.
518
This umbrella term, primarily used by academics, artists
and curators, refers to a range of artistic, curatorial and pedagogical practices that interrogate
institutions and also advocates for new solutions. Originating with lectures and symposia within
academia, “the educational turn” has also instigated pedagogical projects by artists who
appropriate education as a medium for art in the form of a school, knowledge exchanges,
reading groups, lectures, or learning laboratories.
519

In light of the Bologna process, Irit Rogoff’s article, “Academy as Potentiality,” that
critically examined art academies and proposed alternatives to use research and knowledge for

517
The Bologna Process, a series of meetings and agreements to standardize all institutions and programs of higher
education within the European Union and has now expanded to 47 countries beyond the EU. This process emerged
from the Centre for Higher Education, a think tank founded in 1995 by the Bertelsmann Corporation, a worldwide
media conglomerate, with interests in new markets for media products, reflecting the neoliberal agenda.
518
Irit Rogoff, “Turning,” eflux, http://www.e-flux.com/journal/turning/ (accessed March 1, 2016). In this article
Rogoff cites several examples of the term “turn” in reference to education, pedagogy and curatorial practices.
519
Some of these artist-initiated projects include Fritz Haeg’s Sundown Schoolhouse, Mark Allen’s Machine Project
workshops, Jorge Pardo’s Mountain School of Art in Los Angeles; the Future Farmers pedagogical teach-ins in San
Francisco’s and the Copenhagen Free University founded by Danish artists Henriette Heise and Jakob Jakobsen.
Other artists have been invited to execute pedagogical projects ore engagements within museums including Anton
Vidokle’s Night School at the New Museum in New York; assorted participants in the Engagement Party programs
at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MoCA) and the Public Engagement program at the UCLA
Hammer Museum in Los Angeles and the Open Field program at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis.

225
what is meaningful and important, rather than just what is practical and useful. Citing Giorgio
Agamben’s ideas of “potentiality,” Rogoff proposes that art schools should explore possible
new forms of knowledge: she suggests how more process oriented, investigative learning may
result in “not-yet-known-knowledge,” as opposed to success and resolution.
520
She also notes
that with the increasingly performative nature of our culture, “meaning takes place as events
unfold.”
521
It is not produced in isolation but is constructed through “webs of connectedness,”
and “participants produce meaning through relations with each other.”
522

While written in 2006, Rogoff’s proposals do to have an uncanny resemblance to
aspects of Halprin, Kaprow and Knowles’ 1960s and 1970s: how process-oriented, investigative
learning and incipient knowledge, are “not known” until it is directly experienced; that
contingent meaning unfolds in the present movement of a given event, and how the production
of meaning is inherently connected and collaborative, participatory and interpersonal in nature.
Rogoff and others who desire more process-oriented, less outcome-bound, observational, and
participatory curricula in arts academies, should revisit Halprin, Kaprow and Knowles’ event-
based performances and pedagogical experiments from the 1960s and 1970s: they may serve
as excellent models for a “contemporary turn in experimental and experiential education.”

520
Irit Rogoff, “Academy as Potentiality,” in A.C.A.D.E.M.Y. ed. Angelika Nollen, et. al.(Frankfurt am Main: Revolver,
2006) 3. Rogoff, a Professor of Visual Cultures at Goldsmith’s College in London, wrote this article after the
Academy Project (2006) at he Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven, Holland, as series of exhibition, projects and events
tat explores learning within the museum, the university, and the art school.
521
Ibid., 4.
522
Ibid., 5.

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POSTSCRIPT

The main chapters of this dissertation have specifically examined Halprin, Kaprow and
Knowles integrated event-based performance and pedagogical platforms in experimental
education contexts from the late 1960 until the early to mid-1970s. While I explicitly chose not
discuss their work beyond this pivotal period, as mentioned in the preface, as a curator I
worked on programs with all three artists and attended their events in the 1990s and 2000s. As
their performance practices were gradually transmitted into different institutional contexts, I
observed how they continued using the same event structures and workshop formats they first
developed in their experimental teaching beginning in the 1960s. In this Postscript I will discuss
a few specific examples of later artistic production that strengthens my argument that Halprin,
Kaprow and Knowles’ continued to integrate event-based performance into pedagogical
workshops which sustained their respective practices for decades.

Halprin: Revisiting Parades and Changes
As discussed at the end of chapter 2, in the late 1960s Halprin pursued more ritualistic,
community-based, collaborative events, but in 1971 she was diagnosed with a deadly form of
cancer and attributed her survival in part to a rigorous regimen of movement exercises. As a
result, she focused her attention on directing Moving Towards Life, a series of healing
workshops for people battling serious illnesses. By 1978 Halprin and her daughter, Daria
Halprin, transformed SFDW into the Tamalpa Institute, an “educational and research arm” of

227
SFDW, to teach what she calls the Life/Art Process.
523
Going forward, all of Halprin’s pursuits
occurred under the aegis of this umbrella organization, merging her artistic practice and
workshops.
Halprin has become very well known for her work with Tamalpa, and while it became
her primary focus, she did not abandon staging performances entirely. In 1997, when she
received the Samuel H. Scripps American Dance Festival Award, she was asked to present an
excerpt of her work at the ceremony, and she decided to perform Parades and Changes for the
first time in twenty-five years. Following this event, interest in the performance surged, and it
has subsequently been presented in dance venues, theaters, and museums internationally.
524

My own personal experience of seeing two quite different iterations of Parades and
Changes from the 2000s has reinforced my understanding of this work. For each of these
events––one at the Roy and Edna Disney CalArts Theater (REDCAT) in Los Angeles and the other
at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive
525
––Halprin conducted workshops with
dancers she had not worked with previously to familiarize them with the original score and its
ordinary movements. As in the 1960s, she used the cell block structure and index cards to
randomly select each element of the event to produce the sequencing, costumes, staging, and
music that make each iteration of Parades and Changes completely different.

