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Reinventing ephemeral forms: an investigation of the reinvention of Allan Kaprow's work in Allan Kaprow—Art as life (2008)

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Reinventing ephemeral forms: an investigation of the reinvention of Allan Kaprow's work in Allan Kaprow—Art as life (2008)

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REINVENTING EPHEMERAL FORMS: AN INVESTIGATION OF THE REINVENTION OF
ALLAN KAPROW’S WORK IN ALLAN KAPROW—ART AS LIFE (2008)

by

Julia R. McCornack

A Thesis Presented to the
Faculty of the USC Graduate School
University of Southern California
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
Master of Arts
(Art and Curatorial Practices in the Public Sphere)
May 2014
ii

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Any work such as this would not have been realized without the generous support of several
people I wish to thank. I would like to express my deepest gratitude to Connie Butler for the
unwavering encouragement and tremendous insight she provided—it has been an honor to work
with Butler. Thank you to Rhea Anastas for bringing clarity to my ideas and for instilling
confidence in my writing. Thanks to Suzanne Hudson, for the gracious guidance and invaluable
advice. Thank you also to Noura Wedell for the compassion and support as a professor.

My sincere indebtedness to the individuals who provided a wealth of knowledge for this project:
Micol Hebron, Philipp Kaiser, Corrina Peipon, Andrew Perchuk, Steve Roden, Judith
Rodenbeck, Aandrea Stang, and Barbara T. Smith. A special thank you to Tamara Bloomberg of
the Allan Kaprow Estate for the generous assistance. My appreciation also goes to the
incomparable resources and helpful individuals at the Getty Research Institute for the History of
Art and the Humanities, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and the Norton Simon
Museum.

I would like to extend my most sincere gratitude to my family—Donna, Clark and Andrew
McCornack—for fostering my curiosity and supporting my scholarly endeavors. I am also
grateful to Michael Daly for his continued support.

iii

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgements……………………………………………………………………………….ii

Abstract……………………………………………………………………………………...........iv

Introduction………………………………………… …………………………………………….1

Chapter One: The Problem of Allan Kaprow—Art as Life………………………………………10

Chapter Two: Reinvention as an Artists’ Methodology…………………………………………14

Chapter Three: Reinvention and its Applications:
Works in the 2008 MOCA Presentation…………………………………………………………25
Push and Pull…………………………………………………………………………………….32
Fluids…………………………………………………………………………………………….38
Words…………………………………………………………………………………………….45
The Question of Authorship……………………………………………………………………...51
Issues of Artist’s Intention and Authority………………………………………………………..53

Conclusion……………………………………………………………………………………….56

Bibliography……………………………………………………………………………………..60

iv

ABSTRACT
The late Allan Kaprow’s notion of reinvention functions as a model that carefully
systematizes future instantiations of the artist’s work. Deftly articulated through his
writings, reinventions are not the same as reconstructions, re-presentations, or re-
creations because the term denotes that such reinvented versions “differ markedly from
their originals.”
1
What is reinvention to Kaprow, and what are its limits as an approach
when it is transferred to curators, scholars and other artists making his work? Looking at
the example of the traveling retrospective Allan Kaprow—Art as Life, realized just after
Kaprow’s death in 2006, this thesis centers on the production of the artist’s ephemeral
works in the 2008 presentation at the Geffen Contemporary at the Museum of
Contemporary Art (MOCA), Los Angeles. By defining and conceiving of reinvention as
an artists’ methodology, this thesis argues that reinvention can be theorized, despite
hierarchies between artists’ writing and critical discourse. This study reveals how this
artists’ methodology changes when it is transferred from the original artist to curators,
scholars and other artists. It looks at such changes by focusing on aspects such as
authorship, artist’s intention, and authority. This thesis demonstrates that reinvention can
be used to analyze works in the MOCA show, including Push and Pull: A Furniture
Comedy for Hans Hofmann (1963/2008), Words (1962/2008), and Fluids (1967/2008)—
pieces that were also realized in Kaprow’s first retrospective at the Pasadena Art Museum
in 1967—as well as other instances of reinvention. Additionally, given Kaprow’s interest
in reinvention, process, and changeability, this thesis explores the very idea of theorizing
from artists’ writing and own self-theorization.

1
Allan Kaprow, “Introduction to a Theory,” in 7 Environments, by Allan Kaprow (Milan: Fondazione Mudima,
1992), 23.
1

INTRODUCTION

I am put off by museums 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…Museums do more than isolate
such work from life, they subtly sanctify it and thus kill it.
2

The opening statement included in the Pasadena Art Museum’s exhibition catalogue for
Allan Kaprow’s first retrospective show in 1967 reveals the complexities of the artist’s position
concerning the presentation of art within an institutional context. Throughout his life, Kaprow, a
vanguard of performance art who is popularly known for creating the term “Happening,” had a
contradictory and unresolved view towards exhibitions that displayed his work and ultimately
created contextual art forms in sites which opposed the values Kaprow attributed to a museum.
In fact, the artist’s experiential and participatory works sought to resist commodification and blur
the boundaries between art and life. Given this, the artist’s traveling retrospective, Allan
Kaprow—Art as Life, conceived by Eva Meyer-Hermann and Stephanie Rosenthal, and realized
just after Kaprow’s death in 2006—particularly as staged at the Geffen Contemporary at the
Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), Los Angeles—provides a rich platform for
investigating the issue of “reinventing” Kaprow’s ephemeral work for an institutional venture.
3

Reinvention, a term Kaprow began using in his writings in the early 1990s, is a unique model for

2
Allan Kaprow, statement in Allan Kaprow: An Exhibition sponsored by the Art Alliance of the Pasadena Art
Museum (Pasadena: Pasadena Art Museum, 1967), 3.
3
Allan Kaprow—Art as Life was a traveling exhibition, which was on view at five different museums from 2006-
2008. The show opened on October 17, 2006 at the first venue, the Haus der Kunst in Munich. Kaprow died on
April 5, 2006. Reinvention is a term that Kaprow used for the restaging of his work. He uses the phrase in his essay
“Introduction to a Theory,” in 7 Environments (1992). Stephanie Rosenthal’s essay “Agency for Action” discusses
the term reinvention in Allan Kaprow—Art as Life (2008), a comprehensive volume published by the Getty Research
Institute upon the conclusion of the traveling retrospective. Reinvention will be further defined in Chapter Two.

2

the production of future instantiations of his work that will be both examined and theorized in
this paper.
4

With Arizona ranch life as the backdrop for his early days, Kaprow, who suffered severe
asthma and spent most of his childhood living where the climate was better suited for his
condition, participated in activities such as attending rodeos and taking care of routine ranch
chores.
5
Kaprow’s biographer Jeff Kelley affirms that origins of Kaprow’s work can be found in
his ranch life experiences, where “his everyday life was something special—that from
insignificant daily routines might spring forth vivid experiences….”
6
When Kaprow’s health
improved, he returned to the east coast where he studied painting with Hans Hofmann from
1947-1948 at the Hans Hofmann School of Fine Arts in New York, NY. While studying with
Hofmann, Kaprow learned Hofmann’s philosophy of “push and pull,” which he would later use
as a “foil against which to experiment with the aleatory effects of collage.”
7
Kaprow studied art
history with Meyer Schapiro at Columbia University in New York from 1950-1952.
8
Schapiro
was a significant influence on Kaprow’s studies, teaching him the “value of a detailed formal and
social analysis of art and art history.”
9
From 1957-1958, Kaprow attended a weekly music
composition with John Cage at the New School for Social Research in New York. Known for his
use of chance operation, Cage’s scores are unpredictable and employ sounds created by non-
instrumental objects. It is interesting to note that Cage’s 1952 untitled event at Black Mountain

4
Tamara Bloomberg of the Allan Kaprow Estate is confirming when Kaprow first used the word reinvention in his
writing for the author. At the time this thesis was written, Bloomberg and the author believe the artist first used the
term in his essay for 7 Environments (1992).
5
Kaprow was born in 1927 in Atlantic City, New Jersey.
6
Jeff Kelley, Childsplay: The Art of Allan Kaprow (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 11.
7
Ibid., 8.
8
Kaprow earned a M.A. in Art History and wrote his masters thesis on Piet Mondrian.
9
Jeff Kelley, “Introduction,” in Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life, ed. Jeff Kelley (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2003), xxv. In “Critique of Instrumental Labor: Meyer Schapiro’s and Allan Kaprow’s Theory of
Avant-Garde Art,” Robert Haywood discusses how Kaprow was shaped by Schapiro’s social philosophy of art and
positions Kaprow’s practice vis-à-vis the critique of capital.
3

College is by and large attributed as the first occurrence to demonstrate characteristics of the
word “happening”. During Cage’s experimental music course, Kaprow ultimately was impacted
by “Cagean theories about aleatory, mixed-media composition” which gave him a “way of
composing and presenting the chance operations of concrete, commonplace phenomena.”
10

Cage’s workshop was a formative experience for Kaprow and ultimately provided him with a
platform leading to the conception of Happenings.
Kaprow started his career as a painter in the early 1950s and invented his first “action
collages” in 1956. These works, which were the size of a painting, included found materials,
scraps of paintings by the artist, and other materials to create the composition. Following
Kaprow’s action collages, he began developing assemblages. The artist’s assemblages were
larger and included raw materials not typically found in an artist’s studio. While these works
retained some characteristics of traditional painting, the use of materials found in daily life
enabled Kaprow to create works that gave the viewer a visual experience without employing
conventional painting technique. Rearrangeable Panels (1957), an assemblage that could
literally be arranged and rearranged by the artist or curator, is one of Kaprow’s better-known
works within this period. Kaprow began creating “Environments,” or works that filled an entire
space of a gallery that literally immersed the viewer inside the work of art, about two years after
he started creating assemblages.
11
Kaprow’s first Environments were installed at the Hansa
Gallery in 1958, a New York space that he co-founded in 1952. By creating works that place the
viewer inside the work of art, Kaprow drew upon the immersive character of Pollock’s all-over
paintings but entered a new space of artistic practice.

10
Jeff Kelley, Childsplay: The Art of Allan Kaprow (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 16-17.
11
I will capitalize the term Environment in this paper. Jeff Kelley does not capitalize “environment” in Childsplay:
The Art of Allan Kaprow, but it is capitalized by Eva Meyer-Hermann, Stephanie Rosenthal, and others.

4

The term Happening first appeared in Kaprow’s monumental essay “The Legacy of
Jackson Pollock” (1958) to describe an unidentified form of art.
12
Kaprow’s first public
Happening, Communication (1958), was presented at the Douglass College campus of Rutgers
University as a part of a lecture series.
13
In 1958, the Hansa Gallery invited Kaprow to create a
piece for the gallery’s inaugural exhibition. It was for this occasion that Kaprow conceived
Eighteen Happenings in Six Parts (1958) which was his first work to include the term Happening
in the title. A “new collage form of performance,” the work “initially was a collage of rather
abstract events for moveable audiences….”
14
Following Kaprow’s invention of the term
Happening, the word quickly became a part of popular culture. Kelley explains “Eighteen
Happenings may have been the culmination of several years’ work for Kaprow, but for other
artists is was the beginning of an intense period of experimentation with the performance genre
suddenly known as Happenings.”
15
In “Pinpointing Happenings” (1967), Kaprow states
“Happening is a household word, yet it means almost anything to the households that hear it and
use it” and provides various examples of the ways in which the term Happening is applied to
contexts ranging from political campaigns to a cosmetics advertisement.
16
By 1967, Kaprow had

12
For this paper, I will use the word Happening with a capital “H” to refer to this work. Judith Rodenbeck does not
capitalize the word “happening” when describing Kaprow’s works in Radical Prototypes: Allan Kaprow and the
Invention of Happenings. However, Kaprow titles the word in his 2001 essay “Preface to the Expanded Edition: On
the Way to Un-Art,” in Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life. Jeff Kelley, Eva Meyer-Hermann, Stephanie
Rosenthal, and others have capitalized the term in their writings.
13
For his lecture, Kaprow “prerecorded a script on the impossibility of communication and replayed it from three
different tape decks in three different parts of the lecture hall.” Judith F. Rodenbeck, Radical Prototypes: Allan
Kaprow and the Invention of Happenings (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2011), 232. Kaprow taught at Rutgers University
in New Jersey from 1953 to 1961.
14
Judith F. Rodenbeck, Radical Prototypes: Allan Kaprow and the Invention of Happenings (Cambridge: MIT
Press, 2011), ix. Allan Kaprow, “Preface to the Expanded Edition: On the Way to Un-Art,” in Essays on the
Blurring of Art and Life, ed. Jeff Kelley (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), xxvii.
15
Jeff Kelley, Childsplay: The Art of Allan Kaprow (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 43.

16
Allan Kaprow, “Pinpointing Happenings,” in Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life, ed. Jeff Kelley (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2003), 84.
5

moved away from the phrase Happening: “Most, including myself, have tried to get rid of the
word Happening, but this seems futile by now.”
17

In the late 1960s, Kaprow began creating more intimate actions later known as
“Activities,” which “consist of private actions undertaken by consenting participants who agreed
to realize a scored event. The contents changed with each action but all addressed problems of
perception and the observation of the performance of particular aspects of life.”
18
In an essay
included in the exhibition catalogue 7 Environments, Pierre Restany conveys that Kaprow
“abandoned the devaluated term ‘Happening’ for the voluntarily neutral ‘Activities.’”
19
Restany
draws on the word “neutral” to describe Kaprow’s choice of the term Activity and Kaprow also
uses the term when recounting the use of photography as a way to give participants instructions
on how to realize an event: “None of the photos—or practically none after the sixties—are
documents at all. [They] were made up in the style of…escape instructions…I just was looking

17
Allan Kaprow, “Pinpointing Happenings,” in Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life, ed. Jeff Kelley (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2003), 85. In his 2001 essay “On the Way to Un-Art,” Kaprow reflects on the status
of Happenings following their initial creation:
But soon, even the experimental Happenings appeared saddled with art history they would replace. I’m not
referring to the traditional topics of genre, style, and subject matter which occupy historians and critics. I’m
talking about unquestioned beliefs associated with all the arts. For example, belief in objects that can be
possessed; belief in eternity; belief in control and skill; belief in creativity; belief in publicity and fame;
belief in marketability. These beliefs guided the Happenings no less than the conventional arts and popular
culture. Happenings, therefore, were just another version of vanguard theater. But I gradually eliminated
most of these beliefs by doing events only once, by not sending out announcements, by shifting events
sites…to remote landscapes or to multiple sites…. The biggest problem, however, was the presence of
audiences at Happenings…. Commercial galleries and most museums also count their attendees to
determine upcoming budgets, programs, sales. Getting rid of one’s audiences could threaten not only an
artist’s self-esteem but his or her survival. I had a job, fortunately, so I could experiment.
Allan Kaprow, “Preface to the Expanded Edition: On the Way to Un-Art,” in Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life,
ed. Jeff Kelley (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), xxviii.
18
Kristine Stiles, “Uncorrupted Joy: International Art Activities,” in Out of Actions: Between Performance and the
Object, 1949-1979, by Paul Schimmel (Los Angeles: The Museum of Contemporary Art, 1998), 282. I will
capitalize the term Activity in this paper. Judith Rodenbeck explains, “… demoralized by the mutation of the word
‘happening’ into a synonym for ‘groovy’ and by the increasing commercialization resulting from his all-too-
successful efforts at publicity, Kaprow banished both audience and photographers (but not photography) from his
events, requiring that the only attendees be volunteer participants. He soon shifted, in fact, from happenings to
small, privately executed actions called activities.” Judith F. Rodenbeck, “Foil: Allan Kaprow Before Photography,”
in Experiments in the Everyday: Allan Kaprow and Robert Watts: Events, Objects, Documents, (New York:
Columbia University, Miriam and Ira Wallach Art Gallery, 1999), 56.
19
Pierre Restany, “Re-inventing and Re-membering,” in 7 Environments, by Allan Kaprow (Milan: Fondazione
Mudima, 1992), 11.
6

for a language, a neutral language….”
20
I suggest that Kaprow deliberately selected the term
Activity, a phrase that resists a certain kind of language around art practice that implies an art
historical context. Also, the artist appears to be avoiding a term that would become
commercialized like the phrase Happening. From the 1970s throughout the later part of his
career, Kaprow’s practice was progressively private, experienced by very few people, and
functioned in sites removed from the context of the art institution.
21

