80

Spread from Allan KaprowrsquosAssemblage Environmentsand Happenings 1966Photograph on left HansNamuth Photograph on right Ken HeymanMeridian Photographics

Grey Room 13 Fall 2003 pp 80ndash107 copy 2003 Grey Room Inc and Massachusetts Institute of Technology 81

Framed Space Allan Kaprow and the Spread of PaintingWILLIAM KAIZEN

As modernism gets older context becomes content In a peculiar reversalthe object introduced into the gallery ldquoframesrdquo the gallery and its laws1

mdashBrian OrsquoDoherty

A pair of images begins this brief history of the overlap between paint-ing and architecture in America after world war II of the period whenpainting spread beyond its frame toward what Allan Kaprow calledenvironments and happenings and toward installation art today It is a two-page layout from his book Assemblage Environments andHappenings with one image on either page Published in 1966 the bookhad been in the works since as early as 1959 when Kaprow wrote thefirst version of the eponymously titled essay that would become itscenterpiece2 Just before the written essay is a long sequence of pho-tographs a sort of photo-essay titled ldquoStep Right Inrdquo consisting of aseries of large black-and-white pictures with text interspersed Thetitle refers to Jackson Pollock and his comment that he works ldquoinrdquo hispaintings3 It shows a variety of work by artists from the 1950s andearly 1960s such as Robert Rauschenberg Yayoi Kusama Robert Whitmanand Kaprow himself all of whom Kaprow thought extended Pollockrsquoslegacy into three dimensions By creating postpainterly installationsthat one necessarily stepped into their work had come off the wallsand expanded to ll the space of the gallery and beyond

The sequence of photos ends by returning to a point of origin thenal pair of images serving to summarize the progress made by all ofthese artists who followed on the heels of abstract expressionism tri-umphant These two images bookend a trajectory marking an originon the left and its logical outcome on the right On the left we see a HansNamuth photograph of Pollock at work in his studio In his paintingPollock is a blur arm extended the light that streams in from the windowsabove overexposing the upper half of his body Caught in the wildlight his body is part of the canvases that surround him Sectioned bythe bands of light he becomes part of the paintings and not just thesource of the action Pollock the man and Pollock the work become oneHe is in literally dissolving into his paintings On the right following

82 Grey Room 13

the image of Pollock as if following directly from Pollockmdashheir to hislegacy and also its conclusionmdashstands Kaprow in the middle of hissculpture Yard a eld of randomly strewn tires completely lling thesmall courtyard behind a tenement building4 Like Pollock he is shotfrom above so that in the middle of these throwaway commodities heis also caught in the work Rather than blur into the work Kaprow sitsat the bottom of the page riding the wave of tires that seems to tumbleout of the picture He looks up at the viewer in shirtsleeves a pipebetween his teeth Crawling behind him is a child whose presenceelicits an atmosphere of play from an otherwise dingy environmentThe madness and alcoholism that supposedly fueled Pollockrsquos workif only in the popular imagination has now been replaced by Kaprowwith his own image as the bohemian academic and family man ldquoTheabstract expressionists [had] a point of view full of agony andecstasy full of crisisrdquo Kaprow said ldquoThis is no longer possible for usWe came too late for thatrdquo5

Kaprowrsquos generation was born too late to remember the Depressionwhich was just old enough to be caught up in the new prosperity ofthe postndashworld war II economic boom Instead of engaging withuntrammeled ego and pure expression Kaprow engaged with the prob-lem of painting and space and with objects in a society turning awayfrom production and toward consumption While Kaprow in AssemblageEnvironments and Happenings charts one trajectory out of Pollock thisessay follows another slightly different line of ight In constructinghis own legacy in Assemblage Kaprow obscures what is perhaps moreinteresting in the development of his own work as it relates to thework of others that followed rather than only beget performance arthis early work opened up the conjunction of viewing subject art objectand gallery space turning space into a eld for artistic production6 Inthe literature on Kaprow his own trajectorymdashone where he simplymoves Pollock off the wall and into performancemdashis generally takenfor granted7 By tracing another trajectory I hope to show how Kaprowin the context of post-world war II America called into being a differentset of problems problems that would be developed by minimalism andinstitutional critique and into installation and site-specic work today8

The point of origin for this trajectory and the one that I will followthroughout this essay will focus on the problem of autonomy as rstdeveloped in the dialogue between Pollock and Clement GreenbergIn his essay ldquoTowards a Newer Laocoonrdquo Greenberg states that auton-omy under modernism meant the separation of each art form into itsconstituent medium rather than as Theodor Adorno had had it by itsseparation from social use-value For Greenberg each art form neces-sarily distinguished itself from all the others via its material support ldquoTheartsrdquo wrote Greenberg ldquohave been hunted back to their mediums and

Kaizen | Framed Space Allan Kaprow and the Spread of Painting 83

there they have been isolated concentrated and denedrdquo9 As we willsee despite Greenbergrsquos later claims he nevertheless recognized thatPollockrsquos work operated precisely against the limitations of paintingas medium pushing painting toward sculpture and architecture asmuch as it engaged with two-dimensional atness Conversely Kaprowwhose early environments and happenings seem to inaugurate theldquopost-medium conditionrdquo of art since the 1960s ends up reassertingmediumistic autonomy one that is based on the specificity of thegallery space and its laws10 To get from Pollock to Kaprow I will touchon the intermediate points of Peter Blakersquos project for a museumdesigned to house Pollockrsquos work as well as the dialogue betweenRobert Rauschenberg and John Cage using these intermediaries as abridge between Kaprowrsquos engagement with Pollockrsquos work and Kaprowrsquosown early work in environments and happenings

| | | | |

Kaprow had written an essay ten years before Assemblage Environmentsand Happenings staking out the territory that was to become his lifersquoswork Called ldquoThe Legacy of Jackson Pollockrdquo it was written shortlyafter Pollockrsquos death in 1956 as Kaprow was looking for a way beyondabstract expressionism and out of his art historical and artistic train-ing11 He had read Harold Rosenbergrsquos essay ldquoThe American ActionPaintersrdquo where Rosenberg described abstract expressionism as anexistentialist engagement with the morality of mark making ldquoThe newpaintingrdquo Rosenberg said ldquohas broken down every distinction betweenart and liferdquo For Rosenberg the collapse of this distinction meant thecollapse between the work of art and its maker so that the work of artbecame the result of a specic ego struggling with a material processLife for Rosenberg was biographical and the artist was a heroic creatoran existential superman whose every mark became a moral act realizinga will to power with each gesture12

Kaprowrsquos essay extends Rosenbergrsquos argument but rather than takepolemically the claim that Pollock collapses art and life he reads it literally For Kaprow Pollockrsquos unboundedness his tendency towardinnite expansion suggested an extension of painting into the spaceof viewing and into everyday life

Kaprow had first experienced Pollockrsquos paintings at the series ofhighly influential and well-publicized exhibitions held at the BettyParsons Gallery from 1948 to 195113 These shows featured Pollockrsquosdrip paintings shown so that they covered the gallery walls manymade specically to match their height As Kaprow described it theyfilled the viewersrsquo senses surrounding them in a complete environ-ment refusing any possibility of disembodied purely optical viewing

84 Grey Room 13

This happened he said for several reasons but it was the size of thesepaintings that was most important ldquoPollockrsquos choice of enormous can-vases served many purposesrdquo he said ldquochief of which for our discus-sion is that his mural-scale paintings ceased to become paintings andbecame environmentsrdquo14 But it was their wall size (and not their scale)15

that caused Pollockrsquos drips to overow the bounds of the canvasrsquo framingedge Kaprow continues it was ldquoour size as spectators in relation to thesize of the picture [and] Pollockrsquos choice of great sizes [that] resultedin our being confronted assaulted sucked inrdquo

The size of Pollockrsquos paintings engaged even attacked the viewerrsquoswhole body and not just their eye Kaprow immediately qualies thephrase ldquosucked inrdquo as he contrasts Pollockrsquos relationship to the wallwith that of Renaissance painting If Renaissance painting acted as awindow that the eye traveled through extending the room outward intospace for Kaprow Pollockrsquos paint came off the canvas and into the roomwith the spectator lling and surrounding the spectator ldquoWhat I believeis clearly discernablerdquo he said ldquois that the entire painting comes outat us (we are participants rather than observers) right into the roomrdquo16

The experience of Pollockrsquos work as exceeding the constraints ofthe framing edge of the canvas was one that Pollock recognized in hisown work and that he sought however ambivalently to elicit through-out his career17 Although he had long been engaged with the muralhe had never convinced himself to make work that was fully inte-grated with an architectural structure Even when working at wall sizehe never made the full transition to the wall painting even his largestworks on stretched canvas He recognized that his paintings existedambiguously between the easel and the wall saying at one point in thelate forties ldquoI intend to paint large movable pictures which will func-tion between the easel and the mural I believe the easel picture tobe a dying form and the tendency of modern feeling is towards thewall picture or muralrdquo This statement written in 1947 was in dialoguewith critic Clement Greenberg18 Greenberg known for his teleologyof atness in modern painting had at this earlier date recognized thatthe size of Pollockrsquos paintings made them wall-like physical objects

Jackson Pollock exhibition atThe Betty Parsons Gallery 28 Novemberndash16 December1950 Photo Hans Namuth

Kaizen | Framed Space Allan Kaprow and the Spread of Painting 85

and that the tendency of modern painting was not to become at butto spread out into space19 While Greenberg would come to deny theimplications of this idea by the 1960s he said in a 1948 article onPollockrsquos work

After all easel painting is on the way out There is a persistenturge as persistent as it is largely unconscious to go beyond thecabinet picture which is destined to occupy only a spot on the wallto a kind of picture that without actually becoming identifiedwith the wall like a mural would spread over it and acknowl-edge its physical reality I do not know whether there is anythingin modern architecture itself that explicitly invites this tendencyBut it is a fact that abstract painting shows a greater and greaterreluctance for the small frame-enclosed format Abstract paintingbeing at needs greater extension of surface on which to developits ideas than does the old three-dimensional easel painting andit seems to become trivial when conned within anything mea-suring less than two feet by two20

Here we see even in the critic best known for his call for the separa-tion of painting from other art forms that already within abstractexpressionism lay the seeds of its dissolution into the space of archi-tecture For Greenberg this was a drive to be repressed Painting couldsurvive in the end only if it were to maintain its autonomy from theother arts21 Nevertheless he clearly recognized that with this lay thepossibility of its dissolution into an impure state a state where theframing space of the work becomes as important as the work itselfWhat Greenberg recognized in Pollockrsquos work and what Kaprow extrap-olated out of it was the relationship between painting and the spacethat contains it What Greenbergrsquos recognition amounted to forKaprow but also for many artists who followed was the end of paint-ing in a particular sense with the end of easel painting in abstractexpressionism as painting became a wall it was no longer a windowPainting as wall is not a window to be looked through but a thing to belooked at an object in the way some thing in space rather than a trans-parent surface

| | | | |

Leading up to the exhibitions of wall-size paintings at the Betty ParsonsGallery and key to their development was the dialogue betweenPollock and architect Peter Blake22 Blake had visited Pollockrsquos studioin 1949 Pollock had only recently begun his series of drip paintingsand had been using an old barn behind his house which was morespacious than the upstairs room in the house he had previously used

86 Grey Room 13

Seeing all of the paintings on the walls andoor of the barn elicited an intense reactionin Blake The paintings seemed both trans-parent and reective dissolving the walls ofthe barn as if they captured the misty land-scape of the bay outside and also because ofPollockrsquos use of aluminum paint reectingthe light streaming in through the windowslike enormous mirrors23 Blakersquos experiencewas central to his design for a small museummeant to house Pollockrsquos work Blake recalled

I designed a large somewhat abstractldquoexhibitrdquo of his workmdasha kind of ldquoIdealMuseumrdquo in which his paintings were

suspended between the earth and the sky and set between mir-rored walls so as to extend into infinity Beyond these floatingcanvases would be the marshes and the inlets of The Springsmdashthe relentlessly horizontal landscape of that end of Long Island24

Blakersquos ldquoIdeal Museumrdquo was indebted to Ludwig Mies van der Rohewhose Barcelona Pavilion and Museum for a Small City project formedthe basis of his design25 In Blakersquos monograph on Mies he expressedhis admiration for the Barcelona Pavilion and noted that it suggested anew direction for the integration of art and architecture ldquoThe resultingcompositionrdquo he said referring to the sculpture by Georg Kolbe as it was framed by the walls in the Pavilionrsquos enclosed courtyard ldquohasbecome a favorite example of those who advocate collaboration betweenarchitects on the one hand and sculptors and painters on the other[The Kolbe sculpture] does suggest that there may be other and betterways towards integration of the artsrdquomdashways that Blake would furtherpursue in his Pollock Museum26

As in Miesrsquos project for a Museum for a Small City the exterior wallsof Blakersquos Pollock Museum were to be made entirely of glass No inte-rior walls would be interposed between the art and the landscape outside The art became the walls Paintings were to be hung on free-standing walls no bigger than the work itself so that only the art itselfwould be visible oating in space with other works of art juxtaposedagainst it and with the exterior environment as a background Blakeunframes the work of art pulling it out of its usual relationship withthe wall where it would normally sit enclosed in a traditional framereframing it to create a collaged space one where works of art are seentogether overlapping one another as the viewer moves through themuseum27 Blake attempted to replicate the relationships between theviewer and the art object that Miesrsquos Pavilion and Museum had embodied

Top Jackson Pollock andPeter Blake looking at themodel of Blakesrsquos museumdesign on display at theBetty Parsonrsquos Gallery Photo Ben Schultz

Bottom Georg Kolbe DerMorgen 1925 Shown housedin Mies van der RoheBarcelona Pavilion 1928ndash29Photo Berliner Bild-Bericht

Kaizen | Framed Space Allan Kaprow and the Spread of Painting 87

the removal of the traditional framing device (the picture frame) for anoverlapping frame of collaged space the collapse of outside and insideand the reection back onto the viewer of their somatic viewing expe-rience Like Mies Blake adopted the materials of modern distraction(plate glass in particular) and combined them with an open plan inorder to create an interior that would use the glass curtain wall to offerrespite from the city street and the speed of modernity28

The only substantive article published on the Pollock Museum atthe time was Arthur Drexlerrsquos ldquoUnframed Spacerdquo29 The title camefrom Blakersquos own assessment that his project would realize the unlim-ited extension of Pollockrsquos marks into a total environment Drexlerconcludes his short essay with words that are similar to Blakersquos ownassessment of Mies ldquoThe Project suggests a re-integration of paintingand architecture wherein painting is the architecture but this timewithout message or content Its sole purpose is to heighten our expe-rience of spacerdquo30 Contrary to Drexlerrsquos title Pollockrsquos paintings arerendered secondary to their use in framing space It is the space of thegallery that submits them to its formal logic In Blakersquos Museum theart is secondary to the space that contains it

Blakersquos Museum conates both of Miesrsquos projects from which it wasprimarily derived By using abstract paintings Blake was able to fillhis museum with art while simultaneously returning these large-sizeabstractions directly to the wall Pollockrsquos painting functions like thestone cladding on the central wall in the Barcelona Pavilion as a dec-orative surface Pollock recognized the reduction inherent in Blakersquosproject saying to him after the design was done ldquoThe trouble is youthink I am a decoratorrdquo Blakersquos reply was telling ldquoOf course I thinkhis paintings might make terric walls After all architects spend a lotof time thinking about wallsrdquo31 What kept Pollock from working directlyon the wall and what Blake as an architect recognized immediatelywas that when painting became a wall or approached this conditionthrough wall size its autonomy was destroyed It approached the

Interiors (January 1950) featuring Blakersquos Pollockmuseum

88 Grey Room 13

status of interior decoration and that was the wayBlake wanted itmdashPollock reduced to ldquoterrific wallsrdquoHe even tried to commission Pollock to paint panelsfor the moving walls of the Pinwheel House his nextproject so that when they slid shut the housersquos inte-rior would be enclosed in Pollocks surrounded bypainted wallpaper32 The paintings as walls are sub-mitted to the logic of Blakersquos architecture He destroysthe autonomy of Pollockrsquos paintings only to sublatethem into the autonomy of modernist architecturerealizing Pollockrsquos fear of turning his work into meredecoration Blakersquos project asserts architecture over

painting As painting becomes wall it is sublated into the autonomousmodernist space of Miesian architecture Pollockrsquos work is turned intoa decorative surface into an interior design for a modernist space

The Pollock Museum was never built but not because either Pollockor Blake had second thoughts Despite any misgivings that Pollock hadwith this project the model was exhibited at Betty Parsons Gallery in1949 and afterward the model remained in Pollockrsquos studio promi-nently displayed in case he could convince a visiting collector to helpfinance its construction At his next exhibition with Betty Parson in1950 the paintings were made to be the same height and almost thesame length of the walls on which they hung so that they would comeas close as possible to realizing Blakersquos design within the more tradi-tional gallery setting33

If Blakersquos project misrepresented Pollock this was only to the extentthat Pollock had already acknowledged the tendency of painting atwall size to become an object What Blakersquos project makes clear is thatwhen paintings became wall-size or as they literally became wallsthey lost their capacity to create an autonomous space divorced fromcontext While it took an architect initially to realize such a possibilityartists soon followed suit34

It is likely that Kaprow saw the 1949 exhibition of Pollockrsquos workwhich included the model for Blakersquos Museum Although in his writ-ings on Pollock he doesnrsquot mention the Museum in an interview from1967 he claimed to have rst seen a Pollock exhibition in 194935 Thiswould mean that he had seen the show at the Betty Parsons Gallerywith the model on display The model for the museum is also clearlyvisible in the photographs of Pollock working in his studio that illus-trate both the original publication of Kaprowrsquos ldquoThe Legacy of JacksonPollockrdquo and (much later) his collection of essays The Blurring of Artand Life36 Kaprow also explicitly referenced the subsequent Pollockexhibition with its wall-size works when he discussed the all-overeld Pollockrsquos work created in the space of the gallery But along with

Photograph of Pollock in hisstudio As published in Allan Kaprow ldquoThe Legacy ofJackson Pollockrdquo in Art News(October 1958) The model of Blakersquos museum is visiblein the upper-left cornerPhoto Rudy Burckhardt

Kaizen | Framed Space Allan Kaprow and the Spread of Painting 89

Pollock and Blake Kaprow also engagedwith the work of Robert Rauschenbergand John Cage two artists who had asmuch impact on his thinking about spaceas Pollock

| | | | |

In the fall of 1951 when Kaprow visitedRauschenbergrsquos studio he saw the WhitePaintings37 Rauschenberg had made theseworks during the previous summer at BlackMountain College Like Blake Rauschenberg also engaged space usingpainting but he did so as an artist not as an architect Yet rather thanreassert the autonomy of painting he established a semiautonomousspace for painting The White Paintings are a series of works paintedat matte white with no visible marks to attract the viewerrsquos eye WhileBlake submitted the autonomy of Pollockrsquos painting to the logic of hisarchitecture upholding the autonomy of modernist space in favor ofarchitecture over art Rauschenberg was far more ambivalent about thepossibility of autonomy for either art or architecture The White Paintingsexist between the two as semiautonomous objectsmdashnot quite wall notquite paintingmdashand certainly not like their nearest precursor abstractexpressionist painting with its ood of gesture and mark The WhitePaintings in their utter blankness call attention to the ephemeral effectsof light and shade that played across them Upon seeing them Kaprowwas unsure what to think until he noticed that they turned the surfaceof painting into an active plane of reception for the movement of his bodyldquoI was walking back and forth not knowing how I should take thesethingsrdquo he said ldquoand then I saw my shadows across the paintingmdashmovingrdquo38 For Kaprow the surface of these paintings became a tem-poral screen reecting the viewerrsquos body in the changing environmentof the gallery Their painterly incidence was not their whiteness perse but their ability to capture the presence of the viewer as he or shestood in front of the work The viewer activated the work so that thework the viewer and the space in between all became part of the workAs Rauschenberg wrote at the time ldquoPainting relates to both art andlife Neither can be made (I try to act in that gap between the two)rdquo39

These paintings are caught between painting as an object that is func-tionally and fundamentally separate from its architectural containerand the spread of painting into a semiautonomous state somewherebetween art architecture and the viewing subject moving through theexhibition space

Rauschenberg had developed his White Paintings in dialogue with

Photograph of Pollock in hisstudio As published in AllanKaprow Essays on theBlurring of Art and Life 1993The model of Blakersquosmuseum is visible in theupper-right corner PhotoHans Namuth

90 Grey Room 13

Cage who was also at Black Mountain in the summer of 195240 Thatsummer Cage incorporated The White Paintings into his own workTheater Piece No 141 They were suspended over the heads of theaudience members at various angles as a variety of performance eventstook place beneath them These events included Rauschenberg andDavid Tudor playing piano poets MC Richards and Charles Olsonreading poetry from atop a ladder and Merce Cunningham and othersdancing through the space and around the audience It was the WhitePaintings with their environmental quality that that led Cage to write4rsquo 33 in 1952 Tudor was the original performer of the compositionwhose score was open to interpretation42 He realized it on pianoplaying it by silently opening and closing the piano lid allowing thesounds of the audience and the ambient noises of the space to becomethe work Kaprow attended one of the rst performances of 4rsquo 33 atCarnegie Hall in 1952 and was deeply affected He compared his expe-rience of 4rsquo 33 to his experience of Rauschenbergrsquos paintings Thesounds in the space chairs creaking the air condition humming peoplecoughing and clearing their throatsmdashall the ambient sounds that lledthe space of the auditoriummdashbecame foregrounded ldquoIt was like theshadows in Bob Rauschenbergrsquos picturesrdquo Kaprow recalled ldquoThat is tosay there [wa]s no marking the boundary of the artwork or the boundaryof so-called everyday life They merge[d] And we the listeners in Cagersquosconcert and the lookers at Rauschenbergrsquos pictures were the collabo-rators of the artworkrdquo43 For Kaprow Cage like Rauschenberg col-lapsed the autonomy of art by engaging the listener as collaborator ina semiautonomous space (ldquoso-called everyday liferdquo and not true every-day life) that depended upon the interaction between work spaceand subject

On his visit to Rauschenbergrsquos studio Kaprow also saw the earliestof Rauschenbergrsquos black paintings44 This series is the antipode of thesmooth matte white surfaces of the White Paintings They are allblack monochromes most painted with a high-gloss enamel soakedinto newspaper pages that were then haphazardly stuck onto the sur-face of a canvas trapped pockets of air often causing the paintingsrsquosurfaces to bulge outward repulsively At their largest they framespace as Pollockrsquos work did but as art brut walls instead of dazzlingskeins of paint One photograph of a later diptych shows the paintingsblocking the doorway to Rauschenbergrsquos studio at Black Mountain asif they were extensions of the rough-hewn stone walls on either side45

But in this next transformation of painting as wall what seems moreimportant for the direction that both Rauschenberg and Kaprow wouldfollow out of these works was their newspaper ground As Rauschenbergrsquospaintings became wall-size their art brut surface was built on the newsof the day At rst everyday events as reported in the newspaper are

Kaizen | Framed Space Allan Kaprow and the Spread of Painting 91

painted out and hidden behind the blackpaint46 As the series proceeded he allowedincreasingly more of the news to showthrough While the White Paintings engagedwith the gap between art and life by cap-turing the viewerrsquos bodymdashas did Cagersquos4rsquo 33 at least for Kaprowmdashthe black paint-ings did so by using the everyday objectas a ground Through their use of news-paper they suggested another trajectoryout of painting and into everyday spacea trajectory whose base condition was thecommodity object

In order to get into the gap between art and life Rauschenbergrsquoswork rst had to approximate the condition of being a wall It neededto assume a relation to its architectural frame in order to move awayfrom the autonomy of painting and into semiautonomy but once it didso Rauschenberg would abandon the problem of painting as wallFollowing the White Paintings and black paintings (and then a briefseries of Red Paintings) he made his rst Combines works that rein-state the autonomy of the individual art object even while they existbetween painting sculpture and the surrealist objet trouveacute47 Ratherthan engage with space Rauschenbergrsquos Combines elevate the ready-made or found object back to the status of the autonomous art objectThe Combines formalize the everyday object into an in-between statebut one that nevertheless produces singular art objects While theblack paintings led Rauschenberg back to the art object they led Kaprowfarther off the wall and out into space

| | | | |

Kaprow wrote ldquoa statementrdquo about his work sketching the trajectoryhe took from painting through collage then out into the space of thegallery48 After his initial show of paintings in 1952 he described thedevelopment of what he called ldquoaction collagerdquo These were done asquickly as possible by throwing together readily available everydaymaterials including parts of his past work tinfoil photographsnewspaper and food Although he doesnrsquot mention particular works by name presumably these action-collages include the early piecesreproduced in Assemblage Environments and Happenings In a photo-graph of Penny Arcade (1956) we see Kaprow standing in front of a largewall-size assemblage densely layered with parts of paintings scrapsof wood and large pieces of advertising signage that look like Kaproweither found them on the side of the road or appropriated them from a

Robert RauschenbergUntitled 1952

92 Grey Room 13

storefront It also included flashing lights andsounds calling out to the viewer like a ConeyIsland carnival booth but one made all the moreconfusing with its hyperarray of upside-downand fragmented word parts While collage hadbeen delicate even dainty in its appliqueacute of smallscraps of paper to the surface of the image KaprowrsquosPenny Arcade was massive and rough-hewn Unlikeits glitzier real-world counterpart Penny Arcadelooks cobbled together a temporary faccedilade brico-laged from odds and ends Here Kaprow turnedthe gallery space into the street turning the wallinto a pseudo-storefront bringing the architec-ture of the outside world into the gallery but lteredthrough the compositional strategies of collage

and abstract expressionism Abstraction before world war II had beenundertaken in a quest to find a universal Esperanto of color and form a problem that had been transformed by abstract expressionisminto a private iconography of psychic signs In Penny Arcade Kaprowturns the private symbolism of abstraction expressionism back to the world through advertising as commodity sign He makes the private symbol public again by reconnecting prendashWorld War II modelsof collective production with postndashWorld War II models of collectiveconsumption

Another work from this time further demonstrates how Kaprowused everyday materials to partition space Alternately titled (inAssemblage) Wall Kiosk and Rearrangeable Panels (1957ndash1959) thispiece looks like an enormous folding Japanese screen Measuring eightfeet high and over twenty feet long its panels are covered in eggshellsleaves and broken mirrorsmdashnot mass-produced commodities or sig-nage but detritus and waste Several of the panels are painted one inHoffmanrsquos push-pull style two seem to nod toward Rauschenberg onepainted white one black This piece is designed to sit on the oor ofthe gallery and as its various names imply it can be placed in a varietyof positions called ldquowallrdquo when arrayed in a straight line ldquokioskrdquowhen arranged into a square and ldquorearrangeable panelsrdquo in generalor when it sits in a zigzag Each position changes the relationship ofthe object to the space that contains it Kaprow recast the painting-as-wall as a transformable piece of furniture recognizing the possibilityof ludic engagement with the viewer but withholding it because theviewer is not allowed to interact with the piece directly Once installedthe work transforms the space of the gallery but it cannot be recong-ured by the viewer49

When asked why he used junk to make his work Kaprow replied

Allan Kaprow standing infront of Penny Arcade 1956Photo WF Gainfort

Kaizen | Framed Space Allan Kaprow and the Spread of Painting 93

It was clearly part of transformingreality It gave everyone a sense ofinstant involvement in a kind of crudeeveryday reality which was quite arelief after the high-art attitude ofexclusion from the real world It alsoallowed us to give up a certain kindof seriousness that traditional artmaking required Whatrsquos more thematerials were available everywhereon street corners at night And ifyou didnrsquot sell these environmentalconstructions yoursquod just throwthem back into the garbage canWhy not just throw them out It wasvery liberating to think of oneself aspart of an endlessly transformingreal world50

The ldquocrude everyday realityrdquo capturedby Penny Arcade as with Kaprowrsquos subsequent work is predicatedupon his project of capturing the ldquoendlessly transforming real worldrdquoThis statement connects him with Rauschenberg and Cage but alsoshows how their work differs in an important and crucial way InKaprowrsquos comment describing his experience of 4rsquo33 (as quoted inthe previous section) he says ldquoAnd we the listeners in Cagersquos concertand the lookers at Rauschenbergrsquos pictures were the collaborators of[sic] the artworkrdquo ending with ldquoIt was a kind of collaborative end-lessly changing affair The artwork was simply this organism that wasaliverdquo51 For Kaprow the key word here is change and in order tomove from artwork to organism the work of art must be reconsiderednot as a ldquochance operationrdquo (to use Cagersquos term) but as a change oper-ation During this time Kaprow had begun to take classes with Cageand he was exposed to Cagersquos use of chance methods of compositionWhile he would adopt much from Cagersquos work and teaching he thoughtthat change was the most important principle for his own work52

For Kaprow change was integrally connected to the postndashworld warII environment lled with mass-produced throwaway products Theart of this timemdashhis artmdashshould necessarily reect this environmentIn opposition to the nostalgic use of the objet trouveacute in surrealism hismethod was closer to the readymade choosing everyday objects to res-cue from oblivion but spreading them out in space so that they wouldenvironmentally engulf the viewer53 Kaprow temporarily revalues thethrowaway commodity in his environments to create a space where

Allan Kaprow RearrangeablePanels 1957-9 Shown intheir ldquoKioskrdquo con gurationPhoto Robert R McElroy

94 Grey Room 13

everyday life as planned obsolescence is brought under the control ofthe artist He creates a momentary space of anti-entropy in the life ofthe commodity where it is temporarily reinvested with value only to bedisposed of once the environment is destroyed54 Citing critic LawrenceAlloway on the ldquothrowawayrdquo culture of postndashworld war II AmericaKaprow goes on to describe the importance of change in his work

Change governing both reality and art has extended from theexpression of an idea arrested in a painting to a work in whichthe usually slow mutations wrought by nature are quickened andliterally made part of the experience of it they manifest the veryprocess of creation-decay-creation almost as one watches Theuse of debris waste products or very impermanent substanceslike toilet paper or bread has of course a clear range of allusionswith obvious sociological implications the simplest being theartistrsquos positive involvement on the one hand with an everydayworld and on the other with a group of objects which beingexpendable might suggest that corresponding lack of statuswhich is supposed to be the fate of anything creative todayThese choices must not be ignored for they reveal what in oursurroundings charges the imagination as well as what is mosthuman in our art55

What is ldquomost humanrdquo in Kaprowrsquos art as he denes it is its reectionof this throwaway culture This is governed not by Cagean chance butby planned obsolescence with its endless renewal of more of thesame ldquo[My] workrdquo Kaprow says ldquois intended to last only a short timeand is destroyed immediately after the exhibition If [its] obsolescenceis not planned it is expectedrdquo56 Alloway also writing on assemblagebetter describes the overlap between the throwaway object and its usein environmental art during the 1950s

The acceptance of mass-produced objects just because they arewhat is around not because they issue from idolatrised technol-ogy is central to mid-century Junk Culture Junk Culture iscity art Its source is obsolescence the throwaway material ofcities Assemblages of such material come at the spectator asbits of life bits of the environment frequently presented interms that dramatize spread ow extension trespass The junkis obtruded into our space with the aim of achieving maximumintimacy Proximity and participation replace distance and con-templation as the communicative style of the object57

So the space of Junk Culture when used in art as assemblage or envi-ronment achieves ldquomaximum intimacyrdquo with the observer throughtheir ldquoproximity and participationrdquo with the throwaway commodity

Kaizen | Framed Space Allan Kaprow and the Spread of Painting 95

As Kaprow moves farther into the space of the gallery he does so in anincreased attempt to engage the viewer He partitions the gallery spaceso that the body of the viewer becomes a product of its participationwithin the eld of the throwaway commodity

These early wall-like constructions were for Kaprow still not closeenough to a participatory art Kaprow wanted to move further towardthe creation of environments and even events to take over the gallerywith a plenitude of throwaway objects among which the viewer wouldself-consciously circulate The action collages still maintained toomuch autonomy because they existed as individual objects and so asKaprow recalled ldquonow I simply filled the whole gallery up startingfrom one wall and ending with the otherrdquo58 With his rst environmentKaprow was no longer composing within the autonomous space ofpainting but composing the entire space of the gallery Kaprowrsquos rstenvironmentmdashmade at the Hansa Gallery in November 1958mdashwasmeant to totally engage the visitors to the gallery to make them intopart of the work itself ldquopassively or actively according to [their] talentsfor lsquoengagementrsquordquo59 From a drop ceiling of wires suspended in a gridseveral inches below the galleryrsquos original ceiling he hung variousmaterials creating a labyrinthine space divided by sheets of plastictangles of cellophane Scotch tape and more including a time-releasedmist of pine-scented deodorizer His work had taken over the galleryspace lling it with a nearly impenetrable eld of throwaway objects60

Kaprow took the ood of postndashworld war II consumer goods and usedthem to compose walls that partitioned space And composemdashin thetraditional sense of arranging shapes and forms on the surface of acanvasmdashis exactly what he did

Kaprow described his use of the full space of the gallery as a eld aterm that he derives from painting calling the second section of hisldquoAssemblagerdquo essay ldquoThe Field in Paintingrdquo ldquoThis space is in part theliteral distance between all solids included in the workrdquo Kaprowwrote ldquoBut it is also a space that is a direct heritage of paintingrdquo61

Everything in the space that he produced became part of his compo-sition including the viewer Like any other object in the work Kaprowsaid ldquoin as much as people visiting [an] environment are moving col-ored shapes [they] were counted lsquoinrsquordquo62 Each visitor as they movedthrough Kaprowrsquos labyrinth became a part of the work Art and lifehad now seemingly collapsed the autonomy of painting as a separateobjectmdashframed and isolated from the rest of its environment as a spaceonly for the eyemdashhad been abandoned for an embodied experienceViewing was now dependent upon space a space full of the objects ofeveryday life Using the materials of everyday life Kaprow invited hisviewers to get rid of their distance from the art object forcing theminto physical contact with his work This work he wrote ldquoinvites us

96 Grey Room 13

to cast aside for a moment proper manners andpartake wholly in the real nature of art and (onehopes) liferdquo63 Against the look-donrsquot-touch attitude ofmuseum and gallery Kaprow created a haptic spacewhere touch became the basis of the work where vis-itors came into physical contact with his throwawayobjects In this space as visitors threaded their waythrough the labyrinth the color of their clothes andtheir presence among these objects turned them intoa part of the work The viewer appeared as anotherthing in Kaprowrsquos composition not so different fromhis throwaway materials In his environment autonomycollapsed into participation based on the reicationof the subject as an obsolete material temporally

composited into the work While Kaprow certainly intended to includehis observers in the work he could do so only by turning them intoobjects rather than active subjects He later described his own sense ofthe failure with this exhibition that he couldnrsquot seem to engage theviewer enough but blamed it on the framing space of the galleryAfterward he said ldquoI complained immediately about the fact that therewas a sense of mystery until your eye reached a wall Then there wasa dead end At that point my disagreement with the gallery spacebeganrdquo64 But Kaprow didnrsquot abandon the gallerymdashat least not yet Toget closer to the everyday Kaprow thought he should more fully incor-porate the bodies of his viewers into his work This led to the origin ofhappenings in an attempt to make viewers into active subjects to engagethem more actively in creating the work as they became part of it

| | | | |

In 1958 Kaprow had presented two other early proto-happenings oneat Rutgers called Communication and one at George Segalrsquos farmcalled Pastorale65 Communication was based on work he had devel-oped in Cagersquos class It was close to traditional theater Presented in achapel that doubled as an auditorium for theater and music perfor-mances it included movement sound and banners unfurled from thebalconies Kaprow built ldquoplastic panelsrdquo behind which he performeda series of simple actions nally hiding himself from the audience bypainting the plastic wall in front of him and so ldquopainting himself outrdquoof the audiencersquos view66 For Pastorale he built frames that looked likeabysmal theater sets stretcher bars with torn strips of canvas runningfrom top to bottom During one part of the performance artists RobertWatts and Lucas Samaras painted on either side of one of these con-structions Inserted into the landscape these performance paintings

Part of the environment Allan Kaprow created for his piece Pastorale 1958Photo Vaughn Rachel

Kaizen | Framed Space Allan Kaprow and the Spread of Painting 97

marked the boundary between event and nonevent partitioning theground into territories and framing Pastoralersquos space using once againpainting as wall Unfortunately for Kaprow Pastorale was held during apicnic and the other participants were either too drunk or just plainunwilling to follow his directions They were engaged but refused tofollow his rules of play

18 Happenings in 6 Parts which took place in October 1959 wasthe rst ofcial happening67 Kaprow divided the inside of the galleryinto three smaller contiguous rooms using wooden two-by-fours Inphotographs of the piece as it was being installed these woodenbeams can be seen framing a space within the space of the gallerymdashnot into a proscenium stage but into an environment within the largergallery space where various events would occur Instead of wood ordrywall translucent plastic sheeting created the walls so that actioncould be partially seen from one room to the next Each room was litwith different colored lights and in each room where the audiencewas forced to sit and observe the action a group of actors movedthrough tightly scripted but simple routines as sounds came in and outand lms were projected

On the program the audience is listed under the ldquoCast of Participantsrdquowritten into the performance itself and actively engaged but only asthe subject of direction and authorial control At specific intervalsbells rang and the audience was required to change seats and to switchrooms based on instruction cards they had been given when they enteredthe gallery before the performance Kaprow had realized with his HansaGallery environment that he needed to give his viewers increasedresponsibility but he also realized that relinquishing too much con-trol could be a disaster as it had been in Pastorale As with his previ-ous work his goal with 18 Happenings was the ldquointegration of allelementsmdashenvironment constructed sections time space and peoplerdquoand the audience was once again included as just another material inhis composition68

During the fifth part of 18 Happenings one sequence of actionsseems to reveal Kaprowrsquos relationship with painting the viewer and space Kaprow had built a construction he called the ldquothe sandwich manrdquo named after its everyday counterparts paid to walkaround the city streets as human billboards Kaprowrsquos sandwich

Left The construction of thespace used for Allan Kaprowrsquos18 Happenings in 6 Parts1958

Right A view of Allan Kaprowrsquos18 Happenings whereRearrangeable Panels is partially visible on the leftThe in-set canvas panel onwhich actors painted live as part of the performance is shown at center PhotoScott Hyde

98 Grey Room 13

man was barely humanoidan automaton with forward-and backward-pointing mir-rors for a body bicycle wheelsfor feet and a gallon bucketof enamel paint for a headSticking out in front was apiece of wood for an arm end-ing in a hand that held cardslabeled ldquoXrdquo and ldquo3rdquo the adver-

tising handbill reduced to its zero degree In the middle of the sand-wich man hidden on a shelf between the two mirrors was a recordplayer and projecting out from behind it were two handles so that itcould be wheeled around the rooms As the sandwich man was wheeledfrom one room to another its mirrored body reflected the audienceback onto themselves their image taking the place of what would havebeen an advertisement They were reected not as participatory viewersnot even as active objects as in his environment but as passive objectsnow totally reied their image produced as a reection of Junk CultureHere in Brechtian fashion using a literal ldquoframing effectrdquo Kaprowturned his previous use of the viewer back into a critique of the eventitself In reecting the audiencersquos passivity back to them he forced amoment of recognition of their complicity in the production of thework They could see that as they became an ad on the sandwich manrsquosbelly so they became throwaway objects in his composition By reduc-ing the spectator to the general equivalence of these objects Kaprowrecognized the subject of the postndashWorld War II period as a product ofplanned obsolescence and consumer culture

Following this as the sandwich man was wheeled through the secondroom and into the third two men stood up from their seats one in eachroom Each took up a brush and a can of paint and approached oppo-site sides of one of the plastic walls simultaneously painting on a sec-tion of canvas set among the plastic walls and so turning the wall backinto a painting69 The canvas was left unprimed so that the simple gures that each artist painted (one was supposed to paint lines theother circles) would bleed through and so would be immediately visibleon the opposite side each mark responding to that of their partner Asin his two earlier happenings painting is done live before an audienceon a wall Kaprow showed the audience that when painting becomeswall it functions only to put space on display Here painting as a sin-gular art object was meaningless It became a throwaway stage propand so became a demonstration of how painting as object was part ofthe larger environment in which it resides The limit condition of paint-ing as wall with viewer as spectator was the gallery as frame70

The sandwich man part ofKaprowrsquos 18 HappeningsPhoto Scott Hyde

Kaizen | Framed Space Allan Kaprow and the Spread of Painting 99

What this sequence from 18 Happenings reveals is that Kaprow hadan acute sense of the way in which the gallery as frame produces sub-ject and space together He undermined the normal function of the artgallery turning both viewer and art object into Junk Culture Throwawayviewers throwaway paintings and throwaway rooms turned the galleryspacemdasha space designed to be neutral to hide itself as the objects itcontains become the sole focus of the viewerrsquos concentrationmdashinto thelocus of planned obsolescence With the creation of happeningsKaprow used Junk Culture against the doxa of gallery space upsettingthe common sense of what a space for art is and what it does Afterhappenings the paradoxical logic of the gallery as a site for both theprivate contemplation of singular aesthetic objects as well as the pub-lic transaction of luxury goods had been (however temporarily) sub-verted In asserting the gallery space as the limit condition of paintingKaprow framed the institution as the ground of artistic production

In ldquoThe Legacy of Jackson Pollockrdquo Kaprow says ldquoPollock left us atthe point where we must become preoccupied with and even dazzled by the space and objects of our everyday liferdquo71 In ldquoAssemblageEnvironments Happeningsrdquo bridging the gap between his early andlater work he concludes ldquothis has brought sharply into focus that theroom has always been a frame or format toordquo72 Kaprowrsquos collapse ofautonomy via art into lifemdashthat environments and happenings wouldldquopartake wholly in the real nature of art and (one hopes) liferdquomdashwasonly ever a hope as he himself knew If painting had used the frameas the delimitation of a eld for composition then environments andhappenings turned the gallery into the limit condition of this fieldWhile he tried to get closer to everyday life by making art he inevitablypushed it further away This ambivalence toward the collapse of artand life runs throughout Kaprowrsquos work even as he moved out of thegallery and into everyday life following his early work with his laterldquoactivitiesrdquo The early work was even by his own estimation more adisplay of experience and not a fair representation of actual everydayexperience But this is precisely where the importance of this work liesKaprowrsquos environments and happenings extended Rauschenbergrsquossemiautonomous gap so far that they turned the screw one notchhigher autonomy returning not though the sublation of art into archi-tecture but through the medium of framed space