523
Anna Halprin Digital Archive, https://annahalprindigitalarchive.omeka.net/biography
(accessed February 22, 2016). Tamalpa is an accredited school for movement-based arts therapy training and a
center for research, collaboration, workshops, and performance.
524
A selection from Halprin’s chronology includes the Festival d’Automne at the Centre Pompidou, Paris (2004 and
2008); Biennale de la Danse de Lyon (2008); Dance Theater Workshop, New York (2009); Dansenhus Stockholm,
Sweden (2011); and Dance Festival Helsinki (2011), as well as Museum Ludwig (2009), MCA Chicago (2009), as well
as REDCAT, Los Angeles (2009), and Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive (2013) that will be discussed further
in the conclusion.
525
Parades & Changes, replay was at REDCAT, Wednesday, November 11, 2009 to Saturday, November 14, 2009.
Parades and Changes at Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive was performed February 16-17, 2003 in
conjunction with the previously cited exhibition, Anna Halprin Parades and Change MATRIX 246.

228
Halprin and choreographer Anne Collod collaborated on parade & changes, replays
(2009) REDCAT, quite ironically, a space funded by Roy Disney––one of the family members
who opposed the radical pedagogy of the early days of Cal Arts. Years later he funded the art
school’s interdisciplinary center that is arguably one of L.A.’s most experimental performance
spaces, an apt venue for Halprin’s Parades and Changes.
This “replay,” commenced with the parade of performers in formal wear dancing against
a minimal backdrop and on colorful modular blocks. (fig. 5.1a-b) Later sections of the parade
featured whimsical props and costumes with references to contemporary art: a green winged
figure, reminiscent of a Jim Dine Nike sculpture; a black inner tube recalling the tire in Robert
Rauschenberg’s Monogram (1955–59); a floating white sphere similar to Hans Haacke’s White
Balloons (1967); and metallic balloons like those in Andy Warhol’s Mylar Silver Clouds (1966), or
those used in Merce Cunningham’s dance RainForest (1968). (fig. 5.1c-d) With its Pop art
aesthetic and props, this new 2009 iteration created a fresh and festive ambience that is
antithetical to the cool, stark, spare staging of Parades and Changes in the 1960s.
Toward the end of this performance, the dancers abruptly left the stage and performed
the paper dance finale outside the REDCAT theater on Grand Avenue. Their spontaneous street
dance loomed above the stage in a video projection, mediated movements from outdoors that
contrasted with the live stage performance. This rendition of Parades and Changes, with its
playful Pop sensibility and video intervention, also obliquely referenced its specific site: REDCAT
is directly across the street from the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MoCA), an
institution known for its holdings of the Pop and other art of the 1960s. Additionally, REDCAT is

229
part of the Walt Disney Concert Hall complex, the most ubiquitous film location in the city,
which underscored the theater’s patronage and proximity to the entertainment industry.
In 2013, when Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAM/PFA) presented the
exhibition Anna Halprin/Matrix 246, which included documentation, notes, and scores of
Parades and Changes, Halprin and the composer Morton Subotnick reunited almost fifty years
after the work’s debut in Berkeley to collaborate on this new version, which differed
considerably from the REDCAT event. The dancers in the parade of costumes wore dark suits,
white shirts, and bowler hats, and each carried a black or red umbrella. Holding their umbrellas
in the air, they danced in a manner that seemed to parody Gene Kelly in “Singing in the Rain”
(fig. 5.2a) except that here the soundtrack was Petula Clark’s British invasion pop anthem
“Downtown” (1965), a flashback to the year of the initial presentation of Parades and Changes.
In the stomp sequence, the performers wore casual contemporary clothing and jumped
vigorously on raw wood pedestals, accompanied by a drummer’s Afro-Caribbean and hip-hop
beats. (5.2b) After this sequence, they segued into sensual embraces in dramatic, bright-hued
lighting. (5.2c) For the paper dance, the nude dancers fervently ripped the reams of paper,
formed a pyramid of bodies bathed in warm amber light, and then gathered the remains for
the finale. (fig.5.2d) In contrast to the REDCAT version with quotations of contemporary Pop
art, the street dance, and the video intervention, the experience of BAM/PFA’s Parades and
Changes was more like an entertaining theatrical spectacle.
These new versions of Parades and Changes incorporated different references to pop
culture and contemporary art of the 1960s and used newer technologies for lighting and video,
but all the formative elements remained the same: using the original score of ordinary

230
movements, engaging the senses and projecting sensuality, responding to the moment using
improvisation, and synthesizing workshop pedagogy and staged performance. As Halprin noted,
in Parades and Changes, “one gets an accelerated view of everyday life,”
526
retaining directness
and immediacy in the present moment in whatever time frame it is presented.

Kaprow: Performing Life
Kaprow continued teaching at UCSD until 1993, when he became an emeritus professor.
Throughout his tenure there he attended conferences and was a visiting artist at institutions in
both the United States and abroad. When he received invitations, Kaprow would rely on the
same methodology he developed in the 1970s: using simple event scores to perform events or
Activities, often in workshop formats.
When Kaprow visited the Getty Research Institute to prepare his papers for accession
into its Special Collections, the staff invited art historians, visiting scholars, and graduate
students, including myself, to attend a workshop with him, which took place in 1998. After
speaking about his work, Kaprow assembled the group of about forty of us in an empty room to
engage in two Activities. The first involved water: everyone received a utensil, and then he
poured water from a pitcher and instructed us to move the water to the next person, spoon by
spoon, until it disappeared. An inversion of George Brecht’s simple score Drip Music (1962),
which called for the enactor to pour water from one vessel into another, this Activity required
manual dexterity, extreme focus, and constant cooperation with others to accomplish the task.
Forcing us to pay attention to our actions in relation to one another and to consider an

526
Anna Halprin, “Notes on Parades and Changes,” Anna Halprin Papers, box 6, folder 32.

231
essential but endangered resource, this ultimately was not a futile exercise but a physical action
that functioned like a Zen koan, teaching us about absence, presence, and mindfulness.
For the second Activity, Kaprow distributed Post-it notes to the participants, instructing
us to crumple the paper into a ball, place it on the floor, get down on our hands and knees, find
someone across the room, and blow the note toward them. We all blew our little balls of paper
across the room, scooting slowly behind them, and when we reached our partners, we were
instructed to give them a hug. This arduous but playful Activity forced us to conserve our
breath, to rely on our own stamina and proprioception, and to perform an affectionate gesture
with a stranger, embodied actions that taught us about kinesthetic awareness and
interpersonal dynamics.
Both of these Activities at the Getty reveal Kaprow’s continued efforts to use Activities
as pedagogical platforms for learning from fleeting, seemingly meaningless everyday actions. A
similar motive prevails in his Performing Life (1996) (fig. 5.3), one of a series of Activities at the
Kunsthalle Palazzo in Liestal, Switzerland, described by Philip Ursprung:
One of these Activities required one person to draw a chalk line on the ground in a
street, followed by another person rubbing it out with an eraser. The event lasted until
either the chalk or the eraser was used up. As I knelt on the ground outside the town’s
train station, drawing my chalk line, with my partner diligently rubbing away at it, a
woman—waiting nearby—watched what we were doing. In the end, she asked what we
were up to. I replied that I was drawing a line, which my partner was rubbing out, until
either the chalk or the eraser was used up when she cried out: “Oh, but that is just like
life!”
527