While evidence suggests that Kaprow moved towards the idea of reinvention when
planning the restaging of his work for exhibitions in the mid-to-late 1980s, he first used the term
in an essay included in 7 Environments (1992), an exhibition catalogue for shows on view at the
Fondazione Mudima, Milan in the fall of 1991 and at Studio Morra, Naples in the winter of 1992
in which he reinvented seven Environments.
22
In this text, the artist argues that unlike
“reconstructions,” reinventions “differ markedly from their originals. Intentionally so.”
23
In this
essay, he claims that the idea stems back to his early practice: “As I wrote in the notes to one of
them [Environments], they were planned to change each time they were remade. This decision,
made in the late 50’s, was the polar opposite of the traditional belief that the physical art
object—the painting, photo, music composition, etc.—should be fixed in a permanent form.”
24

One must take into account that at the time of this statement, Kaprow was creating his own
narrative through his writing practice. Nonetheless, it is crucial to point out that Kaprow

20
Judith F. Rodenbeck, “Foil: Allan Kaprow Before Photography,” in Experiments in the Everyday: Allan Kaprow
and Robert Watts: Events, Objects, Documents, (New York: Columbia University, Miriam and Ira Wallach Art
Gallery, 1999), 57.
21
In 1966, Kaprow acknowledges the broader artistic shift to work outside of the gallery space by noting the limits
of architecture in relation to artistic practice: “If there are to be measures and limits in art they must be of a new
kind. Rather than fight against the confines of a typical room, many are actively considering working out in the
open. They cannot wait for the new architecture.” Allan Kaprow, Assemblages, Environments and Happenings
(New York: H. N. Abrams, 1966), 155.
22
Tamara Bloomberg of the Kaprow Estate is currently confirming this fact for the author.
23
Allan Kaprow, “Introduction to a Theory,” in 7 Environments, by Allan Kaprow (Milan: Fondazione Mudima,
1992), 23.
24
Ibid.
7

reinvented the Environments produced in the late 1980s and 1990s himself, thus maintaining
authorship and authority in the production of the reinvented pieces.
Kaprow’s decision to permit other artists to reinvent new versions of his work, which was
decided during an early conversation with curators Meyer-Hermann and Rosenthal in 2004,
unquestionably shapes the future of Kaprow’s work posthumously and also provides a model for
the restaging of other artists’ ephemeral art forms. The weight of Kaprow’s resolution put the
production of reinvention in the hands of curators and other artists that would inherently produce
a new set of authors, collaborators, discourses, and conditions. This paper illuminates how
reinvention changes in the case of Allan Kaprow—Art as Life, primarily in the retrospective at
MOCA—which was the only venue in the artist’s native country where he spent his career—
when the amount of authorship attributed to the original artist changes. For the MOCA
presentation, friends and colleagues of Kaprow reinvented Environments and an extensive
number of Happenings and Activities were reinvented across the greater Los Angeles area. What
is reinvention to Kaprow, and what are its limits as a methodology when it is transferred to
curators, scholars, and other artists making his work? The critical methodology that will be
traced in this thesis is reinvention as an artists’ methodology. I argue that this artists’
methodology can be theorized, despite hierarchies between artists’ writing and critical discourse.
This paper defines reinvention and investigates how its methodology can be narrated from the
point of view of Kaprow and from its interpretation by the institution, curators, other artists, and
art historians.
To open an analysis of reinvention as an artists’ methodology, this study will examine
Kaprow’s own writing on the term included in 7 Environments. This paper will investigate
curatorial discourse on reinvention, including Rosenthal’s essay “Agency for Action” found in
8

the Getty publication produced in correlation with the occasion of Allan Kaprow—Art as Life.
Also, this paper surveys the material on reinvention selected by the Allan Kaprow Estate for the
artist’s website which illustrates their position on the term. Moreover, it will draw on a text by
Kelley to further illuminate the term. A brief survey of an essay on re-performance by Amelia
Jones will also serve as an example of another position on the restaging of ephemeral works.
Other writings by Kaprow, such as his text on Happenings found in the 1966 publication
Assemblages, Environments and Happenings, will be reviewed to augment this study. Kaprow’s
writing practice provides various examples of his foresight regarding the future of art practice, as
exemplified in his momentous essay, “The Legacy of Jackson Pollock” (1958). In view of that,
Kaprow’s notion of reinvention should not be overlooked despite hierarchies between artists’
writing and critical discourse.
By interrogating the problematic issue of presenting Kaprow’s Environments,
Happenings, and Activities in the 2008 retrospective, this thesis centers on reinvention through
an examination of the concerns that arise when the methodology is employed by curators,
scholars, and artists other than Kaprow. Using reinvention to examine works in the Los Angeles
presentation of Allan Kaprow—Art as Life including Push and Pull: A Furniture Comedy for
Hans Hofmann (1963/2008), Words (1962/2008), and Fluids (1967/2008), I contend that this
artists’ methodology can be used to analyze the MOCA show and other instances of
reinvention.
25
My argument reveals how reinvention changes when it is transferred from the
original artist to various hands and looks at such changes by focusing on aspects such as
authorship, artist’s intention, and authority. In the case of the Kaprow retrospective at hand,
suddenly the authorship of works by Kaprow is distributed, thus putting into question the

25
Push and Pull: A Furniture Comedy for Hans Hofmann (1963/1967/2008), Words (1962/1967/2008), and Fluids
(1967/2008) were all produced for Kaprow’s 1967 retrospective.
9

authorship of the projects produced for the show. What issues of authorship arise when artists
and curators work from this artists’ methodology? To what extent were these works—and other
pieces in the MOCA presentation—reinvented when evaluated through the lens of Kaprow’s
formula for the term? What does it mean to stay close to the original artist’s intention? If an artist
restages a work by Kaprow and attempts to re-produce the original form, the work is not a true
reinvention. This thesis explores the principles of reinvention and where its complex and flexible
boundaries lie. What happens when an interpretation falls outside the rubric of the model and
what risks are at stake in such instances? I posit that some of the MOCA reinventions,
particularly Eighteen Happenings in Six Parts (1958/2008), question the limits of reinvention’s
unstable borders. Additionally, I argue that without the original author present, the authority of
an artist can be compromised due to factors such as institutional constraints and pressure to pay
honor to the original piece by staying close to the initial version. Before analyzing reinvention as
a methodology, this thesis stages the problem of the 2008 MOCA presentation with a brief
outline of the exhibition history and context of Allan Kaprow—Art as Life, followed by a close
description of the issues and challenges presented by organizing a retrospective of Kaprow’s
work.
Finally, I will close by questioning the very idea of theorizing from artists’ methodology
since evidence suggests that Kaprow would not want his own ideas to become something fixed.
Kaprow’s interest in process, changeability, and the viewer’s role in producing an unfixed work
further problematizes the attempt to theorize from reinvention. However, I suggest that curators
and scholars—in addition to artists—can draw on the model of reinvention as a way to approach
their practices with the eye of an inventor, rather than a re-creator.

10

CHAPTER ONE: THE PROBLEM OF ALLAN KAPROW—ART AS LIFE
It is crucial I begin by outlining the exhibition history and context of Allan Kaprow—Art
as Life, which was conceived around 2004 and traveled to a total of five venues from October
2006 through June 2008. Beginning in the early 2000s, an upsurge of exhibitions and
performances that explore ephemeral forms occurred in both the United States and Europe.
Perhaps one of the most-referenced examples is Marina Abramović’s Seven Easy Pieces, which
consisted of seven nights of performances at the Guggenheim Museum in New York from
November 9 through November 15, 2005. For Seven Easy Pieces, each night Abramović re-
performed a work by a total of five other performance artists as well as a work of her own. These
pieces included Bruce Nauman’s Body Pressure (1974), Vito Acconci’s Seedbed (1972), VALIE
EXPORT’s Action Pants: Genital Panic (1969), Gina Pane’s The Conditioning, First Action of
Self-Portrait(s) (1973), Joseph Beuys’s How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare (1965), and
Abramović’s Lips of Thomas (1975).
26
On the final night, the artist performed a new work
created for the show called Entering the Other Side (2005). The show also produced a catalogue
that includes documentation of the re-performed works and the piece commissioned for the
exhibition. Other examples of exhibitions and performances that staged reenactments and re-
performances of past performance works include A Little Bit of History Repeated (2001) at
Kunst-Werke in Berlin; the performance event Re-enact (2004), organized by Casco and
Mediamatic in Amsterdam; A Short History of Performance, an ongoing series beginning in

26
“Marina Abramović: Seven Easy Pieces,” Guggenheim Museum, accessed November 20 2013,
http://pastexhibitions.guggenheim.org/abramovic/.
11

2002 at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in London; and Life, Once More: Forms of Reenactment in
Contemporary Art (2005) at the Witte de With, Center for Contemporary Art in Rotterdam.
Kaprow initially was hesitant and uncertain about the proposition for a retrospective of
his work. During Meyer-Hermann and Rosenthal’s first meeting with the artist on December 14,
2004, Kaprow “set the tone” of the conversation by stating “Here’s the problem: I don’t want to
have a show!”
27
However, Rosenthal conveys that Kaprow had invited the curators to meet with
him and “had already expressed his interest, in principle, in an exhibition of his work.”
28
She
explains, “From that point onward our discussions revolved around this paradox and our
realization that Kaprow’s resistance was deeply rooted in his artistic outlook.”
29
Ultimately,
however, Kaprow agreed to Meyer-Hermann and Rosenthal’s proposed plan of a retrospective.
Rosenthal explains, “By the end of this first visit, Kaprow had agreed to the exhibition. We had
passed his test…. Apparently, there was a certain significance in the fact that we were
Europeans, representing a continent that had shown considerably more interest in Kaprow’s
work in recent years than his native land had done.”
30

It is interesting to take into consideration that Kaprow appeared more willing to work
with European curators and that the show was presented at only one venue in the United States—
in Los Angeles—whereas it traveled to four institutions in Europe. Perhaps the lack of American
interest in Kaprow’s work is due to the fact that until recently Happenings were sidelined within
art historical discourse. Judith Rodenbeck expresses that “Happenings have languished far too
long in the ‘theatrical’ ghetto to which both George Maciunas and Michael Fried relegated them.
This critical marginalization, reinforced by the liminal position that Happenings occupied

27
Stephanie Rosenthal, “Agency for Action,” in Allan Kaprow—Art as Life, ed. Eva Meyer-Hermann, Andrew
Perchuk, and Stephanie Rosenthal (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2008), 57.
28
Ibid., 57-58.
29
Ibid., 58.

30
Ibid.
12

between established artistic mediums, has long prevented any adequate reckoning with them,
either historically or formally—and this despite their widely acknowledged importance. Their
various kinds of resistance—to documentation, to memory, to the market, and even to their own
codification—challenge their illusory appeal of crucial closure.”
31

Kaprow had been resistant towards the prospect of retrospectives in the 1980s and did not
care for the idea of a “retrospective” of his work. In his essay for 7 Environments titled “Re-
Membering,” Kelley explains, “When offered a ‘retrospective’ (that institutionalized form of art-
world memory in which artworks made in the past are re-presented in the present as if they were
still in the past) he will choose instead to ‘retrospect.’”
32
In fact, Kaprow’s 1988 “retrospective”
Allan Kaprow: Precedings, organized by Kelley at the Center for Research in Contemporary Art
at the University of Texas at Arlington, did not take the typical form of a retrospective:
Precedings wasn’t a retrospective in the customary sense. It was retrospection, allowing
Kaprow to think about works he had already done—to think about his career—as a
template for doing new works in various places with different groups of
people…Kaprow’s enactments are works of art (despite his attempts to “un-art” them),
and as such may be considered historical artifacts. But they are, first and always,
enactments of the present. Precedings was not ironic at all. It was a strategy for
acknowledging the passage of time as a way of continuing to work.
33

Rosenthal refers to Kelley’s Precedings as “how things stood” in terms of the most recent
retrospective for Kaprow during their first meeting with the artist.
34
While exploring different
modes in which to present the artist’s work within the context of an institution, the curators

31
Judith F. Rodenbeck, Radical Prototypes: Allan Kaprow and the Invention of Happenings (Cambridge: MIT
Press, 2011), ix.
32
Jeff Kelley, “Re-Membering,” in 7 Environments, by Allan Kaprow (Milan: Fondazione Mudima, 1992), 73.
33
Jeff Kelley, Childsplay: The Art of Allan Kaprow (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 219-220.

34
Stephanie Rosenthal, “Agency for Action,” in Allan Kaprow—Art as Life, ed. Eva Meyer-Hermann, Andrew
Perchuk, and Stephanie Rosenthal (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2008), 57.
13

decided against ideas such as creating a film, framing the exhibition as a workshop, and
producing a traditional show of Kaprow’s paintings.
35

In the publication Allan Kaprow—Art as Life, curators Meyer-Hermann and Rosenthal
discuss the challenges of framing Kaprow’s work within the context of an institution. Meyer-
Hermann discusses Kaprow’s critique of museums, including his pointed statement in the 1967
exhibition catalogue for the Pasadena Art Museum and his published conversation with Robert
Smithson entitled “What Is a Museum” (1967). It is interesting to note that she mentions
Kaprow’s involvement with organizing his retrospective in 1967. She conveys that Kaprow’s
stern theoretical critique of museums and institutions “stands in contrast to Kaprow’s apparently
muted approach to his own exhibition in Pasadena….”
36
Following the 1967 show, Kaprow
participated in fewer exhibitions as his work became increasingly intimate in the later part of his
career.
Kaprow’s decision to permit other artists to reinvent new versions of selected
Environments, Happenings, and Activities not only shaped the conceptual framework for Allan
Kaprow—Art as Life, but also impacted the mode in which his Happenings and Activities would
take form in future exhibitions. Rosenthal further illuminates the weight of Kaprow’s resolution
in relation his practice:
The crucial outcome of our discussion was our decision to realize new versions of some
of Kaprow’s Environments, Happenings, and Activities—to “reinvent” them. He would
have to separate his art from his life, although the two had always been inextricably
connected. This was a radical step on Kaprow’s part, one that would give his whole
output a new dimension. His art would not come to an end, for he was now prepared to

35
Ibid., 58. Rosenthal notes the film’s title would have been “How To Fail To Do an Exhibition with Allan
Kaprow.”
36
Eva Meyer-Hermann, “Museum as Mediation,” in Allan Kaprow—Art as Life, ed. Eva Meyer-Hermann, Andrew
Perchuk, and Stephanie Rosenthal (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2008), 77.
14

let go. The exhibition would mark this change. Kaprow bid us farewell [following their
meeting in 2004] by saying, “I have to take a risk. I have to trust the public.”
37

The consequence of Kaprow’s decision transferred the production of reinvention as an artists’
methodology in the hands of curators and others, thus opening an entirely new set of conditions
for this model to operate.