100 Grey Room 13

NotesThanks to the generosity and insight of Karen Kurczynski John Harwood SethMcCormick Jaleh Mansoor Beth Hinderliter Vered Maimon Benjamin Buchloh andBarry Bergdoll as well as Branden Joseph and the Editors of Grey Room

1 Brian OrsquoDoherty Inside the White Cube The Ideology of the Gallery Space(Berkeley and Los Angeles University of California Press 1999) 15

2 It was originally called ldquoPainting Environments Happeningsrdquo and publishedin a condensed form in the catalog for the exhibition New FormsmdashNew Media I at the Martha Jackson Gallery New York the rst uptown show of Kaprow and his con-temporaries It was changed to ldquoAssemblage Environments and Happeningsrdquo for nalpublication Kaprow changed the title to incorporate the recent acceptance of the termassemblage It had been used rst by Helen Comstock to describe the work of ArthurDove in the 1920s but remained obscure until Jean Dubuffet popularized its use in 1953The term as used by Dubuffet was then adopted by William Seitz for his exhibitionThe Art of Assemblage at the Museum of Modern Art See Allan Kaprow AssemblageEnvironments and Happenings (New York Harry N Abrams 1966) 150ndash208 NewFormsmdashNew Media I (New York Martha Jackson Gallery 1960) np and RogerShattuck ldquoIntroduction How Collage Became Assemblagerdquo Essays on Assemblage(New York Museum of Modern Art 1992) 119

3 ldquoWhen I am in my painting Irsquom not aware of what Irsquom doingrdquo said PollockJackson Pollock Jackson Pollock Interviews Articles Reviews ed Pepe Karmel (NewYork Museum of Modern Art 1999) 17ndash18

4 Yard was Kaprowrsquos contribution to the exhibition Environments SituationsSpaces at the Martha Jackson Gallery a follow up to New FormsndashNew Media (see n 2)

5 ldquoAllan Kaprow and Robert Watts Interviewed by Sidney Simonrdquo in Benjamin HDBuchloh and Judith F Rodenbeck Experiments in the Everyday Allan Kaprow andRobert Watts Events Objects Documents (New York Wallach Art Gallery 1999) 76

6 To cite but one example of many Thomas Hirschhorn is an artist who continuesto extend and develop Kaprowrsquos legacy today

7 On Kaprow and performance see Amelia Jones Body Art Performing the Subject(Minneapolis University of Minnesota Press 1998) 56ndash57 Paul Schimmel ldquoLeap intothe Void Performance and the Objectrdquo in Out of Actions Between Performance andthe Object 1949ndash1979 ed Paul Schimmel (New York Thames and Hudson 1998)59ndash63

8 The relationship between painting and space had been explored before partic-ularly in the period between the two world wars by the artists associated with De Stijland constructivism For more on De Stijl see Nancy Troy The De Stijl Environment(Cambridge MIT Press 1983) On constructivism see Yve-Alain Bois ldquoEl LissitzkyRadical Reversibilityrdquo Art in America 76 no 4 (April 1988) 161ndash181 and Yve-AlainBois ldquoMaterial Utopiasrdquo Art in America 79 no 6 (June 1991) 98ndash107 Another Europeanwho explored the everyday object painting and space was Kurt Schwitters in the various incarnation of his Merzbau See Elizabeth Burns Gamard Kurt SchwittersrsquoMerzbau The Cathedral of Erotic Misery (New York Princeton Architectural Press2000) Two other important precursors who bridge the European and American con-text are Lazlo Moholy-Nagy and Friedrick Kiesler For information on Moholy-Nagyrsquosearly environmental projects as well as those of Lissitzy see Joan Ockman ldquoThe RoadNot Taken Alexander Dornerrsquos Way Beyond Artrdquo in Autonomy and Ideology Positioningan Avant-Garde in America ed RE Somol (New York Monicelli Press 1997) For

Kaizen | Framed Space Allan Kaprow and the Spread of Painting 101

information on Kiesler see RL Held Endless Innovations Frederick Kieslerrsquos Theoryand Scenic Design (Ann Arbor UMI Research Press 1982) Lisa Phillips FrederickKiesler (New York The Whitney Museum of American Art 1989) Brian OrsquoDohertydraws out the connections between the prendash and postndashWorld War II manifestations ofthis relationship in Inside the White Cube

9 For Benjamin the work of art attains autonomy under modernism with theemergence of art for artrsquos sake This autonomy is then usurped by mechanical repro-duction See Walter Benjamin ldquoThe Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproductionrdquoin Illuminations ed Hanna Arendt (New York Harcourt Brace and Jovanovich Inc1968) p 224-226 For Greenberg as the above quote indicates the autonomy of artcontinues even in the face of mechanization See Clement Greenberg ldquoTowards a NewerLaocoonrdquo Perceptions and Judgments 1939ndash1944 vol 1 of Clement Greenberg TheCollected Essays and Criticism ed John OrsquoBrien (Chicago University of Chicago1986) p 32

10 Rosalind Krauss uses the term ldquopost-medium conditionrdquo to designate ldquomixed-media installationrdquo work done today While Krauss argues that only the most signi-cant artists working since the 1960s reassert the medium in their work against thegeneral postmedium condition I believe that all mixed-media installation work operates using the gallery or institution as medium See Rosalind Krauss ldquoA Voyageon the North Seardquo Art in the Age of the Post-Medium Condition (New York Thamesand Hudson 1999) for her comments on a specic contemporary artist and the rein-vention of the medium see Rosalind Krauss ldquo And Then Turn Awayrdquo An Essayon James Colemanrdquo October 81 (Summer 1997) 5ndash33

11 Allan Kaprow ldquoThe Legacy of Jackson Pollockrdquo Art News 57 no 6 (October1958) 24ndash26 55ndash57 reprinted in Allan Kaprow Essays on the Blurring of Art andLife ed Jeff Kelley (Berkeley and Los Angles University of California Press 1993) 1ndash9 Kaprow has stated that the essay was written in 1956 in ldquoAllan Kaprow andRobert Watts Interviewed by Sidney Simonrdquo 77 Kaprow had been a student of bothHans Hoffman and Meyer Schapiro

12 Harold Rosenberg ldquoThe American Action Paintersrdquo Art News 52 (December1952) 22ndash23 In a footnote that Rosenberg added when the article was republished aspart of his book of collected essays in 1959 he added the following ldquoAction Paintinghas extracted the element of decision inherent in all art in that the work is not fin-ished at its beginning but has to be carried forward by an accumulation of lsquorightrsquo ges-tures In a word Action Painting is the abstraction of the moral element in art itsmark is moral tension in detachment from moral or esthetic certainties and it judgesitself morally in declaring that picture to be worthless which is not the incorporationof a genuine struggle one which could at any point have been lostrdquo Harold RosenbergThe Tradition of the New (New York Horizon Press 1959) 33ndash34 Kaprow recountsthe influence of Rosenbergrsquos essay on his work in ldquoAllan Kaprow and Robert WattsInterviewed by Sidney Simonrdquo 77

13 There were five all told They were held as follows 5ndash23 January 1948 24Januaryndash12 February 1949 21 Novemberndash10 December 1949 28 Novemberndash16 December1950 26 Novemberndash15 December 1951 These shows had a remarkable resonance onethat extended beyond even the insular New York art world when after the secondexhibition Life magazine published the feature article ldquoJackson Pollock Is He theGreatest Living Painter in the United Statesrdquo Dorothy Sieberling Life (August 81949) 42ndash45

14 Allan Kaprow ldquoThe Legacy of Jackson Pollockrdquo in Kaprow Essays on the

102 Grey Room 13

Blurringrdquo 615 Kaprow uses both the terms scale and size to describe Pollockrsquos work but as

TJ Clark has shown these are two very different terms and Pollock is a painter of sizeand not scale For Clark it is size that engages the body ldquoNormally speaking size isliteralmdasha matter of actual physical intuition It involves grasping how big or small acertain object really is most likely in relation to the size of the grasperrsquos upright body oroutspread armsrdquo TJ Clark ldquoPollockrsquos Smallnessrdquo in Jackson Pollock New Approachesed Kirk Varnedoe and Pepe Karmel (New York Museum of Modern Art 1999) 15

16 Kaprow ldquoThe Legacy of Jackson Pollockrdquo Essays on the Blurring 617 In most of his work the paint engages with the edge of the canvas emphasizing

and bordering it and not continuing around it as if the canvas had been cut down fromsome innite expanse Kaprow claims otherwise by singling out the exceptions sayingldquo[H]is art gives the impression of going on forever [T]hough evidence points to aslackening of the attack as Pollock came to the edges of many of his canvases in thebest ones he compensated for this by tacking much of the painted surface around theback of his stretchersrdquo Kaprow ldquoThe Legacy of Jackson Pollockrdquo Essays on the Blurringof Art and Life 5 An examination of the paintings shows that more often Pollockstopped before the edge or reworked his compositions after they were stretched sothat they reengaged with the edge even when cut from larger canvas Kaprow claimsotherwise because it furthers his arguments that Pollockrsquos paintings emerge into thespace of the viewer

18 Jackson Pollock ldquoApplication for a Guggenheim Fellowship 1947rdquo in JacksonPollock Interviews 17 The inuence of Greenberg at this time is discussed in StevenNaifeh and Gregory White Smith Jackson Pollock An American Saga (Aiken SCWoodwardWhite 1989) 551 Pollock had also engaged with wall-size painting duringhis association with Joseacute Clemente Orozco and in earlier work such as Mural(1943ndash1944) painted for Peggy Guggenheimrsquos house

19 Greenbergrsquos version of modernism was most fully laid out only in 1959 andpublished in 1960 ldquoIt was the stressing of the ineluctable atness of the surface thatremained however more fundamental than anything else to the process by whichpictorial art criticized and defined itself under Modernism For flatness alone wasunique and exclusive to pictorial art Because flatness was the only conditionpainting shared with no other art Modernist painting oriented itself to atness as itdid to nothing elserdquo In Clement Greenberg ldquoModernist Paintingrdquo in Modernism witha Vengeance 1957ndash1969 vol 4 of Clement Greenberg The Collected Essays andCriticism ed John OrsquoBrien (Chicago University of Chicago Press 1993) 87

20 Clement Greenberg ldquoThe Situation at the Momentrdquo in Arrogant Purpose1945ndash1949 vol 2 of Clement Greenberg The Collected Essays and Criticism ed JohnOrsquoBrien (Chicago University of Chicago 1986) 194ndash195

21 See Greenberg ldquoTowards a Newer Laocoonrdquo throughout22 Eric Lum has done extensive work on the relationship between abstract expres-

sionism and architecture The analysis in this essay follows from his especially whereBlakersquos project is concerned but also expands on it As he jumps from Blake to PhilipJohnson and Mark Rothkorsquos Houston Chapel however Lum misses the importance ofother interventions between painting and architecture such as those made by KaprowThis is evident when he says ldquoThrough this marriage of mural and wall paintingcould become fully integrated into architecture an idealized conjecture nor realizeduntil Mark Rothkorsquos 1971 Houston Chapelrdquo Eric Lum ldquoPollockrsquos Promise Toward anAbstract Expressionist Architecturerdquo Assemblage 39 (August 1999) 68

Kaizen | Framed Space Allan Kaprow and the Spread of Painting 103

23 Blake said of his visit to Pollockrsquos studio ldquoIt was a very sunny day and thesun was shining on the paintings I felt like I was standing in the Hall of Mirrors atVersailles It was a dazzling incredible sightrdquo Naifeh and Smith 588

24 Peter Blake No Place like Utopia Modern Architecture and the Company WeKept (New York Knopf 1993) 111ndash112

25 Miesrsquos museum plan was designed at the request of the editors at ArchitecturalForum who had been publishing a series of articles ldquoto show how building might beimproved through fuller and more imaginative use of existing resourcesrdquo They requesteddesigns for a variety of buildings that could be placed in a hypothetical city of 70000inhabitants ldquoNew Buildings for 194Xrdquo Architectural Forum 78 no 5 (May 1943)69ndash85 The Barcelona Pavilion was built in 1929 for the Barcelona Universal Expositionand was destroyed when the fair ended It was subsequently rebuilt in 1981ndash86

26 Peter Blake Mies van der Rohe (New York Pelican 1960) 54 It is worth notingthat like Miesrsquos use of the Kolbe sculpture Blake had Pollock actually make smallwire sculptures splattered with paint miniatures of sculptures that Blake hopedPollock would make for the actual museum Pollock himself was experimenting withsculpture around this time building three-dimensional forms out of papier-macirccheacutethat he then splattered with paint

27 Blakersquos collage space follows from Miesrsquos The production of collages as in situmodels for Miesrsquos buildings had begun in the twenties with his work for the journal Gin association with Dadaists such as Hans Richter Neil Levine notes this creation ofa collage space in Mies particularly in the Pavilion and the Museum for a Small Cityin relation to his use of reection to layer one surface on top of another Neil LevineldquolsquoThe Signicance of Factsrsquo Miesrsquo Collages Up Close and Personalrdquo Assemblage 37(December 1998) 71ndash101

28 Blake designed his museum just as Philip Johnson was building his Glass Housewhere they both spent considerable time while planning exhibitions for the Museumof Modern Art Johnsonrsquos inuence is also evident in Blakersquos design Blake No Placelike Utopia 149ndash155

29 Arthur Drexler ldquoUnframed Space A Museum for Jackson Pollackrsquos [sic] PaintingsrdquoInteriors and Industrial Design 109 no 6 (January 1950) 90ndash91 The article was partof a special issue whose theme was ldquoInteriors to Comerdquo a recurring topic that wasmeant ldquoto show the direction in which some of our best designers are goingrdquo The termunframed space was used several times in reference to Pollockrsquos work as the title oftwo articles Drexlerrsquos and one published slightly later by Berton Rouecheacute ThoughRouecheacute in an interview in To a Violent Grave says that Lee Krasner used the phraserst Charles Pollock says that Blake was the origin of the term The fact that Drexlerrsquosarticle was written and published earlier seems to conrm this See Berton RouecheacuteldquoUnframed Spacerdquo in Jackson Pollock Interviews 18ndash19 and Jeffrey Potter To aViolent Grave (New York Pushcart Press 1985) 126

30 Drexler 9031 Blake No Place like Utopia 113ndash11432 Blake completed construction on his ldquoPinwheel Houserdquo in 1952 It is a small

beach house that he designed for himself and his family in South Hampton on NewYorkrsquos Long Island Situated on the beach the house is square in plan and its fourexterior walls slide horizontally outward each in a successive clockwise directionrevealing glass walls When the exterior walls are fully extended and the house isviewed from above it forms a shape like a pinwheel Opening the exterior wallsreveals an ever-changing view of the landscape outside turning the ocean and the

104 Grey Room 13

dunes into the picturesque framing them so that they entirely ll the space of the walland put its surface in motion Blake had discussed with Pollock the possibility of hispainting the sliding walls so that his paintings would be superimposed over the land-scape Pollock considered it but Blake couldnrsquot come up with the commission moneythat Pollock asked for They never finalized their plans and it was never clear howthe panels were to be painted Blake suggested that they might be made of glass so hebought the sheet of glass that Pollock used to paint Number 29 1950 (1950) the paintingthat Hans Namuth lmed from underneath for his documentary on Pollock His col-laboration with Blake did lead to one commission a mural-size canvas done for ahouse designed by Marcel Breuer Untitled (Mural) (1950) Shortly after his collabo-ration with Blake Pollock began another unrealized architectural project this onewith Alfonso Ossorio and Tony Smith for a church designed by Smith with murals byPollock For more on all of this see Blake No Place like Utopia 114ndash118 Naifeh andSmith 649 and Lum ldquoPollockrsquos Promiserdquo 68 85ndash88

33 Lum ldquoPollockrsquos Promiserdquo 67ndash6834 A few pages down from Drexlerrsquos article on the Pollock Museum in Interiors

and Industrial Design was another architectural response to the same problem OlgaGueftrsquos article ldquoThe Museumrsquos Oasisrdquo describes another museum this one by Gyorgyand Juliet Kepes ldquoThe Kepesesrdquo it begins ldquoare not exactly opposed to museumsrdquo how-ever it would seem that they were opposed to museums containing works of artReplacing the art objects entirely the Kepeses substituted shells driftwood plantsand animals Instead of a natural history museum they proposed a modern-dayWunderkammerwhere natural forms take the place of art as objects for contemplationldquoThe proposed galleryrdquo they declared ldquowould bridge the gap between the art museumwhich is concerned with man-made beauty and the natural history museum whichis preoccupied with nature but not particularly with naturersquos beautyrdquo Gyorgy KepesrsquosThe New Landscape exhibition at MIT a year later in 1951 (the same years as theIndependent Grouprsquos similar exhibition Growth and Form in London) and the pub-lication that followed The New Landscape in Art and Sciencewould ultimately realizethis project with blown-up photographs of natural forms (cells shells and electronmicrographs) in place of actual objects

The Kepeses seem to have taken the next logical step beyond Blake proposing aneven more radical rethinking of the wall-size work of art Eliminating the need for theartist altogether they found abstract forms in nature and turned their reproductionsinto what would elsewhere have been works of art By turning the art object into scientic vision The Kepeses proposed its total instrumentation Autonomous abstractpainting was transformed into its instrumental other a mechanically reproduced science of vision Rather than turn art into interior design The Kepesesrsquo replacementof abstract painting recast the status of scientic technology into that of high art SeeOlga Gueft ldquoThe Museumrsquos Oasisrdquo Interiors and Industrial Design 109 no 6 (January1950) 100ndash103 and Gyorgy Kepes The New Landscape in Art and Science (ChicagoPaul Theobald and Co 1956)

35 Kaprow stated that it was ldquoIn 1949 [that] I saw an exhibition of [Pollockrsquos] workfor the rst timerdquo ldquoInterviewrdquo in Allan Kaprow (Pasadena Pasadena Art Museum1967) 7

36 See Kaprow ldquoThe Legacy of Jackson Pollockrdquo Art News 25 and Kaprow ldquoTheLegacy of Jackson Pollockrdquo Essays on the Blurring 3

37 Joan Marter ldquoThe Forgotten Legacy Happenings Pop Art and Fluxus at RutgersUniversityrdquo in Off Limits Rutgers University and the Avant-Garde 1957ndash1963 ed Joan

Kaizen | Framed Space Allan Kaprow and the Spread of Painting 105

Marter (Newark The Newark Museum 1999) 438 Marter 13239 Quoted in John Cage Silence (Middletown Wesleyan University Press 1961) 10540 Branden Joseph has developed the link between Cage and Rauschenberg in several

recent essays See Branden W Joseph ldquoJohn Cage and the Architecture of SilencerdquoOctober 81 (Summer 1997) 81ndash104 and Branden Joseph ldquoWhite on Whiterdquo CriticalInquiry 27 no 1 (Summer 2001) 90ndash121

41 For Cage on Rauschenberg see Cage Silence98ndash108 For his description ofTheater Piece No 1 see ldquoInterview with John Cagerdquo in Happenings and Other Actsed Mariellen R Sandford (New York Routledge 1995) 53 Cage subsequently referredto Theater Piece No 1 as ldquothe rst happeningrdquo See John Cage ldquoAn AutobiographicalStatementrdquo Southwest Review 76 no 1 (Winter 1991) 65

42 The score itself has had various incarnations It wasnrsquot published until 1960and in this version includes a note wherein Cage describes the rst performance byTudor For more on 4rsquo33 and its various scores see Liz Kotz ldquoWords on Paper NotNecessarily Meant to Be Read as Art Postwar Media Poetics from Cage to Warholrdquo(PhD diss Columbia University 2002) 83ndash115 Kotz follows a different lineage outof Cage and into performance and happenings than the one traced in this essay

43 Marter 13244 Walter Hopps in the first survey catalog of Rauschenbergrsquos early work does

not name the black paintings as a group as he does the White Paintings He calls themeach Untitled followed by a description in brackets Hopps notes of the largest ofthese works that ldquoThese paintings with a greater vastness and ambiguity of scale thanother Rauschenberg works relate to spatial qualities of Jackson Pollockrdquo HoppsRobert Rauschenberg The Early 1950s (Houston Houston Fine Art Press 1991) 67This convention was also followed in Rauschenbergrsquos 1997 Guggenheim retrospectivecatalog and is followed in this essay Robert Rauschenberg A Retrospective ed WalterHopps and Susan Davidson (New York Solomon R Guggenheim Museum 1997)

45 The piece is called Untitled [two black panels] (1953) Hopps Robert Rauschenberg99

46 Helen Molesworth notes the importance of Rauschenbergrsquos newspaper groundin the black paintings and develops this problem in relation to the abject body as it isfurther pursued in his work throughout the 1950s Helen Molesworth ldquoBefore BedrdquoOctober 63 (Winter 1993) 68ndash82

47 Asked about this work Rauschenberg said ldquoI called them combines I had tocoin that word because I got so bored with arguments I was interested in people seeingmy work When someone would come up and I really wanted to know what they thoughtof it or wanted to sense the exposure there was always this screen that they could getbehind which was if I said lsquoIt is paintingrsquo they would say lsquoThatrsquos not painting Thatrsquossculpturersquo And they thought this was very interestingrdquo Jeanne Siegel ArtwordsDiscourse on the 60s and 70s (New York DaCapo 1985) 153

48 Allan Kaprow ldquoa Statementrdquo in Happenings An Illustrated Anthology edMichael Kirby (New York EP Dutton and Co 1965) 44ndash45

49 Benjamin Buchloh notes the importance of play in the 1950s and its link toconsumer culture During the 1950s he writes ldquoa theory of games would remerge asa cultural project at the very moment of an ever-increasing instrumentalization oflibidinal desire through consumer culturerdquo Benjamin HD Buchloh ldquoRobert WattsInanimate ObjectsmdashInanimate Subjectsrdquo in Buchloh and Rodenbeck Experiments inthe Everyday 25 n 4

Grey Room 13 Fall 2003 pp 80ndash107 copy 2003 Grey Room Inc and Massachusetts Institute of Technology 81

Framed Space Allan Kaprow and the Spread of PaintingWILLIAM KAIZEN

As modernism gets older context becomes content In a peculiar reversalthe object introduced into the gallery ldquoframesrdquo the gallery and its laws1

mdashBrian OrsquoDoherty

A pair of images begins this brief history of the overlap between paint-ing and architecture in America after world war II of the period whenpainting spread beyond its frame toward what Allan Kaprow calledenvironments and happenings and toward installation art today It is a two-page layout from his book Assemblage Environments andHappenings with one image on either page Published in 1966 the bookhad been in the works since as early as 1959 when Kaprow wrote thefirst version of the eponymously titled essay that would become itscenterpiece2 Just before the written essay is a long sequence of pho-tographs a sort of photo-essay titled ldquoStep Right Inrdquo consisting of aseries of large black-and-white pictures with text interspersed Thetitle refers to Jackson Pollock and his comment that he works ldquoinrdquo hispaintings3 It shows a variety of work by artists from the 1950s andearly 1960s such as Robert Rauschenberg Yayoi Kusama Robert Whitmanand Kaprow himself all of whom Kaprow thought extended Pollockrsquoslegacy into three dimensions By creating postpainterly installationsthat one necessarily stepped into their work had come off the wallsand expanded to ll the space of the gallery and beyond

The sequence of photos ends by returning to a point of origin thenal pair of images serving to summarize the progress made by all ofthese artists who followed on the heels of abstract expressionism tri-umphant These two images bookend a trajectory marking an originon the left and its logical outcome on the right On the left we see a HansNamuth photograph of Pollock at work in his studio In his paintingPollock is a blur arm extended the light that streams in from the windowsabove overexposing the upper half of his body Caught in the wildlight his body is part of the canvases that surround him Sectioned bythe bands of light he becomes part of the paintings and not just thesource of the action Pollock the man and Pollock the work become oneHe is in literally dissolving into his paintings On the right following

82 Grey Room 13

the image of Pollock as if following directly from Pollockmdashheir to hislegacy and also its conclusionmdashstands Kaprow in the middle of hissculpture Yard a eld of randomly strewn tires completely lling thesmall courtyard behind a tenement building4 Like Pollock he is shotfrom above so that in the middle of these throwaway commodities heis also caught in the work Rather than blur into the work Kaprow sitsat the bottom of the page riding the wave of tires that seems to tumbleout of the picture He looks up at the viewer in shirtsleeves a pipebetween his teeth Crawling behind him is a child whose presenceelicits an atmosphere of play from an otherwise dingy environmentThe madness and alcoholism that supposedly fueled Pollockrsquos workif only in the popular imagination has now been replaced by Kaprowwith his own image as the bohemian academic and family man ldquoTheabstract expressionists [had] a point of view full of agony andecstasy full of crisisrdquo Kaprow said ldquoThis is no longer possible for usWe came too late for thatrdquo5

Kaprowrsquos generation was born too late to remember the Depressionwhich was just old enough to be caught up in the new prosperity ofthe postndashworld war II economic boom Instead of engaging withuntrammeled ego and pure expression Kaprow engaged with the prob-lem of painting and space and with objects in a society turning awayfrom production and toward consumption While Kaprow in AssemblageEnvironments and Happenings charts one trajectory out of Pollock thisessay follows another slightly different line of ight In constructinghis own legacy in Assemblage Kaprow obscures what is perhaps moreinteresting in the development of his own work as it relates to thework of others that followed rather than only beget performance arthis early work opened up the conjunction of viewing subject art objectand gallery space turning space into a eld for artistic production6 Inthe literature on Kaprow his own trajectorymdashone where he simplymoves Pollock off the wall and into performancemdashis generally takenfor granted7 By tracing another trajectory I hope to show how Kaprowin the context of post-world war II America called into being a differentset of problems problems that would be developed by minimalism andinstitutional critique and into installation and site-specic work today8

The point of origin for this trajectory and the one that I will followthroughout this essay will focus on the problem of autonomy as rstdeveloped in the dialogue between Pollock and Clement GreenbergIn his essay ldquoTowards a Newer Laocoonrdquo Greenberg states that auton-omy under modernism meant the separation of each art form into itsconstituent medium rather than as Theodor Adorno had had it by itsseparation from social use-value For Greenberg each art form neces-sarily distinguished itself from all the others via its material support ldquoTheartsrdquo wrote Greenberg ldquohave been hunted back to their mediums and

Kaizen | Framed Space Allan Kaprow and the Spread of Painting 83

there they have been isolated concentrated and denedrdquo9 As we willsee despite Greenbergrsquos later claims he nevertheless recognized thatPollockrsquos work operated precisely against the limitations of paintingas medium pushing painting toward sculpture and architecture asmuch as it engaged with two-dimensional atness Conversely Kaprowwhose early environments and happenings seem to inaugurate theldquopost-medium conditionrdquo of art since the 1960s ends up reassertingmediumistic autonomy one that is based on the specificity of thegallery space and its laws10 To get from Pollock to Kaprow I will touchon the intermediate points of Peter Blakersquos project for a museumdesigned to house Pollockrsquos work as well as the dialogue betweenRobert Rauschenberg and John Cage using these intermediaries as abridge between Kaprowrsquos engagement with Pollockrsquos work and Kaprowrsquosown early work in environments and happenings

| | | | |

Kaprow had written an essay ten years before Assemblage Environmentsand Happenings staking out the territory that was to become his lifersquoswork Called ldquoThe Legacy of Jackson Pollockrdquo it was written shortlyafter Pollockrsquos death in 1956 as Kaprow was looking for a way beyondabstract expressionism and out of his art historical and artistic train-ing11 He had read Harold Rosenbergrsquos essay ldquoThe American ActionPaintersrdquo where Rosenberg described abstract expressionism as anexistentialist engagement with the morality of mark making ldquoThe newpaintingrdquo Rosenberg said ldquohas broken down every distinction betweenart and liferdquo For Rosenberg the collapse of this distinction meant thecollapse between the work of art and its maker so that the work of artbecame the result of a specic ego struggling with a material processLife for Rosenberg was biographical and the artist was a heroic creatoran existential superman whose every mark became a moral act realizinga will to power with each gesture12

Kaprowrsquos essay extends Rosenbergrsquos argument but rather than takepolemically the claim that Pollock collapses art and life he reads it literally For Kaprow Pollockrsquos unboundedness his tendency towardinnite expansion suggested an extension of painting into the spaceof viewing and into everyday life

Kaprow had first experienced Pollockrsquos paintings at the series ofhighly influential and well-publicized exhibitions held at the BettyParsons Gallery from 1948 to 195113 These shows featured Pollockrsquosdrip paintings shown so that they covered the gallery walls manymade specically to match their height As Kaprow described it theyfilled the viewersrsquo senses surrounding them in a complete environ-ment refusing any possibility of disembodied purely optical viewing

84 Grey Room 13

This happened he said for several reasons but it was the size of thesepaintings that was most important ldquoPollockrsquos choice of enormous can-vases served many purposesrdquo he said ldquochief of which for our discus-sion is that his mural-scale paintings ceased to become paintings andbecame environmentsrdquo14 But it was their wall size (and not their scale)15

that caused Pollockrsquos drips to overow the bounds of the canvasrsquo framingedge Kaprow continues it was ldquoour size as spectators in relation to thesize of the picture [and] Pollockrsquos choice of great sizes [that] resultedin our being confronted assaulted sucked inrdquo

The size of Pollockrsquos paintings engaged even attacked the viewerrsquoswhole body and not just their eye Kaprow immediately qualies thephrase ldquosucked inrdquo as he contrasts Pollockrsquos relationship to the wallwith that of Renaissance painting If Renaissance painting acted as awindow that the eye traveled through extending the room outward intospace for Kaprow Pollockrsquos paint came off the canvas and into the roomwith the spectator lling and surrounding the spectator ldquoWhat I believeis clearly discernablerdquo he said ldquois that the entire painting comes outat us (we are participants rather than observers) right into the roomrdquo16

The experience of Pollockrsquos work as exceeding the constraints ofthe framing edge of the canvas was one that Pollock recognized in hisown work and that he sought however ambivalently to elicit through-out his career17 Although he had long been engaged with the muralhe had never convinced himself to make work that was fully inte-grated with an architectural structure Even when working at wall sizehe never made the full transition to the wall painting even his largestworks on stretched canvas He recognized that his paintings existedambiguously between the easel and the wall saying at one point in thelate forties ldquoI intend to paint large movable pictures which will func-tion between the easel and the mural I believe the easel picture tobe a dying form and the tendency of modern feeling is towards thewall picture or muralrdquo This statement written in 1947 was in dialoguewith critic Clement Greenberg18 Greenberg known for his teleologyof atness in modern painting had at this earlier date recognized thatthe size of Pollockrsquos paintings made them wall-like physical objects

Jackson Pollock exhibition atThe Betty Parsons Gallery 28 Novemberndash16 December1950 Photo Hans Namuth

Kaizen | Framed Space Allan Kaprow and the Spread of Painting 85

and that the tendency of modern painting was not to become at butto spread out into space19 While Greenberg would come to deny theimplications of this idea by the 1960s he said in a 1948 article onPollockrsquos work

After all easel painting is on the way out There is a persistenturge as persistent as it is largely unconscious to go beyond thecabinet picture which is destined to occupy only a spot on the wallto a kind of picture that without actually becoming identifiedwith the wall like a mural would spread over it and acknowl-edge its physical reality I do not know whether there is anythingin modern architecture itself that explicitly invites this tendencyBut it is a fact that abstract painting shows a greater and greaterreluctance for the small frame-enclosed format Abstract paintingbeing at needs greater extension of surface on which to developits ideas than does the old three-dimensional easel painting andit seems to become trivial when conned within anything mea-suring less than two feet by two20

Here we see even in the critic best known for his call for the separa-tion of painting from other art forms that already within abstractexpressionism lay the seeds of its dissolution into the space of archi-tecture For Greenberg this was a drive to be repressed Painting couldsurvive in the end only if it were to maintain its autonomy from theother arts21 Nevertheless he clearly recognized that with this lay thepossibility of its dissolution into an impure state a state where theframing space of the work becomes as important as the work itselfWhat Greenberg recognized in Pollockrsquos work and what Kaprow extrap-olated out of it was the relationship between painting and the spacethat contains it What Greenbergrsquos recognition amounted to forKaprow but also for many artists who followed was the end of paint-ing in a particular sense with the end of easel painting in abstractexpressionism as painting became a wall it was no longer a windowPainting as wall is not a window to be looked through but a thing to belooked at an object in the way some thing in space rather than a trans-parent surface

| | | | |

Leading up to the exhibitions of wall-size paintings at the Betty ParsonsGallery and key to their development was the dialogue betweenPollock and architect Peter Blake22 Blake had visited Pollockrsquos studioin 1949 Pollock had only recently begun his series of drip paintingsand had been using an old barn behind his house which was morespacious than the upstairs room in the house he had previously used

86 Grey Room 13

Seeing all of the paintings on the walls andoor of the barn elicited an intense reactionin Blake The paintings seemed both trans-parent and reective dissolving the walls ofthe barn as if they captured the misty land-scape of the bay outside and also because ofPollockrsquos use of aluminum paint reectingthe light streaming in through the windowslike enormous mirrors23 Blakersquos experiencewas central to his design for a small museummeant to house Pollockrsquos work Blake recalled

I designed a large somewhat abstractldquoexhibitrdquo of his workmdasha kind of ldquoIdealMuseumrdquo in which his paintings were

suspended between the earth and the sky and set between mir-rored walls so as to extend into infinity Beyond these floatingcanvases would be the marshes and the inlets of The Springsmdashthe relentlessly horizontal landscape of that end of Long Island24

Blakersquos ldquoIdeal Museumrdquo was indebted to Ludwig Mies van der Rohewhose Barcelona Pavilion and Museum for a Small City project formedthe basis of his design25 In Blakersquos monograph on Mies he expressedhis admiration for the Barcelona Pavilion and noted that it suggested anew direction for the integration of art and architecture ldquoThe resultingcompositionrdquo he said referring to the sculpture by Georg Kolbe as it was framed by the walls in the Pavilionrsquos enclosed courtyard ldquohasbecome a favorite example of those who advocate collaboration betweenarchitects on the one hand and sculptors and painters on the other[The Kolbe sculpture] does suggest that there may be other and betterways towards integration of the artsrdquomdashways that Blake would furtherpursue in his Pollock Museum26

As in Miesrsquos project for a Museum for a Small City the exterior wallsof Blakersquos Pollock Museum were to be made entirely of glass No inte-rior walls would be interposed between the art and the landscape outside The art became the walls Paintings were to be hung on free-standing walls no bigger than the work itself so that only the art itselfwould be visible oating in space with other works of art juxtaposedagainst it and with the exterior environment as a background Blakeunframes the work of art pulling it out of its usual relationship withthe wall where it would normally sit enclosed in a traditional framereframing it to create a collaged space one where works of art are seentogether overlapping one another as the viewer moves through themuseum27 Blake attempted to replicate the relationships between theviewer and the art object that Miesrsquos Pavilion and Museum had embodied

Top Jackson Pollock andPeter Blake looking at themodel of Blakesrsquos museumdesign on display at theBetty Parsonrsquos Gallery Photo Ben Schultz

Bottom Georg Kolbe DerMorgen 1925 Shown housedin Mies van der RoheBarcelona Pavilion 1928ndash29Photo Berliner Bild-Bericht

Kaizen | Framed Space Allan Kaprow and the Spread of Painting 87

the removal of the traditional framing device (the picture frame) for anoverlapping frame of collaged space the collapse of outside and insideand the reection back onto the viewer of their somatic viewing expe-rience Like Mies Blake adopted the materials of modern distraction(plate glass in particular) and combined them with an open plan inorder to create an interior that would use the glass curtain wall to offerrespite from the city street and the speed of modernity28

The only substantive article published on the Pollock Museum atthe time was Arthur Drexlerrsquos ldquoUnframed Spacerdquo29 The title camefrom Blakersquos own assessment that his project would realize the unlim-ited extension of Pollockrsquos marks into a total environment Drexlerconcludes his short essay with words that are similar to Blakersquos ownassessment of Mies ldquoThe Project suggests a re-integration of paintingand architecture wherein painting is the architecture but this timewithout message or content Its sole purpose is to heighten our expe-rience of spacerdquo30 Contrary to Drexlerrsquos title Pollockrsquos paintings arerendered secondary to their use in framing space It is the space of thegallery that submits them to its formal logic In Blakersquos Museum theart is secondary to the space that contains it

Blakersquos Museum conates both of Miesrsquos projects from which it wasprimarily derived By using abstract paintings Blake was able to fillhis museum with art while simultaneously returning these large-sizeabstractions directly to the wall Pollockrsquos painting functions like thestone cladding on the central wall in the Barcelona Pavilion as a dec-orative surface Pollock recognized the reduction inherent in Blakersquosproject saying to him after the design was done ldquoThe trouble is youthink I am a decoratorrdquo Blakersquos reply was telling ldquoOf course I thinkhis paintings might make terric walls After all architects spend a lotof time thinking about wallsrdquo31 What kept Pollock from working directlyon the wall and what Blake as an architect recognized immediatelywas that when painting became a wall or approached this conditionthrough wall size its autonomy was destroyed It approached the

Interiors (January 1950) featuring Blakersquos Pollockmuseum

88 Grey Room 13

status of interior decoration and that was the wayBlake wanted itmdashPollock reduced to ldquoterrific wallsrdquoHe even tried to commission Pollock to paint panelsfor the moving walls of the Pinwheel House his nextproject so that when they slid shut the housersquos inte-rior would be enclosed in Pollocks surrounded bypainted wallpaper32 The paintings as walls are sub-mitted to the logic of Blakersquos architecture He destroysthe autonomy of Pollockrsquos paintings only to sublatethem into the autonomy of modernist architecturerealizing Pollockrsquos fear of turning his work into meredecoration Blakersquos project asserts architecture over

painting As painting becomes wall it is sublated into the autonomousmodernist space of Miesian architecture Pollockrsquos work is turned intoa decorative surface into an interior design for a modernist space

The Pollock Museum was never built but not because either Pollockor Blake had second thoughts Despite any misgivings that Pollock hadwith this project the model was exhibited at Betty Parsons Gallery in1949 and afterward the model remained in Pollockrsquos studio promi-nently displayed in case he could convince a visiting collector to helpfinance its construction At his next exhibition with Betty Parson in1950 the paintings were made to be the same height and almost thesame length of the walls on which they hung so that they would comeas close as possible to realizing Blakersquos design within the more tradi-tional gallery setting33

If Blakersquos project misrepresented Pollock this was only to the extentthat Pollock had already acknowledged the tendency of painting atwall size to become an object What Blakersquos project makes clear is thatwhen paintings became wall-size or as they literally became wallsthey lost their capacity to create an autonomous space divorced fromcontext While it took an architect initially to realize such a possibilityartists soon followed suit34

It is likely that Kaprow saw the 1949 exhibition of Pollockrsquos workwhich included the model for Blakersquos Museum Although in his writ-ings on Pollock he doesnrsquot mention the Museum in an interview from1967 he claimed to have rst seen a Pollock exhibition in 194935 Thiswould mean that he had seen the show at the Betty Parsons Gallerywith the model on display The model for the museum is also clearlyvisible in the photographs of Pollock working in his studio that illus-trate both the original publication of Kaprowrsquos ldquoThe Legacy of JacksonPollockrdquo and (much later) his collection of essays The Blurring of Artand Life36 Kaprow also explicitly referenced the subsequent Pollockexhibition with its wall-size works when he discussed the all-overeld Pollockrsquos work created in the space of the gallery But along with

Photograph of Pollock in hisstudio As published in Allan Kaprow ldquoThe Legacy ofJackson Pollockrdquo in Art News(October 1958) The model of Blakersquos museum is visiblein the upper-left cornerPhoto Rudy Burckhardt

Kaizen | Framed Space Allan Kaprow and the Spread of Painting 89

Pollock and Blake Kaprow also engagedwith the work of Robert Rauschenbergand John Cage two artists who had asmuch impact on his thinking about spaceas Pollock

| | | | |

In the fall of 1951 when Kaprow visitedRauschenbergrsquos studio he saw the WhitePaintings37 Rauschenberg had made theseworks during the previous summer at BlackMountain College Like Blake Rauschenberg also engaged space usingpainting but he did so as an artist not as an architect Yet rather thanreassert the autonomy of painting he established a semiautonomousspace for painting The White Paintings are a series of works paintedat matte white with no visible marks to attract the viewerrsquos eye WhileBlake submitted the autonomy of Pollockrsquos painting to the logic of hisarchitecture upholding the autonomy of modernist space in favor ofarchitecture over art Rauschenberg was far more ambivalent about thepossibility of autonomy for either art or architecture The White Paintingsexist between the two as semiautonomous objectsmdashnot quite wall notquite paintingmdashand certainly not like their nearest precursor abstractexpressionist painting with its ood of gesture and mark The WhitePaintings in their utter blankness call attention to the ephemeral effectsof light and shade that played across them Upon seeing them Kaprowwas unsure what to think until he noticed that they turned the surfaceof painting into an active plane of reception for the movement of his bodyldquoI was walking back and forth not knowing how I should take thesethingsrdquo he said ldquoand then I saw my shadows across the paintingmdashmovingrdquo38 For Kaprow the surface of these paintings became a tem-poral screen reecting the viewerrsquos body in the changing environmentof the gallery Their painterly incidence was not their whiteness perse but their ability to capture the presence of the viewer as he or shestood in front of the work The viewer activated the work so that thework the viewer and the space in between all became part of the workAs Rauschenberg wrote at the time ldquoPainting relates to both art andlife Neither can be made (I try to act in that gap between the two)rdquo39

These paintings are caught between painting as an object that is func-tionally and fundamentally separate from its architectural containerand the spread of painting into a semiautonomous state somewherebetween art architecture and the viewing subject moving through theexhibition space

Rauschenberg had developed his White Paintings in dialogue with

Photograph of Pollock in hisstudio As published in AllanKaprow Essays on theBlurring of Art and Life 1993The model of Blakersquosmuseum is visible in theupper-right corner PhotoHans Namuth