Rather than ignoring the gestures or dismissing them as absurd, this passerby quietly observed
them and immediately comprehended the metaphor. A similar kind of reception occurred at

514
Philip Ursprung, Allan Kaprow, Robert Smithson, and the Limits to Art, (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of
California Press): 2-3.

232
the Getty, where a group of people acknowledged a simple, slightly absurd action as
emblematic of everyday life, in that case, a basic metaphor for awareness of body and mind,
human interaction, and interpersonal relationships. These Activities exemplify both the
sustaining impact of the pedagogical workshops that Kaprow conceived for schoolchildren and
art students in the 1960s and his later studies of Zen—pared-down Activities aimed at revealing
simple truths of life.
In the 1980s performance art and intermedia materials started to be acquired by major
archives such as the Archiv Sohm at the Staatsgalerie in Stuttgart (1981) and the Jean Brown
Papers at the Getty Research Institute (1989).
528
Concurrently, galleries, museums, and
biennials would begin organize more exhibitions on Fluxus and Happenings.
529
When asked to
lend documentation of Happenings to these shows, Kaprow would do so but insisted that he be
invited to present a “live” art event, just as he did for his first exhibition at the Pasadena Art
Museum in 1967. He also received many requests from curators to do a major exhibition or
retrospective, but for many years he refused because of his ambivalence about museums,
reflected in his statement “Life in a museum is like making love in a cemetery.”
530

Kelley, who did manage to curate a Kaprow exhibition, Precedings at the Center for
Research in Contemporary Art at the University of Texas at Arlington (1988), also grappled with

528
Dr. Hanns Sohm, a dentist from Stuttgart, Germany attended the Fluxus Festivals in 1962 and started to collect
ephemera of Fluxus and other performance art. Jean Brown a former librarian, collected Dada, Surrealism and
avant-garde artists books and multiples from the 1960s. As cited previously, both Dick Higgins and Kaprow’s own
papers also entered the Getty Special Collections in the early 1990s.
529
These include Fluxus Subjectiv at Galerie Krinzinger, Vienna (1986) organized by artists Hermann Nitsch, Ben
Vautier, Milan Knizak and artist/theorist Peter Weibel; Happenings & Fluxus an exhibition at the Galerie 1900-
2000, Galerie de Genie, and Galerie de Poche in Paris. (1989) organized by critic Charles Dreyfus, and the 8th
Biennale of Sydney, Readymade Boomerang: Certain Relations in 20th Century Art (1990), curated by René Block.
530
Allan Kaprow, “Preface to the Expanded Edition: On the Way to Un-Art, “ in Essays on the Blurring of Art and
Life, xxix.

233
the questions of how an artist could be represented and located in art history if no objects
remain from his career.
531
He recalls how Kaprow had to remember these events
“retrospectively,” noting that he “interpreted, and re-invented” his own career in the
process.
532

When Stephanie Rosenthal met with Kaprow in December 2004 to discuss having a
major exhibition at the Haus der Kunst in Munich, he told her he did “not want a show,” so they
spent several days discussing alternative possibilities.
533
One of these included “turning the
exhibition into a workshop,” which suggests that Kaprow was much less ambivalent about
communicating his ideas through pedagogical formats and writing than he was about subjecting
his work to a curatorial process in a museum. Finally, however, he would agree to do this
exhibition only if the curators would realize some of his Environments, Happenings, and
Activities as “reinventions,”

a term he used to differentiate them from the original, complying
with own guideline that Happenings can be presented only once and instantiating his idea that
the “past can only be created, not re-created.”
534

The resulting exhibition, Allan Kaprow: Art as Life, opened at the Museum of
Contemporary Art in Los Angeles in 2008.
535
It filled two expansive galleries: one with white
walls lined with paintings and collages (fig. 5.4a) and the other more of a black box space with
documentary videos, overhead projectors to view documents, and archival materials in vitrines

531
Kelley, ix.
532
Ibid.
533
Rosenthal, “Agency for Action” in Art as Life, 57-58. The exhibition, organized by the Haus der Kunst and the
Van Abbemuseum in 2007, travelled to Bern and Genoa before its U.S. debut at the Museum of Contemporary Art
from March 32 through June 30, 2008.
534
Ibid, 61. For a discussion of the typologies of re-dos, re-inventions, re-presentations, etc. see Perform Repeat
Record: Live Art in History. Adrian Heathfield and Amelia Jones, eds. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012)
and Martha Buskirk, Amelia Jones, Caroline Jones, “The Year in “Re:” Artforum, December 2013.
535
Kaprow died in April, 2006, so all of the presentations of this exhibition were posthumous.