CHAPTER TWO: REINVENTION AS AN ARTISTS’ METHODOLOGY
Reinvention will now be defined as an artists’ methodology by examining how the term
is narrated from Kaprow’s point of view and from others’ interpretation of the model. This
analysis opens with the artist’s influential essay, “The Legacy of Jackson Pollock” (1958), to
illustrate the importance of Kaprow’s writing practice and foresight regarding the future of art
practice. This example is used to argue that Kaprow’s writing must be taken into account and
held at equal weight with critical discourse. Subsequently, this paper will examine Kaprow’s
essay “An Introduction to a Theory” included in 7 Environments, curator Rosenthal’s essay
“Agency for Action” produced in correlation with the occasion of Allan Kaprow—Art as Life,
material on reinvention selected by the Allan Kaprow Estate, and an essay by art historian Kelley
to further illuminate the term. In order to provide an understanding of another methodology used
for the restaging of ephemeral works, this paper will provide a brief outline of an essay on re-
performance by Amelia Jones. Additionally, an excerpt on Happenings from Assemblages,
Environments and Happenings will be surveyed.
In the seminal essay “The Legacy of Jackson Pollock,” which was written two years after
Jackson Pollock’s death and published in the October 1958 issue of Art News, Kaprow conveys
that Pollock may have sensed that art’s boundaries were on the tip of being broken, but did not

37
Stephanie Rosenthal, “Agency for Action,” in Allan Kaprow—Art as Life, ed. Eva Meyer-Hermann, Andrew
Perchuk, and Stephanie Rosenthal (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2008), 58.

15

push the border’s limit himself. In the moving text, he concludes with a plea to artists of his
generation, asking them to break away from the established mode of practice and to “give up the
making of painting entirely—I mean the single flat rectangle or oval as we know it.”
38
Kaprow
describes what he sees as the setting for the future art scene:
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 lives, either our bodies, clothes,
rooms, 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 substances of
sight, sound, movements, people, odors, touch. Objects of every sort are materials for the
new art: paint, chairs, food, electric and neon lights, smoke, water, old socks, a dog,
movies, a thousand other things that will be discovered by the present generation of
artists. Not only will these bold creators show us, as if for the first time, the world we
have always had about us but ignored, but they will disclose entirely unheard-of
happenings and events, found in garbage cans, police files, hotel lobbies; seen in store
windows and on the streets; and sensed in dreams and horrible accidents. An odor of
crushed strawberries, a letter from a friend, or a billboard selling Drano; three taps on the
front door, a scratch, a sigh, or a voice lecturing endlessly, a blinding staccato flash, a
bowler hat—all will become materials for this new concrete art.
39

Although critics need to be careful when trying to parse an artist’s intention from what they
understand of the artist’s production, its context, and real effects, this text serves as a reminder of
how prescient an artist’s writing can indeed be. This paper will now launch its investigation of
reinvention and define it as an artists’ methodology.
My research suggests that Kaprow’s first written use of the term reinvention was in an
essay by the artist for the catalogue 7 Environments.
40
This essay, titled “Introduction to a
Theory,” opens with a clear definition for the term reinvention:
I say reinventions, rather than reconstructions, because the seven works differ markedly
from their originals. Intentionally so. As I wrote in notes to one of them, they were
planned to change each time they were remade. This decision, made in the late 50s, was
the polar opposite of the traditional belief that the physical art object—the painting,
photo, music composition, etc.—should be fixed in a permanent form. Furthermore, the

38
Allan Kaprow, “The Legacy of Jackson Pollock,” in Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life, ed. Jeff Kelley
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 7.
39
Ibid., 7, 9.
40
Tamara Bloomberg of the Kaprow Estate is currently confirming this fact.
16

Environment quickly incorporated the idea of internal changes during its presentation.
The conventional spectators became the participants who executed the changes. Here,
also, the traditional notion of the uniquely talented artist (the genius) was suspended in
favor of a tentative collectivity (the social group as artist). Art was like the weather.
41

“Introduction to a Theory” is Kaprow’s principal text on his theory of reinvention. The
publication 7 Environments also includes writings by Kaprow for each of his works reinvented
for the exhibitions. In these texts, the artist describes the different previous version(s) of the
Environments reinvented for the two presentations in Italy.
In the essay “Agency for Action,” Rosenthal uses a section of the text to explain the word
reinvention and describe Kaprow’s process behind his selection of the term. She begins by citing
Kaprow’s project description to Whitney Museum of Art Curator Barbara Haskell for the
exhibition Blam! The Explosion of Pop, Minimalism, and Performance, 1958-1964. This 1984
proposal read:
So my proposal is this: to create 1960 wholesale, not to re-create it in any sense. The idea
stems from the plan I’m currently working out with Al Nodal at Otis/Parsons in LA. Al
wanted to present a retrospective of my work back to 1947. I suggested instead the
invention of my past and he was enthusiastic. The central point of the retrospective would
be not retrospecting; and it would be made clear right from the beginning in all public
communication, for example: “Inventing 1958, 1960, 1963, 1969, 1970, 1974, 1980, and
so on…” might appear as the catalog title. Almost nothing will appear in the gallery,
since the key focus will be the site-specific work after 1957. And for each “older” piece
that is created, I plan several versions in different places and at different times.
42

While Kaprow does not specifically use the term reinvention above, the passage suggests
his interest in creating new versions of his works. Kelley also cites the artist’s 1984 project when
discussing the roots of Kaprow’s interest in reinvention. He states, the “question of redoing-
versus-reinventing became apparent in the mid-1980s, when Yard was reinstalled in the sunken

41
Allan Kaprow, “Introduction to a Theory,” in 7 Environments, by Allan Kaprow (Milan: Fondazione Mudima,
1992), 23.

42
Stephanie Rosenthal, “Agency for Action,” in Allan Kaprow—Art as Life, ed. Eva Meyer-Hermann, Andrew
Perchuk, and Stephanie Rosenthal (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2008), 61-62.
17

courtyard of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, as a part of the exhibition Blam!
The Explosion of Pop, Minimalism, and Performance in the fall of 1984.”
43

In his 1984 project description to Haskell, Kaprow uses the term “site-specific” when
describing his work: “Almost nothing will appear in the gallery, since the key focus will be the
site-specific work after 1957.”
44
Miwon Kwon, author of One Place After Another: Site-specific
Art and Locational Identity, defines site-specificity as “something grounded, bound to the laws
of physics. Often playing with gravity, site-specific works used to be obstinate about ‘presence,’
even if they were materially ephemeral, and adamant about immobility, even in the face of
disappearance or destruction.”
45
Kwon continues, “The art object or event in this context was to
be singularly and multiply experienced in the here and now through bodily presence of each
viewing subject, in a sensory immediacy of spatial extension and temporal duration…rather than
instantaneously perceived in a visual epiphany by a disembodied eye. Site-specific work in its
earliest formation, then, focused on establishing an inextricable, indivisible relationship between
the work and its site, and demanded the physical presence of the viewer for the work’s
completion.”
46
Reading Kaprow’s work through the lens of Kwon’s definition posits that the
artist’s Environments, Happenings, and Activities are tied to the site in which the work was
either created or realized. This implies that any new version of Kaprow’s work will be bound to
the site of that iteration. Kaprow’s 1992 writing on the Environment Yard further points to this
observation:
Yard was originally made in the sculpture garden of the Martha Jackson gallery in New
York. It consisted of hundreds of used tires covering the ground in no particular order….

43
Jeff Kelley, Childsplay: The Art of Allan Kaprow (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 217.
44
Stephanie Rosenthal, “Agency for Action,” in Allan Kaprow—Art as Life, ed. Eva Meyer-Hermann, Andrew
Perchuk, and Stephanie Rosenthal (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2008), 61-62.
45
Miwon Kwon, One Place After Another: Site-specific Art and Locational Identity (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002),
11.
46
Ibid., 11-12.

18

Since 1961, the work (whose conceptual rights belong to Wolfgang Feelisch in
Remscheid) has been remade seven or eight times in Europe and America; and on each
occasion it was changed, more or less greatly, to fit the particular spaces and contexts.
This version is the most radically distinct. The tires are new rather than used; they are
stacked on shelves as they would be in a tire store, rather than scattered over the ground.
A car is introduced, instead of tarpaper mounds, and visitors are urged to change the car's
wheels by using a pneumatic wrench or spanner. Furthermore, the gray tonality of the
early version is here replaced by walls of fluorescent acid-rose.
47

Following Kaprow’s proposal for Blam! The Explosion of Pop, Minimalism, and
Performance, Rosenthal explains in her essay that Kaprow began creating new versions of
Happenings and Activities for his 1988 retrospective curated by Kelley in Texas. Kelley
confirms Kaprow’s progressive turn away from the restaging of his work:
The philosophical divide between restaging and reinventing past works came to a head
for Kaprow in April 1988, when he was invited, by this author, to participate in a
yearlong series of “retrospections” in which the artist would reinvent and then enact
particular works from between 1959 and 1985 that he believed had helped move his
thinking forward over the course of his career…. For Kaprow, retrospecting was a way of
avoiding what he considered the trap of allowing his Happenings to be ossified as
museum (and period) pieces in a retrospective exhibition. The idea was to retain the core
metaphor of each work while enacting it according to the present-tense particulars of
given times and places—with unpredictable results.
48

I want to focus on the last line of Kelley’s above text as a way to think about defining
reinvention. Kelley interprets reinvention as method that maintains “the core metaphor of each
work while enacting it according to the present-tense particulars of given times and places.”
49
To
further explore Kelley’s notion of the “core metaphor,” it is useful to compare it to MOCA
curator Philipp Kaiser’s perspective on the term. In a phone conversation with the author, Kaiser
observed, “It’s interesting that [Kaprow] systematized the notion of reinvention, and that’s very

47
Allan Kaprow, “Yard,” in 7 Environments, by Allan Kaprow (Milan: Fondazione Mudima, 1992), 113.
48
Jeff Kelley, Childsplay: The Art of Allan Kaprow (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 217-218.
49
Jeff Kelley, Childsplay: The Art of Allan Kaprow (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 218. In a
correspondence with Judith Rodenbeck about reinvention, she cites the Kelley’s 1988 show and notes Kaprow’s use
of the term “recipes” for scores: “I believe this word [reinvention] was arrived at in the planning stages for the
retrospective Jeff Kelley organized at the University of Texas in Arlington in 1988 called Precedings. By the time I
talked to Kaprow in 1997 he was also calling his scores ‘recipes,’ though I'm not sure when he first started using that
term.” Judith Rodenbeck, e-mail message to author, February 11, 2014.
19

special…. Kaprow is trying to do one more step in the next reinvention, when you look at…how
one thing, it doesn’t matter which Environment, but how much the Environment changed over
the course…For example, Words, there’s a version…[with] mirrors, and it looked so differently
from the original version, you think this is like a different work, but the core, the idea, is still the
same.”
50
As demonstrated in Kaiser’s statement, he draws on the idea of the “core” to describe
reinventions and how they are related to previous versions. I suggest that the notion of the “core
metaphor” or the “core” are useful ways to approach the concept of reinvention because it allows
for flexibility in terms of the actual aesthetic form that is produced.
Rosenthal also mentions the artist’s proposal for a new version of Eighteen Happenings
in Six Parts for MOCA’s exhibition Out of Actions: Between Performance and the Object, 1949-
1979. Kaprow had planned to lead the Happening if it was realized. However, in the end the
Happening was not reinvented for the show.
51
Rosenthal also notes the fact that unlike
Happenings, Environments such as Stockroom (1961) were “specifically designed so that they
could also be realized by other people” and did not require Kaprow’s participation for the
realization of the work.
52
Moreover, Rosenthal addresses the importance of Kaprow’s choice to
allow the reinvention—not reenactment—of his works by other artists for Allan Kaprow—Art as
Life. She explains, “By deciding in favor of reinventions rather than reenactments, he was
guiding his work in a direction that could be sustained even in his absence. Kaprow deliberately
chose the term reinvention for new versions of his works, which, unlike reenactment, does not
typically have a historical flavor. The term underlined the fact that Kaprow did not intend the

50
Philipp Kaiser in a phone conversation with the author, November 6, 2013.
51
Kaprow did reinvent a new version of Yard (Yard 1961/1998).
52
Stephanie Rosenthal, “Agency for Action,” in Allan Kaprow—Art as Life, ed. Eva Meyer-Hermann, Andrew
Perchuk, and Stephanie Rosenthal (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2008), 62.

20

new versions to be replicas of the versions he had realized in the past, and that change was the
order of the day.”
53

Kaprow did not aim for his works reenacted, which is a method that has been employed
by other artists such as Marina Abramović for her exhibition Seven Easy Pieces at the
Guggenheim Museum in November 2005. Instead, Kaprow emphasized that a reinvention of his
work should be a new variation of the original form that is tied to its present time. Rodenbeck
also compares Kaprow with Abramović in a correspondence with the author: “Reinvention is
part of the current interest in reenactment, redos, restagings, and the recapture, however tenuous,
of earlier avant-garde gestures. It is a bit more honest than Abramović’s redos in that it allows
the first iteration—the ‘original’ performance—to stand on its own not as simply the first in a set
but as the invention that spawns reinventions….”
54
It is important to emphasize that Abramović
restaged performance works, which are inherently different than Kaprow’s work. Reinventing an
Environment, Happening, or Activity poses a different set of conditions set apart from a
performance or installation work. Kaprow articulates the differences between Happenings,
performances, Environments, and installations:
To clarify the philosophical objectives of the Environment, and in that way to get past its
surface eccentricities (which can be enjoyable but misleading), we can compare it with
the current popular mode of the Installation. The two are often confused, as are the
Happening and the Performance, although they are almost antithetical. I would propose a
working definition. The Installation is to the Environment as the Performance is to the
Happening: retardataire forms of radical prototypes. Installation is scenographic as
Performance is theatrical. Theater and its subordinate scenography are a generic category
of the arts, evolved out of a long history of specialization. Environments attempted to
bypass scenography, and the true Happening did in fact bypass theater, thus briefly
producing new genres….
55

53
Ibid.
54
Judith Rodenbeck, e-mail message to author, February 11, 2014.
55
Allan Kaprow, “Introduction to a Theory,” in 7 Environments, by Allan Kaprow (Milan: Fondazione Mudima,
1992), 24. This text is referenced in the title of Judith F. Rodenbeck’s book Radical Prototypes: Allan Kaprow and
the Invention of Happenings.

21

Additionally, it is important to recall that Kaprow eliminated the audience within his Happenings
and Activities. Kaprow explains, the Happening “was not at all theater, since it did away with the
theatrical frame (the stage or equivalent), the audience, the narrative script, the actor (or
performer) and the role (being what one isn’t). It was concerned, instead, with being exactly
what and who one is, carrying out simple tasks in the real world, and thus becoming conscious of
mundane routines such as tying a shoelace....”
56
In contrast, Abramović’s work operates within a
performer-audience dynamic. The audience is not invited to participate in the performance and is
forced into the role of spectatorship. On the contrary, Kaprow eliminated the audience within his
participatory works—the viewer’s participation is fundamental to the piece. Art historian and
critic Claire Bishop has addressed issues of participation and spectatorship in her book Artificial
Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship (2012) and her editorial venture titled
Participation (2006). In Participation, Bishop uses Kaprow’s text “Notes on the Elimination of
the Audience” (1966) within the section containing artist’s writings that represent various models
of participatory works. Kaprow serves as example of an artist who viewed the audience as a
participant—participation was required to experience one of his Happenings or Activities.
Amelia Jones takes up the issue of reenacting performance works in her 2011 essay “‘The
Artist is Present’ Artistic Re-enactments and the Impossibility of Presence.”
57
In this text, Jones
analyzes Abramovic’s 2010 retrospective Marina Abramovic: The Artist is Present at the
Museum of Modern Art in New York. Jones, a performance historian and theorist, acknowledges

56
Ibid.

57
The recent upsurge of interest in reenactment and re-performance has occurred beyond the realm of art and
performance—the trend is also evident within popular culture and societies that organize the restaging of historical
events.