90 Grey Room 13

Cage who was also at Black Mountain in the summer of 195240 Thatsummer Cage incorporated The White Paintings into his own workTheater Piece No 141 They were suspended over the heads of theaudience members at various angles as a variety of performance eventstook place beneath them These events included Rauschenberg andDavid Tudor playing piano poets MC Richards and Charles Olsonreading poetry from atop a ladder and Merce Cunningham and othersdancing through the space and around the audience It was the WhitePaintings with their environmental quality that that led Cage to write4rsquo 33 in 1952 Tudor was the original performer of the compositionwhose score was open to interpretation42 He realized it on pianoplaying it by silently opening and closing the piano lid allowing thesounds of the audience and the ambient noises of the space to becomethe work Kaprow attended one of the rst performances of 4rsquo 33 atCarnegie Hall in 1952 and was deeply affected He compared his expe-rience of 4rsquo 33 to his experience of Rauschenbergrsquos paintings Thesounds in the space chairs creaking the air condition humming peoplecoughing and clearing their throatsmdashall the ambient sounds that lledthe space of the auditoriummdashbecame foregrounded ldquoIt was like theshadows in Bob Rauschenbergrsquos picturesrdquo Kaprow recalled ldquoThat is tosay there [wa]s no marking the boundary of the artwork or the boundaryof so-called everyday life They merge[d] And we the listeners in Cagersquosconcert and the lookers at Rauschenbergrsquos pictures were the collabo-rators of the artworkrdquo43 For Kaprow Cage like Rauschenberg col-lapsed the autonomy of art by engaging the listener as collaborator ina semiautonomous space (ldquoso-called everyday liferdquo and not true every-day life) that depended upon the interaction between work spaceand subject

On his visit to Rauschenbergrsquos studio Kaprow also saw the earliestof Rauschenbergrsquos black paintings44 This series is the antipode of thesmooth matte white surfaces of the White Paintings They are allblack monochromes most painted with a high-gloss enamel soakedinto newspaper pages that were then haphazardly stuck onto the sur-face of a canvas trapped pockets of air often causing the paintingsrsquosurfaces to bulge outward repulsively At their largest they framespace as Pollockrsquos work did but as art brut walls instead of dazzlingskeins of paint One photograph of a later diptych shows the paintingsblocking the doorway to Rauschenbergrsquos studio at Black Mountain asif they were extensions of the rough-hewn stone walls on either side45

But in this next transformation of painting as wall what seems moreimportant for the direction that both Rauschenberg and Kaprow wouldfollow out of these works was their newspaper ground As Rauschenbergrsquospaintings became wall-size their art brut surface was built on the newsof the day At rst everyday events as reported in the newspaper are

Kaizen | Framed Space Allan Kaprow and the Spread of Painting 91

painted out and hidden behind the blackpaint46 As the series proceeded he allowedincreasingly more of the news to showthrough While the White Paintings engagedwith the gap between art and life by cap-turing the viewerrsquos bodymdashas did Cagersquos4rsquo 33 at least for Kaprowmdashthe black paint-ings did so by using the everyday objectas a ground Through their use of news-paper they suggested another trajectoryout of painting and into everyday spacea trajectory whose base condition was thecommodity object

In order to get into the gap between art and life Rauschenbergrsquoswork rst had to approximate the condition of being a wall It neededto assume a relation to its architectural frame in order to move awayfrom the autonomy of painting and into semiautonomy but once it didso Rauschenberg would abandon the problem of painting as wallFollowing the White Paintings and black paintings (and then a briefseries of Red Paintings) he made his rst Combines works that rein-state the autonomy of the individual art object even while they existbetween painting sculpture and the surrealist objet trouveacute47 Ratherthan engage with space Rauschenbergrsquos Combines elevate the ready-made or found object back to the status of the autonomous art objectThe Combines formalize the everyday object into an in-between statebut one that nevertheless produces singular art objects While theblack paintings led Rauschenberg back to the art object they led Kaprowfarther off the wall and out into space

| | | | |

Kaprow wrote ldquoa statementrdquo about his work sketching the trajectoryhe took from painting through collage then out into the space of thegallery48 After his initial show of paintings in 1952 he described thedevelopment of what he called ldquoaction collagerdquo These were done asquickly as possible by throwing together readily available everydaymaterials including parts of his past work tinfoil photographsnewspaper and food Although he doesnrsquot mention particular works by name presumably these action-collages include the early piecesreproduced in Assemblage Environments and Happenings In a photo-graph of Penny Arcade (1956) we see Kaprow standing in front of a largewall-size assemblage densely layered with parts of paintings scrapsof wood and large pieces of advertising signage that look like Kaproweither found them on the side of the road or appropriated them from a

Robert RauschenbergUntitled 1952

92 Grey Room 13

storefront It also included flashing lights andsounds calling out to the viewer like a ConeyIsland carnival booth but one made all the moreconfusing with its hyperarray of upside-downand fragmented word parts While collage hadbeen delicate even dainty in its appliqueacute of smallscraps of paper to the surface of the image KaprowrsquosPenny Arcade was massive and rough-hewn Unlikeits glitzier real-world counterpart Penny Arcadelooks cobbled together a temporary faccedilade brico-laged from odds and ends Here Kaprow turnedthe gallery space into the street turning the wallinto a pseudo-storefront bringing the architec-ture of the outside world into the gallery but lteredthrough the compositional strategies of collage

and abstract expressionism Abstraction before world war II had beenundertaken in a quest to find a universal Esperanto of color and form a problem that had been transformed by abstract expressionisminto a private iconography of psychic signs In Penny Arcade Kaprowturns the private symbolism of abstraction expressionism back to the world through advertising as commodity sign He makes the private symbol public again by reconnecting prendashWorld War II modelsof collective production with postndashWorld War II models of collectiveconsumption

Another work from this time further demonstrates how Kaprowused everyday materials to partition space Alternately titled (inAssemblage) Wall Kiosk and Rearrangeable Panels (1957ndash1959) thispiece looks like an enormous folding Japanese screen Measuring eightfeet high and over twenty feet long its panels are covered in eggshellsleaves and broken mirrorsmdashnot mass-produced commodities or sig-nage but detritus and waste Several of the panels are painted one inHoffmanrsquos push-pull style two seem to nod toward Rauschenberg onepainted white one black This piece is designed to sit on the oor ofthe gallery and as its various names imply it can be placed in a varietyof positions called ldquowallrdquo when arrayed in a straight line ldquokioskrdquowhen arranged into a square and ldquorearrangeable panelsrdquo in generalor when it sits in a zigzag Each position changes the relationship ofthe object to the space that contains it Kaprow recast the painting-as-wall as a transformable piece of furniture recognizing the possibilityof ludic engagement with the viewer but withholding it because theviewer is not allowed to interact with the piece directly Once installedthe work transforms the space of the gallery but it cannot be recong-ured by the viewer49

When asked why he used junk to make his work Kaprow replied

Allan Kaprow standing infront of Penny Arcade 1956Photo WF Gainfort

Kaizen | Framed Space Allan Kaprow and the Spread of Painting 93

It was clearly part of transformingreality It gave everyone a sense ofinstant involvement in a kind of crudeeveryday reality which was quite arelief after the high-art attitude ofexclusion from the real world It alsoallowed us to give up a certain kindof seriousness that traditional artmaking required Whatrsquos more thematerials were available everywhereon street corners at night And ifyou didnrsquot sell these environmentalconstructions yoursquod just throwthem back into the garbage canWhy not just throw them out It wasvery liberating to think of oneself aspart of an endlessly transformingreal world50

The ldquocrude everyday realityrdquo capturedby Penny Arcade as with Kaprowrsquos subsequent work is predicatedupon his project of capturing the ldquoendlessly transforming real worldrdquoThis statement connects him with Rauschenberg and Cage but alsoshows how their work differs in an important and crucial way InKaprowrsquos comment describing his experience of 4rsquo33 (as quoted inthe previous section) he says ldquoAnd we the listeners in Cagersquos concertand the lookers at Rauschenbergrsquos pictures were the collaborators of[sic] the artworkrdquo ending with ldquoIt was a kind of collaborative end-lessly changing affair The artwork was simply this organism that wasaliverdquo51 For Kaprow the key word here is change and in order tomove from artwork to organism the work of art must be reconsiderednot as a ldquochance operationrdquo (to use Cagersquos term) but as a change oper-ation During this time Kaprow had begun to take classes with Cageand he was exposed to Cagersquos use of chance methods of compositionWhile he would adopt much from Cagersquos work and teaching he thoughtthat change was the most important principle for his own work52

For Kaprow change was integrally connected to the postndashworld warII environment lled with mass-produced throwaway products Theart of this timemdashhis artmdashshould necessarily reect this environmentIn opposition to the nostalgic use of the objet trouveacute in surrealism hismethod was closer to the readymade choosing everyday objects to res-cue from oblivion but spreading them out in space so that they wouldenvironmentally engulf the viewer53 Kaprow temporarily revalues thethrowaway commodity in his environments to create a space where

Allan Kaprow RearrangeablePanels 1957-9 Shown intheir ldquoKioskrdquo con gurationPhoto Robert R McElroy

94 Grey Room 13

everyday life as planned obsolescence is brought under the control ofthe artist He creates a momentary space of anti-entropy in the life ofthe commodity where it is temporarily reinvested with value only to bedisposed of once the environment is destroyed54 Citing critic LawrenceAlloway on the ldquothrowawayrdquo culture of postndashworld war II AmericaKaprow goes on to describe the importance of change in his work

Change governing both reality and art has extended from theexpression of an idea arrested in a painting to a work in whichthe usually slow mutations wrought by nature are quickened andliterally made part of the experience of it they manifest the veryprocess of creation-decay-creation almost as one watches Theuse of debris waste products or very impermanent substanceslike toilet paper or bread has of course a clear range of allusionswith obvious sociological implications the simplest being theartistrsquos positive involvement on the one hand with an everydayworld and on the other with a group of objects which beingexpendable might suggest that corresponding lack of statuswhich is supposed to be the fate of anything creative todayThese choices must not be ignored for they reveal what in oursurroundings charges the imagination as well as what is mosthuman in our art55

What is ldquomost humanrdquo in Kaprowrsquos art as he denes it is its reectionof this throwaway culture This is governed not by Cagean chance butby planned obsolescence with its endless renewal of more of thesame ldquo[My] workrdquo Kaprow says ldquois intended to last only a short timeand is destroyed immediately after the exhibition If [its] obsolescenceis not planned it is expectedrdquo56 Alloway also writing on assemblagebetter describes the overlap between the throwaway object and its usein environmental art during the 1950s

The acceptance of mass-produced objects just because they arewhat is around not because they issue from idolatrised technol-ogy is central to mid-century Junk Culture Junk Culture iscity art Its source is obsolescence the throwaway material ofcities Assemblages of such material come at the spectator asbits of life bits of the environment frequently presented interms that dramatize spread ow extension trespass The junkis obtruded into our space with the aim of achieving maximumintimacy Proximity and participation replace distance and con-templation as the communicative style of the object57

So the space of Junk Culture when used in art as assemblage or envi-ronment achieves ldquomaximum intimacyrdquo with the observer throughtheir ldquoproximity and participationrdquo with the throwaway commodity

Kaizen | Framed Space Allan Kaprow and the Spread of Painting 95

As Kaprow moves farther into the space of the gallery he does so in anincreased attempt to engage the viewer He partitions the gallery spaceso that the body of the viewer becomes a product of its participationwithin the eld of the throwaway commodity

These early wall-like constructions were for Kaprow still not closeenough to a participatory art Kaprow wanted to move further towardthe creation of environments and even events to take over the gallerywith a plenitude of throwaway objects among which the viewer wouldself-consciously circulate The action collages still maintained toomuch autonomy because they existed as individual objects and so asKaprow recalled ldquonow I simply filled the whole gallery up startingfrom one wall and ending with the otherrdquo58 With his rst environmentKaprow was no longer composing within the autonomous space ofpainting but composing the entire space of the gallery Kaprowrsquos rstenvironmentmdashmade at the Hansa Gallery in November 1958mdashwasmeant to totally engage the visitors to the gallery to make them intopart of the work itself ldquopassively or actively according to [their] talentsfor lsquoengagementrsquordquo59 From a drop ceiling of wires suspended in a gridseveral inches below the galleryrsquos original ceiling he hung variousmaterials creating a labyrinthine space divided by sheets of plastictangles of cellophane Scotch tape and more including a time-releasedmist of pine-scented deodorizer His work had taken over the galleryspace lling it with a nearly impenetrable eld of throwaway objects60

Kaprow took the ood of postndashworld war II consumer goods and usedthem to compose walls that partitioned space And composemdashin thetraditional sense of arranging shapes and forms on the surface of acanvasmdashis exactly what he did

Kaprow described his use of the full space of the gallery as a eld aterm that he derives from painting calling the second section of hisldquoAssemblagerdquo essay ldquoThe Field in Paintingrdquo ldquoThis space is in part theliteral distance between all solids included in the workrdquo Kaprowwrote ldquoBut it is also a space that is a direct heritage of paintingrdquo61

Everything in the space that he produced became part of his compo-sition including the viewer Like any other object in the work Kaprowsaid ldquoin as much as people visiting [an] environment are moving col-ored shapes [they] were counted lsquoinrsquordquo62 Each visitor as they movedthrough Kaprowrsquos labyrinth became a part of the work Art and lifehad now seemingly collapsed the autonomy of painting as a separateobjectmdashframed and isolated from the rest of its environment as a spaceonly for the eyemdashhad been abandoned for an embodied experienceViewing was now dependent upon space a space full of the objects ofeveryday life Using the materials of everyday life Kaprow invited hisviewers to get rid of their distance from the art object forcing theminto physical contact with his work This work he wrote ldquoinvites us

96 Grey Room 13

to cast aside for a moment proper manners andpartake wholly in the real nature of art and (onehopes) liferdquo63 Against the look-donrsquot-touch attitude ofmuseum and gallery Kaprow created a haptic spacewhere touch became the basis of the work where vis-itors came into physical contact with his throwawayobjects In this space as visitors threaded their waythrough the labyrinth the color of their clothes andtheir presence among these objects turned them intoa part of the work The viewer appeared as anotherthing in Kaprowrsquos composition not so different fromhis throwaway materials In his environment autonomycollapsed into participation based on the reicationof the subject as an obsolete material temporally

composited into the work While Kaprow certainly intended to includehis observers in the work he could do so only by turning them intoobjects rather than active subjects He later described his own sense ofthe failure with this exhibition that he couldnrsquot seem to engage theviewer enough but blamed it on the framing space of the galleryAfterward he said ldquoI complained immediately about the fact that therewas a sense of mystery until your eye reached a wall Then there wasa dead end At that point my disagreement with the gallery spacebeganrdquo64 But Kaprow didnrsquot abandon the gallerymdashat least not yet Toget closer to the everyday Kaprow thought he should more fully incor-porate the bodies of his viewers into his work This led to the origin ofhappenings in an attempt to make viewers into active subjects to engagethem more actively in creating the work as they became part of it

| | | | |

In 1958 Kaprow had presented two other early proto-happenings oneat Rutgers called Communication and one at George Segalrsquos farmcalled Pastorale65 Communication was based on work he had devel-oped in Cagersquos class It was close to traditional theater Presented in achapel that doubled as an auditorium for theater and music perfor-mances it included movement sound and banners unfurled from thebalconies Kaprow built ldquoplastic panelsrdquo behind which he performeda series of simple actions nally hiding himself from the audience bypainting the plastic wall in front of him and so ldquopainting himself outrdquoof the audiencersquos view66 For Pastorale he built frames that looked likeabysmal theater sets stretcher bars with torn strips of canvas runningfrom top to bottom During one part of the performance artists RobertWatts and Lucas Samaras painted on either side of one of these con-structions Inserted into the landscape these performance paintings

Part of the environment Allan Kaprow created for his piece Pastorale 1958Photo Vaughn Rachel

Kaizen | Framed Space Allan Kaprow and the Spread of Painting 97

marked the boundary between event and nonevent partitioning theground into territories and framing Pastoralersquos space using once againpainting as wall Unfortunately for Kaprow Pastorale was held during apicnic and the other participants were either too drunk or just plainunwilling to follow his directions They were engaged but refused tofollow his rules of play

18 Happenings in 6 Parts which took place in October 1959 wasthe rst ofcial happening67 Kaprow divided the inside of the galleryinto three smaller contiguous rooms using wooden two-by-fours Inphotographs of the piece as it was being installed these woodenbeams can be seen framing a space within the space of the gallerymdashnot into a proscenium stage but into an environment within the largergallery space where various events would occur Instead of wood ordrywall translucent plastic sheeting created the walls so that actioncould be partially seen from one room to the next Each room was litwith different colored lights and in each room where the audiencewas forced to sit and observe the action a group of actors movedthrough tightly scripted but simple routines as sounds came in and outand lms were projected

On the program the audience is listed under the ldquoCast of Participantsrdquowritten into the performance itself and actively engaged but only asthe subject of direction and authorial control At specific intervalsbells rang and the audience was required to change seats and to switchrooms based on instruction cards they had been given when they enteredthe gallery before the performance Kaprow had realized with his HansaGallery environment that he needed to give his viewers increasedresponsibility but he also realized that relinquishing too much con-trol could be a disaster as it had been in Pastorale As with his previ-ous work his goal with 18 Happenings was the ldquointegration of allelementsmdashenvironment constructed sections time space and peoplerdquoand the audience was once again included as just another material inhis composition68

During the fifth part of 18 Happenings one sequence of actionsseems to reveal Kaprowrsquos relationship with painting the viewer and space Kaprow had built a construction he called the ldquothe sandwich manrdquo named after its everyday counterparts paid to walkaround the city streets as human billboards Kaprowrsquos sandwich

Left The construction of thespace used for Allan Kaprowrsquos18 Happenings in 6 Parts1958

Right A view of Allan Kaprowrsquos18 Happenings whereRearrangeable Panels is partially visible on the leftThe in-set canvas panel onwhich actors painted live as part of the performance is shown at center PhotoScott Hyde

98 Grey Room 13

man was barely humanoidan automaton with forward-and backward-pointing mir-rors for a body bicycle wheelsfor feet and a gallon bucketof enamel paint for a headSticking out in front was apiece of wood for an arm end-ing in a hand that held cardslabeled ldquoXrdquo and ldquo3rdquo the adver-

tising handbill reduced to its zero degree In the middle of the sand-wich man hidden on a shelf between the two mirrors was a recordplayer and projecting out from behind it were two handles so that itcould be wheeled around the rooms As the sandwich man was wheeledfrom one room to another its mirrored body reflected the audienceback onto themselves their image taking the place of what would havebeen an advertisement They were reected not as participatory viewersnot even as active objects as in his environment but as passive objectsnow totally reied their image produced as a reection of Junk CultureHere in Brechtian fashion using a literal ldquoframing effectrdquo Kaprowturned his previous use of the viewer back into a critique of the eventitself In reecting the audiencersquos passivity back to them he forced amoment of recognition of their complicity in the production of thework They could see that as they became an ad on the sandwich manrsquosbelly so they became throwaway objects in his composition By reduc-ing the spectator to the general equivalence of these objects Kaprowrecognized the subject of the postndashWorld War II period as a product ofplanned obsolescence and consumer culture

Following this as the sandwich man was wheeled through the secondroom and into the third two men stood up from their seats one in eachroom Each took up a brush and a can of paint and approached oppo-site sides of one of the plastic walls simultaneously painting on a sec-tion of canvas set among the plastic walls and so turning the wall backinto a painting69 The canvas was left unprimed so that the simple gures that each artist painted (one was supposed to paint lines theother circles) would bleed through and so would be immediately visibleon the opposite side each mark responding to that of their partner Asin his two earlier happenings painting is done live before an audienceon a wall Kaprow showed the audience that when painting becomeswall it functions only to put space on display Here painting as a sin-gular art object was meaningless It became a throwaway stage propand so became a demonstration of how painting as object was part ofthe larger environment in which it resides The limit condition of paint-ing as wall with viewer as spectator was the gallery as frame70

The sandwich man part ofKaprowrsquos 18 HappeningsPhoto Scott Hyde

Kaizen | Framed Space Allan Kaprow and the Spread of Painting 99

What this sequence from 18 Happenings reveals is that Kaprow hadan acute sense of the way in which the gallery as frame produces sub-ject and space together He undermined the normal function of the artgallery turning both viewer and art object into Junk Culture Throwawayviewers throwaway paintings and throwaway rooms turned the galleryspacemdasha space designed to be neutral to hide itself as the objects itcontains become the sole focus of the viewerrsquos concentrationmdashinto thelocus of planned obsolescence With the creation of happeningsKaprow used Junk Culture against the doxa of gallery space upsettingthe common sense of what a space for art is and what it does Afterhappenings the paradoxical logic of the gallery as a site for both theprivate contemplation of singular aesthetic objects as well as the pub-lic transaction of luxury goods had been (however temporarily) sub-verted In asserting the gallery space as the limit condition of paintingKaprow framed the institution as the ground of artistic production

In ldquoThe Legacy of Jackson Pollockrdquo Kaprow says ldquoPollock left us atthe point where we must become preoccupied with and even dazzled by the space and objects of our everyday liferdquo71 In ldquoAssemblageEnvironments Happeningsrdquo bridging the gap between his early andlater work he concludes ldquothis has brought sharply into focus that theroom has always been a frame or format toordquo72 Kaprowrsquos collapse ofautonomy via art into lifemdashthat environments and happenings wouldldquopartake wholly in the real nature of art and (one hopes) liferdquomdashwasonly ever a hope as he himself knew If painting had used the frameas the delimitation of a eld for composition then environments andhappenings turned the gallery into the limit condition of this fieldWhile he tried to get closer to everyday life by making art he inevitablypushed it further away This ambivalence toward the collapse of artand life runs throughout Kaprowrsquos work even as he moved out of thegallery and into everyday life following his early work with his laterldquoactivitiesrdquo The early work was even by his own estimation more adisplay of experience and not a fair representation of actual everydayexperience But this is precisely where the importance of this work liesKaprowrsquos environments and happenings extended Rauschenbergrsquossemiautonomous gap so far that they turned the screw one notchhigher autonomy returning not though the sublation of art into archi-tecture but through the medium of framed space

100 Grey Room 13

NotesThanks to the generosity and insight of Karen Kurczynski John Harwood SethMcCormick Jaleh Mansoor Beth Hinderliter Vered Maimon Benjamin Buchloh andBarry Bergdoll as well as Branden Joseph and the Editors of Grey Room

1 Brian OrsquoDoherty Inside the White Cube The Ideology of the Gallery Space(Berkeley and Los Angeles University of California Press 1999) 15

2 It was originally called ldquoPainting Environments Happeningsrdquo and publishedin a condensed form in the catalog for the exhibition New FormsmdashNew Media I at the Martha Jackson Gallery New York the rst uptown show of Kaprow and his con-temporaries It was changed to ldquoAssemblage Environments and Happeningsrdquo for nalpublication Kaprow changed the title to incorporate the recent acceptance of the termassemblage It had been used rst by Helen Comstock to describe the work of ArthurDove in the 1920s but remained obscure until Jean Dubuffet popularized its use in 1953The term as used by Dubuffet was then adopted by William Seitz for his exhibitionThe Art of Assemblage at the Museum of Modern Art See Allan Kaprow AssemblageEnvironments and Happenings (New York Harry N Abrams 1966) 150ndash208 NewFormsmdashNew Media I (New York Martha Jackson Gallery 1960) np and RogerShattuck ldquoIntroduction How Collage Became Assemblagerdquo Essays on Assemblage(New York Museum of Modern Art 1992) 119

3 ldquoWhen I am in my painting Irsquom not aware of what Irsquom doingrdquo said PollockJackson Pollock Jackson Pollock Interviews Articles Reviews ed Pepe Karmel (NewYork Museum of Modern Art 1999) 17ndash18

4 Yard was Kaprowrsquos contribution to the exhibition Environments SituationsSpaces at the Martha Jackson Gallery a follow up to New FormsndashNew Media (see n 2)

5 ldquoAllan Kaprow and Robert Watts Interviewed by Sidney Simonrdquo in Benjamin HDBuchloh and Judith F Rodenbeck Experiments in the Everyday Allan Kaprow andRobert Watts Events Objects Documents (New York Wallach Art Gallery 1999) 76

6 To cite but one example of many Thomas Hirschhorn is an artist who continuesto extend and develop Kaprowrsquos legacy today

7 On Kaprow and performance see Amelia Jones Body Art Performing the Subject(Minneapolis University of Minnesota Press 1998) 56ndash57 Paul Schimmel ldquoLeap intothe Void Performance and the Objectrdquo in Out of Actions Between Performance andthe Object 1949ndash1979 ed Paul Schimmel (New York Thames and Hudson 1998)59ndash63

8 The relationship between painting and space had been explored before partic-ularly in the period between the two world wars by the artists associated with De Stijland constructivism For more on De Stijl see Nancy Troy The De Stijl Environment(Cambridge MIT Press 1983) On constructivism see Yve-Alain Bois ldquoEl LissitzkyRadical Reversibilityrdquo Art in America 76 no 4 (April 1988) 161ndash181 and Yve-AlainBois ldquoMaterial Utopiasrdquo Art in America 79 no 6 (June 1991) 98ndash107 Another Europeanwho explored the everyday object painting and space was Kurt Schwitters in the various incarnation of his Merzbau See Elizabeth Burns Gamard Kurt SchwittersrsquoMerzbau The Cathedral of Erotic Misery (New York Princeton Architectural Press2000) Two other important precursors who bridge the European and American con-text are Lazlo Moholy-Nagy and Friedrick Kiesler For information on Moholy-Nagyrsquosearly environmental projects as well as those of Lissitzy see Joan Ockman ldquoThe RoadNot Taken Alexander Dornerrsquos Way Beyond Artrdquo in Autonomy and Ideology Positioningan Avant-Garde in America ed RE Somol (New York Monicelli Press 1997) For

Kaizen | Framed Space Allan Kaprow and the Spread of Painting 101

information on Kiesler see RL Held Endless Innovations Frederick Kieslerrsquos Theoryand Scenic Design (Ann Arbor UMI Research Press 1982) Lisa Phillips FrederickKiesler (New York The Whitney Museum of American Art 1989) Brian OrsquoDohertydraws out the connections between the prendash and postndashWorld War II manifestations ofthis relationship in Inside the White Cube

9 For Benjamin the work of art attains autonomy under modernism with theemergence of art for artrsquos sake This autonomy is then usurped by mechanical repro-duction See Walter Benjamin ldquoThe Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproductionrdquoin Illuminations ed Hanna Arendt (New York Harcourt Brace and Jovanovich Inc1968) p 224-226 For Greenberg as the above quote indicates the autonomy of artcontinues even in the face of mechanization See Clement Greenberg ldquoTowards a NewerLaocoonrdquo Perceptions and Judgments 1939ndash1944 vol 1 of Clement Greenberg TheCollected Essays and Criticism ed John OrsquoBrien (Chicago University of Chicago1986) p 32

10 Rosalind Krauss uses the term ldquopost-medium conditionrdquo to designate ldquomixed-media installationrdquo work done today While Krauss argues that only the most signi-cant artists working since the 1960s reassert the medium in their work against thegeneral postmedium condition I believe that all mixed-media installation work operates using the gallery or institution as medium See Rosalind Krauss ldquoA Voyageon the North Seardquo Art in the Age of the Post-Medium Condition (New York Thamesand Hudson 1999) for her comments on a specic contemporary artist and the rein-vention of the medium see Rosalind Krauss ldquo And Then Turn Awayrdquo An Essayon James Colemanrdquo October 81 (Summer 1997) 5ndash33

11 Allan Kaprow ldquoThe Legacy of Jackson Pollockrdquo Art News 57 no 6 (October1958) 24ndash26 55ndash57 reprinted in Allan Kaprow Essays on the Blurring of Art andLife ed Jeff Kelley (Berkeley and Los Angles University of California Press 1993) 1ndash9 Kaprow has stated that the essay was written in 1956 in ldquoAllan Kaprow andRobert Watts Interviewed by Sidney Simonrdquo 77 Kaprow had been a student of bothHans Hoffman and Meyer Schapiro

12 Harold Rosenberg ldquoThe American Action Paintersrdquo Art News 52 (December1952) 22ndash23 In a footnote that Rosenberg added when the article was republished aspart of his book of collected essays in 1959 he added the following ldquoAction Paintinghas extracted the element of decision inherent in all art in that the work is not fin-ished at its beginning but has to be carried forward by an accumulation of lsquorightrsquo ges-tures In a word Action Painting is the abstraction of the moral element in art itsmark is moral tension in detachment from moral or esthetic certainties and it judgesitself morally in declaring that picture to be worthless which is not the incorporationof a genuine struggle one which could at any point have been lostrdquo Harold RosenbergThe Tradition of the New (New York Horizon Press 1959) 33ndash34 Kaprow recountsthe influence of Rosenbergrsquos essay on his work in ldquoAllan Kaprow and Robert WattsInterviewed by Sidney Simonrdquo 77

13 There were five all told They were held as follows 5ndash23 January 1948 24Januaryndash12 February 1949 21 Novemberndash10 December 1949 28 Novemberndash16 December1950 26 Novemberndash15 December 1951 These shows had a remarkable resonance onethat extended beyond even the insular New York art world when after the secondexhibition Life magazine published the feature article ldquoJackson Pollock Is He theGreatest Living Painter in the United Statesrdquo Dorothy Sieberling Life (August 81949) 42ndash45

14 Allan Kaprow ldquoThe Legacy of Jackson Pollockrdquo in Kaprow Essays on the

102 Grey Room 13

Blurringrdquo 615 Kaprow uses both the terms scale and size to describe Pollockrsquos work but as

TJ Clark has shown these are two very different terms and Pollock is a painter of sizeand not scale For Clark it is size that engages the body ldquoNormally speaking size isliteralmdasha matter of actual physical intuition It involves grasping how big or small acertain object really is most likely in relation to the size of the grasperrsquos upright body oroutspread armsrdquo TJ Clark ldquoPollockrsquos Smallnessrdquo in Jackson Pollock New Approachesed Kirk Varnedoe and Pepe Karmel (New York Museum of Modern Art 1999) 15

16 Kaprow ldquoThe Legacy of Jackson Pollockrdquo Essays on the Blurring 617 In most of his work the paint engages with the edge of the canvas emphasizing

and bordering it and not continuing around it as if the canvas had been cut down fromsome innite expanse Kaprow claims otherwise by singling out the exceptions sayingldquo[H]is art gives the impression of going on forever [T]hough evidence points to aslackening of the attack as Pollock came to the edges of many of his canvases in thebest ones he compensated for this by tacking much of the painted surface around theback of his stretchersrdquo Kaprow ldquoThe Legacy of Jackson Pollockrdquo Essays on the Blurringof Art and Life 5 An examination of the paintings shows that more often Pollockstopped before the edge or reworked his compositions after they were stretched sothat they reengaged with the edge even when cut from larger canvas Kaprow claimsotherwise because it furthers his arguments that Pollockrsquos paintings emerge into thespace of the viewer

18 Jackson Pollock ldquoApplication for a Guggenheim Fellowship 1947rdquo in JacksonPollock Interviews 17 The inuence of Greenberg at this time is discussed in StevenNaifeh and Gregory White Smith Jackson Pollock An American Saga (Aiken SCWoodwardWhite 1989) 551 Pollock had also engaged with wall-size painting duringhis association with Joseacute Clemente Orozco and in earlier work such as Mural(1943ndash1944) painted for Peggy Guggenheimrsquos house

19 Greenbergrsquos version of modernism was most fully laid out only in 1959 andpublished in 1960 ldquoIt was the stressing of the ineluctable atness of the surface thatremained however more fundamental than anything else to the process by whichpictorial art criticized and defined itself under Modernism For flatness alone wasunique and exclusive to pictorial art Because flatness was the only conditionpainting shared with no other art Modernist painting oriented itself to atness as itdid to nothing elserdquo In Clement Greenberg ldquoModernist Paintingrdquo in Modernism witha Vengeance 1957ndash1969 vol 4 of Clement Greenberg The Collected Essays andCriticism ed John OrsquoBrien (Chicago University of Chicago Press 1993) 87

20 Clement Greenberg ldquoThe Situation at the Momentrdquo in Arrogant Purpose1945ndash1949 vol 2 of Clement Greenberg The Collected Essays and Criticism ed JohnOrsquoBrien (Chicago University of Chicago 1986) 194ndash195

21 See Greenberg ldquoTowards a Newer Laocoonrdquo throughout22 Eric Lum has done extensive work on the relationship between abstract expres-

sionism and architecture The analysis in this essay follows from his especially whereBlakersquos project is concerned but also expands on it As he jumps from Blake to PhilipJohnson and Mark Rothkorsquos Houston Chapel however Lum misses the importance ofother interventions between painting and architecture such as those made by KaprowThis is evident when he says ldquoThrough this marriage of mural and wall paintingcould become fully integrated into architecture an idealized conjecture nor realizeduntil Mark Rothkorsquos 1971 Houston Chapelrdquo Eric Lum ldquoPollockrsquos Promise Toward anAbstract Expressionist Architecturerdquo Assemblage 39 (August 1999) 68

Kaizen | Framed Space Allan Kaprow and the Spread of Painting 103

23 Blake said of his visit to Pollockrsquos studio ldquoIt was a very sunny day and thesun was shining on the paintings I felt like I was standing in the Hall of Mirrors atVersailles It was a dazzling incredible sightrdquo Naifeh and Smith 588

24 Peter Blake No Place like Utopia Modern Architecture and the Company WeKept (New York Knopf 1993) 111ndash112

25 Miesrsquos museum plan was designed at the request of the editors at ArchitecturalForum who had been publishing a series of articles ldquoto show how building might beimproved through fuller and more imaginative use of existing resourcesrdquo They requesteddesigns for a variety of buildings that could be placed in a hypothetical city of 70000inhabitants ldquoNew Buildings for 194Xrdquo Architectural Forum 78 no 5 (May 1943)69ndash85 The Barcelona Pavilion was built in 1929 for the Barcelona Universal Expositionand was destroyed when the fair ended It was subsequently rebuilt in 1981ndash86

26 Peter Blake Mies van der Rohe (New York Pelican 1960) 54 It is worth notingthat like Miesrsquos use of the Kolbe sculpture Blake had Pollock actually make smallwire sculptures splattered with paint miniatures of sculptures that Blake hopedPollock would make for the actual museum Pollock himself was experimenting withsculpture around this time building three-dimensional forms out of papier-macirccheacutethat he then splattered with paint

27 Blakersquos collage space follows from Miesrsquos The production of collages as in situmodels for Miesrsquos buildings had begun in the twenties with his work for the journal Gin association with Dadaists such as Hans Richter Neil Levine notes this creation ofa collage space in Mies particularly in the Pavilion and the Museum for a Small Cityin relation to his use of reection to layer one surface on top of another Neil LevineldquolsquoThe Signicance of Factsrsquo Miesrsquo Collages Up Close and Personalrdquo Assemblage 37(December 1998) 71ndash101

28 Blake designed his museum just as Philip Johnson was building his Glass Housewhere they both spent considerable time while planning exhibitions for the Museumof Modern Art Johnsonrsquos inuence is also evident in Blakersquos design Blake No Placelike Utopia 149ndash155

29 Arthur Drexler ldquoUnframed Space A Museum for Jackson Pollackrsquos [sic] PaintingsrdquoInteriors and Industrial Design 109 no 6 (January 1950) 90ndash91 The article was partof a special issue whose theme was ldquoInteriors to Comerdquo a recurring topic that wasmeant ldquoto show the direction in which some of our best designers are goingrdquo The termunframed space was used several times in reference to Pollockrsquos work as the title oftwo articles Drexlerrsquos and one published slightly later by Berton Rouecheacute ThoughRouecheacute in an interview in To a Violent Grave says that Lee Krasner used the phraserst Charles Pollock says that Blake was the origin of the term The fact that Drexlerrsquosarticle was written and published earlier seems to conrm this See Berton RouecheacuteldquoUnframed Spacerdquo in Jackson Pollock Interviews 18ndash19 and Jeffrey Potter To aViolent Grave (New York Pushcart Press 1985) 126

30 Drexler 9031 Blake No Place like Utopia 113ndash11432 Blake completed construction on his ldquoPinwheel Houserdquo in 1952 It is a small

beach house that he designed for himself and his family in South Hampton on NewYorkrsquos Long Island Situated on the beach the house is square in plan and its fourexterior walls slide horizontally outward each in a successive clockwise directionrevealing glass walls When the exterior walls are fully extended and the house isviewed from above it forms a shape like a pinwheel Opening the exterior wallsreveals an ever-changing view of the landscape outside turning the ocean and the

104 Grey Room 13

dunes into the picturesque framing them so that they entirely ll the space of the walland put its surface in motion Blake had discussed with Pollock the possibility of hispainting the sliding walls so that his paintings would be superimposed over the land-scape Pollock considered it but Blake couldnrsquot come up with the commission moneythat Pollock asked for They never finalized their plans and it was never clear howthe panels were to be painted Blake suggested that they might be made of glass so hebought the sheet of glass that Pollock used to paint Number 29 1950 (1950) the paintingthat Hans Namuth lmed from underneath for his documentary on Pollock His col-laboration with Blake did lead to one commission a mural-size canvas done for ahouse designed by Marcel Breuer Untitled (Mural) (1950) Shortly after his collabo-ration with Blake Pollock began another unrealized architectural project this onewith Alfonso Ossorio and Tony Smith for a church designed by Smith with murals byPollock For more on all of this see Blake No Place like Utopia 114ndash118 Naifeh andSmith 649 and Lum ldquoPollockrsquos Promiserdquo 68 85ndash88

33 Lum ldquoPollockrsquos Promiserdquo 67ndash6834 A few pages down from Drexlerrsquos article on the Pollock Museum in Interiors

and Industrial Design was another architectural response to the same problem OlgaGueftrsquos article ldquoThe Museumrsquos Oasisrdquo describes another museum this one by Gyorgyand Juliet Kepes ldquoThe Kepesesrdquo it begins ldquoare not exactly opposed to museumsrdquo how-ever it would seem that they were opposed to museums containing works of artReplacing the art objects entirely the Kepeses substituted shells driftwood plantsand animals Instead of a natural history museum they proposed a modern-dayWunderkammerwhere natural forms take the place of art as objects for contemplationldquoThe proposed galleryrdquo they declared ldquowould bridge the gap between the art museumwhich is concerned with man-made beauty and the natural history museum whichis preoccupied with nature but not particularly with naturersquos beautyrdquo Gyorgy KepesrsquosThe New Landscape exhibition at MIT a year later in 1951 (the same years as theIndependent Grouprsquos similar exhibition Growth and Form in London) and the pub-lication that followed The New Landscape in Art and Sciencewould ultimately realizethis project with blown-up photographs of natural forms (cells shells and electronmicrographs) in place of actual objects

The Kepeses seem to have taken the next logical step beyond Blake proposing aneven more radical rethinking of the wall-size work of art Eliminating the need for theartist altogether they found abstract forms in nature and turned their reproductionsinto what would elsewhere have been works of art By turning the art object into scientic vision The Kepeses proposed its total instrumentation Autonomous abstractpainting was transformed into its instrumental other a mechanically reproduced science of vision Rather than turn art into interior design The Kepesesrsquo replacementof abstract painting recast the status of scientic technology into that of high art SeeOlga Gueft ldquoThe Museumrsquos Oasisrdquo Interiors and Industrial Design 109 no 6 (January1950) 100ndash103 and Gyorgy Kepes The New Landscape in Art and Science (ChicagoPaul Theobald and Co 1956)

35 Kaprow stated that it was ldquoIn 1949 [that] I saw an exhibition of [Pollockrsquos] workfor the rst timerdquo ldquoInterviewrdquo in Allan Kaprow (Pasadena Pasadena Art Museum1967) 7

36 See Kaprow ldquoThe Legacy of Jackson Pollockrdquo Art News 25 and Kaprow ldquoTheLegacy of Jackson Pollockrdquo Essays on the Blurring 3

37 Joan Marter ldquoThe Forgotten Legacy Happenings Pop Art and Fluxus at RutgersUniversityrdquo in Off Limits Rutgers University and the Avant-Garde 1957ndash1963 ed Joan

Kaizen | Framed Space Allan Kaprow and the Spread of Painting 105

Marter (Newark The Newark Museum 1999) 438 Marter 13239 Quoted in John Cage Silence (Middletown Wesleyan University Press 1961) 10540 Branden Joseph has developed the link between Cage and Rauschenberg in several

recent essays See Branden W Joseph ldquoJohn Cage and the Architecture of SilencerdquoOctober 81 (Summer 1997) 81ndash104 and Branden Joseph ldquoWhite on Whiterdquo CriticalInquiry 27 no 1 (Summer 2001) 90ndash121

41 For Cage on Rauschenberg see Cage Silence98ndash108 For his description ofTheater Piece No 1 see ldquoInterview with John Cagerdquo in Happenings and Other Actsed Mariellen R Sandford (New York Routledge 1995) 53 Cage subsequently referredto Theater Piece No 1 as ldquothe rst happeningrdquo See John Cage ldquoAn AutobiographicalStatementrdquo Southwest Review 76 no 1 (Winter 1991) 65

42 The score itself has had various incarnations It wasnrsquot published until 1960and in this version includes a note wherein Cage describes the rst performance byTudor For more on 4rsquo33 and its various scores see Liz Kotz ldquoWords on Paper NotNecessarily Meant to Be Read as Art Postwar Media Poetics from Cage to Warholrdquo(PhD diss Columbia University 2002) 83ndash115 Kotz follows a different lineage outof Cage and into performance and happenings than the one traced in this essay

43 Marter 13244 Walter Hopps in the first survey catalog of Rauschenbergrsquos early work does

not name the black paintings as a group as he does the White Paintings He calls themeach Untitled followed by a description in brackets Hopps notes of the largest ofthese works that ldquoThese paintings with a greater vastness and ambiguity of scale thanother Rauschenberg works relate to spatial qualities of Jackson Pollockrdquo HoppsRobert Rauschenberg The Early 1950s (Houston Houston Fine Art Press 1991) 67This convention was also followed in Rauschenbergrsquos 1997 Guggenheim retrospectivecatalog and is followed in this essay Robert Rauschenberg A Retrospective ed WalterHopps and Susan Davidson (New York Solomon R Guggenheim Museum 1997)