234
(fig. 5.4b). In spite of these museological and archival installations, the curators did honor the
artist’s request for reinventions with several Environments, installations, and events in the
MOCA galleries and a large-scale, multisite festival throughout the city during the course of the
exhibition.
536

One of these reinventions, Fluids, took place in several locations, many executed by art
students, just like many of Kaprow’s Happenings.
537
In the Getty Museum sculpture garden, LA
ArtGirls (LAAG), a collective of thirty women, created Overflow (fig. 5.5a-c ). The event took
place on an unusually hot spring day, and one of the walls of the ice structure melted and fell
down surprisingly quickly, epitomizing the chance nature of a Happening and the ephemeral
materials that quite literally became fluid. In this reinvention the female collective rewrote
Kaprow’s script, questioning the authorship and the authority of the original written document,
as they critiqued the institutionalizing and historicizing procedures of archives and museums
such as the Getty.
At MOCA, several artists reinvented Kaprow’s works, including his former student
Suzanne Lacy, who collaborated with the architect Michael Rotondi and artist/filmmaker Peter
Kirby on a performative installation, Trade Talk (fig. 5.5c-d). Their project reinvented Kaprow’s
Trading Dirt (1983), in which he filled a bucket with “Zen” dirt from his Buddhist teacher’s
house and proceeded to trade it with others for another kind of dirt, who then trade their
“new” dirt with someone else and so on, like an ongoing conversation. Trade Talk consisted of a
platform of dirt, a swath of fabric designed to represent the Buddhist house of Kaprow’s

536
To ensure that all institutions and participants understood Kaprow’s work, MOCA staff organized several pre-
festival education programs including an orientation session with art historian Julia Bryan-Wilson.
537
Other ice structures were built at Cal State University, Los Angeles; Los Angeles County Museum of Art,
Memorial Park in Pasadena, Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills and at the University of Southern California,

235
teacher and a circle to leave audio recordings. This reinvention mirrored the simple, everyday
materials used in Kaprow’s events and the discursive nature of teaching.
538

Ironically, while he expressed disdain for museums, Kaprow received significant new
attention through exhibitions and reinventions in mainstream arts institutions such as MOCA in
the 2000s. While he would likely be surprised at the extent of this posthumous recognition, I
believe he would be pleased that many of the reinventions were executed by his former
protégés and that legions of other students have learned more about both his pedagogy and
performance through

Knowles: The Secrets of Ordinary Things
After returning to New York following her two years at CalArts, throughout the 1970s
and 1980s Knowles did not teach again formally but would continue to do event-based
performances and workshops in galleries, alternative spaces, art schools, and universities. With
the resurgent interest in Fluxus and intermedia in the early 1990s, she participated in the In the
Spirit of Fluxus (1993) exhibition which included documents of her events from the 1960s, a
new interactive sculpture and performances in Fluxus Festivals that I organized in at the Walker
Art Center and Santa Barbara Museum of Art.
For the exhibition Out of Actions: Between Performance and the Object (1998) at the
Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, Knowles exhibited and performed Gentle Surprise

538
Suzanne Lacy, Trade Talk description on her website http://www.suzannelacy.com/trade-talk/ (accessed
February 20, 2016).

236
for Eyes and Ears (1973) (fig #5.6a-b).
539
This installation includes eighty objects, each with
handwritten text instructions for the spectator to activate it to produce a sensory response and
a do-it-yourself performance. The text accompanying this work read: “We suggest that simple
activities, routine movements, sounds and sights that are taken for granted and cast aside
might be perused, researched and thoroughly investigated by you. . . We are doing what we
ordinarily do in our lives with a certain energy focus and sensitivity that gives it a turn into a
performance/environment, or, if you like, into art.”
540

Here we find key elements of Knowles’s experience-based, learning-oriented process:
taking activities, routines, and movements, simple tasks that are “perused, researched and . . .
investigated,” subjected to a process of study and discovery. Using everyday actions, the
spectator may transform the work into a “performance/environment” and optionally into art.
These multiple open scores extend Knowles’s original minimal Propositions that invite
spectators to engage their senses while they echo the experiential pedagogical strategies that
she used in her teaching at CalArts and again in her later workshops.
I also worked with Knowles on an exhibition in the Walter and McBean Galleries at the
San Francisco Art Institute (SFAI), The Secrets of Ordinary Things (2003).
541
(fig. 5.7a-b), which
included prints and interactive sound pieces, collaborations with SFAI students, and an
intensive workshop that she described as follows: “The focus of this intensive workshop is to
generate, for one another, artworks as well as performances to expand our view of art, the

539
This collaboration of Knowles with composers Philip Corner and Bill Fontana was performed at the Experimental
Intermedia space in New York City in the 1970s according to Knowles website,
http://www.aknowles.com/gentle.html (accessed February 20. 2016).
540
Alison Knowles and Bill Fontana, Gentle Surprises for the Eye and Ear, typescript from performance at the
Tranegarden, Denmark, undated, Getty Research Institute, Jean Brown Papers, 890164, box 28, folder 37.
541
The Secrets of Ordinary Things exhibition and workshop took place in April, 2003.

237
practices of intermedia and Fluxus. For inspiration, we will look to things found both on the
street and in the kitchen. We will discover the secrets of ordinary things using concepts of
chance operations conceptual art and indeterminacy. Our familiarity with these terms will be
affirmed through daily exchanges during the course.
”542

As in her courses in the 1960s, Knowles relied on scores, found objects, and food to
produce a collaborative installation and performances of Fluxus events with the students. In the
morning sessions, she presented her own work and that of other artists to introduce Fluxus
score-based events. In the afternoons, she worked with the group on an installation also titled
The Secrets of Ordinary Things, which consisted of a large table with everyday objects donated
by the students, such as a glass of wine, a stuffed animal, bags of tea, and tins of spices to
engage the senses of the spectator. (fig. 5.8a-b). As in Gentle Surprises for Eyes and Ears, each
item had a tag bearing the name of the donor and a short text about the object (fig. 5.8c). The
event score indicated that gallery visitors could peruse these items and take one (fig. 5.8d),
provided they replace it with another object affixed with the requisite tag, with an option to
post a story on the wall about why the object was significant to them. This project also recalled
Knowles’s previous gift exchange scores, such as 99 Red North and Gift Event II, which she
executed with students at CalArts in the 1970s.
In addition to the installation at SFAI, Knowles conducted a Fluxus concert with the
students that included her Newspaper Event (1965), a simultaneous reading of newspapers in
different languages and varied tempos per the conductor’s instructions (figs. 5.9a-b), and her
Celebration Red (figs.5.10b), a spread of foods such as salsa, strawberries, beans, and red velvet

542
Alison Knowles, “Interdisciplinary Intensive: Secrets of Ordinary Things” course description from the author’s
personal files.