Several texts on reenactment consulted for this study include Sven Lütticken’s 2004 essay “Planet of the
Remake,” Lütticken’s introduction for Life, Once More: Forms of Reenactment in Contemporary Art (2005),
Howard Giles’s essay “A Brief History of Re-enactment,” and Rebecca Schneider’s 2011 publication Performing
Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment. My research reveals that reenactment has two spelling
variations: “reenactment and “re-enactment.” For this paper, I will use “reenactment.” Jones employs the alternate
spelling “re-enactment.”
22

the broad trend of reenactment in recent years. She asserts that within art and performance
practices, “this has taken the form of an obsessive interest in histories of performance or live art,
ephemeral works that expose the contradiction between durationality and aesthetics—between
the passage of time and the materiality that art discourse requires to substantiate the value of
works of art as ‘unique.’”
58
She claims that reenactment “activates precisely the tension between
our desire for the material (for the other’s body; for ‘presence’; for the ‘true event’) and the
impossibility of ever fixing this in space and time. The re-enactment both testifies to our desire
to know the past in order to secure ourselves in the present and the paradox of that knowledge
always taking place through repetition. It thus exposes the paradox of that knowledge, proving
our own inexorable mortality: the fact that we are always reaching to secure time, and always
failing.”
59
The main line of her argument contends that reenactment “establishes itself from the
get-go as simultaneously representational and live (it is a live re-doing of something already
done in the past — it is a reiteration, a performative re-doing—and one that itself becomes
instantaneously ‘past,’ raising questions about its own existence in time and in history).”
60
Jones
also observes the recent development in exhibition models that reenact art and performance, such
as Allan Kaprow—Art as Life. In contrast to previous modes of reenactment, this new interest
“has increasingly been worked through in relation to some variation on a newly developed re-
enactment format—whether this means literal performance works, redone by the same or a
different author, or elaborate and often more conceptual homages inspired by earlier works, as in

58
Amelia Jones, “‘The Artist is Present’ Artistic Re-enactments and the Impossibility of Presence,” in TDR: The
Drama Review 55:1 (Spring 2011), accessed November 24, 2013,
http://muse.jhu.edu/login?auth=0&type=summary&url=/journals/the_drama_review/v055/55.1.jones.pdf.
59
Ibid.
60
Ibid.

23

the restaging of Allan Kaprow’s Happenings during the retrospective Allan Kaprow—Art as
Life.”
61

On Kaprow’s website, the section “About Reinventions” includes three quotations by the
artist to illustrate and define the term reinvention. The first section, “Allan Kaprow on
Reinventions,” cites a quotation by the artist taken from the opening of his essay “An
Introduction to a Theory. This quotation is cited previously in this chapter. It begins, “I say
reinventions, rather than reconstructions, because the seven works differ markedly from their
originals….”
62
Next, the section on the webpage titled “On Reinventions of Yard” uses another
quotation from 7 Environments, which was discussed to illustrate Kaprow’s interest in site-
specificity. The artist asserts, “Yard was originally made in the sculpture garden of the Martha
Jackson Gallery in New York…Since 1961, the work…has been remade seven or eight times in
Europe and America; and on each occasion it was changed, more or less greatly, to fit the
particular spaces and contexts.”
63
The final section, “On Reinventions of Fluids,” includes a
statement made by the artist in 2004:
While there was an initial version of Fluids, there isn't an original or permanent work.
Rather, there is an idea to do something and a physical trace of that idea. By inventing a
version of Fluids…[one] is not copying my concept but is participating in a practice of
reinvention central to my work. Fluids continues, and its reinventions further multiply its
meanings. [Its history and artifacts are catalysts], an invitation to do something.
64

In the catalogue 7 Environments, Kelley provides a definition for Kaprow’s term
reinvention in his essay “Re-Membering.” His explanation follows:
Reinvention is not recreation. Since an artist can never recreate the precise conditions of
time and place that gave rise to a particular work (whether a painting or a Happening), it
follows that the work itself cannot be recreated, especially if the particularities of time

61
Ibid.
62
“About Reinventions,” Allan Kaprow Website, accessed October 16, 2013,
http://allankaprow.com/about_reinvetion.html.

63
Ibid.

64
Ibid.
24

and place were part of its “original” condition. Since it takes its meanings from the
present, an Environment, having happened, can never happen again in the same way, nor
even mean the same things. It will happen differently the next time, meaning different
things to different people. Consequently, to reinvent means to let go of one's investment
in the notion of “origin,” and then to remember in the present, fully conscious of the
frailties of memory, and the fabrications of history. Thereby, one remembers imperfectly,
and it is in the gap between the imperfection of his own memory as an artist and the art
world's need for authenticity - for accurate history - that Kaprow plays whenever he
“reinvents” a work. He remembers less perfectly, more playfully, than we demand. We
become impatient - he winks.
65

Kaprow clearly systematized the reinvention of his work. However, one must take into
account Kaprow’s change of terms from his earlier writings. In a 1966 statement in Assemblages,
Environments and Happenings, the artist outlines general rules of thumb for Happenings:
(A) The line between art and life should be kept as fluid, and perhaps indistinct, as
possible….
(B) Therefore, the source of themes, materials, actions, and the relationships between
them are to be derived from any place or period except from the arts, their derivatives,
and their milieu….
(C) The performance of a Happening should take place over several widely spaced,
sometimes moving and changing locales….
(D) Time, which follows closely on space considerations, should be variable and
discontinuous….
(E) Happenings should be performed once only….
(F) It follows that audiences should be eliminated entirely….
(G) The composition of a Happening proceeds exactly as in Assemblage and
Environments, that is, it is evolved as a collage of events in certain spans of time and in
certain spaces….
66

As revealed in the text above, Kaprow initially declared that “Happenings should be performed
once only.”
67
While this suggests that a Happening should never be repeated—perhaps even the
title of a work—it also upholds Kaprow’s belief that reinventions should “differ markedly from

65
Jeff Kelley, “Re-Membering,” in 7 Environments, by Allan Kaprow (Milan: Fondazione Mudima, 1992), 74.
66
Allan Kaprow, “The Event,” in Assemblages, Environments and Happenings (New York: H. N. Abrams, 1966),
188-198.
67
Ibid., 193.
25

their originals.”
68
Consequently, I argue that Happenings are not repeated when they are
reinvented because the reinvented version should take a new form.

CHAPTER THREE: REINVENTION AND ITS APPLICATIONS:
WORKS IN THE 2008 MOCA PRESENTATION

This paper will now use reinvention as an artists’ methodology and rubric to investigate
works in the 2008 MOCA presentation. Before analyzing Push and Pull: A Furniture Comedy
for Hans Hofmann, Words, and Fluids, this study will review the curatorial strategies employed
for the in-gallery display of the MOCA show followed by an examination of MOCA’s curatorial
approach to reinventions. This paper also provides a short overview of the 1967 exhibition Allan
Kaprow at the Pasadena Art Museum, which functions as a historical example to ground the
question of producing Kaprow’s work within the context of a retrospective. Kaprow created and
installed the works in the 1967 show himself and each of the works examined in this study were
realized in the Pasadena show.
69

Allan Kaprow—Art as Life was on view at the Geffen Contemporary at MOCA from
March 23 to June 30, 2008. Following its presentation at the Haus der Kunst and the Van
Abbemuseum, the exhibition traveled to the Kunsthalle Bern in Bern, Switzerland and the Museo
di Arte Contemporanea di Villa Croce in Genova, Italy prior to its presentation at MOCA.
70
The
show included Kaprow’s paintings, assemblages, Environments, Happenings, Activities, and
documentation such as the artist’s scores, photographs, videos, and films.
71
MOCA’s curatorial

68
Allan Kaprow, “Introduction to a Theory,” in 7 Environments, by Allan Kaprow (Milan: Fondazione Mudima,
1992), 23.

69
Push and Pull: A Furniture Comedy for Hans Hofmann (1963/1967/2008), Words (1962/1967/2008), and Fluids
(1967/2008) were all produced for Kaprow’s 1967 retrospective.
70
Rosenthal curated the show in Munich and Meyer-Hermann curated the exhibition in Eindhoven.
71
The terms “museum as mediation” and “agency for action” were conceived by Meyer-Hermann and Rosenthal.
While the MOCA show was also divided by these two overarching themes, curator Philipp Kaiser did not look to
these terms to inform his curatorial strategies for the 2008 display.
26

team included Philipp Kaiser, Paul McCarthy, Andrew Perchuk, Corrina Peipon, and Paul
Schimmel. Visitors were invited to participate in the Happenings and Activities that took place in
various off-site locations around Los Angeles and MOCA documented these reinvented works.
Also, several of Kaprow’s colleagues and friends reinvented certain Environments, while the
Environment Trade Talk (2008) was conceived by Suzanne Lacy in collaboration with architect
Michael Rotondi and artist Peter Kirby.
Since the retrospective was a traveling show, Kaiser, the primary curator at MOCA for
the 2008 presentation, worked within the parameters of a set checklist and a minimum
requirement for the number of reinvented Environments, Happenings, and Activities for the
exhibition in Los Angeles.
72
Also, Meyer-Hermann and Rosenthal predetermined the archival
material displayed in the exhibition. However, Kaiser was able to apply his own curatorial
strategies to the in-gallery display and had more flexibility in terms of the organization and scope
of the off-site reinventions.
73
In terms of staffing, Kaiser was in charge of the exhibition at the
Geffen Contemporary and the reinventions of the Environments that were located within the
gallery space. Aandrea Stang, MOCA’s then Director of Public Programs, organized the

72
Meyer-Hermann and Rosenthal discuss the curatorial strategies for the exhibition in their essays, “Museum as
Mediation” and “Agency for Action,” which are included in the Allan Kaprow—Art as Life volume. Rosenthal
explains that they sought to display Kaprow’s work “in a way that would preserve his synthesis of art and everyday
life.”

Also, Rosenthal expresses that she and Meyer-Hermann decided to create an exhibition that would “reflect the
paradox of Kaprow’s desire for an exhibition coupled with his rejection of the idea.” Stephanie Rosenthal, “Agency
for Action,” in Allan Kaprow—Art as Life, ed. Eva Meyer-Hermann, Andrew Perchuk, and Stephanie Rosenthal
(Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2008), 57, 63.
73
For the presentation of Allan Kaprow—Art as Life in Munich and Eindhoven, Meyer-Hermann and Rosenthal
conceptually organized the show into two parts: “Museum as Mediation,” a term used by Kaprow, and “Agency for
Action,” a phrase conceived by the curators. The section “Museum as Mediation” related to the “way in which the
exhibition was ordered” and included works by Kaprow including paintings, collages, and assemblages and
documentation such as the artist’s scores, photographs, videos, and films. “Agency for Action” made up the second
component of the presentation and included reinventions of Environments, Happenings, and Activities.

The curators
were acutely aware of the paradoxical pairing of “Museum as Mediation” and “Agency for Action.” In fact, this
choice of conceptual framework for the exhibition was their strategy to present Kaprow’s work in the context of a
retrospective: “The dichotomy in this pairing cannot be resolved; it was our paradoxical response to the challenge of
satisfactorily conveying Kaprow’s concept of a work of art in an exhibition—or rather, presentation. ‘Museum as
Mediation’ presented the active presence of the past; ‘Agency for Action’ turned the present into the past before our
eyes.” Eva Meyer-Hermann, “Museum as Mediation,” in Allan Kaprow—Art as Life, ed. Eva Meyer-Hermann,
Andrew Perchuk, and Stephanie Rosenthal (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2008), 82-83.
27

extensive number of reinventions of Happenings and Activities that occurred outside of the
museum and covered the greater Los Angeles area, with an extension reaching as far as San
Diego. Also, Kaiser’s main advisor was artist McCarthy, who was consulted for various
decisions throughout the planning of the show.
For the in-gallery installation of Allan Kaprow—Art as Life, Kaiser organized the
exhibition space by dividing it into three medium-specific sections: a space for the
Environments, a section for the paintings, and an area for the archive.
74
When entering the
gallery, the back wall displayed paintings and collages from the 1950s, which were hung in a
chronological manner, and the archive and projections were located in the front area, where the
walls were painted black.
75
The Environments were installed in the middle of the exhibition
space. Kaiser pointed out, “when you entered the show, the first thing you saw was a projection
of Household [a digital projection of a 16mm film, transferred to video, of a Happening from
1964].”
76
Kaiser strategically decided against building walls in the show. He explains, “For the
archives, it wasn’t really hidden but it was. I felt it was important for them to be connected to the
Environments and not to build any architecture. So that wasn’t a thematic decision, it was much
more a conceptual decision. We bought one big wall for the Ruppersberg reinvention of Words
and that’s it.”
77

A total of four Environments were installed: Apple Shrine (1960/2008), reinvented by
John Baldessari and Skylar Haskard; Words, by Allen Ruppersberg; Push and Pull: A Furniture
Comedy for Hans Hofmann, reinvented by Barbara T. Smith; and Trade Talk (2008) created by

74

Kaiser explained, “…the middle part is the widest one and the most prominent one, that’s where the Environments
were, and one was the paintings, and the other the archives.” Philipp Kaiser in a phone conversation with the author,
November 6, 2013.
75
Philipp Kaiser in a phone conversation with the author, November 6, 2013.
76
Ibid.

77
Ibid.
28

Suzanne Lacy with Michael Rotondi and Peter Kirby.
78
Kaiser conveyed that his strategy for
displaying the large archive and the Environments—without overwhelming the viewer—was to
create a clear structure within the in-gallery presentation by placing the Environments in a line in
the middle of the exhibition space.
79
Kaiser also noted that Trade Talk was the “very
centerpiece” of the Environment installations.
80
In a conversation with Peipon, who was Kaiser’s
curatorial assistant, she laid out some of the challenges of displaying Kaprow’s work within an
institution,
One of the challenges is presenting work that is really not meant to be presented within
the four walls of the museum. Also, this work needed to be presented with earlier, more
traditional art works—paintings—which require surveillance and insurance. It ran the
gamut from something that was high-valued, insured, guarded artwork to works that were
re-interpreted, and even those were a challenge. Is it a redo, a remake, a re-interpretation,
or a brand new piece all together? These works generated a lot of conversation about
what word one should even use. When we invited artists to do re-interpretations of his
pieces, what were those? Were they works that were made by commission? Were they
Allan Kaprow artworks? Were they Barbara Smith artworks? These types of challenges
to the curatorial framework and to the curatorial process are definitely present in the
work.
81

Prior to an examination of the works reinvented in the 2008 retrospective, it is essential to
discuss the guidelines that MOCA’s curatorial team drew on to inform its decisions for the
reinventions realized for the show. During the panel discussion “Exploring Kaprow’s
Environments,” Kaiser stated the three rules that Kaprow devised for reinvention during his
lifetime: a site-specific approach, doubt in art, and impermanence, thus suggesting that he also

78
Ruppersberg did not see his piece as a reinvention. This is discussed in later in this chapter.
79
Kaiser explained to the author, “his work is so overwhelming and going from one Environment to another, I
thought it was important to have a very clear structure in the space. There were columns in the middle of the gallery,
so that it was somewhat like a church, with a central axis and one Environment after the other. I just lined them up.”

Philipp Kaiser in a phone conversation with the author, November 6, 2013.

80
He explained, “it seemed to be important to have a kind of ephemeral practice, in the very center, in the heart of
the exhibition, where the pieces were reinvented, and you could talk about Kaprow.”
Philipp Kaiser in a phone
conversation with the author, November 6, 2013.