45 The piece is called Untitled [two black panels] (1953) Hopps Robert Rauschenberg99

46 Helen Molesworth notes the importance of Rauschenbergrsquos newspaper groundin the black paintings and develops this problem in relation to the abject body as it isfurther pursued in his work throughout the 1950s Helen Molesworth ldquoBefore BedrdquoOctober 63 (Winter 1993) 68ndash82

47 Asked about this work Rauschenberg said ldquoI called them combines I had tocoin that word because I got so bored with arguments I was interested in people seeingmy work When someone would come up and I really wanted to know what they thoughtof it or wanted to sense the exposure there was always this screen that they could getbehind which was if I said lsquoIt is paintingrsquo they would say lsquoThatrsquos not painting Thatrsquossculpturersquo And they thought this was very interestingrdquo Jeanne Siegel ArtwordsDiscourse on the 60s and 70s (New York DaCapo 1985) 153

48 Allan Kaprow ldquoa Statementrdquo in Happenings An Illustrated Anthology edMichael Kirby (New York EP Dutton and Co 1965) 44ndash45

49 Benjamin Buchloh notes the importance of play in the 1950s and its link toconsumer culture During the 1950s he writes ldquoa theory of games would remerge asa cultural project at the very moment of an ever-increasing instrumentalization oflibidinal desire through consumer culturerdquo Benjamin HD Buchloh ldquoRobert WattsInanimate ObjectsmdashInanimate Subjectsrdquo in Buchloh and Rodenbeck Experiments inthe Everyday 25 n 4

82 Grey Room 13

the image of Pollock as if following directly from Pollockmdashheir to hislegacy and also its conclusionmdashstands Kaprow in the middle of hissculpture Yard a eld of randomly strewn tires completely lling thesmall courtyard behind a tenement building4 Like Pollock he is shotfrom above so that in the middle of these throwaway commodities heis also caught in the work Rather than blur into the work Kaprow sitsat the bottom of the page riding the wave of tires that seems to tumbleout of the picture He looks up at the viewer in shirtsleeves a pipebetween his teeth Crawling behind him is a child whose presenceelicits an atmosphere of play from an otherwise dingy environmentThe madness and alcoholism that supposedly fueled Pollockrsquos workif only in the popular imagination has now been replaced by Kaprowwith his own image as the bohemian academic and family man ldquoTheabstract expressionists [had] a point of view full of agony andecstasy full of crisisrdquo Kaprow said ldquoThis is no longer possible for usWe came too late for thatrdquo5

Kaprowrsquos generation was born too late to remember the Depressionwhich was just old enough to be caught up in the new prosperity ofthe postndashworld war II economic boom Instead of engaging withuntrammeled ego and pure expression Kaprow engaged with the prob-lem of painting and space and with objects in a society turning awayfrom production and toward consumption While Kaprow in AssemblageEnvironments and Happenings charts one trajectory out of Pollock thisessay follows another slightly different line of ight In constructinghis own legacy in Assemblage Kaprow obscures what is perhaps moreinteresting in the development of his own work as it relates to thework of others that followed rather than only beget performance arthis early work opened up the conjunction of viewing subject art objectand gallery space turning space into a eld for artistic production6 Inthe literature on Kaprow his own trajectorymdashone where he simplymoves Pollock off the wall and into performancemdashis generally takenfor granted7 By tracing another trajectory I hope to show how Kaprowin the context of post-world war II America called into being a differentset of problems problems that would be developed by minimalism andinstitutional critique and into installation and site-specic work today8

The point of origin for this trajectory and the one that I will followthroughout this essay will focus on the problem of autonomy as rstdeveloped in the dialogue between Pollock and Clement GreenbergIn his essay ldquoTowards a Newer Laocoonrdquo Greenberg states that auton-omy under modernism meant the separation of each art form into itsconstituent medium rather than as Theodor Adorno had had it by itsseparation from social use-value For Greenberg each art form neces-sarily distinguished itself from all the others via its material support ldquoTheartsrdquo wrote Greenberg ldquohave been hunted back to their mediums and

Kaizen | Framed Space Allan Kaprow and the Spread of Painting 83

there they have been isolated concentrated and denedrdquo9 As we willsee despite Greenbergrsquos later claims he nevertheless recognized thatPollockrsquos work operated precisely against the limitations of paintingas medium pushing painting toward sculpture and architecture asmuch as it engaged with two-dimensional atness Conversely Kaprowwhose early environments and happenings seem to inaugurate theldquopost-medium conditionrdquo of art since the 1960s ends up reassertingmediumistic autonomy one that is based on the specificity of thegallery space and its laws10 To get from Pollock to Kaprow I will touchon the intermediate points of Peter Blakersquos project for a museumdesigned to house Pollockrsquos work as well as the dialogue betweenRobert Rauschenberg and John Cage using these intermediaries as abridge between Kaprowrsquos engagement with Pollockrsquos work and Kaprowrsquosown early work in environments and happenings

| | | | |

Kaprow had written an essay ten years before Assemblage Environmentsand Happenings staking out the territory that was to become his lifersquoswork Called ldquoThe Legacy of Jackson Pollockrdquo it was written shortlyafter Pollockrsquos death in 1956 as Kaprow was looking for a way beyondabstract expressionism and out of his art historical and artistic train-ing11 He had read Harold Rosenbergrsquos essay ldquoThe American ActionPaintersrdquo where Rosenberg described abstract expressionism as anexistentialist engagement with the morality of mark making ldquoThe newpaintingrdquo Rosenberg said ldquohas broken down every distinction betweenart and liferdquo For Rosenberg the collapse of this distinction meant thecollapse between the work of art and its maker so that the work of artbecame the result of a specic ego struggling with a material processLife for Rosenberg was biographical and the artist was a heroic creatoran existential superman whose every mark became a moral act realizinga will to power with each gesture12

Kaprowrsquos essay extends Rosenbergrsquos argument but rather than takepolemically the claim that Pollock collapses art and life he reads it literally For Kaprow Pollockrsquos unboundedness his tendency towardinnite expansion suggested an extension of painting into the spaceof viewing and into everyday life

Kaprow had first experienced Pollockrsquos paintings at the series ofhighly influential and well-publicized exhibitions held at the BettyParsons Gallery from 1948 to 195113 These shows featured Pollockrsquosdrip paintings shown so that they covered the gallery walls manymade specically to match their height As Kaprow described it theyfilled the viewersrsquo senses surrounding them in a complete environ-ment refusing any possibility of disembodied purely optical viewing

84 Grey Room 13

This happened he said for several reasons but it was the size of thesepaintings that was most important ldquoPollockrsquos choice of enormous can-vases served many purposesrdquo he said ldquochief of which for our discus-sion is that his mural-scale paintings ceased to become paintings andbecame environmentsrdquo14 But it was their wall size (and not their scale)15

that caused Pollockrsquos drips to overow the bounds of the canvasrsquo framingedge Kaprow continues it was ldquoour size as spectators in relation to thesize of the picture [and] Pollockrsquos choice of great sizes [that] resultedin our being confronted assaulted sucked inrdquo

The size of Pollockrsquos paintings engaged even attacked the viewerrsquoswhole body and not just their eye Kaprow immediately qualies thephrase ldquosucked inrdquo as he contrasts Pollockrsquos relationship to the wallwith that of Renaissance painting If Renaissance painting acted as awindow that the eye traveled through extending the room outward intospace for Kaprow Pollockrsquos paint came off the canvas and into the roomwith the spectator lling and surrounding the spectator ldquoWhat I believeis clearly discernablerdquo he said ldquois that the entire painting comes outat us (we are participants rather than observers) right into the roomrdquo16

The experience of Pollockrsquos work as exceeding the constraints ofthe framing edge of the canvas was one that Pollock recognized in hisown work and that he sought however ambivalently to elicit through-out his career17 Although he had long been engaged with the muralhe had never convinced himself to make work that was fully inte-grated with an architectural structure Even when working at wall sizehe never made the full transition to the wall painting even his largestworks on stretched canvas He recognized that his paintings existedambiguously between the easel and the wall saying at one point in thelate forties ldquoI intend to paint large movable pictures which will func-tion between the easel and the mural I believe the easel picture tobe a dying form and the tendency of modern feeling is towards thewall picture or muralrdquo This statement written in 1947 was in dialoguewith critic Clement Greenberg18 Greenberg known for his teleologyof atness in modern painting had at this earlier date recognized thatthe size of Pollockrsquos paintings made them wall-like physical objects

Jackson Pollock exhibition atThe Betty Parsons Gallery 28 Novemberndash16 December1950 Photo Hans Namuth

Kaizen | Framed Space Allan Kaprow and the Spread of Painting 85

and that the tendency of modern painting was not to become at butto spread out into space19 While Greenberg would come to deny theimplications of this idea by the 1960s he said in a 1948 article onPollockrsquos work

After all easel painting is on the way out There is a persistenturge as persistent as it is largely unconscious to go beyond thecabinet picture which is destined to occupy only a spot on the wallto a kind of picture that without actually becoming identifiedwith the wall like a mural would spread over it and acknowl-edge its physical reality I do not know whether there is anythingin modern architecture itself that explicitly invites this tendencyBut it is a fact that abstract painting shows a greater and greaterreluctance for the small frame-enclosed format Abstract paintingbeing at needs greater extension of surface on which to developits ideas than does the old three-dimensional easel painting andit seems to become trivial when conned within anything mea-suring less than two feet by two20

Here we see even in the critic best known for his call for the separa-tion of painting from other art forms that already within abstractexpressionism lay the seeds of its dissolution into the space of archi-tecture For Greenberg this was a drive to be repressed Painting couldsurvive in the end only if it were to maintain its autonomy from theother arts21 Nevertheless he clearly recognized that with this lay thepossibility of its dissolution into an impure state a state where theframing space of the work becomes as important as the work itselfWhat Greenberg recognized in Pollockrsquos work and what Kaprow extrap-olated out of it was the relationship between painting and the spacethat contains it What Greenbergrsquos recognition amounted to forKaprow but also for many artists who followed was the end of paint-ing in a particular sense with the end of easel painting in abstractexpressionism as painting became a wall it was no longer a windowPainting as wall is not a window to be looked through but a thing to belooked at an object in the way some thing in space rather than a trans-parent surface

| | | | |

Leading up to the exhibitions of wall-size paintings at the Betty ParsonsGallery and key to their development was the dialogue betweenPollock and architect Peter Blake22 Blake had visited Pollockrsquos studioin 1949 Pollock had only recently begun his series of drip paintingsand had been using an old barn behind his house which was morespacious than the upstairs room in the house he had previously used

86 Grey Room 13

Seeing all of the paintings on the walls andoor of the barn elicited an intense reactionin Blake The paintings seemed both trans-parent and reective dissolving the walls ofthe barn as if they captured the misty land-scape of the bay outside and also because ofPollockrsquos use of aluminum paint reectingthe light streaming in through the windowslike enormous mirrors23 Blakersquos experiencewas central to his design for a small museummeant to house Pollockrsquos work Blake recalled

I designed a large somewhat abstractldquoexhibitrdquo of his workmdasha kind of ldquoIdealMuseumrdquo in which his paintings were

suspended between the earth and the sky and set between mir-rored walls so as to extend into infinity Beyond these floatingcanvases would be the marshes and the inlets of The Springsmdashthe relentlessly horizontal landscape of that end of Long Island24

Blakersquos ldquoIdeal Museumrdquo was indebted to Ludwig Mies van der Rohewhose Barcelona Pavilion and Museum for a Small City project formedthe basis of his design25 In Blakersquos monograph on Mies he expressedhis admiration for the Barcelona Pavilion and noted that it suggested anew direction for the integration of art and architecture ldquoThe resultingcompositionrdquo he said referring to the sculpture by Georg Kolbe as it was framed by the walls in the Pavilionrsquos enclosed courtyard ldquohasbecome a favorite example of those who advocate collaboration betweenarchitects on the one hand and sculptors and painters on the other[The Kolbe sculpture] does suggest that there may be other and betterways towards integration of the artsrdquomdashways that Blake would furtherpursue in his Pollock Museum26

As in Miesrsquos project for a Museum for a Small City the exterior wallsof Blakersquos Pollock Museum were to be made entirely of glass No inte-rior walls would be interposed between the art and the landscape outside The art became the walls Paintings were to be hung on free-standing walls no bigger than the work itself so that only the art itselfwould be visible oating in space with other works of art juxtaposedagainst it and with the exterior environment as a background Blakeunframes the work of art pulling it out of its usual relationship withthe wall where it would normally sit enclosed in a traditional framereframing it to create a collaged space one where works of art are seentogether overlapping one another as the viewer moves through themuseum27 Blake attempted to replicate the relationships between theviewer and the art object that Miesrsquos Pavilion and Museum had embodied

Top Jackson Pollock andPeter Blake looking at themodel of Blakesrsquos museumdesign on display at theBetty Parsonrsquos Gallery Photo Ben Schultz

Bottom Georg Kolbe DerMorgen 1925 Shown housedin Mies van der RoheBarcelona Pavilion 1928ndash29Photo Berliner Bild-Bericht

Kaizen | Framed Space Allan Kaprow and the Spread of Painting 87

the removal of the traditional framing device (the picture frame) for anoverlapping frame of collaged space the collapse of outside and insideand the reection back onto the viewer of their somatic viewing expe-rience Like Mies Blake adopted the materials of modern distraction(plate glass in particular) and combined them with an open plan inorder to create an interior that would use the glass curtain wall to offerrespite from the city street and the speed of modernity28

The only substantive article published on the Pollock Museum atthe time was Arthur Drexlerrsquos ldquoUnframed Spacerdquo29 The title camefrom Blakersquos own assessment that his project would realize the unlim-ited extension of Pollockrsquos marks into a total environment Drexlerconcludes his short essay with words that are similar to Blakersquos ownassessment of Mies ldquoThe Project suggests a re-integration of paintingand architecture wherein painting is the architecture but this timewithout message or content Its sole purpose is to heighten our expe-rience of spacerdquo30 Contrary to Drexlerrsquos title Pollockrsquos paintings arerendered secondary to their use in framing space It is the space of thegallery that submits them to its formal logic In Blakersquos Museum theart is secondary to the space that contains it

Blakersquos Museum conates both of Miesrsquos projects from which it wasprimarily derived By using abstract paintings Blake was able to fillhis museum with art while simultaneously returning these large-sizeabstractions directly to the wall Pollockrsquos painting functions like thestone cladding on the central wall in the Barcelona Pavilion as a dec-orative surface Pollock recognized the reduction inherent in Blakersquosproject saying to him after the design was done ldquoThe trouble is youthink I am a decoratorrdquo Blakersquos reply was telling ldquoOf course I thinkhis paintings might make terric walls After all architects spend a lotof time thinking about wallsrdquo31 What kept Pollock from working directlyon the wall and what Blake as an architect recognized immediatelywas that when painting became a wall or approached this conditionthrough wall size its autonomy was destroyed It approached the

Interiors (January 1950) featuring Blakersquos Pollockmuseum

88 Grey Room 13

status of interior decoration and that was the wayBlake wanted itmdashPollock reduced to ldquoterrific wallsrdquoHe even tried to commission Pollock to paint panelsfor the moving walls of the Pinwheel House his nextproject so that when they slid shut the housersquos inte-rior would be enclosed in Pollocks surrounded bypainted wallpaper32 The paintings as walls are sub-mitted to the logic of Blakersquos architecture He destroysthe autonomy of Pollockrsquos paintings only to sublatethem into the autonomy of modernist architecturerealizing Pollockrsquos fear of turning his work into meredecoration Blakersquos project asserts architecture over

painting As painting becomes wall it is sublated into the autonomousmodernist space of Miesian architecture Pollockrsquos work is turned intoa decorative surface into an interior design for a modernist space

The Pollock Museum was never built but not because either Pollockor Blake had second thoughts Despite any misgivings that Pollock hadwith this project the model was exhibited at Betty Parsons Gallery in1949 and afterward the model remained in Pollockrsquos studio promi-nently displayed in case he could convince a visiting collector to helpfinance its construction At his next exhibition with Betty Parson in1950 the paintings were made to be the same height and almost thesame length of the walls on which they hung so that they would comeas close as possible to realizing Blakersquos design within the more tradi-tional gallery setting33

If Blakersquos project misrepresented Pollock this was only to the extentthat Pollock had already acknowledged the tendency of painting atwall size to become an object What Blakersquos project makes clear is thatwhen paintings became wall-size or as they literally became wallsthey lost their capacity to create an autonomous space divorced fromcontext While it took an architect initially to realize such a possibilityartists soon followed suit34

It is likely that Kaprow saw the 1949 exhibition of Pollockrsquos workwhich included the model for Blakersquos Museum Although in his writ-ings on Pollock he doesnrsquot mention the Museum in an interview from1967 he claimed to have rst seen a Pollock exhibition in 194935 Thiswould mean that he had seen the show at the Betty Parsons Gallerywith the model on display The model for the museum is also clearlyvisible in the photographs of Pollock working in his studio that illus-trate both the original publication of Kaprowrsquos ldquoThe Legacy of JacksonPollockrdquo and (much later) his collection of essays The Blurring of Artand Life36 Kaprow also explicitly referenced the subsequent Pollockexhibition with its wall-size works when he discussed the all-overeld Pollockrsquos work created in the space of the gallery But along with

Photograph of Pollock in hisstudio As published in Allan Kaprow ldquoThe Legacy ofJackson Pollockrdquo in Art News(October 1958) The model of Blakersquos museum is visiblein the upper-left cornerPhoto Rudy Burckhardt

Kaizen | Framed Space Allan Kaprow and the Spread of Painting 89

Pollock and Blake Kaprow also engagedwith the work of Robert Rauschenbergand John Cage two artists who had asmuch impact on his thinking about spaceas Pollock

| | | | |

In the fall of 1951 when Kaprow visitedRauschenbergrsquos studio he saw the WhitePaintings37 Rauschenberg had made theseworks during the previous summer at BlackMountain College Like Blake Rauschenberg also engaged space usingpainting but he did so as an artist not as an architect Yet rather thanreassert the autonomy of painting he established a semiautonomousspace for painting The White Paintings are a series of works paintedat matte white with no visible marks to attract the viewerrsquos eye WhileBlake submitted the autonomy of Pollockrsquos painting to the logic of hisarchitecture upholding the autonomy of modernist space in favor ofarchitecture over art Rauschenberg was far more ambivalent about thepossibility of autonomy for either art or architecture The White Paintingsexist between the two as semiautonomous objectsmdashnot quite wall notquite paintingmdashand certainly not like their nearest precursor abstractexpressionist painting with its ood of gesture and mark The WhitePaintings in their utter blankness call attention to the ephemeral effectsof light and shade that played across them Upon seeing them Kaprowwas unsure what to think until he noticed that they turned the surfaceof painting into an active plane of reception for the movement of his bodyldquoI was walking back and forth not knowing how I should take thesethingsrdquo he said ldquoand then I saw my shadows across the paintingmdashmovingrdquo38 For Kaprow the surface of these paintings became a tem-poral screen reecting the viewerrsquos body in the changing environmentof the gallery Their painterly incidence was not their whiteness perse but their ability to capture the presence of the viewer as he or shestood in front of the work The viewer activated the work so that thework the viewer and the space in between all became part of the workAs Rauschenberg wrote at the time ldquoPainting relates to both art andlife Neither can be made (I try to act in that gap between the two)rdquo39

These paintings are caught between painting as an object that is func-tionally and fundamentally separate from its architectural containerand the spread of painting into a semiautonomous state somewherebetween art architecture and the viewing subject moving through theexhibition space

Rauschenberg had developed his White Paintings in dialogue with

Photograph of Pollock in hisstudio As published in AllanKaprow Essays on theBlurring of Art and Life 1993The model of Blakersquosmuseum is visible in theupper-right corner PhotoHans Namuth

90 Grey Room 13

Cage who was also at Black Mountain in the summer of 195240 Thatsummer Cage incorporated The White Paintings into his own workTheater Piece No 141 They were suspended over the heads of theaudience members at various angles as a variety of performance eventstook place beneath them These events included Rauschenberg andDavid Tudor playing piano poets MC Richards and Charles Olsonreading poetry from atop a ladder and Merce Cunningham and othersdancing through the space and around the audience It was the WhitePaintings with their environmental quality that that led Cage to write4rsquo 33 in 1952 Tudor was the original performer of the compositionwhose score was open to interpretation42 He realized it on pianoplaying it by silently opening and closing the piano lid allowing thesounds of the audience and the ambient noises of the space to becomethe work Kaprow attended one of the rst performances of 4rsquo 33 atCarnegie Hall in 1952 and was deeply affected He compared his expe-rience of 4rsquo 33 to his experience of Rauschenbergrsquos paintings Thesounds in the space chairs creaking the air condition humming peoplecoughing and clearing their throatsmdashall the ambient sounds that lledthe space of the auditoriummdashbecame foregrounded ldquoIt was like theshadows in Bob Rauschenbergrsquos picturesrdquo Kaprow recalled ldquoThat is tosay there [wa]s no marking the boundary of the artwork or the boundaryof so-called everyday life They merge[d] And we the listeners in Cagersquosconcert and the lookers at Rauschenbergrsquos pictures were the collabo-rators of the artworkrdquo43 For Kaprow Cage like Rauschenberg col-lapsed the autonomy of art by engaging the listener as collaborator ina semiautonomous space (ldquoso-called everyday liferdquo and not true every-day life) that depended upon the interaction between work spaceand subject

On his visit to Rauschenbergrsquos studio Kaprow also saw the earliestof Rauschenbergrsquos black paintings44 This series is the antipode of thesmooth matte white surfaces of the White Paintings They are allblack monochromes most painted with a high-gloss enamel soakedinto newspaper pages that were then haphazardly stuck onto the sur-face of a canvas trapped pockets of air often causing the paintingsrsquosurfaces to bulge outward repulsively At their largest they framespace as Pollockrsquos work did but as art brut walls instead of dazzlingskeins of paint One photograph of a later diptych shows the paintingsblocking the doorway to Rauschenbergrsquos studio at Black Mountain asif they were extensions of the rough-hewn stone walls on either side45

But in this next transformation of painting as wall what seems moreimportant for the direction that both Rauschenberg and Kaprow wouldfollow out of these works was their newspaper ground As Rauschenbergrsquospaintings became wall-size their art brut surface was built on the newsof the day At rst everyday events as reported in the newspaper are

Kaizen | Framed Space Allan Kaprow and the Spread of Painting 91

painted out and hidden behind the blackpaint46 As the series proceeded he allowedincreasingly more of the news to showthrough While the White Paintings engagedwith the gap between art and life by cap-turing the viewerrsquos bodymdashas did Cagersquos4rsquo 33 at least for Kaprowmdashthe black paint-ings did so by using the everyday objectas a ground Through their use of news-paper they suggested another trajectoryout of painting and into everyday spacea trajectory whose base condition was thecommodity object

In order to get into the gap between art and life Rauschenbergrsquoswork rst had to approximate the condition of being a wall It neededto assume a relation to its architectural frame in order to move awayfrom the autonomy of painting and into semiautonomy but once it didso Rauschenberg would abandon the problem of painting as wallFollowing the White Paintings and black paintings (and then a briefseries of Red Paintings) he made his rst Combines works that rein-state the autonomy of the individual art object even while they existbetween painting sculpture and the surrealist objet trouveacute47 Ratherthan engage with space Rauschenbergrsquos Combines elevate the ready-made or found object back to the status of the autonomous art objectThe Combines formalize the everyday object into an in-between statebut one that nevertheless produces singular art objects While theblack paintings led Rauschenberg back to the art object they led Kaprowfarther off the wall and out into space

| | | | |

Kaprow wrote ldquoa statementrdquo about his work sketching the trajectoryhe took from painting through collage then out into the space of thegallery48 After his initial show of paintings in 1952 he described thedevelopment of what he called ldquoaction collagerdquo These were done asquickly as possible by throwing together readily available everydaymaterials including parts of his past work tinfoil photographsnewspaper and food Although he doesnrsquot mention particular works by name presumably these action-collages include the early piecesreproduced in Assemblage Environments and Happenings In a photo-graph of Penny Arcade (1956) we see Kaprow standing in front of a largewall-size assemblage densely layered with parts of paintings scrapsof wood and large pieces of advertising signage that look like Kaproweither found them on the side of the road or appropriated them from a

Robert RauschenbergUntitled 1952

92 Grey Room 13

storefront It also included flashing lights andsounds calling out to the viewer like a ConeyIsland carnival booth but one made all the moreconfusing with its hyperarray of upside-downand fragmented word parts While collage hadbeen delicate even dainty in its appliqueacute of smallscraps of paper to the surface of the image KaprowrsquosPenny Arcade was massive and rough-hewn Unlikeits glitzier real-world counterpart Penny Arcadelooks cobbled together a temporary faccedilade brico-laged from odds and ends Here Kaprow turnedthe gallery space into the street turning the wallinto a pseudo-storefront bringing the architec-ture of the outside world into the gallery but lteredthrough the compositional strategies of collage

and abstract expressionism Abstraction before world war II had beenundertaken in a quest to find a universal Esperanto of color and form a problem that had been transformed by abstract expressionisminto a private iconography of psychic signs In Penny Arcade Kaprowturns the private symbolism of abstraction expressionism back to the world through advertising as commodity sign He makes the private symbol public again by reconnecting prendashWorld War II modelsof collective production with postndashWorld War II models of collectiveconsumption

Another work from this time further demonstrates how Kaprowused everyday materials to partition space Alternately titled (inAssemblage) Wall Kiosk and Rearrangeable Panels (1957ndash1959) thispiece looks like an enormous folding Japanese screen Measuring eightfeet high and over twenty feet long its panels are covered in eggshellsleaves and broken mirrorsmdashnot mass-produced commodities or sig-nage but detritus and waste Several of the panels are painted one inHoffmanrsquos push-pull style two seem to nod toward Rauschenberg onepainted white one black This piece is designed to sit on the oor ofthe gallery and as its various names imply it can be placed in a varietyof positions called ldquowallrdquo when arrayed in a straight line ldquokioskrdquowhen arranged into a square and ldquorearrangeable panelsrdquo in generalor when it sits in a zigzag Each position changes the relationship ofthe object to the space that contains it Kaprow recast the painting-as-wall as a transformable piece of furniture recognizing the possibilityof ludic engagement with the viewer but withholding it because theviewer is not allowed to interact with the piece directly Once installedthe work transforms the space of the gallery but it cannot be recong-ured by the viewer49

When asked why he used junk to make his work Kaprow replied

Allan Kaprow standing infront of Penny Arcade 1956Photo WF Gainfort

Kaizen | Framed Space Allan Kaprow and the Spread of Painting 93

It was clearly part of transformingreality It gave everyone a sense ofinstant involvement in a kind of crudeeveryday reality which was quite arelief after the high-art attitude ofexclusion from the real world It alsoallowed us to give up a certain kindof seriousness that traditional artmaking required Whatrsquos more thematerials were available everywhereon street corners at night And ifyou didnrsquot sell these environmentalconstructions yoursquod just throwthem back into the garbage canWhy not just throw them out It wasvery liberating to think of oneself aspart of an endlessly transformingreal world50

The ldquocrude everyday realityrdquo capturedby Penny Arcade as with Kaprowrsquos subsequent work is predicatedupon his project of capturing the ldquoendlessly transforming real worldrdquoThis statement connects him with Rauschenberg and Cage but alsoshows how their work differs in an important and crucial way InKaprowrsquos comment describing his experience of 4rsquo33 (as quoted inthe previous section) he says ldquoAnd we the listeners in Cagersquos concertand the lookers at Rauschenbergrsquos pictures were the collaborators of[sic] the artworkrdquo ending with ldquoIt was a kind of collaborative end-lessly changing affair The artwork was simply this organism that wasaliverdquo51 For Kaprow the key word here is change and in order tomove from artwork to organism the work of art must be reconsiderednot as a ldquochance operationrdquo (to use Cagersquos term) but as a change oper-ation During this time Kaprow had begun to take classes with Cageand he was exposed to Cagersquos use of chance methods of compositionWhile he would adopt much from Cagersquos work and teaching he thoughtthat change was the most important principle for his own work52

For Kaprow change was integrally connected to the postndashworld warII environment lled with mass-produced throwaway products Theart of this timemdashhis artmdashshould necessarily reect this environmentIn opposition to the nostalgic use of the objet trouveacute in surrealism hismethod was closer to the readymade choosing everyday objects to res-cue from oblivion but spreading them out in space so that they wouldenvironmentally engulf the viewer53 Kaprow temporarily revalues thethrowaway commodity in his environments to create a space where

Allan Kaprow RearrangeablePanels 1957-9 Shown intheir ldquoKioskrdquo con gurationPhoto Robert R McElroy

94 Grey Room 13

everyday life as planned obsolescence is brought under the control ofthe artist He creates a momentary space of anti-entropy in the life ofthe commodity where it is temporarily reinvested with value only to bedisposed of once the environment is destroyed54 Citing critic LawrenceAlloway on the ldquothrowawayrdquo culture of postndashworld war II AmericaKaprow goes on to describe the importance of change in his work

Change governing both reality and art has extended from theexpression of an idea arrested in a painting to a work in whichthe usually slow mutations wrought by nature are quickened andliterally made part of the experience of it they manifest the veryprocess of creation-decay-creation almost as one watches Theuse of debris waste products or very impermanent substanceslike toilet paper or bread has of course a clear range of allusionswith obvious sociological implications the simplest being theartistrsquos positive involvement on the one hand with an everydayworld and on the other with a group of objects which beingexpendable might suggest that corresponding lack of statuswhich is supposed to be the fate of anything creative todayThese choices must not be ignored for they reveal what in oursurroundings charges the imagination as well as what is mosthuman in our art55

What is ldquomost humanrdquo in Kaprowrsquos art as he denes it is its reectionof this throwaway culture This is governed not by Cagean chance butby planned obsolescence with its endless renewal of more of thesame ldquo[My] workrdquo Kaprow says ldquois intended to last only a short timeand is destroyed immediately after the exhibition If [its] obsolescenceis not planned it is expectedrdquo56 Alloway also writing on assemblagebetter describes the overlap between the throwaway object and its usein environmental art during the 1950s

The acceptance of mass-produced objects just because they arewhat is around not because they issue from idolatrised technol-ogy is central to mid-century Junk Culture Junk Culture iscity art Its source is obsolescence the throwaway material ofcities Assemblages of such material come at the spectator asbits of life bits of the environment frequently presented interms that dramatize spread ow extension trespass The junkis obtruded into our space with the aim of achieving maximumintimacy Proximity and participation replace distance and con-templation as the communicative style of the object57

So the space of Junk Culture when used in art as assemblage or envi-ronment achieves ldquomaximum intimacyrdquo with the observer throughtheir ldquoproximity and participationrdquo with the throwaway commodity

Kaizen | Framed Space Allan Kaprow and the Spread of Painting 95

As Kaprow moves farther into the space of the gallery he does so in anincreased attempt to engage the viewer He partitions the gallery spaceso that the body of the viewer becomes a product of its participationwithin the eld of the throwaway commodity

These early wall-like constructions were for Kaprow still not closeenough to a participatory art Kaprow wanted to move further towardthe creation of environments and even events to take over the gallerywith a plenitude of throwaway objects among which the viewer wouldself-consciously circulate The action collages still maintained toomuch autonomy because they existed as individual objects and so asKaprow recalled ldquonow I simply filled the whole gallery up startingfrom one wall and ending with the otherrdquo58 With his rst environmentKaprow was no longer composing within the autonomous space ofpainting but composing the entire space of the gallery Kaprowrsquos rstenvironmentmdashmade at the Hansa Gallery in November 1958mdashwasmeant to totally engage the visitors to the gallery to make them intopart of the work itself ldquopassively or actively according to [their] talentsfor lsquoengagementrsquordquo59 From a drop ceiling of wires suspended in a gridseveral inches below the galleryrsquos original ceiling he hung variousmaterials creating a labyrinthine space divided by sheets of plastictangles of cellophane Scotch tape and more including a time-releasedmist of pine-scented deodorizer His work had taken over the galleryspace lling it with a nearly impenetrable eld of throwaway objects60

Kaprow took the ood of postndashworld war II consumer goods and usedthem to compose walls that partitioned space And composemdashin thetraditional sense of arranging shapes and forms on the surface of acanvasmdashis exactly what he did

Kaprow described his use of the full space of the gallery as a eld aterm that he derives from painting calling the second section of hisldquoAssemblagerdquo essay ldquoThe Field in Paintingrdquo ldquoThis space is in part theliteral distance between all solids included in the workrdquo Kaprowwrote ldquoBut it is also a space that is a direct heritage of paintingrdquo61

Everything in the space that he produced became part of his compo-sition including the viewer Like any other object in the work Kaprowsaid ldquoin as much as people visiting [an] environment are moving col-ored shapes [they] were counted lsquoinrsquordquo62 Each visitor as they movedthrough Kaprowrsquos labyrinth became a part of the work Art and lifehad now seemingly collapsed the autonomy of painting as a separateobjectmdashframed and isolated from the rest of its environment as a spaceonly for the eyemdashhad been abandoned for an embodied experienceViewing was now dependent upon space a space full of the objects ofeveryday life Using the materials of everyday life Kaprow invited hisviewers to get rid of their distance from the art object forcing theminto physical contact with his work This work he wrote ldquoinvites us

96 Grey Room 13

to cast aside for a moment proper manners andpartake wholly in the real nature of art and (onehopes) liferdquo63 Against the look-donrsquot-touch attitude ofmuseum and gallery Kaprow created a haptic spacewhere touch became the basis of the work where vis-itors came into physical contact with his throwawayobjects In this space as visitors threaded their waythrough the labyrinth the color of their clothes andtheir presence among these objects turned them intoa part of the work The viewer appeared as anotherthing in Kaprowrsquos composition not so different fromhis throwaway materials In his environment autonomycollapsed into participation based on the reicationof the subject as an obsolete material temporally

composited into the work While Kaprow certainly intended to includehis observers in the work he could do so only by turning them intoobjects rather than active subjects He later described his own sense ofthe failure with this exhibition that he couldnrsquot seem to engage theviewer enough but blamed it on the framing space of the galleryAfterward he said ldquoI complained immediately about the fact that therewas a sense of mystery until your eye reached a wall Then there wasa dead end At that point my disagreement with the gallery spacebeganrdquo64 But Kaprow didnrsquot abandon the gallerymdashat least not yet Toget closer to the everyday Kaprow thought he should more fully incor-porate the bodies of his viewers into his work This led to the origin ofhappenings in an attempt to make viewers into active subjects to engagethem more actively in creating the work as they became part of it

| | | | |

In 1958 Kaprow had presented two other early proto-happenings oneat Rutgers called Communication and one at George Segalrsquos farmcalled Pastorale65 Communication was based on work he had devel-oped in Cagersquos class It was close to traditional theater Presented in achapel that doubled as an auditorium for theater and music perfor-mances it included movement sound and banners unfurled from thebalconies Kaprow built ldquoplastic panelsrdquo behind which he performeda series of simple actions nally hiding himself from the audience bypainting the plastic wall in front of him and so ldquopainting himself outrdquoof the audiencersquos view66 For Pastorale he built frames that looked likeabysmal theater sets stretcher bars with torn strips of canvas runningfrom top to bottom During one part of the performance artists RobertWatts and Lucas Samaras painted on either side of one of these con-structions Inserted into the landscape these performance paintings

Part of the environment Allan Kaprow created for his piece Pastorale 1958Photo Vaughn Rachel

Kaizen | Framed Space Allan Kaprow and the Spread of Painting 97

marked the boundary between event and nonevent partitioning theground into territories and framing Pastoralersquos space using once againpainting as wall Unfortunately for Kaprow Pastorale was held during apicnic and the other participants were either too drunk or just plainunwilling to follow his directions They were engaged but refused tofollow his rules of play

18 Happenings in 6 Parts which took place in October 1959 wasthe rst ofcial happening67 Kaprow divided the inside of the galleryinto three smaller contiguous rooms using wooden two-by-fours Inphotographs of the piece as it was being installed these woodenbeams can be seen framing a space within the space of the gallerymdashnot into a proscenium stage but into an environment within the largergallery space where various events would occur Instead of wood ordrywall translucent plastic sheeting created the walls so that actioncould be partially seen from one room to the next Each room was litwith different colored lights and in each room where the audiencewas forced to sit and observe the action a group of actors movedthrough tightly scripted but simple routines as sounds came in and outand lms were projected

On the program the audience is listed under the ldquoCast of Participantsrdquowritten into the performance itself and actively engaged but only asthe subject of direction and authorial control At specific intervalsbells rang and the audience was required to change seats and to switchrooms based on instruction cards they had been given when they enteredthe gallery before the performance Kaprow had realized with his HansaGallery environment that he needed to give his viewers increasedresponsibility but he also realized that relinquishing too much con-trol could be a disaster as it had been in Pastorale As with his previ-ous work his goal with 18 Happenings was the ldquointegration of allelementsmdashenvironment constructed sections time space and peoplerdquoand the audience was once again included as just another material inhis composition68

During the fifth part of 18 Happenings one sequence of actionsseems to reveal Kaprowrsquos relationship with painting the viewer and space Kaprow had built a construction he called the ldquothe sandwich manrdquo named after its everyday counterparts paid to walkaround the city streets as human billboards Kaprowrsquos sandwich

Left The construction of thespace used for Allan Kaprowrsquos18 Happenings in 6 Parts1958

Right A view of Allan Kaprowrsquos18 Happenings whereRearrangeable Panels is partially visible on the leftThe in-set canvas panel onwhich actors painted live as part of the performance is shown at center PhotoScott Hyde

98 Grey Room 13

man was barely humanoidan automaton with forward-and backward-pointing mir-rors for a body bicycle wheelsfor feet and a gallon bucketof enamel paint for a headSticking out in front was apiece of wood for an arm end-ing in a hand that held cardslabeled ldquoXrdquo and ldquo3rdquo the adver-

tising handbill reduced to its zero degree In the middle of the sand-wich man hidden on a shelf between the two mirrors was a recordplayer and projecting out from behind it were two handles so that itcould be wheeled around the rooms As the sandwich man was wheeledfrom one room to another its mirrored body reflected the audienceback onto themselves their image taking the place of what would havebeen an advertisement They were reected not as participatory viewersnot even as active objects as in his environment but as passive objectsnow totally reied their image produced as a reection of Junk CultureHere in Brechtian fashion using a literal ldquoframing effectrdquo Kaprowturned his previous use of the viewer back into a critique of the eventitself In reecting the audiencersquos passivity back to them he forced amoment of recognition of their complicity in the production of thework They could see that as they became an ad on the sandwich manrsquosbelly so they became throwaway objects in his composition By reduc-ing the spectator to the general equivalence of these objects Kaprowrecognized the subject of the postndashWorld War II period as a product ofplanned obsolescence and consumer culture

Following this as the sandwich man was wheeled through the secondroom and into the third two men stood up from their seats one in eachroom Each took up a brush and a can of paint and approached oppo-site sides of one of the plastic walls simultaneously painting on a sec-tion of canvas set among the plastic walls and so turning the wall backinto a painting69 The canvas was left unprimed so that the simple gures that each artist painted (one was supposed to paint lines theother circles) would bleed through and so would be immediately visibleon the opposite side each mark responding to that of their partner Asin his two earlier happenings painting is done live before an audienceon a wall Kaprow showed the audience that when painting becomeswall it functions only to put space on display Here painting as a sin-gular art object was meaningless It became a throwaway stage propand so became a demonstration of how painting as object was part ofthe larger environment in which it resides The limit condition of paint-ing as wall with viewer as spectator was the gallery as frame70

The sandwich man part ofKaprowrsquos 18 HappeningsPhoto Scott Hyde

Kaizen | Framed Space Allan Kaprow and the Spread of Painting 99

What this sequence from 18 Happenings reveals is that Kaprow hadan acute sense of the way in which the gallery as frame produces sub-ject and space together He undermined the normal function of the artgallery turning both viewer and art object into Junk Culture Throwawayviewers throwaway paintings and throwaway rooms turned the galleryspacemdasha space designed to be neutral to hide itself as the objects itcontains become the sole focus of the viewerrsquos concentrationmdashinto thelocus of planned obsolescence With the creation of happeningsKaprow used Junk Culture against the doxa of gallery space upsettingthe common sense of what a space for art is and what it does Afterhappenings the paradoxical logic of the gallery as a site for both theprivate contemplation of singular aesthetic objects as well as the pub-lic transaction of luxury goods had been (however temporarily) sub-verted In asserting the gallery space as the limit condition of paintingKaprow framed the institution as the ground of artistic production

In ldquoThe Legacy of Jackson Pollockrdquo Kaprow says ldquoPollock left us atthe point where we must become preoccupied with and even dazzled by the space and objects of our everyday liferdquo71 In ldquoAssemblageEnvironments Happeningsrdquo bridging the gap between his early andlater work he concludes ldquothis has brought sharply into focus that theroom has always been a frame or format toordquo72 Kaprowrsquos collapse ofautonomy via art into lifemdashthat environments and happenings wouldldquopartake wholly in the real nature of art and (one hopes) liferdquomdashwasonly ever a hope as he himself knew If painting had used the frameas the delimitation of a eld for composition then environments andhappenings turned the gallery into the limit condition of this fieldWhile he tried to get closer to everyday life by making art he inevitablypushed it further away This ambivalence toward the collapse of artand life runs throughout Kaprowrsquos work even as he moved out of thegallery and into everyday life following his early work with his laterldquoactivitiesrdquo The early work was even by his own estimation more adisplay of experience and not a fair representation of actual everydayexperience But this is precisely where the importance of this work liesKaprowrsquos environments and happenings extended Rauschenbergrsquossemiautonomous gap so far that they turned the screw one notchhigher autonomy returning not though the sublation of art into archi-tecture but through the medium of framed space

100 Grey Room 13

NotesThanks to the generosity and insight of Karen Kurczynski John Harwood SethMcCormick Jaleh Mansoor Beth Hinderliter Vered Maimon Benjamin Buchloh andBarry Bergdoll as well as Branden Joseph and the Editors of Grey Room

1 Brian OrsquoDoherty Inside the White Cube The Ideology of the Gallery Space(Berkeley and Los Angeles University of California Press 1999) 15