238
cake, an opportunity for spectators to experience sights, sounds, and tastes and to engage in a
convivial ritual. Recalling Fluxus banquets of the late 1970s, which often featured meals
consisting of foods of one type or color,
543
the score for Celebration Red became a recipe that is
made and then consumed by the participants. As Nicole Woods has observed, “Knowles’s work
in the realm of food rituals becomes a trenchant questioning of authorship in the public and
private spheres and almost a reversal of the reification of consumption practices in the (literal)
eating of the readymade.”
544

While Celebration Red took place in the context of a small art school and functioned as a
private ritual of both making and consuming the “readymade” food, in the 2000s Knowles
would perform some of her earlier food-based events in more public sites with much larger
audiences. For example, she performed Proposition #2: Make a Salad for the first time since the
1970s for the exhibition Work Ethic at the Baltimore Museum of Art in 2003.
545
This event
inaugurated a series of larger-scale versions of her earlier scores presented at both museums
and public sites over the next decade. At the Tate Modern she performed Make a Salad for
nineteen hundred people, while at the Walker Art Center she performed the event for the
Open Field program, which turned the green lawn outside the museum into a public

543
John Hendricks, Fluxus Codex, (New York: Harry Abrams, 1988): 66-70. Hendricks lists all of the banquets (black
meals, white meals, multi-colored meals, fish meals, potato meals, transparent meals, etc.) considered as Fluxus
Collective events. The idea of mon-color meals recalls the famous decadent Symbolist black banquet described in
J.K. Huysman’s Against the Grain (1884) a text hat Maciunas and other Fluxus artist would likely have known.

544
Woods, 20.
545
Work Ethic, curated by Helen Molesworth, on view at the Baltimore Museum of Art from October 12, 2003 –
January 4, 2004, traveled to the Des Moines Art Center and the Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, 2004-05.

239
commons.
546
In both cases, Knowles’s performances augmented collection exhibitions with live
participatory events of the sort that now dominate museums’ public engagement programs.
547

Knowles also performed Make a Salad at the Chelsea Market Passage at the the High
Line, a popular walking path and park in New York City.
548
Organized for Earth Day on April 22,
2012, the event (fig.5.11) was specifically sited in this popular outdoor location for the sale and
consumption of specialty foods. Accordingly, the salad consisted of locally sourced produce.
Even with assistants, it took Knowles and her crew two hours to make and serve the salad to
approximately one thousand people.
549
Completely dissociated from an art context, the event
undoubtedly confounded some passersby, but when invited to participate by eating a free
salad, they could enjoy the event irrespective of whether they knew it was a performance. The
participants’ experience of seeing and hearing the salad be prepared, smelling and tasting the
food, and then digesting it is the embodied and sensory experience that Knowles intended with
Make a Salad.
A recent exhibition that I attended, Feast: Radical Hospitality in Contemporary Art
(2013–15), at the Smart Museum of Contemporary Art, examined the subject of meals
orchestrated by artists. It included three different presentations of Knowles’s Identical Lunch.
550

Even before entering the galleries, visitors could order an Identical Lunch at the museum café

546
This event took place in conjunction with the Tate exhibition, States of Flux (2012) while the Walker Art Center
event coincided with Art Expanded, 1958-1978.
547
Claire Bishop, Artificial Hells, 232, notes that in the last twenty years performance art has become
“industrialized” as it has moved from festivals to museums. Artists’ participatory events, in particular can be
instrumentalized to fulfill audience engagement mandates.
548
The High Line, an adaptive re-use of the old Westside Highway, opened in 2009 and has its own arts program,
High Line Arts that sponsored Knowles’ Make A Salad.
549
High Line Art, Alison Knowles’ Make a Salad, April 22, 2012, Chelsea Market passage.
http://art.thehighline.org/project/alisonknowles/ (accessed on February 20, 2016)
550
Feast: Radical Hospitality in Contemporary Art, on view at the Smart Museum, February 16 – June 10, 2012, was
curated by Stephanie Smith and traveled to the Blaffer Museum at University of Houston, SITE Santa Fe, the Gund
Gallery at Kenyon College in Ohio and the Weisman Art Museum in Minneapolis., 2013- 2015.

240
and choose to eat the tuna sandwich and cup of soup or buttermilk as specified in the score, or
decide to alter the meal, according to their own tastes. This experience within the café setting
closely resembles the early Identical Lunch events at the Riss Diner or anywhere else anyone
chose to enact the score.
Inside the galleries, the installation of Identical Lunch included six screen prints, a copy
of the Journal of the Identical Lunch displayed in a vitrine and a tuna sandwich and a cup of
buttermilk placed on a pedestal with an explanatory text on the wall. (fig. 5.12a) Inspired by a
photograph from an unknown date and place in the 1970s,
551
this didactic installation could be
viewed and understood as a narrative without any of the sensory or bodily experiences of
enacting the event score. To compensate for this, Knowles did a live performance titled the
Symphony of the Identical Lunch, in which she changed the score: all the ingredients would be
put into a blender and served as a cold soup. (fig. 5.12b) This whimsical version, first suggested
to Knowles by Maciunas, turned Identical Lunch into a musical event: participants at the Smart
brought their own blenders as Knowles conducted the “symphony” of all the buzzing motors.
552

Once again, this became a large-scale event with hundreds enjoying the soup and the “found
sounds” of the blenders.
While Knowles stages events in these public contexts to accommodate a greater
number of participants, no matter how many people share in the communal meal, I believe that
consuming the food is still a personal, “micro” event—all the sensations of seeing, tasting,

551
Feast: Radical Hospitality in Contemporary Art, Stephanie Smith, ed. (Chicago: Smart Museum of Art and the
University of Chicago Press, 2012): 67-68.
552
In my previously cited interview with Knowles she told me about a letter Maciunas wrote to her: “Dear Alison,
Here is my idea of the — Identical Lunch— Put tuna fish, wheat toast, lettuce, butter, soup or buttermilk— all
into a blender—blend til all is smooth—drink it. Best regards, George.” It is a well-known fact that Maciunas
suffered from digestion problems so this was his personal solution to perform the score. Knowles also told
me more recently this letter is now part of the Gil and Lila Silverman Archives at MoMA.

241
chewing, swallowing, and digesting can only be experienced by an individual body. Additionally,
the score still functions as an instruction to perform a specific action, an invitation for a sensory
experience, and a learning experience, whether one gains knowledge about where food is
sourced, how one’s body and senses function, or how to “play” a blender. Finally, while social
conditions and audience reception have changed since the primary conception of these scores,
these events—from spare Zen Propositions to large-scale iterations—still embody Knowles’s
original intent: they are cumulative meditations and/or object lessons on the everyday and the
“Secrets of Ordinary Things.”