81
Corrina Peipon in conversation with the author, September 25, 2013.
29

worked from these terms.
82
As previously discussed in this paper, Rosenthal conveyed that these
principles were used for the conception of the retrospective. I will now outline the guidelines that
Kaiser used for the reinvented Environments and the guidelines that Stang looked to for the
Happenings and Activities that were reinvented off-site. When asked about the guiding
principles used for reinventions, Kaiser replied:
I actually didn’t talk to the Estate because the question was really “what are the
guidelines,” or “what’s the framework for the reinventions?” My curatorial answer to that
was: let’s invite artists who really respect his work and who are going to respect the
guidelines and the integrity of the piece, and not invite students who don’t really know
where it’s coming from and where it’s going, what the work is about…I thought the
respect that the other artists had for Kaprow would be a clue to keeping the integrity for
the pieces…We never really talked about whether they felt like reinventions, whether
they were different works. But of course you could ask yourself “is it a different work
and what’s the notion? Is it still a Kaprow when someone else does it? What happens
when someone else is taking over, and how much Kaprow is in there? How much
Ruppersberg is in there?” I was interested in the stretch of all these notions of
authorship.
83

As we can see in this quotation, Kaiser drew heavily on the decision to invite venerable,
esteemed artists to reinvent Environments for the exhibition. Kaiser also conveyed that he
decided to include artists—who were friends of Kaprow or who respected his practice—to
reinvent the Environments: “I was interested in artists who are on the same level or who have a
dedication for Kaprow’s practice, rather than students who have never heard of him. To turn the
exhibition into more of a memorial or…maybe that’s the wrong word…to turn it into something
different.”
84
He further emphasized his choice to include respected artists, “I wanted to ask rather
mature artists…great artists that are on the same eye level as Allan Kaprow.”
85

82
Philipp Kaiser, “Exploring Kaprow’s Environments” (panel discussion, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los
Angeles, held at the National Center for the Preservation of Democracy, Los Angeles, CA, May 18, 2008).
83
Philipp Kaiser in a phone conversation with the author, November 6, 2013.
84
Ibid.
85
Ibid.
30

However, well-known artists did not necessarily reinvent the Happenings and Activities
that were organized by twenty-nine institutions over the course of the retrospective.
86
In terms of
the guidelines used for the off-site reinventions, Stang conveyed that first and foremost the
organization needed to work from a score provided by the Kaprow Estate in order to realize the
work: “If you don't have a score, you can’t do it.”
87
Also, the organization needed a reasonable
budget and the organizational means to support the work they planned to realize. Stang also
mentioned that MOCA distributed a list for basic guidelines, but she could not recall what the
document stated. I also spoke with Stang regarding the role of the Kaprow Estate during the
reinvention of Kaprow’s Happenings and Activities. Stang replied, “If I had questions about
things, and it felt a little too off kilter, I would call Tamara [Bloomberg]” to check in.
88
Stang did
not provide any additional details regarding interactions between the Kaprow Estate and MOCA
about the reinvention of works. However, one must take into account that the principles of
reinvention and its boundaries are both complex and flexible. Since the original artist was not
present to authorize the reinventions, we must remember that reinvention opens up a debate
among a set of perspectives, including the point of view of the curator or the Estate. Given that,
reinvention is not a rule of law but rather a complex idea open to interpretation.
It is useful to provide a short overview of Kaprow’s first retrospective at the Pasadena
Art Museum, Allan Kaprow (1967), since each of the works analyzed in this paper were realized
in the Pasadena show. The Pasadena Art Museum, a leading venue for the presentation of

86
In fact, many students and small organizations carried out the reinvention of these works. In a conversation with
Stang, she explained that MOCA put out an open call to arts organizations, inviting them to submit an application to
reinvent a work. Once selected, each organization was given funding that was a result of a gift from the J. Paul Getty
Museum. When asked how the Happenings and Activities were selected by MOCA and its collaborators from the
scores provided by the Kaprow Estate, Stang stated that MOCA tried to get as much variety as possible, but that the
groups they worked with were able to choose whichever work they wanted (as long as they followed the terms
outlined in this chapter). Aandrea Stang in discussion with author, October 22, 2013.
87
Aandrea Stang in discussion with author, October 22, 2013.
88
Ibid. Tamara Bloomberg is a representative of the Allan Kaprow Estate based in La Jolla, CA.
31

contemporary art including renowned exhibitions of artists such as Marcel Duchamp and Andy
Warhol, presented Kaprow’s first retrospective titled Allan Kaprow. Organized by Associate
Curator Barbara Berman, the show was on display from September 15 to October 22, 1967. The
exhibition, which traveled to two venues following its presentation in Pasadena, included twenty-
five works created by the artist between 1953 and 1959, including painting, sculpture, collage,
and assemblage. The show also included reinventions of Environments Yard (1961), Words
(1961), and Push and Pull: A Furniture Comedy for Hans Hofmann (1963). While the
Environments were reinventions, Kaprow assembled and installed the works himself.
Additionally, the Pasadena Art Museum helped organize the Happening Fluids (1967), which
was created for the exhibition and was executed in various locations throughout the Los Angeles
area. A catalogue was published in conjunction with the exhibition which includes an artist
statement, definitions for the terms Happening and Environment, Kaprow’s articles
“Communications Programming” and “Pinpointing Happenings,” an interview with the artist by
Berman, and images of the works included in the show.
89
The catalogue also includes an image
of the poster for Fluids (1967), created for the show.
The publication begins with a statement by Kaprow that also serves as the opening
quotation for this thesis.
90
Kaprow closes his statement for the 1967 catalogue by expressing his
wish for the future of museums: “Hopefully, [the museum] will become an educational institute,

89
1200 copies were printed by Grant Dahlstron/The Castle Press, Pasadena, CA. Throughout the development of the
exhibition, Meyer-Hermann and Rosenthal looked to Kaprow’s statement in the 1967 retrospective catalogue. Thus,
they were “guided by Kaprow’s longstanding desire that the museum be turned into ‘an educational institute, a
computerized bank of cultural history, and an agency for action.’” Stephanie Rosenthal, “Agency for Action,” in
Allan Kaprow—Art as Life, ed. Eva Meyer-Hermann, Andrew Perchuk, and Stephanie Rosenthal (Los Angeles:
Getty Research Institute, 2008), 57.
90
The artist begins with the opening quotation in this paper: “I am put off by museums 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…. Museums do more than isolate such work
from life, they subtly sanctify it and thus kill it.” Allan Kaprow, statement in Allan Kaprow: An Exhibition
sponsored by the Art Alliance of the Pasadena Art Museum. (Pasadena: Pasadena Art Museum, 1967), 3.
32

a computerized bank of cultural history, and an agency for action.”
91
In the preface for the
catalogue, Pasadena Art Museum Director James T. Demetrion addresses Kaprow’s statement
and explains that the exhibition was an “opportunity to trace briefly the development of a new art
form: from painting through collage and assemblage to the Environment and to the Happening
itself.”
92
This example serves as a tool to help us glean what Kaprow would have done when
reinventing works for a show in his mid-career, thus allowing us to see how the criteria for
reinvention has changed over time.
This paper will now use reinvention as an artists’ methodology by examining the
repetition of Kaprow’s ephemeral works and their production within a contemporary context.
The study focuses on three works: Push and Pull: A Furniture Comedy for Hans Hofmann,
Words, and Fluids. Moreover, Eighteen Happenings in Six Parts, reinvented for the MOCA
presentation, will be taken into account for this analysis. Additionally, this investigation pays
special attention to problems of authorship, artist’s intention, and authority in the works that
follow.

Push and Pull
The Environment Push and Pull: A Furniture Comedy for Hans Hofmann (1963),
included in both Allan Kaprow—Art as Life (2008) at MOCA and Allan Kaprow (1967) at the
Pasadena Art Museum, was initially created for the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA)’s Hans
Hofmann and His Students traveling show in 1963. The first Push and Pull, included as one of
fifty works by recognized American artists who were students of Hofmann, was part of a one-

91
Allan Kaprow, statement in Allan Kaprow: An Exhibition sponsored by the Art Alliance of the Pasadena Art
Museum. (Pasadena: Pasadena Art Museum, 1967), 3.
92
James T. Demetrion, “Preface and Acknowledgments,” in Allan Kaprow: An Exhibition sponsored by the Art
Alliance of the Pasadena Art Museum. (Pasadena: Pasadena Art Museum, 1967), 5.
33

day showing on April 17, 1967 at Santini Brother’s Warehouse on West 49th Street in New
York. The show included six paintings by Hofmann alongside the works by his students.
Kaprow’s Environment consisted of two rooms. Visitors were invited to “make their own
compositions by rearranging the furniture.”
93
MoMA’s press release for the show describes
Kaprow’s work:
The “environment” consists of two rooms, each 10 by 20 feet, constructed by Kaprow.
One is entirely black and lit only by a single blue bulb suspended from the low ceiling. It
is crowded with boxes and temporarily discarded objects such as those stored in the attic.
A television set running without sound will flicker from behind a crate. The second room
is painted bright yellow. A red band runs around the lower wall. The furniture consists of
a chest of drawers, chairs, a table, a trunk, mirror, bed and radio all painted in various
shaded of yellow. Aided by Kaprow’s suggestions written on large pieces of cardboard
and filed in a box outside the rooms, visitors are invited to change the furniture, play the
radio, and to ‘push and pull them around until they make a significant composition.
94

Outside the entrance of Push and Pull’s two connected rooms was a crate with signboards
intended for the viewer. One sign “Instructions: Anyone can find or make one or more rooms in
any shape, size, proportion, and color--then furnish them perhaps, maybe paint some things or
everything. Everyone else can come in and, if the rooms are furnished, they also can arrange
them, accommodating themselves as they see fit. Each day things will change.”
95
The visitors
engaged the Environment, moving furniture around and transforming the rooms into a state of
disarray. Kaprow later described the result of Push and Pull at the warehouse: “The public
arrived and began moving everything; an exchange took place between the objects of both
rooms. Soon there was a mess. Some older women resented this and began to straighten things
up, as though they were cleaning house. Other women joined in. Gradually, the two rooms

93
“Hans Hofmann and His Students Press Release,” Museum of Modern Art, accessed October 14, 2013,
http://www.moma.org/docs/press_archives/3139/releases/MOMA_1963_0051_48.pdf?2010.
94
Ibid.
95
Jeff Kelley, Childsplay: The Art of Allan Kaprow (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 83.
34

returned to a state approximating what they originally were, and the cycle was complete.”
96

Kaprow installed Push and Pull for the exhibition at the Santini Brother’s Warehouse, but the
piece did not travel with the show. Nevertheless, the MoMA press release reveals that other
exhibitors were allowed to “stage an environment in the spirit of a text provided by the artist.
Whether an actual setting is made or not, the ideas can be shown on placards prepared by the
artist, which will be sent in a packing case resembling a file and through which the viewer may
leaf.”
97
Art historian Kelley reads the exhibition opening reception as a type of accidental
Happening because it occurred over the course of a single evening.
98
In fact, in Kaprow’s book
Assemblage, Environments, and Happenings, the artist describes Push and Pull as an
“Environment/Happening.”
99
This remained the only work by Kaprow with such a title.
Following Push and Pull, Eat (1964) was the last original Environment created by Kaprow
before the artist moved exclusively to Happenings and later on to Activities.
In 1967, Kaprow reinvented Push and Pull for his retrospective at the Pasadena Art
Museum. The work was on display from September 15 to October 22, 1967. For this particular
show, exhibition installation photographs in the show’s archive suggest that this version of Push
and Pull consisted of three rooms.
100
One room took the form of a living room. This space was
comprised of chairs, an ottoman, tables, a television, pillows, artwork on the walls, and curtains
on a faux window. Other furnishings included a space heater, reading lamps, and other items one
would find in a typical living room. Another room, smaller than the one previously described,

96
Ibid, 85.
97
“Hans Hofmann and His Students Press Release,” Museum of Modern Art, accessed October 14, 2013,
http://www.moma.org/docs/press_archives/3139/releases/MOMA_1963_0051_48.pdf?2010.
98
Jeff Kelley, Childsplay: The Art of Allan Kaprow (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 85.
99
Ibid.
100
However, due to the limited amount of documentation in the archive and the fact that the original version had two
rooms, I am unable to confirm if the work consisted of two or three rooms. For the purpose of this description, I will
propose that there were three rooms. The formal description of this Environment is drawn from installation
photographs located in the Allan Kaprow (1967) Project Files located at the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena.
35

resembled a studio-like bedroom. This space had a cot, a chest with drawers, chairs, a vase with
flowers, and several electrical appliances found in a home of that era. The third room was an
obscure space. Illuminated by a single hanging light bulb, the room’s walls, floor, and ceiling
were painted black creating a stark contrast to the other spaces. This area consisted of items one
would find in an attic, such as wooden crates, a ladder, and large objects wrapped in packing
paper.
In 2008, Push and Pull was reinvented by the artist Barbara T. Smith for Allan Kaprow—
Art as Life and was on view at the Geffen Contemporary at MOCA. The retrospective was
located in Building Five, the exhibition space located to the right of the entrance to the Geffen
Contemporary.
101
Within the room, artists who reinvented Environments for the show were each
given a rectangular space to install their works in the center of the gallery, which was a single
cavernous space without temporary gallery walls. MOCA’s curatorial team approached Smith to
ask if she would create a reinvention of an Environment by Kaprow because she was a close
friend of the artist. She was surprised to be asked to create a reinvention because she had never
previously created installation works: “I was kind of surprised that they asked me to re-create an
event, one of these pieces, you know, and of all the people they could choose…but I guess I’m
equated as being one of his close friends, which is true….”
102
Smith was given several choices of
works permitted by the Allan Kaprow Estate and selected by MOCA, and since the artist was not
familiar with Push and Pull, Smith considered reinventing Eat.
103
However, this work did not

101
Corrina Peipon stated the exhibition was located in Building Five and Aandrea Stang stated it was located in
Building Four.
102
Barbara T. Smith in discussion with the author, September 30, 2013.
103
Barbara T. Smith, “Exploring Kaprow’s Environments,” (panel discussion, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los
Angeles, held at the National Center for the Preservation of Democracy, Los Angeles, CA, May 18, 2008). Apple
Shrine (1960), Stockroom (1960), Words (1962), and Push and Pull (1963) were the four Environments permitted by
the Allan Kaprow Estate. Each venue selected which works they wanted to reinvent for their respective shows. A
minimum of one environment needed to be reinvented.
36

resonate with Smith so she decided to reinvent Push and Pull for the exhibition.
104
Once Smith
selected Push and Pull, the artist was given an extensive file of materials on the work including
its original score and various documents related to past iterations.
105
The task to reinvent a work
by Kaprow was not easy for Smith: “It’s really a challenge and a half to try to imagine
reinventing a piece by someone who’s really changed the nature of art all together by his work
and also we were really good friends.”
106
Smith continues, “And the irony was that I was told I
could do anything I wanted. That was just dumbfounding. It leaves open an enormous door. I
was gradually brought back to something solid by the fact that they were going to give me a
catalogue or a binder that would show me the history of the work.”
107

Smith’s reinvention was titled Push and Pull: A Furniture Comedy for Allan Kaprow. For
this version of the Environment, Smith painted the floor white and there were no partitions or
stanchions surrounding the rectangle space where the work was installed. All of the furniture
included in the work was painted blue. The furniture included tables, chairs, a chest with drawers
and a mirror, dressers, a piano, and other similar objects found in a home, that Smith had
purchased at local thrift stores.
108
Other items in the Environment included shoes and a large roll
of clear plastic wrap, which were not painted. A sign at the entrance of the Environment read:
“NOTICE: Push & Pull: A Furniture Comedy for Allan Kaprow.” Throughout the museum’s
regular visitor hours, viewers could rearrange and interact with furniture. In order to limit the
number of participants in the Environment at any given time, yellow bandanas were provided at