2 It was originally called ldquoPainting Environments Happeningsrdquo and publishedin a condensed form in the catalog for the exhibition New FormsmdashNew Media I at the Martha Jackson Gallery New York the rst uptown show of Kaprow and his con-temporaries It was changed to ldquoAssemblage Environments and Happeningsrdquo for nalpublication Kaprow changed the title to incorporate the recent acceptance of the termassemblage It had been used rst by Helen Comstock to describe the work of ArthurDove in the 1920s but remained obscure until Jean Dubuffet popularized its use in 1953The term as used by Dubuffet was then adopted by William Seitz for his exhibitionThe Art of Assemblage at the Museum of Modern Art See Allan Kaprow AssemblageEnvironments and Happenings (New York Harry N Abrams 1966) 150ndash208 NewFormsmdashNew Media I (New York Martha Jackson Gallery 1960) np and RogerShattuck ldquoIntroduction How Collage Became Assemblagerdquo Essays on Assemblage(New York Museum of Modern Art 1992) 119

3 ldquoWhen I am in my painting Irsquom not aware of what Irsquom doingrdquo said PollockJackson Pollock Jackson Pollock Interviews Articles Reviews ed Pepe Karmel (NewYork Museum of Modern Art 1999) 17ndash18

4 Yard was Kaprowrsquos contribution to the exhibition Environments SituationsSpaces at the Martha Jackson Gallery a follow up to New FormsndashNew Media (see n 2)

5 ldquoAllan Kaprow and Robert Watts Interviewed by Sidney Simonrdquo in Benjamin HDBuchloh and Judith F Rodenbeck Experiments in the Everyday Allan Kaprow andRobert Watts Events Objects Documents (New York Wallach Art Gallery 1999) 76

6 To cite but one example of many Thomas Hirschhorn is an artist who continuesto extend and develop Kaprowrsquos legacy today

7 On Kaprow and performance see Amelia Jones Body Art Performing the Subject(Minneapolis University of Minnesota Press 1998) 56ndash57 Paul Schimmel ldquoLeap intothe Void Performance and the Objectrdquo in Out of Actions Between Performance andthe Object 1949ndash1979 ed Paul Schimmel (New York Thames and Hudson 1998)59ndash63

8 The relationship between painting and space had been explored before partic-ularly in the period between the two world wars by the artists associated with De Stijland constructivism For more on De Stijl see Nancy Troy The De Stijl Environment(Cambridge MIT Press 1983) On constructivism see Yve-Alain Bois ldquoEl LissitzkyRadical Reversibilityrdquo Art in America 76 no 4 (April 1988) 161ndash181 and Yve-AlainBois ldquoMaterial Utopiasrdquo Art in America 79 no 6 (June 1991) 98ndash107 Another Europeanwho explored the everyday object painting and space was Kurt Schwitters in the various incarnation of his Merzbau See Elizabeth Burns Gamard Kurt SchwittersrsquoMerzbau The Cathedral of Erotic Misery (New York Princeton Architectural Press2000) Two other important precursors who bridge the European and American con-text are Lazlo Moholy-Nagy and Friedrick Kiesler For information on Moholy-Nagyrsquosearly environmental projects as well as those of Lissitzy see Joan Ockman ldquoThe RoadNot Taken Alexander Dornerrsquos Way Beyond Artrdquo in Autonomy and Ideology Positioningan Avant-Garde in America ed RE Somol (New York Monicelli Press 1997) For

Kaizen | Framed Space Allan Kaprow and the Spread of Painting 101

information on Kiesler see RL Held Endless Innovations Frederick Kieslerrsquos Theoryand Scenic Design (Ann Arbor UMI Research Press 1982) Lisa Phillips FrederickKiesler (New York The Whitney Museum of American Art 1989) Brian OrsquoDohertydraws out the connections between the prendash and postndashWorld War II manifestations ofthis relationship in Inside the White Cube

9 For Benjamin the work of art attains autonomy under modernism with theemergence of art for artrsquos sake This autonomy is then usurped by mechanical repro-duction See Walter Benjamin ldquoThe Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproductionrdquoin Illuminations ed Hanna Arendt (New York Harcourt Brace and Jovanovich Inc1968) p 224-226 For Greenberg as the above quote indicates the autonomy of artcontinues even in the face of mechanization See Clement Greenberg ldquoTowards a NewerLaocoonrdquo Perceptions and Judgments 1939ndash1944 vol 1 of Clement Greenberg TheCollected Essays and Criticism ed John OrsquoBrien (Chicago University of Chicago1986) p 32

10 Rosalind Krauss uses the term ldquopost-medium conditionrdquo to designate ldquomixed-media installationrdquo work done today While Krauss argues that only the most signi-cant artists working since the 1960s reassert the medium in their work against thegeneral postmedium condition I believe that all mixed-media installation work operates using the gallery or institution as medium See Rosalind Krauss ldquoA Voyageon the North Seardquo Art in the Age of the Post-Medium Condition (New York Thamesand Hudson 1999) for her comments on a specic contemporary artist and the rein-vention of the medium see Rosalind Krauss ldquo And Then Turn Awayrdquo An Essayon James Colemanrdquo October 81 (Summer 1997) 5ndash33

11 Allan Kaprow ldquoThe Legacy of Jackson Pollockrdquo Art News 57 no 6 (October1958) 24ndash26 55ndash57 reprinted in Allan Kaprow Essays on the Blurring of Art andLife ed Jeff Kelley (Berkeley and Los Angles University of California Press 1993) 1ndash9 Kaprow has stated that the essay was written in 1956 in ldquoAllan Kaprow andRobert Watts Interviewed by Sidney Simonrdquo 77 Kaprow had been a student of bothHans Hoffman and Meyer Schapiro

12 Harold Rosenberg ldquoThe American Action Paintersrdquo Art News 52 (December1952) 22ndash23 In a footnote that Rosenberg added when the article was republished aspart of his book of collected essays in 1959 he added the following ldquoAction Paintinghas extracted the element of decision inherent in all art in that the work is not fin-ished at its beginning but has to be carried forward by an accumulation of lsquorightrsquo ges-tures In a word Action Painting is the abstraction of the moral element in art itsmark is moral tension in detachment from moral or esthetic certainties and it judgesitself morally in declaring that picture to be worthless which is not the incorporationof a genuine struggle one which could at any point have been lostrdquo Harold RosenbergThe Tradition of the New (New York Horizon Press 1959) 33ndash34 Kaprow recountsthe influence of Rosenbergrsquos essay on his work in ldquoAllan Kaprow and Robert WattsInterviewed by Sidney Simonrdquo 77

13 There were five all told They were held as follows 5ndash23 January 1948 24Januaryndash12 February 1949 21 Novemberndash10 December 1949 28 Novemberndash16 December1950 26 Novemberndash15 December 1951 These shows had a remarkable resonance onethat extended beyond even the insular New York art world when after the secondexhibition Life magazine published the feature article ldquoJackson Pollock Is He theGreatest Living Painter in the United Statesrdquo Dorothy Sieberling Life (August 81949) 42ndash45

14 Allan Kaprow ldquoThe Legacy of Jackson Pollockrdquo in Kaprow Essays on the

102 Grey Room 13

Blurringrdquo 615 Kaprow uses both the terms scale and size to describe Pollockrsquos work but as

TJ Clark has shown these are two very different terms and Pollock is a painter of sizeand not scale For Clark it is size that engages the body ldquoNormally speaking size isliteralmdasha matter of actual physical intuition It involves grasping how big or small acertain object really is most likely in relation to the size of the grasperrsquos upright body oroutspread armsrdquo TJ Clark ldquoPollockrsquos Smallnessrdquo in Jackson Pollock New Approachesed Kirk Varnedoe and Pepe Karmel (New York Museum of Modern Art 1999) 15

16 Kaprow ldquoThe Legacy of Jackson Pollockrdquo Essays on the Blurring 617 In most of his work the paint engages with the edge of the canvas emphasizing

and bordering it and not continuing around it as if the canvas had been cut down fromsome innite expanse Kaprow claims otherwise by singling out the exceptions sayingldquo[H]is art gives the impression of going on forever [T]hough evidence points to aslackening of the attack as Pollock came to the edges of many of his canvases in thebest ones he compensated for this by tacking much of the painted surface around theback of his stretchersrdquo Kaprow ldquoThe Legacy of Jackson Pollockrdquo Essays on the Blurringof Art and Life 5 An examination of the paintings shows that more often Pollockstopped before the edge or reworked his compositions after they were stretched sothat they reengaged with the edge even when cut from larger canvas Kaprow claimsotherwise because it furthers his arguments that Pollockrsquos paintings emerge into thespace of the viewer

18 Jackson Pollock ldquoApplication for a Guggenheim Fellowship 1947rdquo in JacksonPollock Interviews 17 The inuence of Greenberg at this time is discussed in StevenNaifeh and Gregory White Smith Jackson Pollock An American Saga (Aiken SCWoodwardWhite 1989) 551 Pollock had also engaged with wall-size painting duringhis association with Joseacute Clemente Orozco and in earlier work such as Mural(1943ndash1944) painted for Peggy Guggenheimrsquos house

19 Greenbergrsquos version of modernism was most fully laid out only in 1959 andpublished in 1960 ldquoIt was the stressing of the ineluctable atness of the surface thatremained however more fundamental than anything else to the process by whichpictorial art criticized and defined itself under Modernism For flatness alone wasunique and exclusive to pictorial art Because flatness was the only conditionpainting shared with no other art Modernist painting oriented itself to atness as itdid to nothing elserdquo In Clement Greenberg ldquoModernist Paintingrdquo in Modernism witha Vengeance 1957ndash1969 vol 4 of Clement Greenberg The Collected Essays andCriticism ed John OrsquoBrien (Chicago University of Chicago Press 1993) 87

20 Clement Greenberg ldquoThe Situation at the Momentrdquo in Arrogant Purpose1945ndash1949 vol 2 of Clement Greenberg The Collected Essays and Criticism ed JohnOrsquoBrien (Chicago University of Chicago 1986) 194ndash195

21 See Greenberg ldquoTowards a Newer Laocoonrdquo throughout22 Eric Lum has done extensive work on the relationship between abstract expres-

sionism and architecture The analysis in this essay follows from his especially whereBlakersquos project is concerned but also expands on it As he jumps from Blake to PhilipJohnson and Mark Rothkorsquos Houston Chapel however Lum misses the importance ofother interventions between painting and architecture such as those made by KaprowThis is evident when he says ldquoThrough this marriage of mural and wall paintingcould become fully integrated into architecture an idealized conjecture nor realizeduntil Mark Rothkorsquos 1971 Houston Chapelrdquo Eric Lum ldquoPollockrsquos Promise Toward anAbstract Expressionist Architecturerdquo Assemblage 39 (August 1999) 68

Kaizen | Framed Space Allan Kaprow and the Spread of Painting 103

23 Blake said of his visit to Pollockrsquos studio ldquoIt was a very sunny day and thesun was shining on the paintings I felt like I was standing in the Hall of Mirrors atVersailles It was a dazzling incredible sightrdquo Naifeh and Smith 588

24 Peter Blake No Place like Utopia Modern Architecture and the Company WeKept (New York Knopf 1993) 111ndash112

25 Miesrsquos museum plan was designed at the request of the editors at ArchitecturalForum who had been publishing a series of articles ldquoto show how building might beimproved through fuller and more imaginative use of existing resourcesrdquo They requesteddesigns for a variety of buildings that could be placed in a hypothetical city of 70000inhabitants ldquoNew Buildings for 194Xrdquo Architectural Forum 78 no 5 (May 1943)69ndash85 The Barcelona Pavilion was built in 1929 for the Barcelona Universal Expositionand was destroyed when the fair ended It was subsequently rebuilt in 1981ndash86

26 Peter Blake Mies van der Rohe (New York Pelican 1960) 54 It is worth notingthat like Miesrsquos use of the Kolbe sculpture Blake had Pollock actually make smallwire sculptures splattered with paint miniatures of sculptures that Blake hopedPollock would make for the actual museum Pollock himself was experimenting withsculpture around this time building three-dimensional forms out of papier-macirccheacutethat he then splattered with paint

27 Blakersquos collage space follows from Miesrsquos The production of collages as in situmodels for Miesrsquos buildings had begun in the twenties with his work for the journal Gin association with Dadaists such as Hans Richter Neil Levine notes this creation ofa collage space in Mies particularly in the Pavilion and the Museum for a Small Cityin relation to his use of reection to layer one surface on top of another Neil LevineldquolsquoThe Signicance of Factsrsquo Miesrsquo Collages Up Close and Personalrdquo Assemblage 37(December 1998) 71ndash101

28 Blake designed his museum just as Philip Johnson was building his Glass Housewhere they both spent considerable time while planning exhibitions for the Museumof Modern Art Johnsonrsquos inuence is also evident in Blakersquos design Blake No Placelike Utopia 149ndash155

29 Arthur Drexler ldquoUnframed Space A Museum for Jackson Pollackrsquos [sic] PaintingsrdquoInteriors and Industrial Design 109 no 6 (January 1950) 90ndash91 The article was partof a special issue whose theme was ldquoInteriors to Comerdquo a recurring topic that wasmeant ldquoto show the direction in which some of our best designers are goingrdquo The termunframed space was used several times in reference to Pollockrsquos work as the title oftwo articles Drexlerrsquos and one published slightly later by Berton Rouecheacute ThoughRouecheacute in an interview in To a Violent Grave says that Lee Krasner used the phraserst Charles Pollock says that Blake was the origin of the term The fact that Drexlerrsquosarticle was written and published earlier seems to conrm this See Berton RouecheacuteldquoUnframed Spacerdquo in Jackson Pollock Interviews 18ndash19 and Jeffrey Potter To aViolent Grave (New York Pushcart Press 1985) 126

30 Drexler 9031 Blake No Place like Utopia 113ndash11432 Blake completed construction on his ldquoPinwheel Houserdquo in 1952 It is a small

beach house that he designed for himself and his family in South Hampton on NewYorkrsquos Long Island Situated on the beach the house is square in plan and its fourexterior walls slide horizontally outward each in a successive clockwise directionrevealing glass walls When the exterior walls are fully extended and the house isviewed from above it forms a shape like a pinwheel Opening the exterior wallsreveals an ever-changing view of the landscape outside turning the ocean and the

104 Grey Room 13

dunes into the picturesque framing them so that they entirely ll the space of the walland put its surface in motion Blake had discussed with Pollock the possibility of hispainting the sliding walls so that his paintings would be superimposed over the land-scape Pollock considered it but Blake couldnrsquot come up with the commission moneythat Pollock asked for They never finalized their plans and it was never clear howthe panels were to be painted Blake suggested that they might be made of glass so hebought the sheet of glass that Pollock used to paint Number 29 1950 (1950) the paintingthat Hans Namuth lmed from underneath for his documentary on Pollock His col-laboration with Blake did lead to one commission a mural-size canvas done for ahouse designed by Marcel Breuer Untitled (Mural) (1950) Shortly after his collabo-ration with Blake Pollock began another unrealized architectural project this onewith Alfonso Ossorio and Tony Smith for a church designed by Smith with murals byPollock For more on all of this see Blake No Place like Utopia 114ndash118 Naifeh andSmith 649 and Lum ldquoPollockrsquos Promiserdquo 68 85ndash88

33 Lum ldquoPollockrsquos Promiserdquo 67ndash6834 A few pages down from Drexlerrsquos article on the Pollock Museum in Interiors

and Industrial Design was another architectural response to the same problem OlgaGueftrsquos article ldquoThe Museumrsquos Oasisrdquo describes another museum this one by Gyorgyand Juliet Kepes ldquoThe Kepesesrdquo it begins ldquoare not exactly opposed to museumsrdquo how-ever it would seem that they were opposed to museums containing works of artReplacing the art objects entirely the Kepeses substituted shells driftwood plantsand animals Instead of a natural history museum they proposed a modern-dayWunderkammerwhere natural forms take the place of art as objects for contemplationldquoThe proposed galleryrdquo they declared ldquowould bridge the gap between the art museumwhich is concerned with man-made beauty and the natural history museum whichis preoccupied with nature but not particularly with naturersquos beautyrdquo Gyorgy KepesrsquosThe New Landscape exhibition at MIT a year later in 1951 (the same years as theIndependent Grouprsquos similar exhibition Growth and Form in London) and the pub-lication that followed The New Landscape in Art and Sciencewould ultimately realizethis project with blown-up photographs of natural forms (cells shells and electronmicrographs) in place of actual objects

The Kepeses seem to have taken the next logical step beyond Blake proposing aneven more radical rethinking of the wall-size work of art Eliminating the need for theartist altogether they found abstract forms in nature and turned their reproductionsinto what would elsewhere have been works of art By turning the art object into scientic vision The Kepeses proposed its total instrumentation Autonomous abstractpainting was transformed into its instrumental other a mechanically reproduced science of vision Rather than turn art into interior design The Kepesesrsquo replacementof abstract painting recast the status of scientic technology into that of high art SeeOlga Gueft ldquoThe Museumrsquos Oasisrdquo Interiors and Industrial Design 109 no 6 (January1950) 100ndash103 and Gyorgy Kepes The New Landscape in Art and Science (ChicagoPaul Theobald and Co 1956)

35 Kaprow stated that it was ldquoIn 1949 [that] I saw an exhibition of [Pollockrsquos] workfor the rst timerdquo ldquoInterviewrdquo in Allan Kaprow (Pasadena Pasadena Art Museum1967) 7

36 See Kaprow ldquoThe Legacy of Jackson Pollockrdquo Art News 25 and Kaprow ldquoTheLegacy of Jackson Pollockrdquo Essays on the Blurring 3

37 Joan Marter ldquoThe Forgotten Legacy Happenings Pop Art and Fluxus at RutgersUniversityrdquo in Off Limits Rutgers University and the Avant-Garde 1957ndash1963 ed Joan

Kaizen | Framed Space Allan Kaprow and the Spread of Painting 105

Marter (Newark The Newark Museum 1999) 438 Marter 13239 Quoted in John Cage Silence (Middletown Wesleyan University Press 1961) 10540 Branden Joseph has developed the link between Cage and Rauschenberg in several

recent essays See Branden W Joseph ldquoJohn Cage and the Architecture of SilencerdquoOctober 81 (Summer 1997) 81ndash104 and Branden Joseph ldquoWhite on Whiterdquo CriticalInquiry 27 no 1 (Summer 2001) 90ndash121

41 For Cage on Rauschenberg see Cage Silence98ndash108 For his description ofTheater Piece No 1 see ldquoInterview with John Cagerdquo in Happenings and Other Actsed Mariellen R Sandford (New York Routledge 1995) 53 Cage subsequently referredto Theater Piece No 1 as ldquothe rst happeningrdquo See John Cage ldquoAn AutobiographicalStatementrdquo Southwest Review 76 no 1 (Winter 1991) 65

42 The score itself has had various incarnations It wasnrsquot published until 1960and in this version includes a note wherein Cage describes the rst performance byTudor For more on 4rsquo33 and its various scores see Liz Kotz ldquoWords on Paper NotNecessarily Meant to Be Read as Art Postwar Media Poetics from Cage to Warholrdquo(PhD diss Columbia University 2002) 83ndash115 Kotz follows a different lineage outof Cage and into performance and happenings than the one traced in this essay

43 Marter 13244 Walter Hopps in the first survey catalog of Rauschenbergrsquos early work does

not name the black paintings as a group as he does the White Paintings He calls themeach Untitled followed by a description in brackets Hopps notes of the largest ofthese works that ldquoThese paintings with a greater vastness and ambiguity of scale thanother Rauschenberg works relate to spatial qualities of Jackson Pollockrdquo HoppsRobert Rauschenberg The Early 1950s (Houston Houston Fine Art Press 1991) 67This convention was also followed in Rauschenbergrsquos 1997 Guggenheim retrospectivecatalog and is followed in this essay Robert Rauschenberg A Retrospective ed WalterHopps and Susan Davidson (New York Solomon R Guggenheim Museum 1997)

45 The piece is called Untitled [two black panels] (1953) Hopps Robert Rauschenberg99

46 Helen Molesworth notes the importance of Rauschenbergrsquos newspaper groundin the black paintings and develops this problem in relation to the abject body as it isfurther pursued in his work throughout the 1950s Helen Molesworth ldquoBefore BedrdquoOctober 63 (Winter 1993) 68ndash82

47 Asked about this work Rauschenberg said ldquoI called them combines I had tocoin that word because I got so bored with arguments I was interested in people seeingmy work When someone would come up and I really wanted to know what they thoughtof it or wanted to sense the exposure there was always this screen that they could getbehind which was if I said lsquoIt is paintingrsquo they would say lsquoThatrsquos not painting Thatrsquossculpturersquo And they thought this was very interestingrdquo Jeanne Siegel ArtwordsDiscourse on the 60s and 70s (New York DaCapo 1985) 153

48 Allan Kaprow ldquoa Statementrdquo in Happenings An Illustrated Anthology edMichael Kirby (New York EP Dutton and Co 1965) 44ndash45

49 Benjamin Buchloh notes the importance of play in the 1950s and its link toconsumer culture During the 1950s he writes ldquoa theory of games would remerge asa cultural project at the very moment of an ever-increasing instrumentalization oflibidinal desire through consumer culturerdquo Benjamin HD Buchloh ldquoRobert WattsInanimate ObjectsmdashInanimate Subjectsrdquo in Buchloh and Rodenbeck Experiments inthe Everyday 25 n 4

Kaizen | Framed Space Allan Kaprow and the Spread of Painting 83

there they have been isolated concentrated and denedrdquo9 As we willsee despite Greenbergrsquos later claims he nevertheless recognized thatPollockrsquos work operated precisely against the limitations of paintingas medium pushing painting toward sculpture and architecture asmuch as it engaged with two-dimensional atness Conversely Kaprowwhose early environments and happenings seem to inaugurate theldquopost-medium conditionrdquo of art since the 1960s ends up reassertingmediumistic autonomy one that is based on the specificity of thegallery space and its laws10 To get from Pollock to Kaprow I will touchon the intermediate points of Peter Blakersquos project for a museumdesigned to house Pollockrsquos work as well as the dialogue betweenRobert Rauschenberg and John Cage using these intermediaries as abridge between Kaprowrsquos engagement with Pollockrsquos work and Kaprowrsquosown early work in environments and happenings

| | | | |

Kaprow had written an essay ten years before Assemblage Environmentsand Happenings staking out the territory that was to become his lifersquoswork Called ldquoThe Legacy of Jackson Pollockrdquo it was written shortlyafter Pollockrsquos death in 1956 as Kaprow was looking for a way beyondabstract expressionism and out of his art historical and artistic train-ing11 He had read Harold Rosenbergrsquos essay ldquoThe American ActionPaintersrdquo where Rosenberg described abstract expressionism as anexistentialist engagement with the morality of mark making ldquoThe newpaintingrdquo Rosenberg said ldquohas broken down every distinction betweenart and liferdquo For Rosenberg the collapse of this distinction meant thecollapse between the work of art and its maker so that the work of artbecame the result of a specic ego struggling with a material processLife for Rosenberg was biographical and the artist was a heroic creatoran existential superman whose every mark became a moral act realizinga will to power with each gesture12

Kaprowrsquos essay extends Rosenbergrsquos argument but rather than takepolemically the claim that Pollock collapses art and life he reads it literally For Kaprow Pollockrsquos unboundedness his tendency towardinnite expansion suggested an extension of painting into the spaceof viewing and into everyday life

Kaprow had first experienced Pollockrsquos paintings at the series ofhighly influential and well-publicized exhibitions held at the BettyParsons Gallery from 1948 to 195113 These shows featured Pollockrsquosdrip paintings shown so that they covered the gallery walls manymade specically to match their height As Kaprow described it theyfilled the viewersrsquo senses surrounding them in a complete environ-ment refusing any possibility of disembodied purely optical viewing

84 Grey Room 13

This happened he said for several reasons but it was the size of thesepaintings that was most important ldquoPollockrsquos choice of enormous can-vases served many purposesrdquo he said ldquochief of which for our discus-sion is that his mural-scale paintings ceased to become paintings andbecame environmentsrdquo14 But it was their wall size (and not their scale)15

that caused Pollockrsquos drips to overow the bounds of the canvasrsquo framingedge Kaprow continues it was ldquoour size as spectators in relation to thesize of the picture [and] Pollockrsquos choice of great sizes [that] resultedin our being confronted assaulted sucked inrdquo

The size of Pollockrsquos paintings engaged even attacked the viewerrsquoswhole body and not just their eye Kaprow immediately qualies thephrase ldquosucked inrdquo as he contrasts Pollockrsquos relationship to the wallwith that of Renaissance painting If Renaissance painting acted as awindow that the eye traveled through extending the room outward intospace for Kaprow Pollockrsquos paint came off the canvas and into the roomwith the spectator lling and surrounding the spectator ldquoWhat I believeis clearly discernablerdquo he said ldquois that the entire painting comes outat us (we are participants rather than observers) right into the roomrdquo16

The experience of Pollockrsquos work as exceeding the constraints ofthe framing edge of the canvas was one that Pollock recognized in hisown work and that he sought however ambivalently to elicit through-out his career17 Although he had long been engaged with the muralhe had never convinced himself to make work that was fully inte-grated with an architectural structure Even when working at wall sizehe never made the full transition to the wall painting even his largestworks on stretched canvas He recognized that his paintings existedambiguously between the easel and the wall saying at one point in thelate forties ldquoI intend to paint large movable pictures which will func-tion between the easel and the mural I believe the easel picture tobe a dying form and the tendency of modern feeling is towards thewall picture or muralrdquo This statement written in 1947 was in dialoguewith critic Clement Greenberg18 Greenberg known for his teleologyof atness in modern painting had at this earlier date recognized thatthe size of Pollockrsquos paintings made them wall-like physical objects

Jackson Pollock exhibition atThe Betty Parsons Gallery 28 Novemberndash16 December1950 Photo Hans Namuth

Kaizen | Framed Space Allan Kaprow and the Spread of Painting 85

and that the tendency of modern painting was not to become at butto spread out into space19 While Greenberg would come to deny theimplications of this idea by the 1960s he said in a 1948 article onPollockrsquos work

After all easel painting is on the way out There is a persistenturge as persistent as it is largely unconscious to go beyond thecabinet picture which is destined to occupy only a spot on the wallto a kind of picture that without actually becoming identifiedwith the wall like a mural would spread over it and acknowl-edge its physical reality I do not know whether there is anythingin modern architecture itself that explicitly invites this tendencyBut it is a fact that abstract painting shows a greater and greaterreluctance for the small frame-enclosed format Abstract paintingbeing at needs greater extension of surface on which to developits ideas than does the old three-dimensional easel painting andit seems to become trivial when conned within anything mea-suring less than two feet by two20

Here we see even in the critic best known for his call for the separa-tion of painting from other art forms that already within abstractexpressionism lay the seeds of its dissolution into the space of archi-tecture For Greenberg this was a drive to be repressed Painting couldsurvive in the end only if it were to maintain its autonomy from theother arts21 Nevertheless he clearly recognized that with this lay thepossibility of its dissolution into an impure state a state where theframing space of the work becomes as important as the work itselfWhat Greenberg recognized in Pollockrsquos work and what Kaprow extrap-olated out of it was the relationship between painting and the spacethat contains it What Greenbergrsquos recognition amounted to forKaprow but also for many artists who followed was the end of paint-ing in a particular sense with the end of easel painting in abstractexpressionism as painting became a wall it was no longer a windowPainting as wall is not a window to be looked through but a thing to belooked at an object in the way some thing in space rather than a trans-parent surface

| | | | |

Leading up to the exhibitions of wall-size paintings at the Betty ParsonsGallery and key to their development was the dialogue betweenPollock and architect Peter Blake22 Blake had visited Pollockrsquos studioin 1949 Pollock had only recently begun his series of drip paintingsand had been using an old barn behind his house which was morespacious than the upstairs room in the house he had previously used

86 Grey Room 13

Seeing all of the paintings on the walls andoor of the barn elicited an intense reactionin Blake The paintings seemed both trans-parent and reective dissolving the walls ofthe barn as if they captured the misty land-scape of the bay outside and also because ofPollockrsquos use of aluminum paint reectingthe light streaming in through the windowslike enormous mirrors23 Blakersquos experiencewas central to his design for a small museummeant to house Pollockrsquos work Blake recalled

I designed a large somewhat abstractldquoexhibitrdquo of his workmdasha kind of ldquoIdealMuseumrdquo in which his paintings were

suspended between the earth and the sky and set between mir-rored walls so as to extend into infinity Beyond these floatingcanvases would be the marshes and the inlets of The Springsmdashthe relentlessly horizontal landscape of that end of Long Island24

Blakersquos ldquoIdeal Museumrdquo was indebted to Ludwig Mies van der Rohewhose Barcelona Pavilion and Museum for a Small City project formedthe basis of his design25 In Blakersquos monograph on Mies he expressedhis admiration for the Barcelona Pavilion and noted that it suggested anew direction for the integration of art and architecture ldquoThe resultingcompositionrdquo he said referring to the sculpture by Georg Kolbe as it was framed by the walls in the Pavilionrsquos enclosed courtyard ldquohasbecome a favorite example of those who advocate collaboration betweenarchitects on the one hand and sculptors and painters on the other[The Kolbe sculpture] does suggest that there may be other and betterways towards integration of the artsrdquomdashways that Blake would furtherpursue in his Pollock Museum26

As in Miesrsquos project for a Museum for a Small City the exterior wallsof Blakersquos Pollock Museum were to be made entirely of glass No inte-rior walls would be interposed between the art and the landscape outside The art became the walls Paintings were to be hung on free-standing walls no bigger than the work itself so that only the art itselfwould be visible oating in space with other works of art juxtaposedagainst it and with the exterior environment as a background Blakeunframes the work of art pulling it out of its usual relationship withthe wall where it would normally sit enclosed in a traditional framereframing it to create a collaged space one where works of art are seentogether overlapping one another as the viewer moves through themuseum27 Blake attempted to replicate the relationships between theviewer and the art object that Miesrsquos Pavilion and Museum had embodied

Top Jackson Pollock andPeter Blake looking at themodel of Blakesrsquos museumdesign on display at theBetty Parsonrsquos Gallery Photo Ben Schultz

Bottom Georg Kolbe DerMorgen 1925 Shown housedin Mies van der RoheBarcelona Pavilion 1928ndash29Photo Berliner Bild-Bericht

Kaizen | Framed Space Allan Kaprow and the Spread of Painting 87

the removal of the traditional framing device (the picture frame) for anoverlapping frame of collaged space the collapse of outside and insideand the reection back onto the viewer of their somatic viewing expe-rience Like Mies Blake adopted the materials of modern distraction(plate glass in particular) and combined them with an open plan inorder to create an interior that would use the glass curtain wall to offerrespite from the city street and the speed of modernity28

The only substantive article published on the Pollock Museum atthe time was Arthur Drexlerrsquos ldquoUnframed Spacerdquo29 The title camefrom Blakersquos own assessment that his project would realize the unlim-ited extension of Pollockrsquos marks into a total environment Drexlerconcludes his short essay with words that are similar to Blakersquos ownassessment of Mies ldquoThe Project suggests a re-integration of paintingand architecture wherein painting is the architecture but this timewithout message or content Its sole purpose is to heighten our expe-rience of spacerdquo30 Contrary to Drexlerrsquos title Pollockrsquos paintings arerendered secondary to their use in framing space It is the space of thegallery that submits them to its formal logic In Blakersquos Museum theart is secondary to the space that contains it

Blakersquos Museum conates both of Miesrsquos projects from which it wasprimarily derived By using abstract paintings Blake was able to fillhis museum with art while simultaneously returning these large-sizeabstractions directly to the wall Pollockrsquos painting functions like thestone cladding on the central wall in the Barcelona Pavilion as a dec-orative surface Pollock recognized the reduction inherent in Blakersquosproject saying to him after the design was done ldquoThe trouble is youthink I am a decoratorrdquo Blakersquos reply was telling ldquoOf course I thinkhis paintings might make terric walls After all architects spend a lotof time thinking about wallsrdquo31 What kept Pollock from working directlyon the wall and what Blake as an architect recognized immediatelywas that when painting became a wall or approached this conditionthrough wall size its autonomy was destroyed It approached the

Interiors (January 1950) featuring Blakersquos Pollockmuseum

88 Grey Room 13

status of interior decoration and that was the wayBlake wanted itmdashPollock reduced to ldquoterrific wallsrdquoHe even tried to commission Pollock to paint panelsfor the moving walls of the Pinwheel House his nextproject so that when they slid shut the housersquos inte-rior would be enclosed in Pollocks surrounded bypainted wallpaper32 The paintings as walls are sub-mitted to the logic of Blakersquos architecture He destroysthe autonomy of Pollockrsquos paintings only to sublatethem into the autonomy of modernist architecturerealizing Pollockrsquos fear of turning his work into meredecoration Blakersquos project asserts architecture over

painting As painting becomes wall it is sublated into the autonomousmodernist space of Miesian architecture Pollockrsquos work is turned intoa decorative surface into an interior design for a modernist space

The Pollock Museum was never built but not because either Pollockor Blake had second thoughts Despite any misgivings that Pollock hadwith this project the model was exhibited at Betty Parsons Gallery in1949 and afterward the model remained in Pollockrsquos studio promi-nently displayed in case he could convince a visiting collector to helpfinance its construction At his next exhibition with Betty Parson in1950 the paintings were made to be the same height and almost thesame length of the walls on which they hung so that they would comeas close as possible to realizing Blakersquos design within the more tradi-tional gallery setting33

If Blakersquos project misrepresented Pollock this was only to the extentthat Pollock had already acknowledged the tendency of painting atwall size to become an object What Blakersquos project makes clear is thatwhen paintings became wall-size or as they literally became wallsthey lost their capacity to create an autonomous space divorced fromcontext While it took an architect initially to realize such a possibilityartists soon followed suit34

It is likely that Kaprow saw the 1949 exhibition of Pollockrsquos workwhich included the model for Blakersquos Museum Although in his writ-ings on Pollock he doesnrsquot mention the Museum in an interview from1967 he claimed to have rst seen a Pollock exhibition in 194935 Thiswould mean that he had seen the show at the Betty Parsons Gallerywith the model on display The model for the museum is also clearlyvisible in the photographs of Pollock working in his studio that illus-trate both the original publication of Kaprowrsquos ldquoThe Legacy of JacksonPollockrdquo and (much later) his collection of essays The Blurring of Artand Life36 Kaprow also explicitly referenced the subsequent Pollockexhibition with its wall-size works when he discussed the all-overeld Pollockrsquos work created in the space of the gallery But along with

Photograph of Pollock in hisstudio As published in Allan Kaprow ldquoThe Legacy ofJackson Pollockrdquo in Art News(October 1958) The model of Blakersquos museum is visiblein the upper-left cornerPhoto Rudy Burckhardt

Kaizen | Framed Space Allan Kaprow and the Spread of Painting 89

Pollock and Blake Kaprow also engagedwith the work of Robert Rauschenbergand John Cage two artists who had asmuch impact on his thinking about spaceas Pollock

| | | | |

In the fall of 1951 when Kaprow visitedRauschenbergrsquos studio he saw the WhitePaintings37 Rauschenberg had made theseworks during the previous summer at BlackMountain College Like Blake Rauschenberg also engaged space usingpainting but he did so as an artist not as an architect Yet rather thanreassert the autonomy of painting he established a semiautonomousspace for painting The White Paintings are a series of works paintedat matte white with no visible marks to attract the viewerrsquos eye WhileBlake submitted the autonomy of Pollockrsquos painting to the logic of hisarchitecture upholding the autonomy of modernist space in favor ofarchitecture over art Rauschenberg was far more ambivalent about thepossibility of autonomy for either art or architecture The White Paintingsexist between the two as semiautonomous objectsmdashnot quite wall notquite paintingmdashand certainly not like their nearest precursor abstractexpressionist painting with its ood of gesture and mark The WhitePaintings in their utter blankness call attention to the ephemeral effectsof light and shade that played across them Upon seeing them Kaprowwas unsure what to think until he noticed that they turned the surfaceof painting into an active plane of reception for the movement of his bodyldquoI was walking back and forth not knowing how I should take thesethingsrdquo he said ldquoand then I saw my shadows across the paintingmdashmovingrdquo38 For Kaprow the surface of these paintings became a tem-poral screen reecting the viewerrsquos body in the changing environmentof the gallery Their painterly incidence was not their whiteness perse but their ability to capture the presence of the viewer as he or shestood in front of the work The viewer activated the work so that thework the viewer and the space in between all became part of the workAs Rauschenberg wrote at the time ldquoPainting relates to both art andlife Neither can be made (I try to act in that gap between the two)rdquo39

These paintings are caught between painting as an object that is func-tionally and fundamentally separate from its architectural containerand the spread of painting into a semiautonomous state somewherebetween art architecture and the viewing subject moving through theexhibition space

Rauschenberg had developed his White Paintings in dialogue with

Photograph of Pollock in hisstudio As published in AllanKaprow Essays on theBlurring of Art and Life 1993The model of Blakersquosmuseum is visible in theupper-right corner PhotoHans Namuth

90 Grey Room 13

Cage who was also at Black Mountain in the summer of 195240 Thatsummer Cage incorporated The White Paintings into his own workTheater Piece No 141 They were suspended over the heads of theaudience members at various angles as a variety of performance eventstook place beneath them These events included Rauschenberg andDavid Tudor playing piano poets MC Richards and Charles Olsonreading poetry from atop a ladder and Merce Cunningham and othersdancing through the space and around the audience It was the WhitePaintings with their environmental quality that that led Cage to write4rsquo 33 in 1952 Tudor was the original performer of the compositionwhose score was open to interpretation42 He realized it on pianoplaying it by silently opening and closing the piano lid allowing thesounds of the audience and the ambient noises of the space to becomethe work Kaprow attended one of the rst performances of 4rsquo 33 atCarnegie Hall in 1952 and was deeply affected He compared his expe-rience of 4rsquo 33 to his experience of Rauschenbergrsquos paintings Thesounds in the space chairs creaking the air condition humming peoplecoughing and clearing their throatsmdashall the ambient sounds that lledthe space of the auditoriummdashbecame foregrounded ldquoIt was like theshadows in Bob Rauschenbergrsquos picturesrdquo Kaprow recalled ldquoThat is tosay there [wa]s no marking the boundary of the artwork or the boundaryof so-called everyday life They merge[d] And we the listeners in Cagersquosconcert and the lookers at Rauschenbergrsquos pictures were the collabo-rators of the artworkrdquo43 For Kaprow Cage like Rauschenberg col-lapsed the autonomy of art by engaging the listener as collaborator ina semiautonomous space (ldquoso-called everyday liferdquo and not true every-day life) that depended upon the interaction between work spaceand subject

On his visit to Rauschenbergrsquos studio Kaprow also saw the earliestof Rauschenbergrsquos black paintings44 This series is the antipode of thesmooth matte white surfaces of the White Paintings They are allblack monochromes most painted with a high-gloss enamel soakedinto newspaper pages that were then haphazardly stuck onto the sur-face of a canvas trapped pockets of air often causing the paintingsrsquosurfaces to bulge outward repulsively At their largest they framespace as Pollockrsquos work did but as art brut walls instead of dazzlingskeins of paint One photograph of a later diptych shows the paintingsblocking the doorway to Rauschenbergrsquos studio at Black Mountain asif they were extensions of the rough-hewn stone walls on either side45

But in this next transformation of painting as wall what seems moreimportant for the direction that both Rauschenberg and Kaprow wouldfollow out of these works was their newspaper ground As Rauschenbergrsquospaintings became wall-size their art brut surface was built on the newsof the day At rst everyday events as reported in the newspaper are

Kaizen | Framed Space Allan Kaprow and the Spread of Painting 91

painted out and hidden behind the blackpaint46 As the series proceeded he allowedincreasingly more of the news to showthrough While the White Paintings engagedwith the gap between art and life by cap-turing the viewerrsquos bodymdashas did Cagersquos4rsquo 33 at least for Kaprowmdashthe black paint-ings did so by using the everyday objectas a ground Through their use of news-paper they suggested another trajectoryout of painting and into everyday spacea trajectory whose base condition was thecommodity object

In order to get into the gap between art and life Rauschenbergrsquoswork rst had to approximate the condition of being a wall It neededto assume a relation to its architectural frame in order to move awayfrom the autonomy of painting and into semiautonomy but once it didso Rauschenberg would abandon the problem of painting as wallFollowing the White Paintings and black paintings (and then a briefseries of Red Paintings) he made his rst Combines works that rein-state the autonomy of the individual art object even while they existbetween painting sculpture and the surrealist objet trouveacute47 Ratherthan engage with space Rauschenbergrsquos Combines elevate the ready-made or found object back to the status of the autonomous art objectThe Combines formalize the everyday object into an in-between statebut one that nevertheless produces singular art objects While theblack paintings led Rauschenberg back to the art object they led Kaprowfarther off the wall and out into space

| | | | |

Kaprow wrote ldquoa statementrdquo about his work sketching the trajectoryhe took from painting through collage then out into the space of thegallery48 After his initial show of paintings in 1952 he described thedevelopment of what he called ldquoaction collagerdquo These were done asquickly as possible by throwing together readily available everydaymaterials including parts of his past work tinfoil photographsnewspaper and food Although he doesnrsquot mention particular works by name presumably these action-collages include the early piecesreproduced in Assemblage Environments and Happenings In a photo-graph of Penny Arcade (1956) we see Kaprow standing in front of a largewall-size assemblage densely layered with parts of paintings scrapsof wood and large pieces of advertising signage that look like Kaproweither found them on the side of the road or appropriated them from a

Robert RauschenbergUntitled 1952

92 Grey Room 13

storefront It also included flashing lights andsounds calling out to the viewer like a ConeyIsland carnival booth but one made all the moreconfusing with its hyperarray of upside-downand fragmented word parts While collage hadbeen delicate even dainty in its appliqueacute of smallscraps of paper to the surface of the image KaprowrsquosPenny Arcade was massive and rough-hewn Unlikeits glitzier real-world counterpart Penny Arcadelooks cobbled together a temporary faccedilade brico-laged from odds and ends Here Kaprow turnedthe gallery space into the street turning the wallinto a pseudo-storefront bringing the architec-ture of the outside world into the gallery but lteredthrough the compositional strategies of collage

and abstract expressionism Abstraction before world war II had beenundertaken in a quest to find a universal Esperanto of color and form a problem that had been transformed by abstract expressionisminto a private iconography of psychic signs In Penny Arcade Kaprowturns the private symbolism of abstraction expressionism back to the world through advertising as commodity sign He makes the private symbol public again by reconnecting prendashWorld War II modelsof collective production with postndashWorld War II models of collectiveconsumption