242
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Fig. 1.1 Anna Halprin and San Francisco Dance Workshop, Parades and Changes, 1965, detail of dressing and
undressing sequence, Berkeley
Fig. 1.2 Anna Halprin and Lawrence Halprin, Experiments in the Environment, 1968, detail of blindfolded walk,
Kentfield
Fig. 1.3 Allan Kaprow with students from Project Other Ways, Six Ordinary Happenings, 1970, photograph of Shape
in Berkeley and in Oakland Tribune article
Fig. 1.4 Allan Kaprow with students from California Insitute of the Arts, Publicity (Happening at Vasquez Rocks),
1970, Agua Dulce

Fig. 1.4 Allan Kaprow with students from California Institute of the Arts,
Publicity (Happening at Vasquez Rocks (1970) poster and celebration
Fig. 1.5 a-b Alison Knowles, students outside and inside House of Dust, 1970-71, California Institute of the Arts,
Burbank campus
Fig. 2.1a-b Lawrence Halprin and Arch Lauterer, original photographs of dance deck, 1959, Kentfield
Fig. 2.1c-d Lawrence Halprin and Arch Lauterer, original photograph of dance deck and floorplan, 1959, Kentfield
Fig. 2.2a-b Lawrence Halprin and Arch Lauterer, contemporary photographs of dancers on dance deck and
studio, 2014
Fig. 2. 3a-b Anna Halprin, Movement Ritual book cover, 1975
Charleene Koonce, Movement Ritual diagrams, 1975
Fig. 2. 4 San Francisco Dancers’ Workshop Storefront, Divisidero Street, San Francisco, 1955
Fig. 2. 5a-b Simone Forti and Anna Halprin, Trunk Dance, 1959
Simone Forti, John Graham, and A. A. Leath, Trunk Dance, 1959
Fig. 2. 6a-b Anna Halprin and A. A. Leath, Birds of America, 1960
John Graham and Daria Halprin, Birds of America, 1960
Fig. 2.7 Summer Workshop participants at the Halprin studio, Kentfield
From left to right, standing: Shirley Ririe, Trisha Brown, June Ekman, Sunni Bloland, Anna Halprin, Lisa Strauss, Paul Pera, Willis Ward;
seated: Jerrie Glover, Ruth Emerson, unknown, Simone Forti, Yvonne Rainer, A. A. Leath, unknown, John Graham.
Fig. 2. 8 La Monte Young, Composi ion #2, #3, #4, & #5, 1960
Fig. 2. 9a-b La Monte Young, An Anthology cover and interior folio, 1963
Fig. 2.10a-b Anna Halprin and San Francisco Dancers’ Workshop, Parades and Changes, 1965,
Stockholm Music Festival
Fig. 2.11a Allan Kaprow, Paper, photographs of the Happening, 1964, UC Berkeley parking lot
Fig. 2.11b Allan Kaprow, Paper, score of the Happening, 1964, UC Berkeley parking lot
Fig. 2.12 Anna Halprin and San Francisco Dancers’ Workshop, Invocation of the Cement Spirit ,
program cover and detail, 1970, University Art Museum, Berkeley
Fig. 2.13 Anna Halprin and San Francisco Dancers’ Workshop, Invocation of the Cement Spirit, paper dance
details, 1970, University Art Museum, Berkeley
Fig. 2.14 Anna Halprin, Gestalt Diagram, c. 1969
Fig. 2.1 5a Anna and Lawrence Halprin, Experiments in the Environment, 1966, San Francisco
Fig. 2.1 5b Anna and Lawrence Halprin, Experiments in the Environment detail of Gravity, 1968, Kent field
Fig. 2.1 5c Anna and Lawrence Halprin, Experiments in the Environment, details of Blindfolded Walk and discussion
after event, 1968, Kentfield
Fig. 2.1 5d-e Anna and Lawrence Halprin, Experiments in the Environment details, 1968,
Sea Ranch, Mendocino
Fig. 2.1 5f-g Anna and Lawrence Halprin, Experiments in the Environment detail and score, 1968
Fig. 2.1 6a Anna and Lawrence Halprin, Diagram of the RSVP Cycles, 1969
Fig. 2.1 6b Anna and Lawrence Halprin, Diagram of the RSVP Cycles, 1969
Fig. 3.1 Brandes School, Tucson, Arizona, c. 1945
Fig. 3.2 Portrait of Allan Kaprow in a cowboy outfit, c. 1945
Fig. 3.3a-c Allan Kaprow, Figure in the Landscape, 1953, oil on canvas; Caged Pheasant, 1957, collage and
Rearrangeable Panels––Kiosk version, 1957, assemblage
Fig. 3.4 Allan Kaprow, untitled scores from John Cage’s Composition class, 1957-58
Fig. 3.5 Untitled Environment, 1958, invitation and scores, Hansa Gallery, New York
Fig. 3.6 Allan Kaprow, cover of Assemblage, Happenings, Environments, 1966
Fig. 3.7 18 Happenings in 6 Parts, 1959, Reuben Gallery, New York
Fig. 3.8 Allan Kaprow, Yard, 1961, Martha Jackson Gallery, New York
Fig. 3.9 Allan Kaprow, Self-Service score, 1966, Boston, Los Angeles and New York
Fig. 3.10 Allan Kaprow, Fluids, 1967, poster and score
Fig. 3.11 a-b Allan Kaprow, Fluids, 1967, building structures in Pasadena
Fig. 3.12a Allan Kaprow and Herbert Kohl, Project Other Ways, prospectus and logo 1968-69
Fig. 3.12b Allan Kaprow and Herbert Kohl, Suppose… Project Other Ways poster, 1968-69
Fig. 3.12c Student collages, Project Other Ways, 1968-69
Fig. 3.13a Allan Kaprow, Six Ordinary Happenings, 1969, off-set poster
Fig. 3.13b Allan Kaprow, Charity, Six Ordinary Happenings, 1969, score and photograph
Fig. 3.13c Allan Kaprow, Giveaway, Six Ordinary Happenings, 1969, score and photograph
Fig. 3.13d Allan Kaprow, Purpose, Six Ordinary Happenings, 1969, score and photograph
Fig. 3.13e Allan Kaprow, Pose, Six Ordinary Happenings, 1969, score and photographs
Fig. 3.13f-g Allan Kaprow and students, Shape, Six Ordinary Happenings, 1969, score and photograph from
Oakland Tribune
Fig. 3.13h Allan Kaprow, Fine, Six Ordinary Happenings, 1969, photographs
Fig. 3.14a-b Allan Kaprow, Pose and Dial, 1969, San Francisco Art institute
Fig. 3.15a-b Allan Kaprow, Days Off , 1970, calendar published by the Museum of Modern Art and installation at
John Gibson Gallery, New York
Fig. 3.16a Larry Miller and Maurice Stein, Blueprint for Counter-Education , 1969, California Institute of the Arts
Fig. 3.16b Modernism and Post Modernism poster from Blueprint for Counter-Education , 1969,
California Institute of the Arts
Fig. 3.16c The Box, 1969, California Institute of the Arts
Fig. 3.17a Cover of Prologue to a Community: California Institute of the Arts , special issue of Arts in Society, vol. 7,
no. 3, Fall-Winter 1970
Fig. 3.17b Allan Kaprow, Roundtrip through LA between home and the institute , photographs, 1970
Fig. 3.18a Suzanne Lacy, Maps Happening with Allan Kaprow’s class, detail of lamb drawing and organs,
1974, Valencia
Fig. 3.18b Suzanne Lacy, Maps Happening with Allan Kaprow’s class, detail of meat-packing factory, 1974, Vernon
Fig. 3.19a Allan Kaprow, Publicity (Happening at Vasquez Rocks) poster, 1970
Fig. 3.19b-c Allan Kaprow, Publicity (Happening at Vasquez Rocks) details of building and filming, 1970, Agua Dulce
Fig. 3.20a-b Allan Kaprow, Tracts, Happening with students in Allan Kaprow’s class, 1971
Fig. 3.21 Allan Kaprow, Scales, photographs of Happening with students in Allan Kaprow’s class, 1971
Fig. 3.22a Allan Kaprow, Easy, 1971, as documented in Art in America July/August, 1974