104
Barbara T. Smith, “Exploring Kaprow’s Environments” (panel discussion, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los
Angeles, held at the National Center for the Preservation of Democracy, Los Angeles, CA, May 18, 2008).
105
Barbara T. Smith in discussion with the author, September 30, 2013.
106
Barbara T. Smith, “Exploring Kaprow’s Environments” (panel discussion, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los
Angeles, held at the National Center for the Preservation of Democracy, Los Angeles, CA, May 18, 2008).
107
Ibid.
108
Barbara T. Smith in discussion with the author, September 30, 2013.
37

the entrance of Push and Pull for participants to wear while they engaged the work.
109
Smith
viewed her reinvention as a kind of memorial for Kaprow.
110
In fact, on the opening night of the
exhibition, Smith invited friends of Kaprow to engage with the work.
Having reviewed the file on past versions of Push and Pull, Smith knew that the original
version was divided into two rooms: one that was completely dark and one that was light. During
a panel discussion organized in conjunction with the exhibition, Smith expressed that she could
have created two rooms, but “For some reason, I just couldn’t…the whole thing to me was about
light.”
111
She conveyed that she was “elevating what had the potential of a psychological
dimension, going into the dark side and light side.”
112
“I would rather” she said, “have it become
an affirmation of one thing: an experience in light.”
113
Initially, Smith thought her piece was an
unusual interpretation of Kaprow’s original version of Push and Pull, but later thought that her
work was similar to the original:
Mine was the most pedantic, or most like what had been done before. Once I decided [to
reinvent Push and Pull], I was given an extensive file on the piece that included
everything that had been done for the work. I thought, “I’d like to do something really
different and make it fun.” That was part of what he wanted these to be, was fun. The
very first time he did it was in ‘63, and I never saw color photographs of that version. [In
black and white photographs] yellow looks like black and white, so I had no idea that all
of the furniture was yellow. It’s an interesting piece, but what if I painted all of the
furniture blue? I thought that would be the most unusual thing to do, but it ended up not
being that strange because he did almost the same thing except he painted it yellow.
114

In addition to Push and Pull’s presentation at MoMA in 1963, the Pasadena Art Museum
in 1967, and MOCA in 2008, the Environment has been realized multiple times. Between 1963

109
Ibid.
110
Ibid.
111
Barbara T. Smith, “Exploring Kaprow’s Environments” (panel discussion, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los
Angeles, held at the National Center for the Preservation of Democracy, Los Angeles, CA, May 18, 2008).
112
Ibid.
113
Ibid.
114
Barbara T. Smith in discussion with the author, September 30, 2013.
38

and 2008 Kaprow retrospective, the work was reinvented in 1963, 1965, 1967, 1977, 1986, 1991,
1998, 2002, 2006, and 2007.
115

Fluids
Reinvented for Allan Kaprow—Art as Life, the Happening Fluids (1967) was originally
created by Kaprow for his retrospective at the Pasadena Art Museum. The 1967 Fluids
comprised of numerous events that spanned various locations throughout the Pasadena and Los
Angeles area. While Kaprow’s paintings, sculptures, collage, assemblages, and Environments
were installed within the galleries of the museum, Fluids was realized completely outside the
context and physical frame of the art institution. The poster for Fluids reads, “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.”
116
This
ambitious plan ultimately occurred at a total of fourteen sites.
117

Prior to the realization of the Happening, an information session was held a couple of
days preceding the event. Details regarding the session were found at the bottom of the poster for
Fluids: “Those interested in participating should attend a preliminary meeting at the Pasadena
Art Museum, 46 North Los Robles Avenue, Pasadena, at 8:30 p.m., October 10, 1967. The

115
Allan Kaprow—Art as Life, ed. Eva Meyer-Hermann, Andrew Perchuk, and Stephanie Rosenthal (Los Angeles:
Getty Research Institute, 2008), 355.
116
Allan Kaprow Papers, Poster for Fluids, 1967, Getty Research Institute Special Collections Archive, Los
Angeles. Oversize item.
117
My research reveals a discrepancy in the number of sites that Fluids was realized. Three different sources state
that it took place in fifteen sites. However, the Allan Kaprow (1967) Project Files in the Pasadena Art Museum
Archives suggest that the eleventh site, the “Oil city incinerator adjacent to the end of the Arroyo Pkwy. and
Glenarm, east off Fair Oaks on street just south of Light and Power building, Pasadena” was canceled. This is noted
on two documents in the project file. This site for Fluids was originally scheduled for Saturday, October 14, 1967.
The sources that cite fifteen locations include Jeff Kelley in Childsplay: The Art of Allan Kaprow (he also includes
the incinerator in a narrative description); Eva Meyer-Hermann’s essay “Museum as Mediation,” in Allan Kaprow—
Art as Life; and Robert Haywood’s essay “Critique of Instrumental Labor: Meyer Shapiro’s and Allan Kaprow’s
Theory of Avant-Garde Art” in Experiments in the Everyday: Allan Kaprow and Robert Watts: Events, Objects,
Documents (his sources include Larry Palmer, “15 Ice Houses Slowly Melt,” Independent (October 13, 1967) and
information provided by curator Berman).
39

Happening will be thoroughly discussed by Allan Kaprow and all details worked out.”
118
As
stated on the poster, the Happening took place over the course of three days. In each of the
individual locations, groups of approximately ten to fifteen volunteers worked to build the ice
structures. Kelley outlines the details, “Kaprow had organized the event in collaboration with
museum officials; sites had been identified, permissions obtained, permits acquired, insurance
arranged, volunteers signed up and ice deliveries scheduled for every two hours” over the three-
day span.
119
Union Ice Company was the source for the ice blocks.
On the first day, Thursday, October 12, 1967, the Happening took place in five locations.
These sites included a vacant lot next to a Pasadena McDonald’s hamburger stand, a children’s
center in Temple City called the Play Yard, Pierce College in Woodland Hills (Kaprow later
described this site as an “education factory”), under Pasadena’s Colorado Street Bridge, and the
Tail o’ the Cock parking lot in Los Angeles.
120
On Friday, Fluids took place at three locations,
including Watts Towers in Los Angeles, Brookside Park in Pasadena, and the southern driveway
at La Canada Rustic Stone Company in Pasadena.
121
On the final day, Saturday, October 14,
Fluids occurred at Jade Oil and Gas Company in Los Angeles, the McDonald’s site previously
used on Friday, the Dodge House in Los Angeles, the Lail Brothers Body shop in Los Angeles,
and the Trousdale Estate in Beverly Hills at the end of the last day.
122

In cooperation with MOCA’s Allan Kaprow—Art as Life, Los Angeles County Museum
of Art (LACMA) coordinated the reinvention of Fluids at locations spanning the greater Los

118
Allan Kaprow Papers, Poster for Fluids, 1967, Getty Research Institute Special Collections Archive, Los
Angeles. Oversize item. The printed posted states the date “October 11, 1967,” but this date is crossed out in red
thus reading “October 10, 1967.”
119
Jeff Kelley, Childsplay: The Art of Allan Kaprow (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 121.
120
“Misc. Fluids Folder,” Allan Kaprow (1967) Project Files, 1967, The Pasadena Art Museum Archives at the
Norton Simon Museum, Pasadena. Jeff Kelley, Childsplay: The Art of Allan Kaprow (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2004), 123.
121
“Misc. Fluids Folder,” Allan Kaprow (1967) Project Files, 1967, The Pasadena Art Museum Archives at the
Norton Simon Museum, Pasadena.

122
Ibid.
40

Angeles area. True to the 1967 Fluids’ time-span, this version took place over the course of three
days on Friday, April 25, Saturday, April 26, and Sunday, April 27, 2008. Fluids was realized at
a total of eleven sites and each location was coordinated by participating institutions. Union Ice
Company, who supplied the ice for the 1967 version of Fluids, made an in-kind donation to
support the realization of the 2008 Fluids. On Friday, the Happening materialized at four
locations. LACMA organized the version of Fluids which took place in the rear part of the
museum’s central plaza, the Armory Center for the Arts coordinated the work’s manifestation in
Pasadena’s Memorial Park, California State University, Los Angeles arranged the Happening in
a parking lot on campus, and MOCA realized Fluids under the canopy outside the entrance of the
Geffen Contemporary at MOCA. On the second day, Fluids took form at A Place Called Home
in Los Angeles, in Westchester Park adjacent to Otis College of Art and Design, at the Getty
Center’s Lower Terrace Sculpture Garden, at Rios Clementi Hale Studios/notNeutral in
Larchmont, and at Two Rodeo in Beverly Hills. On the final day, Sunday, Fluids transpired at
MacArthur Park in Westlake and the Angels Gate Cultural Center in San Pedro. It is interesting
to note that MOCA invited the Norton Simon Museum to organize a version of Fluids since the
Happening was first realized at the Pasadena Art Museum (which was the predecessor of the
Norton Simon Museum). However, the Norton Simon Museum did not agree to organize a
piece.
123

The LA Art Girls reinvented Fluids at the Getty Center. Their reinvention of the
Happening, which was titled Overflow, took place over the course of two days. The description
of the work in MOCA’s archives is as follows: “The Getty Center presents Overflow by the LA

123
In the archives at the Norton Simon Museum, I viewed an email correspondence thread between two Norton
Simon’s Chief Curator and another staff member regarding the possibility of hosting Fluids. The last email in the
chain, from the Chief Curator, states: “Perhaps we should look into something else, ‘cause you, me, Mom, and Pop
won’t be creating as long as it is on this here property, pardner.” Allan Kaprow (1967) Project Files, 1967, The
Pasadena Art Museum Archives at the Norton Simon Museum, Pasadena.

41

Art Girls, a reinvention of Allan Kaprow’s 1967 Happening, Fluids. The project is conceived
both as a historic dedication and a new contemporary art work that will explore the social aspects
of Kaprow’s practice through a series of participatory events and activities.”
124
In a phone
conversation with LA Art Girl Micol Hebron, the artist explained that the group spent several
months conducting research on the original Fluids.
125
On Saturday the LA Art Girls and
participants, with the assistance of Union Ice Company, constructed the work’s ice structure.
126

Multiple performances by the LA Art Girls took place during the construction of rectangular ice
structure. Also, the LA Art Girls organized a shuttle bus that transported participants to and from
Otis College of Art and Design in order to “draw connections between the other iterations of
Fluids.”
127
Some of the LA Art Girls rode in the vans to engage people in conversation.
128
The
collective and participants started building the structure on Saturday morning and completed its
construction in the late afternoon.
129
However, this version of Fluids melted very quickly post-
construction due to unseasonably warm weather that day. Hebron explained that shortly after the
structure was completed, the ice construction collapsed while the LA Art Girls were posing for a
photograph in front of the piece (fortunately, they were able to move away from the structure in
time to avoid injury).
130
A celebration for participants took place with DJ J. Sole of KCRW after
the reinvention of Fluids. Sunday consisted of various performances by the LA Art Girls and the
leftover ice was repurposed throughout the day. LACMA’s website states that the LA Art Girls

124
Allan Kaprow—Art as Life Files on Reinvented Happenings, 2008, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles,
Los Angeles.
125
Micol Hebron in a phone conversation with the author, January 20, 2014. Different LA Art Girls researched
different areas including Kaprow’s writings and the Union Ice Company. They also consulted the Kaprow papers at
the Getty Research Institute.
126
MOCA’s archives state that this took place all-day on Thursday, April 24; however, I do not believe that is
correct per my conversation with Hebron. Hebron told the author that the LA Art Girls dressed in blue and silver
uniforms (they each could reinterpret how they wanted to dress). Also, one LA Art Girl dressed as Kaprow in a
muscle suit. Approximately 60-70 people participated.
127
Micol Hebron in a phone conversation with the author, January 20, 2014.
128
Ibid.
129
Ibid.
130
Ibid.

42

and participants were to deconstruct Fluids by “removing and repurposing the ice to various
locations around the Getty campus.”
131
During our phone conversation, Hebron explained that
the Getty Center only allowed participants who had pre-signed up—and who had signed a legal
waiver—participate in the reinvention.
132
Therefore, visitors who came to the Happening the day
of the event could not join the construction of Overflow. This is evidence that the reinvention of
Fluids bears issues of authority and artist’s intention. Not allowing people to participate in the
Happening inevitably creates an audience for the work, which does not meet Kaprow’s intention.
Also, the authority of the artist—both Kaprow and the LA Art Girls—was compromised.
Prior to the realization of Overflow, the LA Art Girls met for hours to discuss the idea of
reinvention and its meaning.
133
Hebron conveyed, “We got no direction at all from MOCA or the
Getty Center in terms of how to do the piece...as Kaprow intended. One of the parts of the
project was necessitating a group dialogue and a collaboration in terms of figuring out how to do
it.”
134
This suggests that the LA Art Girls were given full license to decide how to reinvent the
work. Since the LA Art Girls are a collective of individuals, Hebron explained, “It was important
for us to be able to reinvent the project in a way that would allow each of the [LA] Art Girls to
assert and retain her artistic identity within the project.”
135
It is also significant to note that the
LA Art Girls found it problematic that an all-female group was invited to realize the reinvention:

131
“Fluids, A Happening by Allan Kaprow,” Los Angeles County Museum of Art, accessed October 24 2014,
http://www.lacma.org/art/exhibition/fluids-happening-allan-kaprow. As previously stated, the ice structure had
already collapsed on Saturday.
132
Micol Hebron in a phone conversation with the author, January 20, 2014.

133
Ibid. Hebron said they discussed “what this meant to reinvent Kaprow? And how to be true to his original idea of
what it would be? And how do we change it given the contemporary context and given our identity as a group of
women? And given that the presentation of it [was] at the Getty?”
134
Micol Hebron in a phone conversation with the author, January 20, 2014.
135
Ibid.
43

“We really struggled with the fact that this was a project…that we were being asked as a group
of woman to redo this project for the institution.”
136

In a conversation with Stang, who participated in five to six of the versions reinvented for
Allan Kaprow—Art as Life, she described the version of Fluids realized outside the Geffen
Contemporary and shared a stop-motion film of its creation and dissolution. Stang also expressed
that the weekend that Fluids occurred was unseasonably hot for April, much like it was very
warm during the original Fluids in October 1967. She explained, “by four in the morning, it was
gone...the next morning there was water.”
137
It was also interesting that primarily MOCA staff,
friends, and family realized the MOCA iteration. However, she explained that “it was kind of
hilarious” because the MOCA staff consisted primarily of office staff who never installs
exhibitions or work of art, while the exhibition crew decided not to participate since art
installation is their daily job.
138
Stang’s comment underlines the fact that Fluids can be read as a
political work that critiques labor. In “Critique of Instrumental Labor: Meyer Schapiro’s and
Allan Kaprow’s Theory of Avant-Garde Art,” Robert Haywood discusses the 1967 version of
Fluids and lays out ways in which the work critiques capital. He asserts,
Fluids involved participants in strenuous physical working-class labor that was rendered
unproductive in capitalist terms, thus stripping labor of its instrumental, profit-driven
rational. The labor required to construct Fluids was productive only in the name of art.
Fluids was subversive not simply because there was no end product to exchange or
purchase; rather, it enacted, in the public spaces of Pasadena and Los Angeles, the very
strategy that sustains high productivity in capitalist America—planned obsolescence….
In Fluids, Kaprow expanded and invigorated a profound point that Schapiro, more than
any other critic at the time, saw as being operative in New York School painting: art as a
critique of instrumental labor.
139

136
Ibid.
137
Aandrea Stang in discussion with author, October 22, 2013.
138
Ibid.

139
Robert E. Haywood, “Critique of Instrumental Labor: Meyer Schapiro’s and Allan Kaprow’s Theory of Avant-
Garde Art,” in Experiments in the Everyday: Allan Kaprow and Robert Watts: Events, Objects, Documents, by
Benjamin H. D. Buchloh and Judith F. Rodenbeck (New York: Columbia University, Miriam and Ira Wallach Art
Gallery, 1999), 43-44.
44

In addition to Fluids’ realization in 1967 and in conjunction with Allan Kaprow—Art as
Life, the Happening occurred three times between Kaprow’s two retrospective shows. In 2005,
the work was reinvented for the first time at Art Unlimited Basel in Basel on June 13, 2005. For
this version of the Happening, ice structures were built in three locations throughout Basel by an
international workshop in collaboration with the Department of Art and Design at the University
of Applied Sciences and the University Basel. In response to a request by Kaprow, prior to the
event, “students will spend two days in a workshop, devising strategies to realize the work. They
will determine such particulars as how to co-ordinate delivery of the ice blocks, secure the
necessary equipment and design of the structures. Thus they will create a Basel-specific,
contemporary variant of the Happening, this time without the artist’s direct involvement.”
140

Following the version of Fluids at Art Unlimited Basel, the work was reinvented in Cooper
Square in New York on November 10th, 2007 for the PERFORMA 07 biennial. Artist Zach
Rockhill realized this version of Fluids with student volunteers. It was produced in collaboration
with PERFORMA and The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art. On Saturday
March 29, 2008, Fluids was reinvented for the third time at the Tate Modern’s riverfront
landscape in London. Carried out by Alice Kogel and Goldsmiths, University of London
students, the work was executed for “UBS Openings: Saturday Live. Happening Again: Allan
Kaprow’s Fluids and Scales,” as a part of the series of bi-monthly performance events at the Tate
Modern. Workshops were held prior to this rendition of Fluids.