Another work from this time further demonstrates how Kaprowused everyday materials to partition space Alternately titled (inAssemblage) Wall Kiosk and Rearrangeable Panels (1957ndash1959) thispiece looks like an enormous folding Japanese screen Measuring eightfeet high and over twenty feet long its panels are covered in eggshellsleaves and broken mirrorsmdashnot mass-produced commodities or sig-nage but detritus and waste Several of the panels are painted one inHoffmanrsquos push-pull style two seem to nod toward Rauschenberg onepainted white one black This piece is designed to sit on the oor ofthe gallery and as its various names imply it can be placed in a varietyof positions called ldquowallrdquo when arrayed in a straight line ldquokioskrdquowhen arranged into a square and ldquorearrangeable panelsrdquo in generalor when it sits in a zigzag Each position changes the relationship ofthe object to the space that contains it Kaprow recast the painting-as-wall as a transformable piece of furniture recognizing the possibilityof ludic engagement with the viewer but withholding it because theviewer is not allowed to interact with the piece directly Once installedthe work transforms the space of the gallery but it cannot be recong-ured by the viewer49

When asked why he used junk to make his work Kaprow replied

Allan Kaprow standing infront of Penny Arcade 1956Photo WF Gainfort

Kaizen | Framed Space Allan Kaprow and the Spread of Painting 93

It was clearly part of transformingreality It gave everyone a sense ofinstant involvement in a kind of crudeeveryday reality which was quite arelief after the high-art attitude ofexclusion from the real world It alsoallowed us to give up a certain kindof seriousness that traditional artmaking required Whatrsquos more thematerials were available everywhereon street corners at night And ifyou didnrsquot sell these environmentalconstructions yoursquod just throwthem back into the garbage canWhy not just throw them out It wasvery liberating to think of oneself aspart of an endlessly transformingreal world50

The ldquocrude everyday realityrdquo capturedby Penny Arcade as with Kaprowrsquos subsequent work is predicatedupon his project of capturing the ldquoendlessly transforming real worldrdquoThis statement connects him with Rauschenberg and Cage but alsoshows how their work differs in an important and crucial way InKaprowrsquos comment describing his experience of 4rsquo33 (as quoted inthe previous section) he says ldquoAnd we the listeners in Cagersquos concertand the lookers at Rauschenbergrsquos pictures were the collaborators of[sic] the artworkrdquo ending with ldquoIt was a kind of collaborative end-lessly changing affair The artwork was simply this organism that wasaliverdquo51 For Kaprow the key word here is change and in order tomove from artwork to organism the work of art must be reconsiderednot as a ldquochance operationrdquo (to use Cagersquos term) but as a change oper-ation During this time Kaprow had begun to take classes with Cageand he was exposed to Cagersquos use of chance methods of compositionWhile he would adopt much from Cagersquos work and teaching he thoughtthat change was the most important principle for his own work52

For Kaprow change was integrally connected to the postndashworld warII environment lled with mass-produced throwaway products Theart of this timemdashhis artmdashshould necessarily reect this environmentIn opposition to the nostalgic use of the objet trouveacute in surrealism hismethod was closer to the readymade choosing everyday objects to res-cue from oblivion but spreading them out in space so that they wouldenvironmentally engulf the viewer53 Kaprow temporarily revalues thethrowaway commodity in his environments to create a space where

Allan Kaprow RearrangeablePanels 1957-9 Shown intheir ldquoKioskrdquo con gurationPhoto Robert R McElroy

94 Grey Room 13

everyday life as planned obsolescence is brought under the control ofthe artist He creates a momentary space of anti-entropy in the life ofthe commodity where it is temporarily reinvested with value only to bedisposed of once the environment is destroyed54 Citing critic LawrenceAlloway on the ldquothrowawayrdquo culture of postndashworld war II AmericaKaprow goes on to describe the importance of change in his work

Change governing both reality and art has extended from theexpression of an idea arrested in a painting to a work in whichthe usually slow mutations wrought by nature are quickened andliterally made part of the experience of it they manifest the veryprocess of creation-decay-creation almost as one watches Theuse of debris waste products or very impermanent substanceslike toilet paper or bread has of course a clear range of allusionswith obvious sociological implications the simplest being theartistrsquos positive involvement on the one hand with an everydayworld and on the other with a group of objects which beingexpendable might suggest that corresponding lack of statuswhich is supposed to be the fate of anything creative todayThese choices must not be ignored for they reveal what in oursurroundings charges the imagination as well as what is mosthuman in our art55

What is ldquomost humanrdquo in Kaprowrsquos art as he denes it is its reectionof this throwaway culture This is governed not by Cagean chance butby planned obsolescence with its endless renewal of more of thesame ldquo[My] workrdquo Kaprow says ldquois intended to last only a short timeand is destroyed immediately after the exhibition If [its] obsolescenceis not planned it is expectedrdquo56 Alloway also writing on assemblagebetter describes the overlap between the throwaway object and its usein environmental art during the 1950s

The acceptance of mass-produced objects just because they arewhat is around not because they issue from idolatrised technol-ogy is central to mid-century Junk Culture Junk Culture iscity art Its source is obsolescence the throwaway material ofcities Assemblages of such material come at the spectator asbits of life bits of the environment frequently presented interms that dramatize spread ow extension trespass The junkis obtruded into our space with the aim of achieving maximumintimacy Proximity and participation replace distance and con-templation as the communicative style of the object57

So the space of Junk Culture when used in art as assemblage or envi-ronment achieves ldquomaximum intimacyrdquo with the observer throughtheir ldquoproximity and participationrdquo with the throwaway commodity

Kaizen | Framed Space Allan Kaprow and the Spread of Painting 95

As Kaprow moves farther into the space of the gallery he does so in anincreased attempt to engage the viewer He partitions the gallery spaceso that the body of the viewer becomes a product of its participationwithin the eld of the throwaway commodity

These early wall-like constructions were for Kaprow still not closeenough to a participatory art Kaprow wanted to move further towardthe creation of environments and even events to take over the gallerywith a plenitude of throwaway objects among which the viewer wouldself-consciously circulate The action collages still maintained toomuch autonomy because they existed as individual objects and so asKaprow recalled ldquonow I simply filled the whole gallery up startingfrom one wall and ending with the otherrdquo58 With his rst environmentKaprow was no longer composing within the autonomous space ofpainting but composing the entire space of the gallery Kaprowrsquos rstenvironmentmdashmade at the Hansa Gallery in November 1958mdashwasmeant to totally engage the visitors to the gallery to make them intopart of the work itself ldquopassively or actively according to [their] talentsfor lsquoengagementrsquordquo59 From a drop ceiling of wires suspended in a gridseveral inches below the galleryrsquos original ceiling he hung variousmaterials creating a labyrinthine space divided by sheets of plastictangles of cellophane Scotch tape and more including a time-releasedmist of pine-scented deodorizer His work had taken over the galleryspace lling it with a nearly impenetrable eld of throwaway objects60

Kaprow took the ood of postndashworld war II consumer goods and usedthem to compose walls that partitioned space And composemdashin thetraditional sense of arranging shapes and forms on the surface of acanvasmdashis exactly what he did

Kaprow described his use of the full space of the gallery as a eld aterm that he derives from painting calling the second section of hisldquoAssemblagerdquo essay ldquoThe Field in Paintingrdquo ldquoThis space is in part theliteral distance between all solids included in the workrdquo Kaprowwrote ldquoBut it is also a space that is a direct heritage of paintingrdquo61

Everything in the space that he produced became part of his compo-sition including the viewer Like any other object in the work Kaprowsaid ldquoin as much as people visiting [an] environment are moving col-ored shapes [they] were counted lsquoinrsquordquo62 Each visitor as they movedthrough Kaprowrsquos labyrinth became a part of the work Art and lifehad now seemingly collapsed the autonomy of painting as a separateobjectmdashframed and isolated from the rest of its environment as a spaceonly for the eyemdashhad been abandoned for an embodied experienceViewing was now dependent upon space a space full of the objects ofeveryday life Using the materials of everyday life Kaprow invited hisviewers to get rid of their distance from the art object forcing theminto physical contact with his work This work he wrote ldquoinvites us

96 Grey Room 13

to cast aside for a moment proper manners andpartake wholly in the real nature of art and (onehopes) liferdquo63 Against the look-donrsquot-touch attitude ofmuseum and gallery Kaprow created a haptic spacewhere touch became the basis of the work where vis-itors came into physical contact with his throwawayobjects In this space as visitors threaded their waythrough the labyrinth the color of their clothes andtheir presence among these objects turned them intoa part of the work The viewer appeared as anotherthing in Kaprowrsquos composition not so different fromhis throwaway materials In his environment autonomycollapsed into participation based on the reicationof the subject as an obsolete material temporally

composited into the work While Kaprow certainly intended to includehis observers in the work he could do so only by turning them intoobjects rather than active subjects He later described his own sense ofthe failure with this exhibition that he couldnrsquot seem to engage theviewer enough but blamed it on the framing space of the galleryAfterward he said ldquoI complained immediately about the fact that therewas a sense of mystery until your eye reached a wall Then there wasa dead end At that point my disagreement with the gallery spacebeganrdquo64 But Kaprow didnrsquot abandon the gallerymdashat least not yet Toget closer to the everyday Kaprow thought he should more fully incor-porate the bodies of his viewers into his work This led to the origin ofhappenings in an attempt to make viewers into active subjects to engagethem more actively in creating the work as they became part of it

| | | | |

In 1958 Kaprow had presented two other early proto-happenings oneat Rutgers called Communication and one at George Segalrsquos farmcalled Pastorale65 Communication was based on work he had devel-oped in Cagersquos class It was close to traditional theater Presented in achapel that doubled as an auditorium for theater and music perfor-mances it included movement sound and banners unfurled from thebalconies Kaprow built ldquoplastic panelsrdquo behind which he performeda series of simple actions nally hiding himself from the audience bypainting the plastic wall in front of him and so ldquopainting himself outrdquoof the audiencersquos view66 For Pastorale he built frames that looked likeabysmal theater sets stretcher bars with torn strips of canvas runningfrom top to bottom During one part of the performance artists RobertWatts and Lucas Samaras painted on either side of one of these con-structions Inserted into the landscape these performance paintings

Part of the environment Allan Kaprow created for his piece Pastorale 1958Photo Vaughn Rachel

Kaizen | Framed Space Allan Kaprow and the Spread of Painting 97

marked the boundary between event and nonevent partitioning theground into territories and framing Pastoralersquos space using once againpainting as wall Unfortunately for Kaprow Pastorale was held during apicnic and the other participants were either too drunk or just plainunwilling to follow his directions They were engaged but refused tofollow his rules of play

18 Happenings in 6 Parts which took place in October 1959 wasthe rst ofcial happening67 Kaprow divided the inside of the galleryinto three smaller contiguous rooms using wooden two-by-fours Inphotographs of the piece as it was being installed these woodenbeams can be seen framing a space within the space of the gallerymdashnot into a proscenium stage but into an environment within the largergallery space where various events would occur Instead of wood ordrywall translucent plastic sheeting created the walls so that actioncould be partially seen from one room to the next Each room was litwith different colored lights and in each room where the audiencewas forced to sit and observe the action a group of actors movedthrough tightly scripted but simple routines as sounds came in and outand lms were projected

On the program the audience is listed under the ldquoCast of Participantsrdquowritten into the performance itself and actively engaged but only asthe subject of direction and authorial control At specific intervalsbells rang and the audience was required to change seats and to switchrooms based on instruction cards they had been given when they enteredthe gallery before the performance Kaprow had realized with his HansaGallery environment that he needed to give his viewers increasedresponsibility but he also realized that relinquishing too much con-trol could be a disaster as it had been in Pastorale As with his previ-ous work his goal with 18 Happenings was the ldquointegration of allelementsmdashenvironment constructed sections time space and peoplerdquoand the audience was once again included as just another material inhis composition68

During the fifth part of 18 Happenings one sequence of actionsseems to reveal Kaprowrsquos relationship with painting the viewer and space Kaprow had built a construction he called the ldquothe sandwich manrdquo named after its everyday counterparts paid to walkaround the city streets as human billboards Kaprowrsquos sandwich

Left The construction of thespace used for Allan Kaprowrsquos18 Happenings in 6 Parts1958

Right A view of Allan Kaprowrsquos18 Happenings whereRearrangeable Panels is partially visible on the leftThe in-set canvas panel onwhich actors painted live as part of the performance is shown at center PhotoScott Hyde

98 Grey Room 13

man was barely humanoidan automaton with forward-and backward-pointing mir-rors for a body bicycle wheelsfor feet and a gallon bucketof enamel paint for a headSticking out in front was apiece of wood for an arm end-ing in a hand that held cardslabeled ldquoXrdquo and ldquo3rdquo the adver-

tising handbill reduced to its zero degree In the middle of the sand-wich man hidden on a shelf between the two mirrors was a recordplayer and projecting out from behind it were two handles so that itcould be wheeled around the rooms As the sandwich man was wheeledfrom one room to another its mirrored body reflected the audienceback onto themselves their image taking the place of what would havebeen an advertisement They were reected not as participatory viewersnot even as active objects as in his environment but as passive objectsnow totally reied their image produced as a reection of Junk CultureHere in Brechtian fashion using a literal ldquoframing effectrdquo Kaprowturned his previous use of the viewer back into a critique of the eventitself In reecting the audiencersquos passivity back to them he forced amoment of recognition of their complicity in the production of thework They could see that as they became an ad on the sandwich manrsquosbelly so they became throwaway objects in his composition By reduc-ing the spectator to the general equivalence of these objects Kaprowrecognized the subject of the postndashWorld War II period as a product ofplanned obsolescence and consumer culture

Following this as the sandwich man was wheeled through the secondroom and into the third two men stood up from their seats one in eachroom Each took up a brush and a can of paint and approached oppo-site sides of one of the plastic walls simultaneously painting on a sec-tion of canvas set among the plastic walls and so turning the wall backinto a painting69 The canvas was left unprimed so that the simple gures that each artist painted (one was supposed to paint lines theother circles) would bleed through and so would be immediately visibleon the opposite side each mark responding to that of their partner Asin his two earlier happenings painting is done live before an audienceon a wall Kaprow showed the audience that when painting becomeswall it functions only to put space on display Here painting as a sin-gular art object was meaningless It became a throwaway stage propand so became a demonstration of how painting as object was part ofthe larger environment in which it resides The limit condition of paint-ing as wall with viewer as spectator was the gallery as frame70

The sandwich man part ofKaprowrsquos 18 HappeningsPhoto Scott Hyde

Kaizen | Framed Space Allan Kaprow and the Spread of Painting 99

What this sequence from 18 Happenings reveals is that Kaprow hadan acute sense of the way in which the gallery as frame produces sub-ject and space together He undermined the normal function of the artgallery turning both viewer and art object into Junk Culture Throwawayviewers throwaway paintings and throwaway rooms turned the galleryspacemdasha space designed to be neutral to hide itself as the objects itcontains become the sole focus of the viewerrsquos concentrationmdashinto thelocus of planned obsolescence With the creation of happeningsKaprow used Junk Culture against the doxa of gallery space upsettingthe common sense of what a space for art is and what it does Afterhappenings the paradoxical logic of the gallery as a site for both theprivate contemplation of singular aesthetic objects as well as the pub-lic transaction of luxury goods had been (however temporarily) sub-verted In asserting the gallery space as the limit condition of paintingKaprow framed the institution as the ground of artistic production

In ldquoThe Legacy of Jackson Pollockrdquo Kaprow says ldquoPollock left us atthe point where we must become preoccupied with and even dazzled by the space and objects of our everyday liferdquo71 In ldquoAssemblageEnvironments Happeningsrdquo bridging the gap between his early andlater work he concludes ldquothis has brought sharply into focus that theroom has always been a frame or format toordquo72 Kaprowrsquos collapse ofautonomy via art into lifemdashthat environments and happenings wouldldquopartake wholly in the real nature of art and (one hopes) liferdquomdashwasonly ever a hope as he himself knew If painting had used the frameas the delimitation of a eld for composition then environments andhappenings turned the gallery into the limit condition of this fieldWhile he tried to get closer to everyday life by making art he inevitablypushed it further away This ambivalence toward the collapse of artand life runs throughout Kaprowrsquos work even as he moved out of thegallery and into everyday life following his early work with his laterldquoactivitiesrdquo The early work was even by his own estimation more adisplay of experience and not a fair representation of actual everydayexperience But this is precisely where the importance of this work liesKaprowrsquos environments and happenings extended Rauschenbergrsquossemiautonomous gap so far that they turned the screw one notchhigher autonomy returning not though the sublation of art into archi-tecture but through the medium of framed space

100 Grey Room 13

NotesThanks to the generosity and insight of Karen Kurczynski John Harwood SethMcCormick Jaleh Mansoor Beth Hinderliter Vered Maimon Benjamin Buchloh andBarry Bergdoll as well as Branden Joseph and the Editors of Grey Room

1 Brian OrsquoDoherty Inside the White Cube The Ideology of the Gallery Space(Berkeley and Los Angeles University of California Press 1999) 15

2 It was originally called ldquoPainting Environments Happeningsrdquo and publishedin a condensed form in the catalog for the exhibition New FormsmdashNew Media I at the Martha Jackson Gallery New York the rst uptown show of Kaprow and his con-temporaries It was changed to ldquoAssemblage Environments and Happeningsrdquo for nalpublication Kaprow changed the title to incorporate the recent acceptance of the termassemblage It had been used rst by Helen Comstock to describe the work of ArthurDove in the 1920s but remained obscure until Jean Dubuffet popularized its use in 1953The term as used by Dubuffet was then adopted by William Seitz for his exhibitionThe Art of Assemblage at the Museum of Modern Art See Allan Kaprow AssemblageEnvironments and Happenings (New York Harry N Abrams 1966) 150ndash208 NewFormsmdashNew Media I (New York Martha Jackson Gallery 1960) np and RogerShattuck ldquoIntroduction How Collage Became Assemblagerdquo Essays on Assemblage(New York Museum of Modern Art 1992) 119

3 ldquoWhen I am in my painting Irsquom not aware of what Irsquom doingrdquo said PollockJackson Pollock Jackson Pollock Interviews Articles Reviews ed Pepe Karmel (NewYork Museum of Modern Art 1999) 17ndash18

4 Yard was Kaprowrsquos contribution to the exhibition Environments SituationsSpaces at the Martha Jackson Gallery a follow up to New FormsndashNew Media (see n 2)

5 ldquoAllan Kaprow and Robert Watts Interviewed by Sidney Simonrdquo in Benjamin HDBuchloh and Judith F Rodenbeck Experiments in the Everyday Allan Kaprow andRobert Watts Events Objects Documents (New York Wallach Art Gallery 1999) 76

6 To cite but one example of many Thomas Hirschhorn is an artist who continuesto extend and develop Kaprowrsquos legacy today

7 On Kaprow and performance see Amelia Jones Body Art Performing the Subject(Minneapolis University of Minnesota Press 1998) 56ndash57 Paul Schimmel ldquoLeap intothe Void Performance and the Objectrdquo in Out of Actions Between Performance andthe Object 1949ndash1979 ed Paul Schimmel (New York Thames and Hudson 1998)59ndash63

8 The relationship between painting and space had been explored before partic-ularly in the period between the two world wars by the artists associated with De Stijland constructivism For more on De Stijl see Nancy Troy The De Stijl Environment(Cambridge MIT Press 1983) On constructivism see Yve-Alain Bois ldquoEl LissitzkyRadical Reversibilityrdquo Art in America 76 no 4 (April 1988) 161ndash181 and Yve-AlainBois ldquoMaterial Utopiasrdquo Art in America 79 no 6 (June 1991) 98ndash107 Another Europeanwho explored the everyday object painting and space was Kurt Schwitters in the various incarnation of his Merzbau See Elizabeth Burns Gamard Kurt SchwittersrsquoMerzbau The Cathedral of Erotic Misery (New York Princeton Architectural Press2000) Two other important precursors who bridge the European and American con-text are Lazlo Moholy-Nagy and Friedrick Kiesler For information on Moholy-Nagyrsquosearly environmental projects as well as those of Lissitzy see Joan Ockman ldquoThe RoadNot Taken Alexander Dornerrsquos Way Beyond Artrdquo in Autonomy and Ideology Positioningan Avant-Garde in America ed RE Somol (New York Monicelli Press 1997) For

Kaizen | Framed Space Allan Kaprow and the Spread of Painting 101

information on Kiesler see RL Held Endless Innovations Frederick Kieslerrsquos Theoryand Scenic Design (Ann Arbor UMI Research Press 1982) Lisa Phillips FrederickKiesler (New York The Whitney Museum of American Art 1989) Brian OrsquoDohertydraws out the connections between the prendash and postndashWorld War II manifestations ofthis relationship in Inside the White Cube

9 For Benjamin the work of art attains autonomy under modernism with theemergence of art for artrsquos sake This autonomy is then usurped by mechanical repro-duction See Walter Benjamin ldquoThe Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproductionrdquoin Illuminations ed Hanna Arendt (New York Harcourt Brace and Jovanovich Inc1968) p 224-226 For Greenberg as the above quote indicates the autonomy of artcontinues even in the face of mechanization See Clement Greenberg ldquoTowards a NewerLaocoonrdquo Perceptions and Judgments 1939ndash1944 vol 1 of Clement Greenberg TheCollected Essays and Criticism ed John OrsquoBrien (Chicago University of Chicago1986) p 32

10 Rosalind Krauss uses the term ldquopost-medium conditionrdquo to designate ldquomixed-media installationrdquo work done today While Krauss argues that only the most signi-cant artists working since the 1960s reassert the medium in their work against thegeneral postmedium condition I believe that all mixed-media installation work operates using the gallery or institution as medium See Rosalind Krauss ldquoA Voyageon the North Seardquo Art in the Age of the Post-Medium Condition (New York Thamesand Hudson 1999) for her comments on a specic contemporary artist and the rein-vention of the medium see Rosalind Krauss ldquo And Then Turn Awayrdquo An Essayon James Colemanrdquo October 81 (Summer 1997) 5ndash33

11 Allan Kaprow ldquoThe Legacy of Jackson Pollockrdquo Art News 57 no 6 (October1958) 24ndash26 55ndash57 reprinted in Allan Kaprow Essays on the Blurring of Art andLife ed Jeff Kelley (Berkeley and Los Angles University of California Press 1993) 1ndash9 Kaprow has stated that the essay was written in 1956 in ldquoAllan Kaprow andRobert Watts Interviewed by Sidney Simonrdquo 77 Kaprow had been a student of bothHans Hoffman and Meyer Schapiro

12 Harold Rosenberg ldquoThe American Action Paintersrdquo Art News 52 (December1952) 22ndash23 In a footnote that Rosenberg added when the article was republished aspart of his book of collected essays in 1959 he added the following ldquoAction Paintinghas extracted the element of decision inherent in all art in that the work is not fin-ished at its beginning but has to be carried forward by an accumulation of lsquorightrsquo ges-tures In a word Action Painting is the abstraction of the moral element in art itsmark is moral tension in detachment from moral or esthetic certainties and it judgesitself morally in declaring that picture to be worthless which is not the incorporationof a genuine struggle one which could at any point have been lostrdquo Harold RosenbergThe Tradition of the New (New York Horizon Press 1959) 33ndash34 Kaprow recountsthe influence of Rosenbergrsquos essay on his work in ldquoAllan Kaprow and Robert WattsInterviewed by Sidney Simonrdquo 77

13 There were five all told They were held as follows 5ndash23 January 1948 24Januaryndash12 February 1949 21 Novemberndash10 December 1949 28 Novemberndash16 December1950 26 Novemberndash15 December 1951 These shows had a remarkable resonance onethat extended beyond even the insular New York art world when after the secondexhibition Life magazine published the feature article ldquoJackson Pollock Is He theGreatest Living Painter in the United Statesrdquo Dorothy Sieberling Life (August 81949) 42ndash45

14 Allan Kaprow ldquoThe Legacy of Jackson Pollockrdquo in Kaprow Essays on the

102 Grey Room 13

Blurringrdquo 615 Kaprow uses both the terms scale and size to describe Pollockrsquos work but as

TJ Clark has shown these are two very different terms and Pollock is a painter of sizeand not scale For Clark it is size that engages the body ldquoNormally speaking size isliteralmdasha matter of actual physical intuition It involves grasping how big or small acertain object really is most likely in relation to the size of the grasperrsquos upright body oroutspread armsrdquo TJ Clark ldquoPollockrsquos Smallnessrdquo in Jackson Pollock New Approachesed Kirk Varnedoe and Pepe Karmel (New York Museum of Modern Art 1999) 15

16 Kaprow ldquoThe Legacy of Jackson Pollockrdquo Essays on the Blurring 617 In most of his work the paint engages with the edge of the canvas emphasizing

and bordering it and not continuing around it as if the canvas had been cut down fromsome innite expanse Kaprow claims otherwise by singling out the exceptions sayingldquo[H]is art gives the impression of going on forever [T]hough evidence points to aslackening of the attack as Pollock came to the edges of many of his canvases in thebest ones he compensated for this by tacking much of the painted surface around theback of his stretchersrdquo Kaprow ldquoThe Legacy of Jackson Pollockrdquo Essays on the Blurringof Art and Life 5 An examination of the paintings shows that more often Pollockstopped before the edge or reworked his compositions after they were stretched sothat they reengaged with the edge even when cut from larger canvas Kaprow claimsotherwise because it furthers his arguments that Pollockrsquos paintings emerge into thespace of the viewer

18 Jackson Pollock ldquoApplication for a Guggenheim Fellowship 1947rdquo in JacksonPollock Interviews 17 The inuence of Greenberg at this time is discussed in StevenNaifeh and Gregory White Smith Jackson Pollock An American Saga (Aiken SCWoodwardWhite 1989) 551 Pollock had also engaged with wall-size painting duringhis association with Joseacute Clemente Orozco and in earlier work such as Mural(1943ndash1944) painted for Peggy Guggenheimrsquos house

19 Greenbergrsquos version of modernism was most fully laid out only in 1959 andpublished in 1960 ldquoIt was the stressing of the ineluctable atness of the surface thatremained however more fundamental than anything else to the process by whichpictorial art criticized and defined itself under Modernism For flatness alone wasunique and exclusive to pictorial art Because flatness was the only conditionpainting shared with no other art Modernist painting oriented itself to atness as itdid to nothing elserdquo In Clement Greenberg ldquoModernist Paintingrdquo in Modernism witha Vengeance 1957ndash1969 vol 4 of Clement Greenberg The Collected Essays andCriticism ed John OrsquoBrien (Chicago University of Chicago Press 1993) 87

20 Clement Greenberg ldquoThe Situation at the Momentrdquo in Arrogant Purpose1945ndash1949 vol 2 of Clement Greenberg The Collected Essays and Criticism ed JohnOrsquoBrien (Chicago University of Chicago 1986) 194ndash195

21 See Greenberg ldquoTowards a Newer Laocoonrdquo throughout22 Eric Lum has done extensive work on the relationship between abstract expres-

sionism and architecture The analysis in this essay follows from his especially whereBlakersquos project is concerned but also expands on it As he jumps from Blake to PhilipJohnson and Mark Rothkorsquos Houston Chapel however Lum misses the importance ofother interventions between painting and architecture such as those made by KaprowThis is evident when he says ldquoThrough this marriage of mural and wall paintingcould become fully integrated into architecture an idealized conjecture nor realizeduntil Mark Rothkorsquos 1971 Houston Chapelrdquo Eric Lum ldquoPollockrsquos Promise Toward anAbstract Expressionist Architecturerdquo Assemblage 39 (August 1999) 68

Kaizen | Framed Space Allan Kaprow and the Spread of Painting 103

23 Blake said of his visit to Pollockrsquos studio ldquoIt was a very sunny day and thesun was shining on the paintings I felt like I was standing in the Hall of Mirrors atVersailles It was a dazzling incredible sightrdquo Naifeh and Smith 588

24 Peter Blake No Place like Utopia Modern Architecture and the Company WeKept (New York Knopf 1993) 111ndash112

25 Miesrsquos museum plan was designed at the request of the editors at ArchitecturalForum who had been publishing a series of articles ldquoto show how building might beimproved through fuller and more imaginative use of existing resourcesrdquo They requesteddesigns for a variety of buildings that could be placed in a hypothetical city of 70000inhabitants ldquoNew Buildings for 194Xrdquo Architectural Forum 78 no 5 (May 1943)69ndash85 The Barcelona Pavilion was built in 1929 for the Barcelona Universal Expositionand was destroyed when the fair ended It was subsequently rebuilt in 1981ndash86

26 Peter Blake Mies van der Rohe (New York Pelican 1960) 54 It is worth notingthat like Miesrsquos use of the Kolbe sculpture Blake had Pollock actually make smallwire sculptures splattered with paint miniatures of sculptures that Blake hopedPollock would make for the actual museum Pollock himself was experimenting withsculpture around this time building three-dimensional forms out of papier-macirccheacutethat he then splattered with paint

27 Blakersquos collage space follows from Miesrsquos The production of collages as in situmodels for Miesrsquos buildings had begun in the twenties with his work for the journal Gin association with Dadaists such as Hans Richter Neil Levine notes this creation ofa collage space in Mies particularly in the Pavilion and the Museum for a Small Cityin relation to his use of reection to layer one surface on top of another Neil LevineldquolsquoThe Signicance of Factsrsquo Miesrsquo Collages Up Close and Personalrdquo Assemblage 37(December 1998) 71ndash101

28 Blake designed his museum just as Philip Johnson was building his Glass Housewhere they both spent considerable time while planning exhibitions for the Museumof Modern Art Johnsonrsquos inuence is also evident in Blakersquos design Blake No Placelike Utopia 149ndash155

29 Arthur Drexler ldquoUnframed Space A Museum for Jackson Pollackrsquos [sic] PaintingsrdquoInteriors and Industrial Design 109 no 6 (January 1950) 90ndash91 The article was partof a special issue whose theme was ldquoInteriors to Comerdquo a recurring topic that wasmeant ldquoto show the direction in which some of our best designers are goingrdquo The termunframed space was used several times in reference to Pollockrsquos work as the title oftwo articles Drexlerrsquos and one published slightly later by Berton Rouecheacute ThoughRouecheacute in an interview in To a Violent Grave says that Lee Krasner used the phraserst Charles Pollock says that Blake was the origin of the term The fact that Drexlerrsquosarticle was written and published earlier seems to conrm this See Berton RouecheacuteldquoUnframed Spacerdquo in Jackson Pollock Interviews 18ndash19 and Jeffrey Potter To aViolent Grave (New York Pushcart Press 1985) 126

30 Drexler 9031 Blake No Place like Utopia 113ndash11432 Blake completed construction on his ldquoPinwheel Houserdquo in 1952 It is a small

beach house that he designed for himself and his family in South Hampton on NewYorkrsquos Long Island Situated on the beach the house is square in plan and its fourexterior walls slide horizontally outward each in a successive clockwise directionrevealing glass walls When the exterior walls are fully extended and the house isviewed from above it forms a shape like a pinwheel Opening the exterior wallsreveals an ever-changing view of the landscape outside turning the ocean and the

104 Grey Room 13

dunes into the picturesque framing them so that they entirely ll the space of the walland put its surface in motion Blake had discussed with Pollock the possibility of hispainting the sliding walls so that his paintings would be superimposed over the land-scape Pollock considered it but Blake couldnrsquot come up with the commission moneythat Pollock asked for They never finalized their plans and it was never clear howthe panels were to be painted Blake suggested that they might be made of glass so hebought the sheet of glass that Pollock used to paint Number 29 1950 (1950) the paintingthat Hans Namuth lmed from underneath for his documentary on Pollock His col-laboration with Blake did lead to one commission a mural-size canvas done for ahouse designed by Marcel Breuer Untitled (Mural) (1950) Shortly after his collabo-ration with Blake Pollock began another unrealized architectural project this onewith Alfonso Ossorio and Tony Smith for a church designed by Smith with murals byPollock For more on all of this see Blake No Place like Utopia 114ndash118 Naifeh andSmith 649 and Lum ldquoPollockrsquos Promiserdquo 68 85ndash88

33 Lum ldquoPollockrsquos Promiserdquo 67ndash6834 A few pages down from Drexlerrsquos article on the Pollock Museum in Interiors

and Industrial Design was another architectural response to the same problem OlgaGueftrsquos article ldquoThe Museumrsquos Oasisrdquo describes another museum this one by Gyorgyand Juliet Kepes ldquoThe Kepesesrdquo it begins ldquoare not exactly opposed to museumsrdquo how-ever it would seem that they were opposed to museums containing works of artReplacing the art objects entirely the Kepeses substituted shells driftwood plantsand animals Instead of a natural history museum they proposed a modern-dayWunderkammerwhere natural forms take the place of art as objects for contemplationldquoThe proposed galleryrdquo they declared ldquowould bridge the gap between the art museumwhich is concerned with man-made beauty and the natural history museum whichis preoccupied with nature but not particularly with naturersquos beautyrdquo Gyorgy KepesrsquosThe New Landscape exhibition at MIT a year later in 1951 (the same years as theIndependent Grouprsquos similar exhibition Growth and Form in London) and the pub-lication that followed The New Landscape in Art and Sciencewould ultimately realizethis project with blown-up photographs of natural forms (cells shells and electronmicrographs) in place of actual objects

The Kepeses seem to have taken the next logical step beyond Blake proposing aneven more radical rethinking of the wall-size work of art Eliminating the need for theartist altogether they found abstract forms in nature and turned their reproductionsinto what would elsewhere have been works of art By turning the art object into scientic vision The Kepeses proposed its total instrumentation Autonomous abstractpainting was transformed into its instrumental other a mechanically reproduced science of vision Rather than turn art into interior design The Kepesesrsquo replacementof abstract painting recast the status of scientic technology into that of high art SeeOlga Gueft ldquoThe Museumrsquos Oasisrdquo Interiors and Industrial Design 109 no 6 (January1950) 100ndash103 and Gyorgy Kepes The New Landscape in Art and Science (ChicagoPaul Theobald and Co 1956)

35 Kaprow stated that it was ldquoIn 1949 [that] I saw an exhibition of [Pollockrsquos] workfor the rst timerdquo ldquoInterviewrdquo in Allan Kaprow (Pasadena Pasadena Art Museum1967) 7

36 See Kaprow ldquoThe Legacy of Jackson Pollockrdquo Art News 25 and Kaprow ldquoTheLegacy of Jackson Pollockrdquo Essays on the Blurring 3

37 Joan Marter ldquoThe Forgotten Legacy Happenings Pop Art and Fluxus at RutgersUniversityrdquo in Off Limits Rutgers University and the Avant-Garde 1957ndash1963 ed Joan

Kaizen | Framed Space Allan Kaprow and the Spread of Painting 105

Marter (Newark The Newark Museum 1999) 438 Marter 13239 Quoted in John Cage Silence (Middletown Wesleyan University Press 1961) 10540 Branden Joseph has developed the link between Cage and Rauschenberg in several

recent essays See Branden W Joseph ldquoJohn Cage and the Architecture of SilencerdquoOctober 81 (Summer 1997) 81ndash104 and Branden Joseph ldquoWhite on Whiterdquo CriticalInquiry 27 no 1 (Summer 2001) 90ndash121

41 For Cage on Rauschenberg see Cage Silence98ndash108 For his description ofTheater Piece No 1 see ldquoInterview with John Cagerdquo in Happenings and Other Actsed Mariellen R Sandford (New York Routledge 1995) 53 Cage subsequently referredto Theater Piece No 1 as ldquothe rst happeningrdquo See John Cage ldquoAn AutobiographicalStatementrdquo Southwest Review 76 no 1 (Winter 1991) 65

42 The score itself has had various incarnations It wasnrsquot published until 1960and in this version includes a note wherein Cage describes the rst performance byTudor For more on 4rsquo33 and its various scores see Liz Kotz ldquoWords on Paper NotNecessarily Meant to Be Read as Art Postwar Media Poetics from Cage to Warholrdquo(PhD diss Columbia University 2002) 83ndash115 Kotz follows a different lineage outof Cage and into performance and happenings than the one traced in this essay

43 Marter 13244 Walter Hopps in the first survey catalog of Rauschenbergrsquos early work does

not name the black paintings as a group as he does the White Paintings He calls themeach Untitled followed by a description in brackets Hopps notes of the largest ofthese works that ldquoThese paintings with a greater vastness and ambiguity of scale thanother Rauschenberg works relate to spatial qualities of Jackson Pollockrdquo HoppsRobert Rauschenberg The Early 1950s (Houston Houston Fine Art Press 1991) 67This convention was also followed in Rauschenbergrsquos 1997 Guggenheim retrospectivecatalog and is followed in this essay Robert Rauschenberg A Retrospective ed WalterHopps and Susan Davidson (New York Solomon R Guggenheim Museum 1997)

45 The piece is called Untitled [two black panels] (1953) Hopps Robert Rauschenberg99

46 Helen Molesworth notes the importance of Rauschenbergrsquos newspaper groundin the black paintings and develops this problem in relation to the abject body as it isfurther pursued in his work throughout the 1950s Helen Molesworth ldquoBefore BedrdquoOctober 63 (Winter 1993) 68ndash82

47 Asked about this work Rauschenberg said ldquoI called them combines I had tocoin that word because I got so bored with arguments I was interested in people seeingmy work When someone would come up and I really wanted to know what they thoughtof it or wanted to sense the exposure there was always this screen that they could getbehind which was if I said lsquoIt is paintingrsquo they would say lsquoThatrsquos not painting Thatrsquossculpturersquo And they thought this was very interestingrdquo Jeanne Siegel ArtwordsDiscourse on the 60s and 70s (New York DaCapo 1985) 153

48 Allan Kaprow ldquoa Statementrdquo in Happenings An Illustrated Anthology edMichael Kirby (New York EP Dutton and Co 1965) 44ndash45

49 Benjamin Buchloh notes the importance of play in the 1950s and its link toconsumer culture During the 1950s he writes ldquoa theory of games would remerge asa cultural project at the very moment of an ever-increasing instrumentalization oflibidinal desire through consumer culturerdquo Benjamin HD Buchloh ldquoRobert WattsInanimate ObjectsmdashInanimate Subjectsrdquo in Buchloh and Rodenbeck Experiments inthe Everyday 25 n 4

84 Grey Room 13

This happened he said for several reasons but it was the size of thesepaintings that was most important ldquoPollockrsquos choice of enormous can-vases served many purposesrdquo he said ldquochief of which for our discus-sion is that his mural-scale paintings ceased to become paintings andbecame environmentsrdquo14 But it was their wall size (and not their scale)15

that caused Pollockrsquos drips to overow the bounds of the canvasrsquo framingedge Kaprow continues it was ldquoour size as spectators in relation to thesize of the picture [and] Pollockrsquos choice of great sizes [that] resultedin our being confronted assaulted sucked inrdquo

The size of Pollockrsquos paintings engaged even attacked the viewerrsquoswhole body and not just their eye Kaprow immediately qualies thephrase ldquosucked inrdquo as he contrasts Pollockrsquos relationship to the wallwith that of Renaissance painting If Renaissance painting acted as awindow that the eye traveled through extending the room outward intospace for Kaprow Pollockrsquos paint came off the canvas and into the roomwith the spectator lling and surrounding the spectator ldquoWhat I believeis clearly discernablerdquo he said ldquois that the entire painting comes outat us (we are participants rather than observers) right into the roomrdquo16

The experience of Pollockrsquos work as exceeding the constraints ofthe framing edge of the canvas was one that Pollock recognized in hisown work and that he sought however ambivalently to elicit through-out his career17 Although he had long been engaged with the muralhe had never convinced himself to make work that was fully inte-grated with an architectural structure Even when working at wall sizehe never made the full transition to the wall painting even his largestworks on stretched canvas He recognized that his paintings existedambiguously between the easel and the wall saying at one point in thelate forties ldquoI intend to paint large movable pictures which will func-tion between the easel and the mural I believe the easel picture tobe a dying form and the tendency of modern feeling is towards thewall picture or muralrdquo This statement written in 1947 was in dialoguewith critic Clement Greenberg18 Greenberg known for his teleologyof atness in modern painting had at this earlier date recognized thatthe size of Pollockrsquos paintings made them wall-like physical objects

Jackson Pollock exhibition atThe Betty Parsons Gallery 28 Novemberndash16 December1950 Photo Hans Namuth

Kaizen | Framed Space Allan Kaprow and the Spread of Painting 85

and that the tendency of modern painting was not to become at butto spread out into space19 While Greenberg would come to deny theimplications of this idea by the 1960s he said in a 1948 article onPollockrsquos work

After all easel painting is on the way out There is a persistenturge as persistent as it is largely unconscious to go beyond thecabinet picture which is destined to occupy only a spot on the wallto a kind of picture that without actually becoming identifiedwith the wall like a mural would spread over it and acknowl-edge its physical reality I do not know whether there is anythingin modern architecture itself that explicitly invites this tendencyBut it is a fact that abstract painting shows a greater and greaterreluctance for the small frame-enclosed format Abstract paintingbeing at needs greater extension of surface on which to developits ideas than does the old three-dimensional easel painting andit seems to become trivial when conned within anything mea-suring less than two feet by two20

Here we see even in the critic best known for his call for the separa-tion of painting from other art forms that already within abstractexpressionism lay the seeds of its dissolution into the space of archi-tecture For Greenberg this was a drive to be repressed Painting couldsurvive in the end only if it were to maintain its autonomy from theother arts21 Nevertheless he clearly recognized that with this lay thepossibility of its dissolution into an impure state a state where theframing space of the work becomes as important as the work itselfWhat Greenberg recognized in Pollockrsquos work and what Kaprow extrap-olated out of it was the relationship between painting and the spacethat contains it What Greenbergrsquos recognition amounted to forKaprow but also for many artists who followed was the end of paint-ing in a particular sense with the end of easel painting in abstractexpressionism as painting became a wall it was no longer a windowPainting as wall is not a window to be looked through but a thing to belooked at an object in the way some thing in space rather than a trans-parent surface

| | | | |

Leading up to the exhibitions of wall-size paintings at the Betty ParsonsGallery and key to their development was the dialogue betweenPollock and architect Peter Blake22 Blake had visited Pollockrsquos studioin 1949 Pollock had only recently begun his series of drip paintingsand had been using an old barn behind his house which was morespacious than the upstairs room in the house he had previously used