Fig. 3.22b Allan Kaprow, Easy, 1971, as documented in Art in America July/August, 1974
Fig. 3.22b Allan Kaprow, Easy, 1971, as documented in Art in America July/August, 1974
Fig. 3.23 Allan Kaprow, Air Condition , Activity booklet, 1973
Fig. 4.1 Alison Knowles in her studio with paintings, 1958
Fig. 4.2 George Brecht, Drip Music, 1959, performed in 1962 by Dick Higgins at Fluxus Festival, Nicolaj Church and Art
Centre, Copenhagen
Fig. 4. 3a Alison Knowles, Shuffle 1961 and Proposition # 2: Make A Salad, 1962, printed in by Alison Knowles,
Great Bear Pamphlet, 1965
Fig. 4. 3b Alison Knowles, Variation #1 on Proposition, Nivea Cream Piece and Variation #1 on Nivea Cream Piece,
printed in by Alison Knowles, Great Bear Pamphlet, 1965
Fig. 4. 4a Nam June Paik, Zen for Head, 1962, International Festival of New Music, Wiebaden, Germany
Fig. 4.4b Emmett Williams, George Maciunas, Dick Higgins and Ben Patterson performing Philip Corner’s
Piano Activities, 1962, International Festival of New Music, Wiesbaden
Fig. 4.4c Emmett Williams, George Maciunas, Dick Higgins and Ben Patterson performing Philip Corner’s Piano
Activities, photograph with Alison Knowles in background, International Festival of New Music, Wiesbaden
Fig. 4 .4d Efter alle kunstens regler (When All Artists Rule) Political Cartoon, Politiken, September 25, 1962
Fig. 4. 5 Alison Knowles and Dick Higgins, Danger Music Number Two, International Fluxus Festival of Very New
Music, Wiesbaden, 1962
Fig. 4.6 Alison Knowles, Proposition # 2: Make A Salad, printed in by Alison Knowles, Great Bear Pamphlet, 1965
Fig. 4.7 George Maciunas, Artists’ Logotypes, (Alison Knowles’ logo in 2nd row, 4th square), 1964
Fig. 4.9a-c Alison Knowles with Big Book and Big Book viewed from front, 1967-69
Fig. 4.8a-b Alison Knowles, Identical Lunch , 1967, object from performance
Fig. 4.8c Alison Knowles, Journal of the Identical Lunch , 1971, artists’ book
Fig. 4.10a-b Alison Knowles and James Tenney, House of Dust, computer print-out and detail, 1970
Fig. 4.11a-b Alison Knowles, House of Dust, off-set lithographic postcards, 1970
Fig. 4.12a-b Alison Knowles, House of Dust, exterior of fiberglass and sand houses, California Institute of
the Arts, 1970
Fig. 4.12c Alison Knowles, Here is a Stone From What I’m Doing Now, Contribution to The Box, California Institute
of the Arts, 1970
Fig. 4.12d-e Alison Knowles House of Dust, interior with students, 1970 and Michael Bell, Meditation Event, 1971,
California Institute of the Arts
Fig. 4.13a Alison Knowles, Computer Poem Drop, silk-screened postcards with House of Dust and 99 Red North on
front and score on back, 1971
Fig. 4.13b-c Alison Knowles and Norman Kaplan, Computer Poem Drop Over the House of Dust, California Institute
of the Arts, Valencia Campus, 1971
Fig. 4.14a-b Alison Knowles, 99 Red and detail of keys, 1970, California Institute of the Arts, Burbank Campus
Fig. 4.15a-b Alison Knowles, Street Piece, 1962-63 and Color Music, 1963 printed in by Alison Knowles,
Great Bear Pamphlet, 1965
Fig. 4.16 House of Dust, photograph of small house installed at the preschool of the Early Childhood Education Program at
College of the Canyons in Santa Clarita near California Institute of the Arts
Fig. 4.17a-b Alison Knowles with Marcel Duchamp and Coeurs Volant, silkscreen, 1967
Fig. 4.18 Alison Knowles, Identical Lunch, silkscreen prints with Shigeko Kubota and George Maciunas, 1970
Fig. 4.1 Alison Knowles in her studio with paintings, 1958
Fig. 4.2 George Brecht, Drip Music, 1959, performed in 1962 by Dick Higgins at Fluxus Festival, Nicolaj Church and Art
Centre, Copenhagen
Fig. 4. 3a Alison Knowles, Shuffle 1961 and Proposition # 2: Make A Salad, 1962, printed in by Alison Knowles,
Great Bear Pamphlet, 1965
Fig. 4. 3b Alison Knowles, Variation #1 on Proposition, Nivea Cream Piece and Variation #1 on Nivea Cream Piece,
printed in by Alison Knowles, Great Bear Pamphlet, 1965
Fig. 4. 4a Nam June Paik, Zen for Head, 1962, International Festival of New Music, Wiebaden, Germany
Fig. 4.4b Emmett Williams, George Maciunas, Dick Higgins and Ben Patterson performing Philip Corner’s
Piano Activities, 1962, International Festival of New Music, Wiesbaden
Fig. 4.4c Emmett Williams, George Maciunas, Dick Higgins and Ben Patterson performing Philip Corner’s Piano
Activities, photograph with Alison Knowles in background, International Festival of New Music, Wiesbaden
Fig. 4 .4d Efter alle kunstens regler (When All Artists Rule) Political Cartoon, Politiken, September 25, 1962
Fig. 4. 5 Alison Knowles and Dick Higgins, Danger Music Number Two, International Fluxus Festival of Very New
Music, Wiesbaden, 1962
Fig. 4.6 Alison Knowles, Proposition # 2: Make A Salad, printed in by Alison Knowles, Great Bear Pamphlet, 1965
Fig. 4.7 George Maciunas, Artists’ Logotypes, (Alison Knowles’ logo in 2nd row, 4th square), 1964
Fig. 4.9a-c Alison Knowles with Big Book and Big Book viewed from front, 1967-69
Fig. 4.8a-b Alison Knowles, Identical Lunch , 1967, object from performance
Fig. 4.8c Alison Knowles, Journal of the Identical Lunch , 1971, artists’ book
Fig. 4.10a-b Alison Knowles and James Tenney, House of Dust, computer print-out and detail, 1970
Fig. 4.11a-b Alison Knowles, House of Dust, off-set lithographic postcards, 1970
Fig. 4.12a-b Alison Knowles, House of Dust, exterior of fiberglass and sand houses, California Institute of
the Arts, 1970
Fig. 4.12c Alison Knowles, Here is a Stone From What I’m Doing Now, Contribution to The Box, California Institute
of the Arts, 1970
Fig. 4.12d-e Alison Knowles House of Dust, interior with students, 1970 and Michael Bell, Meditation Event, 1971,
California Institute of the Arts
Fig. 4.13a Alison Knowles, Computer Poem Drop, silk-screened postcards with House of Dust and 99 Red North on
front and score on back, 1971
Fig. 4.13b-c Alison Knowles and Norman Kaplan, Computer Poem Drop Over the House of Dust, California Institute
of the Arts, Valencia Campus, 1971
Fig. 4.14a-b Alison Knowles, 99 Red and detail of keys, 1970, California Institute of the Arts, Burbank Campus
Fig. 4.15a-b Alison Knowles, Street Piece, 1962-63 and Color Music, 1963 printed in by Alison Knowles,
Great Bear Pamphlet, 1965
Fig. 4.16 House of Dust, photograph of small house installed at the preschool of the Early Childhood Education Program at
College of the Canyons in Santa Clarita near California Institute of the Arts
Fig. 4.17a-b Alison Knowles with Marcel Duchamp and Coeurs Volant, silkscreen, 1967
Fig. 4.18 Alison Knowles, Identical Lunch, silkscreen prints with Shigeko Kubota and George Maciunas, 1970