140
“Allan Kaprow: Fluids, 1967/2005,” Art Agenda, accessed October 27, 2013, http://www.art-
agenda.com/shows/allan-kaprow-fluids-19672005/.
45

Words
The Environment Words was first created by Kaprow in 1962, realized again by the artist
for his Pasadena retrospective and reinvented by Allen Ruppersberg for MOCA’s presentation of
Allan Kaprow—Art as Life. Kaprow created the initial version of Words in September 1962 for
an exhibition in the Smolin Gallery in New York City. For this work, the artist built two small
rooms inside the gallery. Kaprow biographer Kelley’s description in the monograph Childsplay
lays out the formal aspects of the work. He begins by describing the exterior room of the
Environment:
The first, outer room, nine by nine feet in size, was the more public, rhetorical of the two.
Four colored lightbulbs hung at eye level, and two vertical rows of lights reached from
floor to ceiling on opposite walls. On two of the walls, five vertical loops of cloth
stenciled with words had been hung side by side, and visitors were invited to roll the
loops so that words would align or misalign…. Hundreds of strips of paper, each
containing a single handwritten word, were stapled onto the other two walls; here,
visitors were encouraged to tear off the strips and replace them with others that had been
nailed to a central post.
141

The smaller and darker internal room of Words, lit by a single lightbulb, had blue walls and a
plastic ceiling. Kelley further details the space:
Hanging from slits in the plastic ceiling were torn strips of cloth, and clipped onto these
were many small pieces of paper with handwritten notes. Near the entrance, paper, clips,
and pencils were provided for visitors to add their own notes. Also hanging from the
ceiling, at the end of long strings, were pieces of colored chalk that could be used to write
or draw on the blue walls. A record player on the floor played barely audible whispering
sounds.
142

For the introduction for the exhibition catalogue produced for the Smolin Gallery show, Kaprow
stated, “I am involved with the city atmosphere of billboards, newspapers, scrawled pavements
and alley walls, in the drone of a lecture, whispered secrets, pitchmen in Times Square, fun-
parlors, bits of stories in conversations overheard at the Automat. All this has been compressed

141
Jeff Kelley, Childsplay: The Art of Allan Kaprow (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 71.
142
Ibid.

46

and shaped into a situation which, in order to ‘live’ in the fullest sense, must actively engage the
viewer.”
143
Kelley explains, “To engage the viewer, in other words, was to bring words to life—
and life came to language through play.”
144
He also conveys that Kaprow sought to remove the
literary meaning of words by “inviting people to engage in such ordinary activities as ‘doodling,
playing anagrams or scrabble, searching for just the right word to express a thought,’ and so
on.”
145

Words was one of the three Environments created by Kaprow for his 1967 retrospective.
The exhibition installation photographs in the show’s archive suggest that this version of the
Environment was similar to the original 1962 Words.
146
The photographs in the archive show
that the work included a room, built within the galleries of the Pasadena Art Museum, similar to
that of the outer room of the work in the Smolin Gallery. These photographs show Kaprow
installing a room with multiple strips of paper with painted words fastened to the walls. In the
center, a post erects from a table with three record players. To the right, there is a dark opening
into another room that I suspect was the smaller, darker room with the blackboard walls and
strips hanging from the ceiling.
Words has been realized multiple times between its first realization in 1962 and its
reinvention by Ruppersberg. The Environment was created two times between the Smolin
Gallery exhibition and the Pasadena Art Museum retrospective in 1967: in 1962 in Stony Brook
and in 1967 in Chicago. In the time between Kaprow’s first retrospective and MOCA’s
presentation in 2008, seven versions of Words have been materialized. In 2005, the Hauser and
Wirth gallery in Zurich reinvented Words for the exhibition Allan Kaprow and was on view from

143
Ibid.
144
Ibid.
145
Ibid., 73.

146
Due to the limited amount of documentation in the archive, I am unable to confirm if the work consisted of one
or two rooms.
47

August 27 through October 8, 2005. In the show’s press release, Kelley describes the 2005
reinvention of the Environment:
In a poignant contrast to the raw physicality and crude visual style of the urban language
surrounding the artist in 1962, Words 2005 will be a more ephemeral work, composed
entirely of sound. Its visual and material aspects stripped away, the Zurich reinvention of
this famous Environment is more cerebral, and may attest not only to the passage of four
decades – a metaphor, perhaps, for the artist’s own aging – but also to the disembodied
state of language that typifies our expanded global “environment” today.
147

Prior to the presentation of Allan Kaprow—Art as Life at MOCA, Words was reinvented for the
exhibition’s 2006 display at the Haus der Kunst in Munich and for its 2007 showing at the Van
Abbemuseum in Eindhoven. Currently, my research has not revealed if Words was reinvented
for the Allan Kaprow—Art as Life venues in Bern and Genova.
Allen Ruppersberg reinvented Words for MOCA’s 2008 presentation. MOCA Curator
Kaiser specifically asked Ruppersberg to recreate Words and the artist felt that Kaiser “couldn’t
have picked a more appropriate work.”
148
During the panel discussion “Exploring Kaprow’s
Environments,” Ruppersberg expressed that he felt—much like Smith—that reinventing a work
by Kaprow was a difficult task:
This is, quite a challenge here, to make a work that…is related to something that you so
admire, and that is so influential, and so it’s kind of a daunting idea to reinvent a work
which you know, in my case, was very influential. Of course, you know, I knew Allan as
some kind of acquaintance, and distant colleague et cetera, but also a generation that was
very influential on me…. The first thought of doing this is kind of like ‘wow, I don’t
know if I can do this,’ ugh you know cause in my mind it’s such a great work and what
on earth could I do here? But I really liked the idea.
149

It is interesting to note that Ruppersberg felt that his own history informed him about idea of
reinvention. During the panel discussion, the artist discussed the re-presentation of his work Al’s

147
“Allan Kaprow,” Hauser and Wirth, accessed November 5, 2013,
http://cloud.hauserwirth.com/documents/lW5VDr85jCSHts9q083H7XL6HPRA0ZZ3eq8CWJkdVR6XKQ5KEg/ka
prow-hwz_2005.pdf
148
Allen Ruppersberg, “Exploring Kaprow’s Environments” (panel discussion, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los
Angeles, held at the National Center for the Preservation of Democracy, Los Angeles, CA, May 18, 2008).
149
Allen Ruppersberg, “Exploring Kaprow’s Environments” (panel discussion, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los
Angeles, held at the National Center for the Preservation of Democracy, Los Angeles, CA, May 18, 2008).
48

Café (1969), a performative installation. The new version, titled Al’s Cafe (Reheated), was
created in 1979 at the Rosamund Felsen Gallery in Los Angeles. Ruppersberg expressed that on
the night of the opening reception for Al’s Cafe (Reheated), he walked into the gallery and
immediately resented his decision to recreate Al’s Café: “This is all wrong, this is a disaster. This
is really the wrong thing to do…I learned at that point that ephemeral events cannot be redone,
that that was that and that is only what it was. When I approached this [reinvention of Kaprow’s
work] of course, on a personal level, I bring that information that you can’t redo these ephemeral
events, and so…do I approach this?”
150
Ruppersberg conveyed that he only had photographs of
Kaprow’s Words and thus referred solely to photographs when he conceptualized his reinvention
of the work. He stated that he preferred Kaprow’s original, 1962 version of the Environment. He
did not look at other documentation or ephemera of the 1962 version or any of the other
reinvented versions.
151
It is interesting to note that he did not view the 1967 version of Words
that Kaprow created for his first retrospective. While looking at the photographs of the original
piece when he began conceiving the new work, Ruppersberg noticed “all the other things that are
in there besides the words themselves, one of which was record players, and then I found out that
he made records to go along with Words, and so I began to be interested in that aspect of it, to
kind of translate it, because the idea of translating, the translation of one’s artists’ work into a
work of mine is something that is consistent with my work anyway” and fits within his practice
in general.
152
Also, the artist explained that three to four years prior to his reinvention of Words,
he created a piece that he said could be considered a reinvention of Allan Ginsberg’s Howl.
Thus, Ruppersberg conveyed,

150
Ibid.
151
Ibid.
152
Ibid.

49

I translated Howl in a certain way, so how do I translate Words into what I knew had to
be a work of my own? And from this past experience with Al’s Café, and the fact that I
had been working in this way anyway, it from day one was work of my own. And yes,
it’s rooted in Words because that’s a great work to me. But, you know, there are lots of
things that play into that because that’s a period I’m interested in anyway…. If you look
at the first pictures of Words, you can’t help but think about poetry.
153

He explained that the idea of poetry and the idea of Kaprow’s recordings shifted his concept to
“the idea of spoken word” which he thought could be translated or reinvented in some way.
154
As
a result, the origin of Ruppersberg’s work was “the idea of not reproducing the visual aspect of
reading these words, but to tweek it into the spoken word.”
155
Ruppersberg explained,
A lot of my work these days comes right out of the Xerox machine. I decided to start with
the idea of creating poems out of spoken word texts because when you read labels, in a
way, you’re reading the same kind of word that you read in the photographs of Allan’s
Words. You’re putting words together in a certain way, but you also hear them because
the recordings are coming out of the vintage equipment that I got [for the piece] which is
the same that is in the photographs of the original Words. Ultimately that’s the direction
that I took.
156

Within the Geffen Contemporary’s exhibition space, this work was installed in the center
of the gallery in line with the other Environments. Ruppersberg’s version of Words consisted of
“8,000 color and black and white Xerox copies, silkscreened cardboard boxes, vintage
typewriters and record players, CD players and original CDs, motion sensors, circuit boards, and
letterpress posters.”
157
For the Environment, tables with vintage typewriters and cardboard boxes
(filled with paper for visitors to type on) placed on each table, folding chairs, and a large wall
composed of a collage-like grid of images of records, words, and other printed materials. Posters
with instructions, collaged on the grid of images, read: “Instructions for Circles: Read Some
Sounds: Find your favorite pages in the boxes on the table. They are free for the taking. (Please

153
Ibid.
154
Ibid.
155
Ibid.
156
Ibid.
157
Allan Kaprow—Art as Life Exhibition Photographs, 2008, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles,
Los Angeles.
50

be kind and select only six pages per person). Compose Some Images: Place a selected page in
one of the typewriters on the table and begin to type. Hear Some Words: Listen for the sounds
coming from the record players on the table. Change typewriters for new sounds when
desired.”
158

It is important to observe that Ruppersberg’s work is titled CIRCLES: Allan Kaprow’s
Words, 1962, by Allen Ruppersberg, 2008.
159
In a phone interview with Kaiser, he explained that
Ruppersberg did not see the work as a reinvention, but his own piece. Kaiser conveys,
“Ruppersberg said ‘this is not a reinvention, this is my piece, I just made it for Kaprow, but it’s
my piece….’ It was all about the title, and I think Allen Ruppersberg called it ‘Circles’ but he
didn’t call it ‘Words.’ It was ‘Allen Ruppersberg Circles’ and then in the title it was about the
reinvention of Words. It wasn’t the other way around, it wasn’t Kaprow by Ruppersberg.”
160
As
we can clearly see in the title of the work, Ruppersberg named the piece “CIRCLES,” not
“Words.”
161
Thus, the title did not suggest that Ruppersberg reinvented a work by Kaprow.
Instead, Ruppersberg’s name is included in the title of the Environment, which indicates that the
work is his own. In an interview with Cheryl Donegan for BOMB magazine, Ruppersberg refers
to the reinvention of Words when discussing his practice in general: “Each work has a different
origin, and might have a different focus. One might be on some experience; another one about a
collection; or yet another one might be about making the past live again through viewer
interaction, like my remake of Allan Kaprow’s Words, a 1962 Environment, for MOCA in 2008.

158
“Making it Happen Again,” image in article, Outsideleft, accessed December 7, 2013,
http://www.outsideleft.com/main.php?updateID=1020.
159
For this study, I refer to the title used for images MOCA provided for my research. These files include
information about the work at the bottom of the image.
160
Philipp Kaiser in a phone conversation with the author, November 6, 2013.
161
Kaiser expressed that Ruppersberg’s claim of authorship of the piece created quite a stir among the curators who
conceived the show and the head of the Kaprow Estate.
51

Each work starts with a different frame of reference, and is developed from there.”
162
Again, we
can see that Ruppersberg considers CIRCLES his own work that was about another work—a past
work by Kaprow. Ruppersberg’s claim of authorship and his work’s title undoubtedly raise
significant issues regarding authorship in the reinvention of Kaprow’s work.

The Question of Authorship
As illustrated in the example of Ruppersberg’s piece, the issue of authorship in the
reinvention of Kaprow’s work raises many questions when considering works reinvented in the
MOCA show and beyond. What does it mean when multiple authors create a work and what
issues arise when the original author is not present? Also, reinvention is an anti-historicist
practice that goes against a linear reading of history. Why is it problematic to reinvent a work
that is absent in its original form, but present in another form? Kaiser was interested in the
question of authorship and sought to test this issue by strategically inviting well-known artists to
reinvent Environments. Kaiser contends, “I was kind of challenging the notion of authorship by
inviting people that are as important as Kaprow but I was also interested in this notion of
authorship. What does it mean if someone else takes over? What does the cover version of a song
mean when the guy who is making the cover version gets more…is better known than the other
guy who initiated the song?”
163

It is interesting to consider Kaiser’s approach to the issue of authorship, which was
nothing like Meyer-Hermann and Rosenthal’s solutions. During the panel discussion “Exploring
Kaprow’s Environments,” Kaiser noted that the reinventions were different at all five venues and
he made a special point to emphasize who reinvented works in the Munich and Eindhoven

162
Cheryl Donegan, “Allen Ruppersberg,” BOMB 109 (Fall 2009), accessed November 6, 2013,
http://bombsite.com/issues/109/articles/3330.
163
Philipp Kaiser in a phone conversation with the author, November 6, 2013.
52

shows. He affirmed that in Munich, professors along with students reinvented Environments.
Thus, there was not an authorship problem because well-known artists, such as McCarthy or
Smith, were not invited to reinvent works.
164
For the Eindhoven presentation, Kaiser revealed
that curator Meyer-Hermann reinvented all of Environments herself, which he said produced
good-looking works with a similar aesthetic.
165
It is important to take into account the specific
curatorial gesture to invite artists to reinvent ephemeral art forms. As illustrated in the example
of Meyer-Hermann, curators have also made the decision to mount such works themselves. It is
worth reflecting upon the curator’s presence, or lack thereof, within the exhibition space.
Curators such as Harald Szeemann, who “defined himself as an Ausstellungsmacher, a maker of
exhibitions,” have asserted themselves into the making of an exhibition.
166
Other curators—take
Lucy Lippard for example—have elected to “undermine the traditional division of roles and
functions between artists, curators and critics” as her “numbers shows” illustrate.
167