86 Grey Room 13

Seeing all of the paintings on the walls andoor of the barn elicited an intense reactionin Blake The paintings seemed both trans-parent and reective dissolving the walls ofthe barn as if they captured the misty land-scape of the bay outside and also because ofPollockrsquos use of aluminum paint reectingthe light streaming in through the windowslike enormous mirrors23 Blakersquos experiencewas central to his design for a small museummeant to house Pollockrsquos work Blake recalled

I designed a large somewhat abstractldquoexhibitrdquo of his workmdasha kind of ldquoIdealMuseumrdquo in which his paintings were

suspended between the earth and the sky and set between mir-rored walls so as to extend into infinity Beyond these floatingcanvases would be the marshes and the inlets of The Springsmdashthe relentlessly horizontal landscape of that end of Long Island24

Blakersquos ldquoIdeal Museumrdquo was indebted to Ludwig Mies van der Rohewhose Barcelona Pavilion and Museum for a Small City project formedthe basis of his design25 In Blakersquos monograph on Mies he expressedhis admiration for the Barcelona Pavilion and noted that it suggested anew direction for the integration of art and architecture ldquoThe resultingcompositionrdquo he said referring to the sculpture by Georg Kolbe as it was framed by the walls in the Pavilionrsquos enclosed courtyard ldquohasbecome a favorite example of those who advocate collaboration betweenarchitects on the one hand and sculptors and painters on the other[The Kolbe sculpture] does suggest that there may be other and betterways towards integration of the artsrdquomdashways that Blake would furtherpursue in his Pollock Museum26

As in Miesrsquos project for a Museum for a Small City the exterior wallsof Blakersquos Pollock Museum were to be made entirely of glass No inte-rior walls would be interposed between the art and the landscape outside The art became the walls Paintings were to be hung on free-standing walls no bigger than the work itself so that only the art itselfwould be visible oating in space with other works of art juxtaposedagainst it and with the exterior environment as a background Blakeunframes the work of art pulling it out of its usual relationship withthe wall where it would normally sit enclosed in a traditional framereframing it to create a collaged space one where works of art are seentogether overlapping one another as the viewer moves through themuseum27 Blake attempted to replicate the relationships between theviewer and the art object that Miesrsquos Pavilion and Museum had embodied

Top Jackson Pollock andPeter Blake looking at themodel of Blakesrsquos museumdesign on display at theBetty Parsonrsquos Gallery Photo Ben Schultz

Bottom Georg Kolbe DerMorgen 1925 Shown housedin Mies van der RoheBarcelona Pavilion 1928ndash29Photo Berliner Bild-Bericht

Kaizen | Framed Space Allan Kaprow and the Spread of Painting 87

the removal of the traditional framing device (the picture frame) for anoverlapping frame of collaged space the collapse of outside and insideand the reection back onto the viewer of their somatic viewing expe-rience Like Mies Blake adopted the materials of modern distraction(plate glass in particular) and combined them with an open plan inorder to create an interior that would use the glass curtain wall to offerrespite from the city street and the speed of modernity28

The only substantive article published on the Pollock Museum atthe time was Arthur Drexlerrsquos ldquoUnframed Spacerdquo29 The title camefrom Blakersquos own assessment that his project would realize the unlim-ited extension of Pollockrsquos marks into a total environment Drexlerconcludes his short essay with words that are similar to Blakersquos ownassessment of Mies ldquoThe Project suggests a re-integration of paintingand architecture wherein painting is the architecture but this timewithout message or content Its sole purpose is to heighten our expe-rience of spacerdquo30 Contrary to Drexlerrsquos title Pollockrsquos paintings arerendered secondary to their use in framing space It is the space of thegallery that submits them to its formal logic In Blakersquos Museum theart is secondary to the space that contains it

Blakersquos Museum conates both of Miesrsquos projects from which it wasprimarily derived By using abstract paintings Blake was able to fillhis museum with art while simultaneously returning these large-sizeabstractions directly to the wall Pollockrsquos painting functions like thestone cladding on the central wall in the Barcelona Pavilion as a dec-orative surface Pollock recognized the reduction inherent in Blakersquosproject saying to him after the design was done ldquoThe trouble is youthink I am a decoratorrdquo Blakersquos reply was telling ldquoOf course I thinkhis paintings might make terric walls After all architects spend a lotof time thinking about wallsrdquo31 What kept Pollock from working directlyon the wall and what Blake as an architect recognized immediatelywas that when painting became a wall or approached this conditionthrough wall size its autonomy was destroyed It approached the

Interiors (January 1950) featuring Blakersquos Pollockmuseum

88 Grey Room 13

status of interior decoration and that was the wayBlake wanted itmdashPollock reduced to ldquoterrific wallsrdquoHe even tried to commission Pollock to paint panelsfor the moving walls of the Pinwheel House his nextproject so that when they slid shut the housersquos inte-rior would be enclosed in Pollocks surrounded bypainted wallpaper32 The paintings as walls are sub-mitted to the logic of Blakersquos architecture He destroysthe autonomy of Pollockrsquos paintings only to sublatethem into the autonomy of modernist architecturerealizing Pollockrsquos fear of turning his work into meredecoration Blakersquos project asserts architecture over

painting As painting becomes wall it is sublated into the autonomousmodernist space of Miesian architecture Pollockrsquos work is turned intoa decorative surface into an interior design for a modernist space

The Pollock Museum was never built but not because either Pollockor Blake had second thoughts Despite any misgivings that Pollock hadwith this project the model was exhibited at Betty Parsons Gallery in1949 and afterward the model remained in Pollockrsquos studio promi-nently displayed in case he could convince a visiting collector to helpfinance its construction At his next exhibition with Betty Parson in1950 the paintings were made to be the same height and almost thesame length of the walls on which they hung so that they would comeas close as possible to realizing Blakersquos design within the more tradi-tional gallery setting33

If Blakersquos project misrepresented Pollock this was only to the extentthat Pollock had already acknowledged the tendency of painting atwall size to become an object What Blakersquos project makes clear is thatwhen paintings became wall-size or as they literally became wallsthey lost their capacity to create an autonomous space divorced fromcontext While it took an architect initially to realize such a possibilityartists soon followed suit34

It is likely that Kaprow saw the 1949 exhibition of Pollockrsquos workwhich included the model for Blakersquos Museum Although in his writ-ings on Pollock he doesnrsquot mention the Museum in an interview from1967 he claimed to have rst seen a Pollock exhibition in 194935 Thiswould mean that he had seen the show at the Betty Parsons Gallerywith the model on display The model for the museum is also clearlyvisible in the photographs of Pollock working in his studio that illus-trate both the original publication of Kaprowrsquos ldquoThe Legacy of JacksonPollockrdquo and (much later) his collection of essays The Blurring of Artand Life36 Kaprow also explicitly referenced the subsequent Pollockexhibition with its wall-size works when he discussed the all-overeld Pollockrsquos work created in the space of the gallery But along with

Photograph of Pollock in hisstudio As published in Allan Kaprow ldquoThe Legacy ofJackson Pollockrdquo in Art News(October 1958) The model of Blakersquos museum is visiblein the upper-left cornerPhoto Rudy Burckhardt

Kaizen | Framed Space Allan Kaprow and the Spread of Painting 89

Pollock and Blake Kaprow also engagedwith the work of Robert Rauschenbergand John Cage two artists who had asmuch impact on his thinking about spaceas Pollock

| | | | |

In the fall of 1951 when Kaprow visitedRauschenbergrsquos studio he saw the WhitePaintings37 Rauschenberg had made theseworks during the previous summer at BlackMountain College Like Blake Rauschenberg also engaged space usingpainting but he did so as an artist not as an architect Yet rather thanreassert the autonomy of painting he established a semiautonomousspace for painting The White Paintings are a series of works paintedat matte white with no visible marks to attract the viewerrsquos eye WhileBlake submitted the autonomy of Pollockrsquos painting to the logic of hisarchitecture upholding the autonomy of modernist space in favor ofarchitecture over art Rauschenberg was far more ambivalent about thepossibility of autonomy for either art or architecture The White Paintingsexist between the two as semiautonomous objectsmdashnot quite wall notquite paintingmdashand certainly not like their nearest precursor abstractexpressionist painting with its ood of gesture and mark The WhitePaintings in their utter blankness call attention to the ephemeral effectsof light and shade that played across them Upon seeing them Kaprowwas unsure what to think until he noticed that they turned the surfaceof painting into an active plane of reception for the movement of his bodyldquoI was walking back and forth not knowing how I should take thesethingsrdquo he said ldquoand then I saw my shadows across the paintingmdashmovingrdquo38 For Kaprow the surface of these paintings became a tem-poral screen reecting the viewerrsquos body in the changing environmentof the gallery Their painterly incidence was not their whiteness perse but their ability to capture the presence of the viewer as he or shestood in front of the work The viewer activated the work so that thework the viewer and the space in between all became part of the workAs Rauschenberg wrote at the time ldquoPainting relates to both art andlife Neither can be made (I try to act in that gap between the two)rdquo39

These paintings are caught between painting as an object that is func-tionally and fundamentally separate from its architectural containerand the spread of painting into a semiautonomous state somewherebetween art architecture and the viewing subject moving through theexhibition space

Rauschenberg had developed his White Paintings in dialogue with

Photograph of Pollock in hisstudio As published in AllanKaprow Essays on theBlurring of Art and Life 1993The model of Blakersquosmuseum is visible in theupper-right corner PhotoHans Namuth

90 Grey Room 13

Cage who was also at Black Mountain in the summer of 195240 Thatsummer Cage incorporated The White Paintings into his own workTheater Piece No 141 They were suspended over the heads of theaudience members at various angles as a variety of performance eventstook place beneath them These events included Rauschenberg andDavid Tudor playing piano poets MC Richards and Charles Olsonreading poetry from atop a ladder and Merce Cunningham and othersdancing through the space and around the audience It was the WhitePaintings with their environmental quality that that led Cage to write4rsquo 33 in 1952 Tudor was the original performer of the compositionwhose score was open to interpretation42 He realized it on pianoplaying it by silently opening and closing the piano lid allowing thesounds of the audience and the ambient noises of the space to becomethe work Kaprow attended one of the rst performances of 4rsquo 33 atCarnegie Hall in 1952 and was deeply affected He compared his expe-rience of 4rsquo 33 to his experience of Rauschenbergrsquos paintings Thesounds in the space chairs creaking the air condition humming peoplecoughing and clearing their throatsmdashall the ambient sounds that lledthe space of the auditoriummdashbecame foregrounded ldquoIt was like theshadows in Bob Rauschenbergrsquos picturesrdquo Kaprow recalled ldquoThat is tosay there [wa]s no marking the boundary of the artwork or the boundaryof so-called everyday life They merge[d] And we the listeners in Cagersquosconcert and the lookers at Rauschenbergrsquos pictures were the collabo-rators of the artworkrdquo43 For Kaprow Cage like Rauschenberg col-lapsed the autonomy of art by engaging the listener as collaborator ina semiautonomous space (ldquoso-called everyday liferdquo and not true every-day life) that depended upon the interaction between work spaceand subject

On his visit to Rauschenbergrsquos studio Kaprow also saw the earliestof Rauschenbergrsquos black paintings44 This series is the antipode of thesmooth matte white surfaces of the White Paintings They are allblack monochromes most painted with a high-gloss enamel soakedinto newspaper pages that were then haphazardly stuck onto the sur-face of a canvas trapped pockets of air often causing the paintingsrsquosurfaces to bulge outward repulsively At their largest they framespace as Pollockrsquos work did but as art brut walls instead of dazzlingskeins of paint One photograph of a later diptych shows the paintingsblocking the doorway to Rauschenbergrsquos studio at Black Mountain asif they were extensions of the rough-hewn stone walls on either side45

But in this next transformation of painting as wall what seems moreimportant for the direction that both Rauschenberg and Kaprow wouldfollow out of these works was their newspaper ground As Rauschenbergrsquospaintings became wall-size their art brut surface was built on the newsof the day At rst everyday events as reported in the newspaper are

Kaizen | Framed Space Allan Kaprow and the Spread of Painting 91

painted out and hidden behind the blackpaint46 As the series proceeded he allowedincreasingly more of the news to showthrough While the White Paintings engagedwith the gap between art and life by cap-turing the viewerrsquos bodymdashas did Cagersquos4rsquo 33 at least for Kaprowmdashthe black paint-ings did so by using the everyday objectas a ground Through their use of news-paper they suggested another trajectoryout of painting and into everyday spacea trajectory whose base condition was thecommodity object

In order to get into the gap between art and life Rauschenbergrsquoswork rst had to approximate the condition of being a wall It neededto assume a relation to its architectural frame in order to move awayfrom the autonomy of painting and into semiautonomy but once it didso Rauschenberg would abandon the problem of painting as wallFollowing the White Paintings and black paintings (and then a briefseries of Red Paintings) he made his rst Combines works that rein-state the autonomy of the individual art object even while they existbetween painting sculpture and the surrealist objet trouveacute47 Ratherthan engage with space Rauschenbergrsquos Combines elevate the ready-made or found object back to the status of the autonomous art objectThe Combines formalize the everyday object into an in-between statebut one that nevertheless produces singular art objects While theblack paintings led Rauschenberg back to the art object they led Kaprowfarther off the wall and out into space

| | | | |

Kaprow wrote ldquoa statementrdquo about his work sketching the trajectoryhe took from painting through collage then out into the space of thegallery48 After his initial show of paintings in 1952 he described thedevelopment of what he called ldquoaction collagerdquo These were done asquickly as possible by throwing together readily available everydaymaterials including parts of his past work tinfoil photographsnewspaper and food Although he doesnrsquot mention particular works by name presumably these action-collages include the early piecesreproduced in Assemblage Environments and Happenings In a photo-graph of Penny Arcade (1956) we see Kaprow standing in front of a largewall-size assemblage densely layered with parts of paintings scrapsof wood and large pieces of advertising signage that look like Kaproweither found them on the side of the road or appropriated them from a

Robert RauschenbergUntitled 1952

92 Grey Room 13

storefront It also included flashing lights andsounds calling out to the viewer like a ConeyIsland carnival booth but one made all the moreconfusing with its hyperarray of upside-downand fragmented word parts While collage hadbeen delicate even dainty in its appliqueacute of smallscraps of paper to the surface of the image KaprowrsquosPenny Arcade was massive and rough-hewn Unlikeits glitzier real-world counterpart Penny Arcadelooks cobbled together a temporary faccedilade brico-laged from odds and ends Here Kaprow turnedthe gallery space into the street turning the wallinto a pseudo-storefront bringing the architec-ture of the outside world into the gallery but lteredthrough the compositional strategies of collage

and abstract expressionism Abstraction before world war II had beenundertaken in a quest to find a universal Esperanto of color and form a problem that had been transformed by abstract expressionisminto a private iconography of psychic signs In Penny Arcade Kaprowturns the private symbolism of abstraction expressionism back to the world through advertising as commodity sign He makes the private symbol public again by reconnecting prendashWorld War II modelsof collective production with postndashWorld War II models of collectiveconsumption

Another work from this time further demonstrates how Kaprowused everyday materials to partition space Alternately titled (inAssemblage) Wall Kiosk and Rearrangeable Panels (1957ndash1959) thispiece looks like an enormous folding Japanese screen Measuring eightfeet high and over twenty feet long its panels are covered in eggshellsleaves and broken mirrorsmdashnot mass-produced commodities or sig-nage but detritus and waste Several of the panels are painted one inHoffmanrsquos push-pull style two seem to nod toward Rauschenberg onepainted white one black This piece is designed to sit on the oor ofthe gallery and as its various names imply it can be placed in a varietyof positions called ldquowallrdquo when arrayed in a straight line ldquokioskrdquowhen arranged into a square and ldquorearrangeable panelsrdquo in generalor when it sits in a zigzag Each position changes the relationship ofthe object to the space that contains it Kaprow recast the painting-as-wall as a transformable piece of furniture recognizing the possibilityof ludic engagement with the viewer but withholding it because theviewer is not allowed to interact with the piece directly Once installedthe work transforms the space of the gallery but it cannot be recong-ured by the viewer49

When asked why he used junk to make his work Kaprow replied

Allan Kaprow standing infront of Penny Arcade 1956Photo WF Gainfort

Kaizen | Framed Space Allan Kaprow and the Spread of Painting 93

It was clearly part of transformingreality It gave everyone a sense ofinstant involvement in a kind of crudeeveryday reality which was quite arelief after the high-art attitude ofexclusion from the real world It alsoallowed us to give up a certain kindof seriousness that traditional artmaking required Whatrsquos more thematerials were available everywhereon street corners at night And ifyou didnrsquot sell these environmentalconstructions yoursquod just throwthem back into the garbage canWhy not just throw them out It wasvery liberating to think of oneself aspart of an endlessly transformingreal world50

The ldquocrude everyday realityrdquo capturedby Penny Arcade as with Kaprowrsquos subsequent work is predicatedupon his project of capturing the ldquoendlessly transforming real worldrdquoThis statement connects him with Rauschenberg and Cage but alsoshows how their work differs in an important and crucial way InKaprowrsquos comment describing his experience of 4rsquo33 (as quoted inthe previous section) he says ldquoAnd we the listeners in Cagersquos concertand the lookers at Rauschenbergrsquos pictures were the collaborators of[sic] the artworkrdquo ending with ldquoIt was a kind of collaborative end-lessly changing affair The artwork was simply this organism that wasaliverdquo51 For Kaprow the key word here is change and in order tomove from artwork to organism the work of art must be reconsiderednot as a ldquochance operationrdquo (to use Cagersquos term) but as a change oper-ation During this time Kaprow had begun to take classes with Cageand he was exposed to Cagersquos use of chance methods of compositionWhile he would adopt much from Cagersquos work and teaching he thoughtthat change was the most important principle for his own work52

For Kaprow change was integrally connected to the postndashworld warII environment lled with mass-produced throwaway products Theart of this timemdashhis artmdashshould necessarily reect this environmentIn opposition to the nostalgic use of the objet trouveacute in surrealism hismethod was closer to the readymade choosing everyday objects to res-cue from oblivion but spreading them out in space so that they wouldenvironmentally engulf the viewer53 Kaprow temporarily revalues thethrowaway commodity in his environments to create a space where

Allan Kaprow RearrangeablePanels 1957-9 Shown intheir ldquoKioskrdquo con gurationPhoto Robert R McElroy

94 Grey Room 13

everyday life as planned obsolescence is brought under the control ofthe artist He creates a momentary space of anti-entropy in the life ofthe commodity where it is temporarily reinvested with value only to bedisposed of once the environment is destroyed54 Citing critic LawrenceAlloway on the ldquothrowawayrdquo culture of postndashworld war II AmericaKaprow goes on to describe the importance of change in his work

Change governing both reality and art has extended from theexpression of an idea arrested in a painting to a work in whichthe usually slow mutations wrought by nature are quickened andliterally made part of the experience of it they manifest the veryprocess of creation-decay-creation almost as one watches Theuse of debris waste products or very impermanent substanceslike toilet paper or bread has of course a clear range of allusionswith obvious sociological implications the simplest being theartistrsquos positive involvement on the one hand with an everydayworld and on the other with a group of objects which beingexpendable might suggest that corresponding lack of statuswhich is supposed to be the fate of anything creative todayThese choices must not be ignored for they reveal what in oursurroundings charges the imagination as well as what is mosthuman in our art55

What is ldquomost humanrdquo in Kaprowrsquos art as he denes it is its reectionof this throwaway culture This is governed not by Cagean chance butby planned obsolescence with its endless renewal of more of thesame ldquo[My] workrdquo Kaprow says ldquois intended to last only a short timeand is destroyed immediately after the exhibition If [its] obsolescenceis not planned it is expectedrdquo56 Alloway also writing on assemblagebetter describes the overlap between the throwaway object and its usein environmental art during the 1950s

The acceptance of mass-produced objects just because they arewhat is around not because they issue from idolatrised technol-ogy is central to mid-century Junk Culture Junk Culture iscity art Its source is obsolescence the throwaway material ofcities Assemblages of such material come at the spectator asbits of life bits of the environment frequently presented interms that dramatize spread ow extension trespass The junkis obtruded into our space with the aim of achieving maximumintimacy Proximity and participation replace distance and con-templation as the communicative style of the object57

So the space of Junk Culture when used in art as assemblage or envi-ronment achieves ldquomaximum intimacyrdquo with the observer throughtheir ldquoproximity and participationrdquo with the throwaway commodity

Kaizen | Framed Space Allan Kaprow and the Spread of Painting 95

As Kaprow moves farther into the space of the gallery he does so in anincreased attempt to engage the viewer He partitions the gallery spaceso that the body of the viewer becomes a product of its participationwithin the eld of the throwaway commodity

These early wall-like constructions were for Kaprow still not closeenough to a participatory art Kaprow wanted to move further towardthe creation of environments and even events to take over the gallerywith a plenitude of throwaway objects among which the viewer wouldself-consciously circulate The action collages still maintained toomuch autonomy because they existed as individual objects and so asKaprow recalled ldquonow I simply filled the whole gallery up startingfrom one wall and ending with the otherrdquo58 With his rst environmentKaprow was no longer composing within the autonomous space ofpainting but composing the entire space of the gallery Kaprowrsquos rstenvironmentmdashmade at the Hansa Gallery in November 1958mdashwasmeant to totally engage the visitors to the gallery to make them intopart of the work itself ldquopassively or actively according to [their] talentsfor lsquoengagementrsquordquo59 From a drop ceiling of wires suspended in a gridseveral inches below the galleryrsquos original ceiling he hung variousmaterials creating a labyrinthine space divided by sheets of plastictangles of cellophane Scotch tape and more including a time-releasedmist of pine-scented deodorizer His work had taken over the galleryspace lling it with a nearly impenetrable eld of throwaway objects60

Kaprow took the ood of postndashworld war II consumer goods and usedthem to compose walls that partitioned space And composemdashin thetraditional sense of arranging shapes and forms on the surface of acanvasmdashis exactly what he did

Kaprow described his use of the full space of the gallery as a eld aterm that he derives from painting calling the second section of hisldquoAssemblagerdquo essay ldquoThe Field in Paintingrdquo ldquoThis space is in part theliteral distance between all solids included in the workrdquo Kaprowwrote ldquoBut it is also a space that is a direct heritage of paintingrdquo61

Everything in the space that he produced became part of his compo-sition including the viewer Like any other object in the work Kaprowsaid ldquoin as much as people visiting [an] environment are moving col-ored shapes [they] were counted lsquoinrsquordquo62 Each visitor as they movedthrough Kaprowrsquos labyrinth became a part of the work Art and lifehad now seemingly collapsed the autonomy of painting as a separateobjectmdashframed and isolated from the rest of its environment as a spaceonly for the eyemdashhad been abandoned for an embodied experienceViewing was now dependent upon space a space full of the objects ofeveryday life Using the materials of everyday life Kaprow invited hisviewers to get rid of their distance from the art object forcing theminto physical contact with his work This work he wrote ldquoinvites us

96 Grey Room 13

to cast aside for a moment proper manners andpartake wholly in the real nature of art and (onehopes) liferdquo63 Against the look-donrsquot-touch attitude ofmuseum and gallery Kaprow created a haptic spacewhere touch became the basis of the work where vis-itors came into physical contact with his throwawayobjects In this space as visitors threaded their waythrough the labyrinth the color of their clothes andtheir presence among these objects turned them intoa part of the work The viewer appeared as anotherthing in Kaprowrsquos composition not so different fromhis throwaway materials In his environment autonomycollapsed into participation based on the reicationof the subject as an obsolete material temporally

composited into the work While Kaprow certainly intended to includehis observers in the work he could do so only by turning them intoobjects rather than active subjects He later described his own sense ofthe failure with this exhibition that he couldnrsquot seem to engage theviewer enough but blamed it on the framing space of the galleryAfterward he said ldquoI complained immediately about the fact that therewas a sense of mystery until your eye reached a wall Then there wasa dead end At that point my disagreement with the gallery spacebeganrdquo64 But Kaprow didnrsquot abandon the gallerymdashat least not yet Toget closer to the everyday Kaprow thought he should more fully incor-porate the bodies of his viewers into his work This led to the origin ofhappenings in an attempt to make viewers into active subjects to engagethem more actively in creating the work as they became part of it

| | | | |

In 1958 Kaprow had presented two other early proto-happenings oneat Rutgers called Communication and one at George Segalrsquos farmcalled Pastorale65 Communication was based on work he had devel-oped in Cagersquos class It was close to traditional theater Presented in achapel that doubled as an auditorium for theater and music perfor-mances it included movement sound and banners unfurled from thebalconies Kaprow built ldquoplastic panelsrdquo behind which he performeda series of simple actions nally hiding himself from the audience bypainting the plastic wall in front of him and so ldquopainting himself outrdquoof the audiencersquos view66 For Pastorale he built frames that looked likeabysmal theater sets stretcher bars with torn strips of canvas runningfrom top to bottom During one part of the performance artists RobertWatts and Lucas Samaras painted on either side of one of these con-structions Inserted into the landscape these performance paintings

Part of the environment Allan Kaprow created for his piece Pastorale 1958Photo Vaughn Rachel

Kaizen | Framed Space Allan Kaprow and the Spread of Painting 97

marked the boundary between event and nonevent partitioning theground into territories and framing Pastoralersquos space using once againpainting as wall Unfortunately for Kaprow Pastorale was held during apicnic and the other participants were either too drunk or just plainunwilling to follow his directions They were engaged but refused tofollow his rules of play

18 Happenings in 6 Parts which took place in October 1959 wasthe rst ofcial happening67 Kaprow divided the inside of the galleryinto three smaller contiguous rooms using wooden two-by-fours Inphotographs of the piece as it was being installed these woodenbeams can be seen framing a space within the space of the gallerymdashnot into a proscenium stage but into an environment within the largergallery space where various events would occur Instead of wood ordrywall translucent plastic sheeting created the walls so that actioncould be partially seen from one room to the next Each room was litwith different colored lights and in each room where the audiencewas forced to sit and observe the action a group of actors movedthrough tightly scripted but simple routines as sounds came in and outand lms were projected

On the program the audience is listed under the ldquoCast of Participantsrdquowritten into the performance itself and actively engaged but only asthe subject of direction and authorial control At specific intervalsbells rang and the audience was required to change seats and to switchrooms based on instruction cards they had been given when they enteredthe gallery before the performance Kaprow had realized with his HansaGallery environment that he needed to give his viewers increasedresponsibility but he also realized that relinquishing too much con-trol could be a disaster as it had been in Pastorale As with his previ-ous work his goal with 18 Happenings was the ldquointegration of allelementsmdashenvironment constructed sections time space and peoplerdquoand the audience was once again included as just another material inhis composition68

During the fifth part of 18 Happenings one sequence of actionsseems to reveal Kaprowrsquos relationship with painting the viewer and space Kaprow had built a construction he called the ldquothe sandwich manrdquo named after its everyday counterparts paid to walkaround the city streets as human billboards Kaprowrsquos sandwich

Left The construction of thespace used for Allan Kaprowrsquos18 Happenings in 6 Parts1958

Right A view of Allan Kaprowrsquos18 Happenings whereRearrangeable Panels is partially visible on the leftThe in-set canvas panel onwhich actors painted live as part of the performance is shown at center PhotoScott Hyde

98 Grey Room 13

man was barely humanoidan automaton with forward-and backward-pointing mir-rors for a body bicycle wheelsfor feet and a gallon bucketof enamel paint for a headSticking out in front was apiece of wood for an arm end-ing in a hand that held cardslabeled ldquoXrdquo and ldquo3rdquo the adver-

tising handbill reduced to its zero degree In the middle of the sand-wich man hidden on a shelf between the two mirrors was a recordplayer and projecting out from behind it were two handles so that itcould be wheeled around the rooms As the sandwich man was wheeledfrom one room to another its mirrored body reflected the audienceback onto themselves their image taking the place of what would havebeen an advertisement They were reected not as participatory viewersnot even as active objects as in his environment but as passive objectsnow totally reied their image produced as a reection of Junk CultureHere in Brechtian fashion using a literal ldquoframing effectrdquo Kaprowturned his previous use of the viewer back into a critique of the eventitself In reecting the audiencersquos passivity back to them he forced amoment of recognition of their complicity in the production of thework They could see that as they became an ad on the sandwich manrsquosbelly so they became throwaway objects in his composition By reduc-ing the spectator to the general equivalence of these objects Kaprowrecognized the subject of the postndashWorld War II period as a product ofplanned obsolescence and consumer culture

Following this as the sandwich man was wheeled through the secondroom and into the third two men stood up from their seats one in eachroom Each took up a brush and a can of paint and approached oppo-site sides of one of the plastic walls simultaneously painting on a sec-tion of canvas set among the plastic walls and so turning the wall backinto a painting69 The canvas was left unprimed so that the simple gures that each artist painted (one was supposed to paint lines theother circles) would bleed through and so would be immediately visibleon the opposite side each mark responding to that of their partner Asin his two earlier happenings painting is done live before an audienceon a wall Kaprow showed the audience that when painting becomeswall it functions only to put space on display Here painting as a sin-gular art object was meaningless It became a throwaway stage propand so became a demonstration of how painting as object was part ofthe larger environment in which it resides The limit condition of paint-ing as wall with viewer as spectator was the gallery as frame70

The sandwich man part ofKaprowrsquos 18 HappeningsPhoto Scott Hyde

Kaizen | Framed Space Allan Kaprow and the Spread of Painting 99

What this sequence from 18 Happenings reveals is that Kaprow hadan acute sense of the way in which the gallery as frame produces sub-ject and space together He undermined the normal function of the artgallery turning both viewer and art object into Junk Culture Throwawayviewers throwaway paintings and throwaway rooms turned the galleryspacemdasha space designed to be neutral to hide itself as the objects itcontains become the sole focus of the viewerrsquos concentrationmdashinto thelocus of planned obsolescence With the creation of happeningsKaprow used Junk Culture against the doxa of gallery space upsettingthe common sense of what a space for art is and what it does Afterhappenings the paradoxical logic of the gallery as a site for both theprivate contemplation of singular aesthetic objects as well as the pub-lic transaction of luxury goods had been (however temporarily) sub-verted In asserting the gallery space as the limit condition of paintingKaprow framed the institution as the ground of artistic production

In ldquoThe Legacy of Jackson Pollockrdquo Kaprow says ldquoPollock left us atthe point where we must become preoccupied with and even dazzled by the space and objects of our everyday liferdquo71 In ldquoAssemblageEnvironments Happeningsrdquo bridging the gap between his early andlater work he concludes ldquothis has brought sharply into focus that theroom has always been a frame or format toordquo72 Kaprowrsquos collapse ofautonomy via art into lifemdashthat environments and happenings wouldldquopartake wholly in the real nature of art and (one hopes) liferdquomdashwasonly ever a hope as he himself knew If painting had used the frameas the delimitation of a eld for composition then environments andhappenings turned the gallery into the limit condition of this fieldWhile he tried to get closer to everyday life by making art he inevitablypushed it further away This ambivalence toward the collapse of artand life runs throughout Kaprowrsquos work even as he moved out of thegallery and into everyday life following his early work with his laterldquoactivitiesrdquo The early work was even by his own estimation more adisplay of experience and not a fair representation of actual everydayexperience But this is precisely where the importance of this work liesKaprowrsquos environments and happenings extended Rauschenbergrsquossemiautonomous gap so far that they turned the screw one notchhigher autonomy returning not though the sublation of art into archi-tecture but through the medium of framed space

100 Grey Room 13

NotesThanks to the generosity and insight of Karen Kurczynski John Harwood SethMcCormick Jaleh Mansoor Beth Hinderliter Vered Maimon Benjamin Buchloh andBarry Bergdoll as well as Branden Joseph and the Editors of Grey Room

1 Brian OrsquoDoherty Inside the White Cube The Ideology of the Gallery Space(Berkeley and Los Angeles University of California Press 1999) 15

2 It was originally called ldquoPainting Environments Happeningsrdquo and publishedin a condensed form in the catalog for the exhibition New FormsmdashNew Media I at the Martha Jackson Gallery New York the rst uptown show of Kaprow and his con-temporaries It was changed to ldquoAssemblage Environments and Happeningsrdquo for nalpublication Kaprow changed the title to incorporate the recent acceptance of the termassemblage It had been used rst by Helen Comstock to describe the work of ArthurDove in the 1920s but remained obscure until Jean Dubuffet popularized its use in 1953The term as used by Dubuffet was then adopted by William Seitz for his exhibitionThe Art of Assemblage at the Museum of Modern Art See Allan Kaprow AssemblageEnvironments and Happenings (New York Harry N Abrams 1966) 150ndash208 NewFormsmdashNew Media I (New York Martha Jackson Gallery 1960) np and RogerShattuck ldquoIntroduction How Collage Became Assemblagerdquo Essays on Assemblage(New York Museum of Modern Art 1992) 119

3 ldquoWhen I am in my painting Irsquom not aware of what Irsquom doingrdquo said PollockJackson Pollock Jackson Pollock Interviews Articles Reviews ed Pepe Karmel (NewYork Museum of Modern Art 1999) 17ndash18

4 Yard was Kaprowrsquos contribution to the exhibition Environments SituationsSpaces at the Martha Jackson Gallery a follow up to New FormsndashNew Media (see n 2)

5 ldquoAllan Kaprow and Robert Watts Interviewed by Sidney Simonrdquo in Benjamin HDBuchloh and Judith F Rodenbeck Experiments in the Everyday Allan Kaprow andRobert Watts Events Objects Documents (New York Wallach Art Gallery 1999) 76

6 To cite but one example of many Thomas Hirschhorn is an artist who continuesto extend and develop Kaprowrsquos legacy today

7 On Kaprow and performance see Amelia Jones Body Art Performing the Subject(Minneapolis University of Minnesota Press 1998) 56ndash57 Paul Schimmel ldquoLeap intothe Void Performance and the Objectrdquo in Out of Actions Between Performance andthe Object 1949ndash1979 ed Paul Schimmel (New York Thames and Hudson 1998)59ndash63

8 The relationship between painting and space had been explored before partic-ularly in the period between the two world wars by the artists associated with De Stijland constructivism For more on De Stijl see Nancy Troy The De Stijl Environment(Cambridge MIT Press 1983) On constructivism see Yve-Alain Bois ldquoEl LissitzkyRadical Reversibilityrdquo Art in America 76 no 4 (April 1988) 161ndash181 and Yve-AlainBois ldquoMaterial Utopiasrdquo Art in America 79 no 6 (June 1991) 98ndash107 Another Europeanwho explored the everyday object painting and space was Kurt Schwitters in the various incarnation of his Merzbau See Elizabeth Burns Gamard Kurt SchwittersrsquoMerzbau The Cathedral of Erotic Misery (New York Princeton Architectural Press2000) Two other important precursors who bridge the European and American con-text are Lazlo Moholy-Nagy and Friedrick Kiesler For information on Moholy-Nagyrsquosearly environmental projects as well as those of Lissitzy see Joan Ockman ldquoThe RoadNot Taken Alexander Dornerrsquos Way Beyond Artrdquo in Autonomy and Ideology Positioningan Avant-Garde in America ed RE Somol (New York Monicelli Press 1997) For

Kaizen | Framed Space Allan Kaprow and the Spread of Painting 101

information on Kiesler see RL Held Endless Innovations Frederick Kieslerrsquos Theoryand Scenic Design (Ann Arbor UMI Research Press 1982) Lisa Phillips FrederickKiesler (New York The Whitney Museum of American Art 1989) Brian OrsquoDohertydraws out the connections between the prendash and postndashWorld War II manifestations ofthis relationship in Inside the White Cube

9 For Benjamin the work of art attains autonomy under modernism with theemergence of art for artrsquos sake This autonomy is then usurped by mechanical repro-duction See Walter Benjamin ldquoThe Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproductionrdquoin Illuminations ed Hanna Arendt (New York Harcourt Brace and Jovanovich Inc1968) p 224-226 For Greenberg as the above quote indicates the autonomy of artcontinues even in the face of mechanization See Clement Greenberg ldquoTowards a NewerLaocoonrdquo Perceptions and Judgments 1939ndash1944 vol 1 of Clement Greenberg TheCollected Essays and Criticism ed John OrsquoBrien (Chicago University of Chicago1986) p 32

10 Rosalind Krauss uses the term ldquopost-medium conditionrdquo to designate ldquomixed-media installationrdquo work done today While Krauss argues that only the most signi-cant artists working since the 1960s reassert the medium in their work against thegeneral postmedium condition I believe that all mixed-media installation work operates using the gallery or institution as medium See Rosalind Krauss ldquoA Voyageon the North Seardquo Art in the Age of the Post-Medium Condition (New York Thamesand Hudson 1999) for her comments on a specic contemporary artist and the rein-vention of the medium see Rosalind Krauss ldquo And Then Turn Awayrdquo An Essayon James Colemanrdquo October 81 (Summer 1997) 5ndash33

11 Allan Kaprow ldquoThe Legacy of Jackson Pollockrdquo Art News 57 no 6 (October1958) 24ndash26 55ndash57 reprinted in Allan Kaprow Essays on the Blurring of Art andLife ed Jeff Kelley (Berkeley and Los Angles University of California Press 1993) 1ndash9 Kaprow has stated that the essay was written in 1956 in ldquoAllan Kaprow andRobert Watts Interviewed by Sidney Simonrdquo 77 Kaprow had been a student of bothHans Hoffman and Meyer Schapiro

12 Harold Rosenberg ldquoThe American Action Paintersrdquo Art News 52 (December1952) 22ndash23 In a footnote that Rosenberg added when the article was republished aspart of his book of collected essays in 1959 he added the following ldquoAction Paintinghas extracted the element of decision inherent in all art in that the work is not fin-ished at its beginning but has to be carried forward by an accumulation of lsquorightrsquo ges-tures In a word Action Painting is the abstraction of the moral element in art itsmark is moral tension in detachment from moral or esthetic certainties and it judgesitself morally in declaring that picture to be worthless which is not the incorporationof a genuine struggle one which could at any point have been lostrdquo Harold RosenbergThe Tradition of the New (New York Horizon Press 1959) 33ndash34 Kaprow recountsthe influence of Rosenbergrsquos essay on his work in ldquoAllan Kaprow and Robert WattsInterviewed by Sidney Simonrdquo 77

13 There were five all told They were held as follows 5ndash23 January 1948 24Januaryndash12 February 1949 21 Novemberndash10 December 1949 28 Novemberndash16 December1950 26 Novemberndash15 December 1951 These shows had a remarkable resonance onethat extended beyond even the insular New York art world when after the secondexhibition Life magazine published the feature article ldquoJackson Pollock Is He theGreatest Living Painter in the United Statesrdquo Dorothy Sieberling Life (August 81949) 42ndash45

14 Allan Kaprow ldquoThe Legacy of Jackson Pollockrdquo in Kaprow Essays on the

102 Grey Room 13

Blurringrdquo 615 Kaprow uses both the terms scale and size to describe Pollockrsquos work but as

TJ Clark has shown these are two very different terms and Pollock is a painter of sizeand not scale For Clark it is size that engages the body ldquoNormally speaking size isliteralmdasha matter of actual physical intuition It involves grasping how big or small acertain object really is most likely in relation to the size of the grasperrsquos upright body oroutspread armsrdquo TJ Clark ldquoPollockrsquos Smallnessrdquo in Jackson Pollock New Approachesed Kirk Varnedoe and Pepe Karmel (New York Museum of Modern Art 1999) 15

16 Kaprow ldquoThe Legacy of Jackson Pollockrdquo Essays on the Blurring 617 In most of his work the paint engages with the edge of the canvas emphasizing

and bordering it and not continuing around it as if the canvas had been cut down fromsome innite expanse Kaprow claims otherwise by singling out the exceptions sayingldquo[H]is art gives the impression of going on forever [T]hough evidence points to aslackening of the attack as Pollock came to the edges of many of his canvases in thebest ones he compensated for this by tacking much of the painted surface around theback of his stretchersrdquo Kaprow ldquoThe Legacy of Jackson Pollockrdquo Essays on the Blurringof Art and Life 5 An examination of the paintings shows that more often Pollockstopped before the edge or reworked his compositions after they were stretched sothat they reengaged with the edge even when cut from larger canvas Kaprow claimsotherwise because it furthers his arguments that Pollockrsquos paintings emerge into thespace of the viewer

18 Jackson Pollock ldquoApplication for a Guggenheim Fellowship 1947rdquo in JacksonPollock Interviews 17 The inuence of Greenberg at this time is discussed in StevenNaifeh and Gregory White Smith Jackson Pollock An American Saga (Aiken SCWoodwardWhite 1989) 551 Pollock had also engaged with wall-size painting duringhis association with Joseacute Clemente Orozco and in earlier work such as Mural(1943ndash1944) painted for Peggy Guggenheimrsquos house

19 Greenbergrsquos version of modernism was most fully laid out only in 1959 andpublished in 1960 ldquoIt was the stressing of the ineluctable atness of the surface thatremained however more fundamental than anything else to the process by whichpictorial art criticized and defined itself under Modernism For flatness alone wasunique and exclusive to pictorial art Because flatness was the only conditionpainting shared with no other art Modernist painting oriented itself to atness as itdid to nothing elserdquo In Clement Greenberg ldquoModernist Paintingrdquo in Modernism witha Vengeance 1957ndash1969 vol 4 of Clement Greenberg The Collected Essays andCriticism ed John OrsquoBrien (Chicago University of Chicago Press 1993) 87

20 Clement Greenberg ldquoThe Situation at the Momentrdquo in Arrogant Purpose1945ndash1949 vol 2 of Clement Greenberg The Collected Essays and Criticism ed JohnOrsquoBrien (Chicago University of Chicago 1986) 194ndash195