Abstract (if available)

Abstract Anna Halprin, Allan Kaprow, and Alison Knowles each established an artistic practice that made use of scores for event-based performances. In 1959 Halprin innovated her improvised form of ordinary, task-oriented kinesthetic movement in collaborative events with her San Francisco Dancers’ Workshop (SFDW), founded that year. Also in 1959, Kaprow staged his first large-scale public Happenings, which evolved into more intimate Work Routines and Activities. Knowles first wrote and performed her abbreviated scores, or Propositions, with Fluxus in 1962 and since then has produced participatory intermedia events and installations. ❧ What is less well known is how Halprin, Kaprow, and Knowles incorporated event-based performances into experimental education in California in the 1960s and 1970s. Although a few monographs or scholarly studies discuss these artists’ pedagogical interests, this is the first dissertation to delve deeply into how they integrated event scores into specific courses and collaborative workshops in self-generated contexts or established art schools and universities. In the chapters that follow, I demonstrate how they imbricated their performances into teaching by using everyday activities and mundane materials, by activating the body and sensory perception, by exploring urban sites and natural environments, and by encouraging communication and collaboration. I argue that the integration of their performance methodologies and pedagogical strategies facilitated experimental and experiential learning, allowing students to acquire knowledge and to access multiple intelligences. I conclude that the event-based teaching experiments undertaken by Halprin, Kaprow, and Knowles in the 1960s and 1970s continued to influence their subsequent artistic production and remain relevant today given the resurgent interest in pedagogy since the mid-2000s.

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Creator Moss, Karen (author)

Core Title Performance into pedagogy: Anna Halprin, Allan Kaprow, and Alison Knowles' score-based events in experimental arts education

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Art History

Publication Date 05/06/2016

Defense Date 03/21/2016

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag experimental arts education,fluxus,intermedia,OAI-PMH Harvest,performance art

Format application/pdf (imt)

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Hudson, Suzanne (committee chair), Holo, Selma (committee member), Jones, Amelia (committee member)

Creator Email karen_moss@mac.com,moss@usc.edu

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c40-247740

Unique identifier UC11279641

Identifier etd-MossKaren-4406.pdf (filename),usctheses-c40-247740 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-MossKaren-4406.pdf

Dmrecord 247740

Document Type Dissertation

Format application/pdf (imt)

Rights Moss, Karen

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the a...

Repository Name University of Southern California Digital Library

Repository Location USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus MC 2810, 3434 South Grand Avenue, 2nd Floor, Los Angeles, California 90089-2810, USA