As revealed in the case of the reinvention by Ruppersberg, I posit that problems arise
when an Environment, Happening, or Activity is not created by the original author. In a
conversation with Kaiser, I asked the curator about problems that arose when artists other than
Kaprow reinvented Environments for the 2008 show. Kaiser replied, “Besides Ruppersberg, who
claimed the piece to be his own and not a Kaprow, it was actually no problem at all. That was the
great thing. Barbara T. Smith was extremely honored to re-perform the piece.”
168
However,

164
Philipp Kaiser, “Exploring Kaprow’s Environments” (panel discussion, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los
Angeles, held at the National Center for the Preservation of Democracy, Los Angeles, CA, May 18, 2008).
165
Ibid.
166
Hans Ulrich Obrist, “Harald Szeemann,” in A Brief History of Curating. ed. Lionel (Bovier. Zurich: JRP/Ringier,
2008), 99.
167
Sabeth Buchmann, “Introduction: From Conceptualism to Feminism,” in From Conceptualism to Feminism:
Lucy Lippard's Numbers Shows, 1969-74. Cornelia Butler et al. (London: Afterall Books, 2012), 9.
168
Philipp Kaiser in a phone conversation with the author, November 6, 2013.
53

Kaiser brought up the intriguing question of authorship when the reinvented work potentially
enters the commercial realm.
169

Issues of Artist’s Intention and Authority
In order to further investigate how reinvention as an artists’ methodology changes when
it is transferred from Kaprow to various hands, I now want to focus on the problems of artist’s
intention and authority. To what extent were works in the MOCA presentation reinvented when
read through the model of reinvention? I use the following section to argue that some of the
MOCA reinventions question the complex boundaries of reinvention’s principles.
Kaprow systematized the reinvention of his work, which precisely indicates that he
wanted his works to be reinvented, not reenacted or re-performed.
170
Stang expressed that
“Kaprow gave very clear instructions: ‘yes, please reinvent my work.’”
171
However, not only did
Kaprow want his work to be reinvented, but he wanted the reinvented version to take a new form
independent of its historical ties. But to what extent was Kaprow’s desire followed? Stang
revealed that many of the reinvented works did not necessarily take a new form:
Tamara [Bloomberg] is very clear on fact that Kaprow didn’t want to have the
reinventions look exactly like his work or be a replica of something that had happened in
the ‘60s, ‘70s, or ‘80s. Instead it should be a unique reinvention. That didn’t really
happen…while there were some changes in some of them, people were very interested in
keeping it as strictly to the letter as possible. We encouraged them to expand ideas, to
take what Kaprow had said and done, and to think things through… I was living with the
ghost of an artist who was recently dead and who had been incredibly significant in
Southern California. I thought, “what if I’m doing this wrong, I don’t want to do this
wrong.” McCarthy’s response to me was, “if you’re worried that you’re doing it wrong,
you’re doing it right.”
172

169
Ibid.
170
This should not be confused with Kaprow’s hesitation to agree to the retrospective.
171
Aandrea Stang in discussion with author, October 22, 2013.
172
Ibid.
54

As shown in the above interview, many reinventions of Happenings and Activities in the MOCA
show were close to the originals. Stang’s observation suggests that some may have felt pressure
to remain close to the initial version.
Artist Steve Roden, who reinvented Eighteen Happenings in Six Parts at LACE as a part
of Allan Kaprow—Art as Life at MOCA, did not believe that he was given artistic license to
create an entirely new form of Eighteen Happenings. Unlike the other works that were
reinvented for the show, this Happening does not have a complete score to work from. As a
result, Roden, along with others including Michael Ned Holte and Carol Stakenas, visited the
Kaprow archive at the Getty Research Institute (GRI) to attempt to piece together the papers
from Eighteen Happenings file to sketch out how the event unfolded. It is important to note that
the end form realized in 2008 was the result of a closely monitored reinvention of the work. In a
conversation with Roden, the artist shared the surprisingly impactful framework he had to work
with for his reinvention:
The hardest part was organizing all of the papers and trying to figure out what
happened…. Then it became clear that we didn’t have quite as much freedom as we
thought we would have. The thing about Kaprow that has always been exciting to me is
his thinking and not the actual pieces…I felt that to be true to his vision was the most
important thing, and to them the most important thing was allowing 18/6 to remain a
moment in time as a seminal work. This was kind of intuitive; there was a conversation at
one point…[when] somebody, Hauser and Wirth, MOCA, or the Estate said, “you guys
can’t just do whatever you want.” At one point, I had to tell them, “we’re not wearing
white shirts with skinny black ties and we’re not using this object that was used before.
We’re not here to create nostalgia.” The only reason I decided to do the piece was to
make it relevant; how fifty years later could it be relevant as a piece of work that still
speaks in a way that is unconventional and charged. In a way, they really handcuffed us
for pushing that. But I felt there would be no reason to do this unless we can make it feel
vital as a service to the piece and to the legacy. We were both thinking about his legacy,
but in very, very different ways.
173

Roden’s first-hand account raises issues when considering the problems built into the model of
reinvention. Roden further emphasizes the fact that the 2008 version Eighteen Happenings was

173
Steve Roden in discussion with the author, September 27, 2013.
55

not a genuine reinvention: “[T]hey were really reluctant to offer us a true reinvention of the
piece. What is sad is that we easily could have sat down together and talked about the firmament
of this piece, and how we can dress it up in a way so that it is relevant and different and not
about history….”
174
The case of Roden’s project reveals that the artist did not have the authority
to produce what he considered an authentic reinvention, thus raising questions regarding both
artist’s intention and authority.
In an effort to further illuminate questions of artist’s intention and authority when
reinvention is transferred from the original artist to others, I will briefly discuss André Lepecki’s
reinvention Eighteen Happenings in Six Parts (1959/2006), which was realized for the Munich
presentation of Allan Kaprow—Art as Life. Lepecki uses the term “redoing” rather than
“reinvention” in his essay “Redoing 18 Happenings in 6 Parts,” included in a publication
produced following the retrospective’s presentation in Munich and Eindhoven titled Allan
Kaprow: 18/6: 18 Happenings in 6 Parts - 9/10/11 November 2006. It is noteworthy that he
refuses to use the phrase reinvention, especially since both Meyer-Hermann and Rosenthal
employ the term in their essays for the book. This suggests that Lepecki followed a model of re-
creation rather than reinvention, thus raising issues of artist’s intention and authority. A
correspondence from artist historian and critic Rodenbeck further indicates that the model of
reinvention was not drawn on for the piece: “The restaging of 18 Happenings in 6 Parts done by
André Lepecki was meticulous in its detailing, with a few interpretive moves…involving props.
One thing that was quite provoking to me was the extreme self-consciousness—the ‘acting,’ if
you will, of the person who had what I believe was Kaprow’s part, which seemed to me exactly
the opposite of what Kaprow was looking for when he said he wanted people to ‘just do.’”
175

174
Ibid.

175
Judith Rodenbeck, e-mail message to author, February 11, 2014.
56

This example adds to my claim that reinventions in Allan Kaprow—Art as Life—in the broader
scope of the traveling show—bear issues of artist’s intention and authority.

CONCLUSION
To close this study, I intend to draw on Kaprow’s own practice by attempting to produce
an unfixed work that questions the stability of its own form by way of problematizing the very
notion of theorizing from artists’ writing and self-theorization. Kaprow’s interest in reinvention
and changeability shows that he did not want his own ideas to become something fixed. As
illustrated in the artist’s 1984 project description for the exhibition Blam! The Explosion of Pop,
Minimalism, and Performance, 1958-1964, the stress of Kaprow’s practice is on “create” and
“invent.”
176
Also, as illustrated in the opening of this paper, the artist opposed values ascribed to
the museum, such as the static object. Kaprow’s contextual sensitivity and studies with Schapiro
indicate that his practice is linked to the critique of “origin,” which means that the artist is
concerned with reinvention as a way to activate the present moment or context. Moreover,
Kaprow’s own self-theorization suggests that he is not against the ongoing reception of his work.
I argue that Kaprow’s notion of reinvention continues to resist a static form and thus remains an
unfixed artists’ methodology.
The notion of “process” in Kaprow’s work illustrates the artist’s interest in the ongoing
practice of creating or inventing. In fact, the idea of process can be found within Kaprow’s
Environments as well as other artists producing work in the 1960s. In his essay “An Introduction
to a Theory,” Kaprow conveys, “The Environment was vestigially scenographic, but it favored

176
Stephanie Rosenthal, “Agency for Action,” in Allan Kaprow—Art as Life, ed. Eva Meyer-Hermann, Andrew
Perchuk, and Stephanie Rosenthal (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2008), 61-62.
57

the making and doing process, not the visual result.”
177
Robert Morris also privileged the process
of creating a work over the end result of an art form. Included in the April 1968 issue of
Artforum, Morris’s essay “Anti Form” emphasizes the importance of process and material in art
practice. He states,
The focus on matter and gravity as means results in forms that were not projected in
advance. Considerations of ordering are necessarily casual and imprecise and
unemphasized. Random piling, loose stacking, hanging, give passing form to the
material. Chance is accepted and indeterminacy is implied, as replacing will result in
another configuration. Disengagement with preconceived enduring forms and orders for
things is a positive assertion. It is part of the work’s refusal to continue aestheticizing the
form by dealing with it as a prescribed end.
178

As shown in the cases of Kaprow and Morris, both artists’ investment in chance and
changeability oppose a closed form.
Kaprow’s interest in American philosopher John Dewey also highlights the fact that
Kaprow would not want his work to have a fixed end. In the late 1940s, Kaprow read Dewey’s
Art as Experience (1934). While reading Dewey in his early years, Kaprow wrote notes in the
columns of the book which included questions such as “Art not separate from experience…what
is an authentic experience?...environment is a process of interaction….”
179
Kelley argues that
Dewey’s theory of experience had a profound influence on shaping Kaprow’s practice and
deems Dewey as Kaprow’s “true intellectual father.”
180
Dewey felt that experience has aesthetic
qualities and that art should be connected with “the everyday events, doings, and sufferings that
are universally recognized to constitute experiences.”
181
He argues, “An experience has pattern
and structure, because it is not just doing and undergoing in alternation, but consists of them in

177
Allan Kaprow, “Introduction to a Theory,” in 7 Environments, by Allan Kaprow (Milan: Fondazione Mudima,
1992), 24.

178
Robert Morris, “Anti Form,” in Continuous Project Altered Daily: the Writings of Robert Morris (Cambridge:
MIT Press; New York, N.Y.: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1993), 46.
179
Jeff Kelley, “Introduction,” in Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life, ed. Jeff Kelley (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2003), xxv.
180
Jeff Kelley, Childsplay: The Art of Allan Kaprow (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 8.
181
Ibid., 7.
58

relationship. To put one’s hand in the fire that consumes it is not necessarily to have an
experience. The action and its consequence must be joined in perception. This relationship is
what gives meaning; to grasp it is the objective of all intelligence.”
182
Kaprow’s work that
centers on the experience of the participant can be read in Dewey’s concept of “an
experience.”
183
In the foreword of Childsplay, David Antin observes, “In his later work Allan
takes [Dewey’s] argument and runs with it, so that triggering concentrated, self-conscious
reflection on any action undertaken—say vacuuming a floor or brushing one’s teeth—will
become a way of making art, which Allan calls ‘un-art’ because he prefers actions drawn from
the colloquial sphere of human experience.”
184
Furthermore, Dewey affirms that “art denotes a
process of doing or making,” and

the notion of art as process, as previously stated, can be found
in Kaprow’s work.
185

The examples above reveal that the American philosopher’s text shaped
the development of Kaprow’s theoretical outlook. As a result, Dewey’s influence on Kaprow,
ranging from the notion of “an experience” to the “process of doing or making,” provides
evidence that Kaprow would not want his work to have a set end.
186

This thesis outlines some of the factors that are at stake with the notion of reinvention
conceptually and when it is put into play, but it is interesting to consider how this model will
shape future production. Rodenbeck suggests, “If the term is to be at all useful it will be
inasmuch as reinvention allows for a less slavish approach to the performance score while also
allowing new generations to feel their way into this performative mode. The word itself calls
upon its user to be an inventor, after all.”
187
Kaprow has laid out a systematized structure that is a

182
John Dewey, Art as Experience (New York: Perigee Books, 2005), 45-46.
183
Ibid., 36.

184
David Antin, “Foreword: Allan at Work” in Childsplay: The Art of Allan Kaprow, by Jeff Kelley (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2004), xv.
185
John Dewey, Art as Experience (New York: Perigee Books, 2005), 48.

186
Ibid., 36, 48.

187
Judith Rodenbeck, e-mail message to author, February 11, 2014.
59

part of art and art discourse. Artists now have the opportunity to consider reinventing a piece,
rather than reenacting, re-performing, or re-presenting a work. However, reinvention also offers
a model that is applicable to curatorial strategies and scholarly writing. By drawing on the
working principles of reinvention, curators and scholars can use the model as an approach to
renew their practices. Taking into account Kaprow’s interest in process, the unfixed, and
changeability, reinvention urges the user to be conscious of the context in which they are
producing—whether it be in the arena of art or discourse—and invites them to become an
“inventor” within such practices.

60

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Cardinal, Roger. Kurt Schwitters. Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2011.

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Robinson, Julia E. John Cage. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2011.

Abstract (if available)

Abstract The late Allan Kaprow’s notion of reinvention functions as a model that carefully systematizes future instantiations of the artist’s work. Deftly articulated through his writings, reinventions are not the same as reconstructions, re‐presentations, or re‐creations because the term denotes that such reinvented versions “differ markedly from their originals.”¹ What is reinvention to Kaprow, and what are its limits as an approach when it is transferred to curators, scholars and other artists making his work? Looking at the example of the traveling retrospective Allan Kaprow—Art as Life, realized just after Kaprow’s death in 2006, this thesis centers on the production of the artist’s ephemeral works in the 2008 presentation at the Geffen Contemporary at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), Los Angeles. By defining and conceiving of reinvention as an artists’ methodology, this thesis argues that reinvention can be theorized, despite hierarchies between artists’ writing and critical discourse. This study reveals how this artists’ methodology changes when it is transferred from the original artist to curators, scholars and other artists. It looks at such changes by focusing on aspects such as authorship, artist’s intention, and authority. This thesis demonstrates that reinvention can be used to analyze works in the MOCA show, including Push and Pull: A Furniture Comedy for Hans Hofmann (1963/2008), Words (1962/2008), and Fluids (1967/2008)—pieces that were also realized in Kaprow’s first retrospective at the Pasadena Art Museum in 1967—as well as other instances of reinvention. Additionally, given Kaprow’s interest in reinvention, process, and changeability, this thesis explores the very idea of theorizing from artists’ writing and own self-theorization. ❧ ¹ Allan Kaprow, “Introduction to a Theory,” in 7 Environments, by Allan Kaprow (Milan: Fondazione Mudima, 1992), 23.

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University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

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Asset Metadata

Creator McCornack, Julia R. (author)

Core Title Reinventing ephemeral forms: an investigation of the reinvention of Allan Kaprow's work in Allan Kaprow—Art as life (2008)

School School of Fine Arts

Degree Master of Arts

Degree Program Art and Curatorial Practices in the Public Sphere

Publication Date 04/16/2014

Defense Date 03/25/2014

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag Allan Kaprow,Allan Kaprow—Art as life,environment,happening,MOCA,OAI-PMH Harvest,reenactment,reinvention,reperformance,representation,restaging

Format application/pdf (imt)

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Butler, Connie (committee chair), Anastas, Rhea (committee member), Hudson, Suzanne P. (committee member)

Creator Email jmccornack@mac.com,mccornac@usc.edu

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c3-378806

Unique identifier UC11296005

Identifier etd-McCornackJ-2367.pdf (filename),usctheses-c3-378806 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-McCornackJ-2367-0.pdf

Dmrecord 378806

Document Type Thesis

Format application/pdf (imt)

Rights McCornack, Julia R.

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