Happening
Description
A happening is a performance, event, or situation art, usually as performance art. The term was first used by Allan Kaprow in 1959 to describe a range of art-related events. Read more ↗
Key Artists
Allan Kaprow
The visionary founder and theorist who coined the term 'Happening' in 1959, choreographing unscripted, ephemeral performance events that dissolved the barrier between performer and audience.
Claes Oldenburg
Pop sculptor who staged wild, immersive Happenings inside his Ray Gun Theater in the Lower East Side, utilizing cardboard costumes, slop, and audience interaction to dramatize urban chaos.
Jim Dine
Painter and performance pioneer who created famous early Happenings such as The Smiling Workman (1960), drinking jars of paint and diving through canvases at the Reuben Gallery.
Robert Whitman
Key creator of multimedia Happenings who integrated early film projections, mirrors, actors, and shadow play into magical, dreamlike theatrical environments such as The American Moon (1960).
Red Grooms
Energetic painter and performer who staged early Happenings such as The Burning Building (1959) in his loft studio, combining expressionist set painting with chaotic live actors and fire engines.
Carolee Schneemann
Kinetic theater pioneer who transformed kinetic assemblage and Happenings into radical, sensuous celebrations of the female body and environmental participation, notably in Meat Joy (1964).
Famous Artworks
Fun Facts
Allan Kaprow first used the word 'happening' in print in his famous 1958 essay 'The Legacy of Jackson Pollock,' arguing that Pollock's action painting had exhausted the flat canvas and that artists must now enter the physical world of everyday objects, sounds, and actions.
↗ Source: guggenheim.org
Unlike traditional theater where spectators sit passively in auditorium seats, Kaprow's Happenings required guests to sign formal instruction cards upon entry, commanding them to change rooms when bells rang and prohibiting applauding at the conclusion because art and life were occurring simultaneously.
↗ Source: guggenheim.org