21 See Greenberg ldquoTowards a Newer Laocoonrdquo throughout22 Eric Lum has done extensive work on the relationship between abstract expres-

sionism and architecture The analysis in this essay follows from his especially whereBlakersquos project is concerned but also expands on it As he jumps from Blake to PhilipJohnson and Mark Rothkorsquos Houston Chapel however Lum misses the importance ofother interventions between painting and architecture such as those made by KaprowThis is evident when he says ldquoThrough this marriage of mural and wall paintingcould become fully integrated into architecture an idealized conjecture nor realizeduntil Mark Rothkorsquos 1971 Houston Chapelrdquo Eric Lum ldquoPollockrsquos Promise Toward anAbstract Expressionist Architecturerdquo Assemblage 39 (August 1999) 68

Kaizen | Framed Space Allan Kaprow and the Spread of Painting 103

23 Blake said of his visit to Pollockrsquos studio ldquoIt was a very sunny day and thesun was shining on the paintings I felt like I was standing in the Hall of Mirrors atVersailles It was a dazzling incredible sightrdquo Naifeh and Smith 588

24 Peter Blake No Place like Utopia Modern Architecture and the Company WeKept (New York Knopf 1993) 111ndash112

25 Miesrsquos museum plan was designed at the request of the editors at ArchitecturalForum who had been publishing a series of articles ldquoto show how building might beimproved through fuller and more imaginative use of existing resourcesrdquo They requesteddesigns for a variety of buildings that could be placed in a hypothetical city of 70000inhabitants ldquoNew Buildings for 194Xrdquo Architectural Forum 78 no 5 (May 1943)69ndash85 The Barcelona Pavilion was built in 1929 for the Barcelona Universal Expositionand was destroyed when the fair ended It was subsequently rebuilt in 1981ndash86

26 Peter Blake Mies van der Rohe (New York Pelican 1960) 54 It is worth notingthat like Miesrsquos use of the Kolbe sculpture Blake had Pollock actually make smallwire sculptures splattered with paint miniatures of sculptures that Blake hopedPollock would make for the actual museum Pollock himself was experimenting withsculpture around this time building three-dimensional forms out of papier-macirccheacutethat he then splattered with paint

27 Blakersquos collage space follows from Miesrsquos The production of collages as in situmodels for Miesrsquos buildings had begun in the twenties with his work for the journal Gin association with Dadaists such as Hans Richter Neil Levine notes this creation ofa collage space in Mies particularly in the Pavilion and the Museum for a Small Cityin relation to his use of reection to layer one surface on top of another Neil LevineldquolsquoThe Signicance of Factsrsquo Miesrsquo Collages Up Close and Personalrdquo Assemblage 37(December 1998) 71ndash101

28 Blake designed his museum just as Philip Johnson was building his Glass Housewhere they both spent considerable time while planning exhibitions for the Museumof Modern Art Johnsonrsquos inuence is also evident in Blakersquos design Blake No Placelike Utopia 149ndash155

29 Arthur Drexler ldquoUnframed Space A Museum for Jackson Pollackrsquos [sic] PaintingsrdquoInteriors and Industrial Design 109 no 6 (January 1950) 90ndash91 The article was partof a special issue whose theme was ldquoInteriors to Comerdquo a recurring topic that wasmeant ldquoto show the direction in which some of our best designers are goingrdquo The termunframed space was used several times in reference to Pollockrsquos work as the title oftwo articles Drexlerrsquos and one published slightly later by Berton Rouecheacute ThoughRouecheacute in an interview in To a Violent Grave says that Lee Krasner used the phraserst Charles Pollock says that Blake was the origin of the term The fact that Drexlerrsquosarticle was written and published earlier seems to conrm this See Berton RouecheacuteldquoUnframed Spacerdquo in Jackson Pollock Interviews 18ndash19 and Jeffrey Potter To aViolent Grave (New York Pushcart Press 1985) 126

30 Drexler 9031 Blake No Place like Utopia 113ndash11432 Blake completed construction on his ldquoPinwheel Houserdquo in 1952 It is a small

beach house that he designed for himself and his family in South Hampton on NewYorkrsquos Long Island Situated on the beach the house is square in plan and its fourexterior walls slide horizontally outward each in a successive clockwise directionrevealing glass walls When the exterior walls are fully extended and the house isviewed from above it forms a shape like a pinwheel Opening the exterior wallsreveals an ever-changing view of the landscape outside turning the ocean and the

104 Grey Room 13

dunes into the picturesque framing them so that they entirely ll the space of the walland put its surface in motion Blake had discussed with Pollock the possibility of hispainting the sliding walls so that his paintings would be superimposed over the land-scape Pollock considered it but Blake couldnrsquot come up with the commission moneythat Pollock asked for They never finalized their plans and it was never clear howthe panels were to be painted Blake suggested that they might be made of glass so hebought the sheet of glass that Pollock used to paint Number 29 1950 (1950) the paintingthat Hans Namuth lmed from underneath for his documentary on Pollock His col-laboration with Blake did lead to one commission a mural-size canvas done for ahouse designed by Marcel Breuer Untitled (Mural) (1950) Shortly after his collabo-ration with Blake Pollock began another unrealized architectural project this onewith Alfonso Ossorio and Tony Smith for a church designed by Smith with murals byPollock For more on all of this see Blake No Place like Utopia 114ndash118 Naifeh andSmith 649 and Lum ldquoPollockrsquos Promiserdquo 68 85ndash88

33 Lum ldquoPollockrsquos Promiserdquo 67ndash6834 A few pages down from Drexlerrsquos article on the Pollock Museum in Interiors

and Industrial Design was another architectural response to the same problem OlgaGueftrsquos article ldquoThe Museumrsquos Oasisrdquo describes another museum this one by Gyorgyand Juliet Kepes ldquoThe Kepesesrdquo it begins ldquoare not exactly opposed to museumsrdquo how-ever it would seem that they were opposed to museums containing works of artReplacing the art objects entirely the Kepeses substituted shells driftwood plantsand animals Instead of a natural history museum they proposed a modern-dayWunderkammerwhere natural forms take the place of art as objects for contemplationldquoThe proposed galleryrdquo they declared ldquowould bridge the gap between the art museumwhich is concerned with man-made beauty and the natural history museum whichis preoccupied with nature but not particularly with naturersquos beautyrdquo Gyorgy KepesrsquosThe New Landscape exhibition at MIT a year later in 1951 (the same years as theIndependent Grouprsquos similar exhibition Growth and Form in London) and the pub-lication that followed The New Landscape in Art and Sciencewould ultimately realizethis project with blown-up photographs of natural forms (cells shells and electronmicrographs) in place of actual objects

The Kepeses seem to have taken the next logical step beyond Blake proposing aneven more radical rethinking of the wall-size work of art Eliminating the need for theartist altogether they found abstract forms in nature and turned their reproductionsinto what would elsewhere have been works of art By turning the art object into scientic vision The Kepeses proposed its total instrumentation Autonomous abstractpainting was transformed into its instrumental other a mechanically reproduced science of vision Rather than turn art into interior design The Kepesesrsquo replacementof abstract painting recast the status of scientic technology into that of high art SeeOlga Gueft ldquoThe Museumrsquos Oasisrdquo Interiors and Industrial Design 109 no 6 (January1950) 100ndash103 and Gyorgy Kepes The New Landscape in Art and Science (ChicagoPaul Theobald and Co 1956)

35 Kaprow stated that it was ldquoIn 1949 [that] I saw an exhibition of [Pollockrsquos] workfor the rst timerdquo ldquoInterviewrdquo in Allan Kaprow (Pasadena Pasadena Art Museum1967) 7

36 See Kaprow ldquoThe Legacy of Jackson Pollockrdquo Art News 25 and Kaprow ldquoTheLegacy of Jackson Pollockrdquo Essays on the Blurring 3

37 Joan Marter ldquoThe Forgotten Legacy Happenings Pop Art and Fluxus at RutgersUniversityrdquo in Off Limits Rutgers University and the Avant-Garde 1957ndash1963 ed Joan

Kaizen | Framed Space Allan Kaprow and the Spread of Painting 105

Marter (Newark The Newark Museum 1999) 438 Marter 13239 Quoted in John Cage Silence (Middletown Wesleyan University Press 1961) 10540 Branden Joseph has developed the link between Cage and Rauschenberg in several

recent essays See Branden W Joseph ldquoJohn Cage and the Architecture of SilencerdquoOctober 81 (Summer 1997) 81ndash104 and Branden Joseph ldquoWhite on Whiterdquo CriticalInquiry 27 no 1 (Summer 2001) 90ndash121

41 For Cage on Rauschenberg see Cage Silence98ndash108 For his description ofTheater Piece No 1 see ldquoInterview with John Cagerdquo in Happenings and Other Actsed Mariellen R Sandford (New York Routledge 1995) 53 Cage subsequently referredto Theater Piece No 1 as ldquothe rst happeningrdquo See John Cage ldquoAn AutobiographicalStatementrdquo Southwest Review 76 no 1 (Winter 1991) 65

42 The score itself has had various incarnations It wasnrsquot published until 1960and in this version includes a note wherein Cage describes the rst performance byTudor For more on 4rsquo33 and its various scores see Liz Kotz ldquoWords on Paper NotNecessarily Meant to Be Read as Art Postwar Media Poetics from Cage to Warholrdquo(PhD diss Columbia University 2002) 83ndash115 Kotz follows a different lineage outof Cage and into performance and happenings than the one traced in this essay

43 Marter 13244 Walter Hopps in the first survey catalog of Rauschenbergrsquos early work does

not name the black paintings as a group as he does the White Paintings He calls themeach Untitled followed by a description in brackets Hopps notes of the largest ofthese works that ldquoThese paintings with a greater vastness and ambiguity of scale thanother Rauschenberg works relate to spatial qualities of Jackson Pollockrdquo HoppsRobert Rauschenberg The Early 1950s (Houston Houston Fine Art Press 1991) 67This convention was also followed in Rauschenbergrsquos 1997 Guggenheim retrospectivecatalog and is followed in this essay Robert Rauschenberg A Retrospective ed WalterHopps and Susan Davidson (New York Solomon R Guggenheim Museum 1997)

45 The piece is called Untitled [two black panels] (1953) Hopps Robert Rauschenberg99

46 Helen Molesworth notes the importance of Rauschenbergrsquos newspaper groundin the black paintings and develops this problem in relation to the abject body as it isfurther pursued in his work throughout the 1950s Helen Molesworth ldquoBefore BedrdquoOctober 63 (Winter 1993) 68ndash82

47 Asked about this work Rauschenberg said ldquoI called them combines I had tocoin that word because I got so bored with arguments I was interested in people seeingmy work When someone would come up and I really wanted to know what they thoughtof it or wanted to sense the exposure there was always this screen that they could getbehind which was if I said lsquoIt is paintingrsquo they would say lsquoThatrsquos not painting Thatrsquossculpturersquo And they thought this was very interestingrdquo Jeanne Siegel ArtwordsDiscourse on the 60s and 70s (New York DaCapo 1985) 153

48 Allan Kaprow ldquoa Statementrdquo in Happenings An Illustrated Anthology edMichael Kirby (New York EP Dutton and Co 1965) 44ndash45

49 Benjamin Buchloh notes the importance of play in the 1950s and its link toconsumer culture During the 1950s he writes ldquoa theory of games would remerge asa cultural project at the very moment of an ever-increasing instrumentalization oflibidinal desire through consumer culturerdquo Benjamin HD Buchloh ldquoRobert WattsInanimate ObjectsmdashInanimate Subjectsrdquo in Buchloh and Rodenbeck Experiments inthe Everyday 25 n 4

Kaizen | Framed Space Allan Kaprow and the Spread of Painting 85

and that the tendency of modern painting was not to become at butto spread out into space19 While Greenberg would come to deny theimplications of this idea by the 1960s he said in a 1948 article onPollockrsquos work

After all easel painting is on the way out There is a persistenturge as persistent as it is largely unconscious to go beyond thecabinet picture which is destined to occupy only a spot on the wallto a kind of picture that without actually becoming identifiedwith the wall like a mural would spread over it and acknowl-edge its physical reality I do not know whether there is anythingin modern architecture itself that explicitly invites this tendencyBut it is a fact that abstract painting shows a greater and greaterreluctance for the small frame-enclosed format Abstract paintingbeing at needs greater extension of surface on which to developits ideas than does the old three-dimensional easel painting andit seems to become trivial when conned within anything mea-suring less than two feet by two20

Here we see even in the critic best known for his call for the separa-tion of painting from other art forms that already within abstractexpressionism lay the seeds of its dissolution into the space of archi-tecture For Greenberg this was a drive to be repressed Painting couldsurvive in the end only if it were to maintain its autonomy from theother arts21 Nevertheless he clearly recognized that with this lay thepossibility of its dissolution into an impure state a state where theframing space of the work becomes as important as the work itselfWhat Greenberg recognized in Pollockrsquos work and what Kaprow extrap-olated out of it was the relationship between painting and the spacethat contains it What Greenbergrsquos recognition amounted to forKaprow but also for many artists who followed was the end of paint-ing in a particular sense with the end of easel painting in abstractexpressionism as painting became a wall it was no longer a windowPainting as wall is not a window to be looked through but a thing to belooked at an object in the way some thing in space rather than a trans-parent surface

| | | | |

Leading up to the exhibitions of wall-size paintings at the Betty ParsonsGallery and key to their development was the dialogue betweenPollock and architect Peter Blake22 Blake had visited Pollockrsquos studioin 1949 Pollock had only recently begun his series of drip paintingsand had been using an old barn behind his house which was morespacious than the upstairs room in the house he had previously used

86 Grey Room 13

Seeing all of the paintings on the walls andoor of the barn elicited an intense reactionin Blake The paintings seemed both trans-parent and reective dissolving the walls ofthe barn as if they captured the misty land-scape of the bay outside and also because ofPollockrsquos use of aluminum paint reectingthe light streaming in through the windowslike enormous mirrors23 Blakersquos experiencewas central to his design for a small museummeant to house Pollockrsquos work Blake recalled

I designed a large somewhat abstractldquoexhibitrdquo of his workmdasha kind of ldquoIdealMuseumrdquo in which his paintings were

suspended between the earth and the sky and set between mir-rored walls so as to extend into infinity Beyond these floatingcanvases would be the marshes and the inlets of The Springsmdashthe relentlessly horizontal landscape of that end of Long Island24

Blakersquos ldquoIdeal Museumrdquo was indebted to Ludwig Mies van der Rohewhose Barcelona Pavilion and Museum for a Small City project formedthe basis of his design25 In Blakersquos monograph on Mies he expressedhis admiration for the Barcelona Pavilion and noted that it suggested anew direction for the integration of art and architecture ldquoThe resultingcompositionrdquo he said referring to the sculpture by Georg Kolbe as it was framed by the walls in the Pavilionrsquos enclosed courtyard ldquohasbecome a favorite example of those who advocate collaboration betweenarchitects on the one hand and sculptors and painters on the other[The Kolbe sculpture] does suggest that there may be other and betterways towards integration of the artsrdquomdashways that Blake would furtherpursue in his Pollock Museum26

As in Miesrsquos project for a Museum for a Small City the exterior wallsof Blakersquos Pollock Museum were to be made entirely of glass No inte-rior walls would be interposed between the art and the landscape outside The art became the walls Paintings were to be hung on free-standing walls no bigger than the work itself so that only the art itselfwould be visible oating in space with other works of art juxtaposedagainst it and with the exterior environment as a background Blakeunframes the work of art pulling it out of its usual relationship withthe wall where it would normally sit enclosed in a traditional framereframing it to create a collaged space one where works of art are seentogether overlapping one another as the viewer moves through themuseum27 Blake attempted to replicate the relationships between theviewer and the art object that Miesrsquos Pavilion and Museum had embodied

Top Jackson Pollock andPeter Blake looking at themodel of Blakesrsquos museumdesign on display at theBetty Parsonrsquos Gallery Photo Ben Schultz

Bottom Georg Kolbe DerMorgen 1925 Shown housedin Mies van der RoheBarcelona Pavilion 1928ndash29Photo Berliner Bild-Bericht

Kaizen | Framed Space Allan Kaprow and the Spread of Painting 87

the removal of the traditional framing device (the picture frame) for anoverlapping frame of collaged space the collapse of outside and insideand the reection back onto the viewer of their somatic viewing expe-rience Like Mies Blake adopted the materials of modern distraction(plate glass in particular) and combined them with an open plan inorder to create an interior that would use the glass curtain wall to offerrespite from the city street and the speed of modernity28

The only substantive article published on the Pollock Museum atthe time was Arthur Drexlerrsquos ldquoUnframed Spacerdquo29 The title camefrom Blakersquos own assessment that his project would realize the unlim-ited extension of Pollockrsquos marks into a total environment Drexlerconcludes his short essay with words that are similar to Blakersquos ownassessment of Mies ldquoThe Project suggests a re-integration of paintingand architecture wherein painting is the architecture but this timewithout message or content Its sole purpose is to heighten our expe-rience of spacerdquo30 Contrary to Drexlerrsquos title Pollockrsquos paintings arerendered secondary to their use in framing space It is the space of thegallery that submits them to its formal logic In Blakersquos Museum theart is secondary to the space that contains it

Blakersquos Museum conates both of Miesrsquos projects from which it wasprimarily derived By using abstract paintings Blake was able to fillhis museum with art while simultaneously returning these large-sizeabstractions directly to the wall Pollockrsquos painting functions like thestone cladding on the central wall in the Barcelona Pavilion as a dec-orative surface Pollock recognized the reduction inherent in Blakersquosproject saying to him after the design was done ldquoThe trouble is youthink I am a decoratorrdquo Blakersquos reply was telling ldquoOf course I thinkhis paintings might make terric walls After all architects spend a lotof time thinking about wallsrdquo31 What kept Pollock from working directlyon the wall and what Blake as an architect recognized immediatelywas that when painting became a wall or approached this conditionthrough wall size its autonomy was destroyed It approached the

Interiors (January 1950) featuring Blakersquos Pollockmuseum

88 Grey Room 13

status of interior decoration and that was the wayBlake wanted itmdashPollock reduced to ldquoterrific wallsrdquoHe even tried to commission Pollock to paint panelsfor the moving walls of the Pinwheel House his nextproject so that when they slid shut the housersquos inte-rior would be enclosed in Pollocks surrounded bypainted wallpaper32 The paintings as walls are sub-mitted to the logic of Blakersquos architecture He destroysthe autonomy of Pollockrsquos paintings only to sublatethem into the autonomy of modernist architecturerealizing Pollockrsquos fear of turning his work into meredecoration Blakersquos project asserts architecture over

painting As painting becomes wall it is sublated into the autonomousmodernist space of Miesian architecture Pollockrsquos work is turned intoa decorative surface into an interior design for a modernist space

The Pollock Museum was never built but not because either Pollockor Blake had second thoughts Despite any misgivings that Pollock hadwith this project the model was exhibited at Betty Parsons Gallery in1949 and afterward the model remained in Pollockrsquos studio promi-nently displayed in case he could convince a visiting collector to helpfinance its construction At his next exhibition with Betty Parson in1950 the paintings were made to be the same height and almost thesame length of the walls on which they hung so that they would comeas close as possible to realizing Blakersquos design within the more tradi-tional gallery setting33

If Blakersquos project misrepresented Pollock this was only to the extentthat Pollock had already acknowledged the tendency of painting atwall size to become an object What Blakersquos project makes clear is thatwhen paintings became wall-size or as they literally became wallsthey lost their capacity to create an autonomous space divorced fromcontext While it took an architect initially to realize such a possibilityartists soon followed suit34

It is likely that Kaprow saw the 1949 exhibition of Pollockrsquos workwhich included the model for Blakersquos Museum Although in his writ-ings on Pollock he doesnrsquot mention the Museum in an interview from1967 he claimed to have rst seen a Pollock exhibition in 194935 Thiswould mean that he had seen the show at the Betty Parsons Gallerywith the model on display The model for the museum is also clearlyvisible in the photographs of Pollock working in his studio that illus-trate both the original publication of Kaprowrsquos ldquoThe Legacy of JacksonPollockrdquo and (much later) his collection of essays The Blurring of Artand Life36 Kaprow also explicitly referenced the subsequent Pollockexhibition with its wall-size works when he discussed the all-overeld Pollockrsquos work created in the space of the gallery But along with

Photograph of Pollock in hisstudio As published in Allan Kaprow ldquoThe Legacy ofJackson Pollockrdquo in Art News(October 1958) The model of Blakersquos museum is visiblein the upper-left cornerPhoto Rudy Burckhardt

Kaizen | Framed Space Allan Kaprow and the Spread of Painting 89

Pollock and Blake Kaprow also engagedwith the work of Robert Rauschenbergand John Cage two artists who had asmuch impact on his thinking about spaceas Pollock

| | | | |

In the fall of 1951 when Kaprow visitedRauschenbergrsquos studio he saw the WhitePaintings37 Rauschenberg had made theseworks during the previous summer at BlackMountain College Like Blake Rauschenberg also engaged space usingpainting but he did so as an artist not as an architect Yet rather thanreassert the autonomy of painting he established a semiautonomousspace for painting The White Paintings are a series of works paintedat matte white with no visible marks to attract the viewerrsquos eye WhileBlake submitted the autonomy of Pollockrsquos painting to the logic of hisarchitecture upholding the autonomy of modernist space in favor ofarchitecture over art Rauschenberg was far more ambivalent about thepossibility of autonomy for either art or architecture The White Paintingsexist between the two as semiautonomous objectsmdashnot quite wall notquite paintingmdashand certainly not like their nearest precursor abstractexpressionist painting with its ood of gesture and mark The WhitePaintings in their utter blankness call attention to the ephemeral effectsof light and shade that played across them Upon seeing them Kaprowwas unsure what to think until he noticed that they turned the surfaceof painting into an active plane of reception for the movement of his bodyldquoI was walking back and forth not knowing how I should take thesethingsrdquo he said ldquoand then I saw my shadows across the paintingmdashmovingrdquo38 For Kaprow the surface of these paintings became a tem-poral screen reecting the viewerrsquos body in the changing environmentof the gallery Their painterly incidence was not their whiteness perse but their ability to capture the presence of the viewer as he or shestood in front of the work The viewer activated the work so that thework the viewer and the space in between all became part of the workAs Rauschenberg wrote at the time ldquoPainting relates to both art andlife Neither can be made (I try to act in that gap between the two)rdquo39

These paintings are caught between painting as an object that is func-tionally and fundamentally separate from its architectural containerand the spread of painting into a semiautonomous state somewherebetween art architecture and the viewing subject moving through theexhibition space

Rauschenberg had developed his White Paintings in dialogue with

Photograph of Pollock in hisstudio As published in AllanKaprow Essays on theBlurring of Art and Life 1993The model of Blakersquosmuseum is visible in theupper-right corner PhotoHans Namuth

90 Grey Room 13

Cage who was also at Black Mountain in the summer of 195240 Thatsummer Cage incorporated The White Paintings into his own workTheater Piece No 141 They were suspended over the heads of theaudience members at various angles as a variety of performance eventstook place beneath them These events included Rauschenberg andDavid Tudor playing piano poets MC Richards and Charles Olsonreading poetry from atop a ladder and Merce Cunningham and othersdancing through the space and around the audience It was the WhitePaintings with their environmental quality that that led Cage to write4rsquo 33 in 1952 Tudor was the original performer of the compositionwhose score was open to interpretation42 He realized it on pianoplaying it by silently opening and closing the piano lid allowing thesounds of the audience and the ambient noises of the space to becomethe work Kaprow attended one of the rst performances of 4rsquo 33 atCarnegie Hall in 1952 and was deeply affected He compared his expe-rience of 4rsquo 33 to his experience of Rauschenbergrsquos paintings Thesounds in the space chairs creaking the air condition humming peoplecoughing and clearing their throatsmdashall the ambient sounds that lledthe space of the auditoriummdashbecame foregrounded ldquoIt was like theshadows in Bob Rauschenbergrsquos picturesrdquo Kaprow recalled ldquoThat is tosay there [wa]s no marking the boundary of the artwork or the boundaryof so-called everyday life They merge[d] And we the listeners in Cagersquosconcert and the lookers at Rauschenbergrsquos pictures were the collabo-rators of the artworkrdquo43 For Kaprow Cage like Rauschenberg col-lapsed the autonomy of art by engaging the listener as collaborator ina semiautonomous space (ldquoso-called everyday liferdquo and not true every-day life) that depended upon the interaction between work spaceand subject

On his visit to Rauschenbergrsquos studio Kaprow also saw the earliestof Rauschenbergrsquos black paintings44 This series is the antipode of thesmooth matte white surfaces of the White Paintings They are allblack monochromes most painted with a high-gloss enamel soakedinto newspaper pages that were then haphazardly stuck onto the sur-face of a canvas trapped pockets of air often causing the paintingsrsquosurfaces to bulge outward repulsively At their largest they framespace as Pollockrsquos work did but as art brut walls instead of dazzlingskeins of paint One photograph of a later diptych shows the paintingsblocking the doorway to Rauschenbergrsquos studio at Black Mountain asif they were extensions of the rough-hewn stone walls on either side45

But in this next transformation of painting as wall what seems moreimportant for the direction that both Rauschenberg and Kaprow wouldfollow out of these works was their newspaper ground As Rauschenbergrsquospaintings became wall-size their art brut surface was built on the newsof the day At rst everyday events as reported in the newspaper are

Kaizen | Framed Space Allan Kaprow and the Spread of Painting 91

painted out and hidden behind the blackpaint46 As the series proceeded he allowedincreasingly more of the news to showthrough While the White Paintings engagedwith the gap between art and life by cap-turing the viewerrsquos bodymdashas did Cagersquos4rsquo 33 at least for Kaprowmdashthe black paint-ings did so by using the everyday objectas a ground Through their use of news-paper they suggested another trajectoryout of painting and into everyday spacea trajectory whose base condition was thecommodity object

In order to get into the gap between art and life Rauschenbergrsquoswork rst had to approximate the condition of being a wall It neededto assume a relation to its architectural frame in order to move awayfrom the autonomy of painting and into semiautonomy but once it didso Rauschenberg would abandon the problem of painting as wallFollowing the White Paintings and black paintings (and then a briefseries of Red Paintings) he made his rst Combines works that rein-state the autonomy of the individual art object even while they existbetween painting sculpture and the surrealist objet trouveacute47 Ratherthan engage with space Rauschenbergrsquos Combines elevate the ready-made or found object back to the status of the autonomous art objectThe Combines formalize the everyday object into an in-between statebut one that nevertheless produces singular art objects While theblack paintings led Rauschenberg back to the art object they led Kaprowfarther off the wall and out into space

| | | | |

Kaprow wrote ldquoa statementrdquo about his work sketching the trajectoryhe took from painting through collage then out into the space of thegallery48 After his initial show of paintings in 1952 he described thedevelopment of what he called ldquoaction collagerdquo These were done asquickly as possible by throwing together readily available everydaymaterials including parts of his past work tinfoil photographsnewspaper and food Although he doesnrsquot mention particular works by name presumably these action-collages include the early piecesreproduced in Assemblage Environments and Happenings In a photo-graph of Penny Arcade (1956) we see Kaprow standing in front of a largewall-size assemblage densely layered with parts of paintings scrapsof wood and large pieces of advertising signage that look like Kaproweither found them on the side of the road or appropriated them from a

Robert RauschenbergUntitled 1952

92 Grey Room 13

storefront It also included flashing lights andsounds calling out to the viewer like a ConeyIsland carnival booth but one made all the moreconfusing with its hyperarray of upside-downand fragmented word parts While collage hadbeen delicate even dainty in its appliqueacute of smallscraps of paper to the surface of the image KaprowrsquosPenny Arcade was massive and rough-hewn Unlikeits glitzier real-world counterpart Penny Arcadelooks cobbled together a temporary faccedilade brico-laged from odds and ends Here Kaprow turnedthe gallery space into the street turning the wallinto a pseudo-storefront bringing the architec-ture of the outside world into the gallery but lteredthrough the compositional strategies of collage

and abstract expressionism Abstraction before world war II had beenundertaken in a quest to find a universal Esperanto of color and form a problem that had been transformed by abstract expressionisminto a private iconography of psychic signs In Penny Arcade Kaprowturns the private symbolism of abstraction expressionism back to the world through advertising as commodity sign He makes the private symbol public again by reconnecting prendashWorld War II modelsof collective production with postndashWorld War II models of collectiveconsumption

Another work from this time further demonstrates how Kaprowused everyday materials to partition space Alternately titled (inAssemblage) Wall Kiosk and Rearrangeable Panels (1957ndash1959) thispiece looks like an enormous folding Japanese screen Measuring eightfeet high and over twenty feet long its panels are covered in eggshellsleaves and broken mirrorsmdashnot mass-produced commodities or sig-nage but detritus and waste Several of the panels are painted one inHoffmanrsquos push-pull style two seem to nod toward Rauschenberg onepainted white one black This piece is designed to sit on the oor ofthe gallery and as its various names imply it can be placed in a varietyof positions called ldquowallrdquo when arrayed in a straight line ldquokioskrdquowhen arranged into a square and ldquorearrangeable panelsrdquo in generalor when it sits in a zigzag Each position changes the relationship ofthe object to the space that contains it Kaprow recast the painting-as-wall as a transformable piece of furniture recognizing the possibilityof ludic engagement with the viewer but withholding it because theviewer is not allowed to interact with the piece directly Once installedthe work transforms the space of the gallery but it cannot be recong-ured by the viewer49

When asked why he used junk to make his work Kaprow replied

Allan Kaprow standing infront of Penny Arcade 1956Photo WF Gainfort

Kaizen | Framed Space Allan Kaprow and the Spread of Painting 93

It was clearly part of transformingreality It gave everyone a sense ofinstant involvement in a kind of crudeeveryday reality which was quite arelief after the high-art attitude ofexclusion from the real world It alsoallowed us to give up a certain kindof seriousness that traditional artmaking required Whatrsquos more thematerials were available everywhereon street corners at night And ifyou didnrsquot sell these environmentalconstructions yoursquod just throwthem back into the garbage canWhy not just throw them out It wasvery liberating to think of oneself aspart of an endlessly transformingreal world50

The ldquocrude everyday realityrdquo capturedby Penny Arcade as with Kaprowrsquos subsequent work is predicatedupon his project of capturing the ldquoendlessly transforming real worldrdquoThis statement connects him with Rauschenberg and Cage but alsoshows how their work differs in an important and crucial way InKaprowrsquos comment describing his experience of 4rsquo33 (as quoted inthe previous section) he says ldquoAnd we the listeners in Cagersquos concertand the lookers at Rauschenbergrsquos pictures were the collaborators of[sic] the artworkrdquo ending with ldquoIt was a kind of collaborative end-lessly changing affair The artwork was simply this organism that wasaliverdquo51 For Kaprow the key word here is change and in order tomove from artwork to organism the work of art must be reconsiderednot as a ldquochance operationrdquo (to use Cagersquos term) but as a change oper-ation During this time Kaprow had begun to take classes with Cageand he was exposed to Cagersquos use of chance methods of compositionWhile he would adopt much from Cagersquos work and teaching he thoughtthat change was the most important principle for his own work52

For Kaprow change was integrally connected to the postndashworld warII environment lled with mass-produced throwaway products Theart of this timemdashhis artmdashshould necessarily reect this environmentIn opposition to the nostalgic use of the objet trouveacute in surrealism hismethod was closer to the readymade choosing everyday objects to res-cue from oblivion but spreading them out in space so that they wouldenvironmentally engulf the viewer53 Kaprow temporarily revalues thethrowaway commodity in his environments to create a space where

Allan Kaprow RearrangeablePanels 1957-9 Shown intheir ldquoKioskrdquo con gurationPhoto Robert R McElroy

94 Grey Room 13

everyday life as planned obsolescence is brought under the control ofthe artist He creates a momentary space of anti-entropy in the life ofthe commodity where it is temporarily reinvested with value only to bedisposed of once the environment is destroyed54 Citing critic LawrenceAlloway on the ldquothrowawayrdquo culture of postndashworld war II AmericaKaprow goes on to describe the importance of change in his work

Change governing both reality and art has extended from theexpression of an idea arrested in a painting to a work in whichthe usually slow mutations wrought by nature are quickened andliterally made part of the experience of it they manifest the veryprocess of creation-decay-creation almost as one watches Theuse of debris waste products or very impermanent substanceslike toilet paper or bread has of course a clear range of allusionswith obvious sociological implications the simplest being theartistrsquos positive involvement on the one hand with an everydayworld and on the other with a group of objects which beingexpendable might suggest that corresponding lack of statuswhich is supposed to be the fate of anything creative todayThese choices must not be ignored for they reveal what in oursurroundings charges the imagination as well as what is mosthuman in our art55

What is ldquomost humanrdquo in Kaprowrsquos art as he denes it is its reectionof this throwaway culture This is governed not by Cagean chance butby planned obsolescence with its endless renewal of more of thesame ldquo[My] workrdquo Kaprow says ldquois intended to last only a short timeand is destroyed immediately after the exhibition If [its] obsolescenceis not planned it is expectedrdquo56 Alloway also writing on assemblagebetter describes the overlap between the throwaway object and its usein environmental art during the 1950s

The acceptance of mass-produced objects just because they arewhat is around not because they issue from idolatrised technol-ogy is central to mid-century Junk Culture Junk Culture iscity art Its source is obsolescence the throwaway material ofcities Assemblages of such material come at the spectator asbits of life bits of the environment frequently presented interms that dramatize spread ow extension trespass The junkis obtruded into our space with the aim of achieving maximumintimacy Proximity and participation replace distance and con-templation as the communicative style of the object57

So the space of Junk Culture when used in art as assemblage or envi-ronment achieves ldquomaximum intimacyrdquo with the observer throughtheir ldquoproximity and participationrdquo with the throwaway commodity

Kaizen | Framed Space Allan Kaprow and the Spread of Painting 95

As Kaprow moves farther into the space of the gallery he does so in anincreased attempt to engage the viewer He partitions the gallery spaceso that the body of the viewer becomes a product of its participationwithin the eld of the throwaway commodity

These early wall-like constructions were for Kaprow still not closeenough to a participatory art Kaprow wanted to move further towardthe creation of environments and even events to take over the gallerywith a plenitude of throwaway objects among which the viewer wouldself-consciously circulate The action collages still maintained toomuch autonomy because they existed as individual objects and so asKaprow recalled ldquonow I simply filled the whole gallery up startingfrom one wall and ending with the otherrdquo58 With his rst environmentKaprow was no longer composing within the autonomous space ofpainting but composing the entire space of the gallery Kaprowrsquos rstenvironmentmdashmade at the Hansa Gallery in November 1958mdashwasmeant to totally engage the visitors to the gallery to make them intopart of the work itself ldquopassively or actively according to [their] talentsfor lsquoengagementrsquordquo59 From a drop ceiling of wires suspended in a gridseveral inches below the galleryrsquos original ceiling he hung variousmaterials creating a labyrinthine space divided by sheets of plastictangles of cellophane Scotch tape and more including a time-releasedmist of pine-scented deodorizer His work had taken over the galleryspace lling it with a nearly impenetrable eld of throwaway objects60

Kaprow took the ood of postndashworld war II consumer goods and usedthem to compose walls that partitioned space And composemdashin thetraditional sense of arranging shapes and forms on the surface of acanvasmdashis exactly what he did

Kaprow described his use of the full space of the gallery as a eld aterm that he derives from painting calling the second section of hisldquoAssemblagerdquo essay ldquoThe Field in Paintingrdquo ldquoThis space is in part theliteral distance between all solids included in the workrdquo Kaprowwrote ldquoBut it is also a space that is a direct heritage of paintingrdquo61

Everything in the space that he produced became part of his compo-sition including the viewer Like any other object in the work Kaprowsaid ldquoin as much as people visiting [an] environment are moving col-ored shapes [they] were counted lsquoinrsquordquo62 Each visitor as they movedthrough Kaprowrsquos labyrinth became a part of the work Art and lifehad now seemingly collapsed the autonomy of painting as a separateobjectmdashframed and isolated from the rest of its environment as a spaceonly for the eyemdashhad been abandoned for an embodied experienceViewing was now dependent upon space a space full of the objects ofeveryday life Using the materials of everyday life Kaprow invited hisviewers to get rid of their distance from the art object forcing theminto physical contact with his work This work he wrote ldquoinvites us

96 Grey Room 13

to cast aside for a moment proper manners andpartake wholly in the real nature of art and (onehopes) liferdquo63 Against the look-donrsquot-touch attitude ofmuseum and gallery Kaprow created a haptic spacewhere touch became the basis of the work where vis-itors came into physical contact with his throwawayobjects In this space as visitors threaded their waythrough the labyrinth the color of their clothes andtheir presence among these objects turned them intoa part of the work The viewer appeared as anotherthing in Kaprowrsquos composition not so different fromhis throwaway materials In his environment autonomycollapsed into participation based on the reicationof the subject as an obsolete material temporally

composited into the work While Kaprow certainly intended to includehis observers in the work he could do so only by turning them intoobjects rather than active subjects He later described his own sense ofthe failure with this exhibition that he couldnrsquot seem to engage theviewer enough but blamed it on the framing space of the galleryAfterward he said ldquoI complained immediately about the fact that therewas a sense of mystery until your eye reached a wall Then there wasa dead end At that point my disagreement with the gallery spacebeganrdquo64 But Kaprow didnrsquot abandon the gallerymdashat least not yet Toget closer to the everyday Kaprow thought he should more fully incor-porate the bodies of his viewers into his work This led to the origin ofhappenings in an attempt to make viewers into active subjects to engagethem more actively in creating the work as they became part of it

| | | | |

In 1958 Kaprow had presented two other early proto-happenings oneat Rutgers called Communication and one at George Segalrsquos farmcalled Pastorale65 Communication was based on work he had devel-oped in Cagersquos class It was close to traditional theater Presented in achapel that doubled as an auditorium for theater and music perfor-mances it included movement sound and banners unfurled from thebalconies Kaprow built ldquoplastic panelsrdquo behind which he performeda series of simple actions nally hiding himself from the audience bypainting the plastic wall in front of him and so ldquopainting himself outrdquoof the audiencersquos view66 For Pastorale he built frames that looked likeabysmal theater sets stretcher bars with torn strips of canvas runningfrom top to bottom During one part of the performance artists RobertWatts and Lucas Samaras painted on either side of one of these con-structions Inserted into the landscape these performance paintings

Part of the environment Allan Kaprow created for his piece Pastorale 1958Photo Vaughn Rachel

Kaizen | Framed Space Allan Kaprow and the Spread of Painting 97

marked the boundary between event and nonevent partitioning theground into territories and framing Pastoralersquos space using once againpainting as wall Unfortunately for Kaprow Pastorale was held during apicnic and the other participants were either too drunk or just plainunwilling to follow his directions They were engaged but refused tofollow his rules of play

18 Happenings in 6 Parts which took place in October 1959 wasthe rst ofcial happening67 Kaprow divided the inside of the galleryinto three smaller contiguous rooms using wooden two-by-fours Inphotographs of the piece as it was being installed these woodenbeams can be seen framing a space within the space of the gallerymdashnot into a proscenium stage but into an environment within the largergallery space where various events would occur Instead of wood ordrywall translucent plastic sheeting created the walls so that actioncould be partially seen from one room to the next Each room was litwith different colored lights and in each room where the audiencewas forced to sit and observe the action a group of actors movedthrough tightly scripted but simple routines as sounds came in and outand lms were projected

On the program the audience is listed under the ldquoCast of Participantsrdquowritten into the performance itself and actively engaged but only asthe subject of direction and authorial control At specific intervalsbells rang and the audience was required to change seats and to switchrooms based on instruction cards they had been given when they enteredthe gallery before the performance Kaprow had realized with his HansaGallery environment that he needed to give his viewers increasedresponsibility but he also realized that relinquishing too much con-trol could be a disaster as it had been in Pastorale As with his previ-ous work his goal with 18 Happenings was the ldquointegration of allelementsmdashenvironment constructed sections time space and peoplerdquoand the audience was once again included as just another material inhis composition68

During the fifth part of 18 Happenings one sequence of actionsseems to reveal Kaprowrsquos relationship with painting the viewer and space Kaprow had built a construction he called the ldquothe sandwich manrdquo named after its everyday counterparts paid to walkaround the city streets as human billboards Kaprowrsquos sandwich

Left The construction of thespace used for Allan Kaprowrsquos18 Happenings in 6 Parts1958

Right A view of Allan Kaprowrsquos18 Happenings whereRearrangeable Panels is partially visible on the leftThe in-set canvas panel onwhich actors painted live as part of the performance is shown at center PhotoScott Hyde

98 Grey Room 13

man was barely humanoidan automaton with forward-and backward-pointing mir-rors for a body bicycle wheelsfor feet and a gallon bucketof enamel paint for a headSticking out in front was apiece of wood for an arm end-ing in a hand that held cardslabeled ldquoXrdquo and ldquo3rdquo the adver-

tising handbill reduced to its zero degree In the middle of the sand-wich man hidden on a shelf between the two mirrors was a recordplayer and projecting out from behind it were two handles so that itcould be wheeled around the rooms As the sandwich man was wheeledfrom one room to another its mirrored body reflected the audienceback onto themselves their image taking the place of what would havebeen an advertisement They were reected not as participatory viewersnot even as active objects as in his environment but as passive objectsnow totally reied their image produced as a reection of Junk CultureHere in Brechtian fashion using a literal ldquoframing effectrdquo Kaprowturned his previous use of the viewer back into a critique of the eventitself In reecting the audiencersquos passivity back to them he forced amoment of recognition of their complicity in the production of thework They could see that as they became an ad on the sandwich manrsquosbelly so they became throwaway objects in his composition By reduc-ing the spectator to the general equivalence of these objects Kaprowrecognized the subject of the postndashWorld War II period as a product ofplanned obsolescence and consumer culture

Following this as the sandwich man was wheeled through the secondroom and into the third two men stood up from their seats one in eachroom Each took up a brush and a can of paint and approached oppo-site sides of one of the plastic walls simultaneously painting on a sec-tion of canvas set among the plastic walls and so turning the wall backinto a painting69 The canvas was left unprimed so that the simple gures that each artist painted (one was supposed to paint lines theother circles) would bleed through and so would be immediately visibleon the opposite side each mark responding to that of their partner Asin his two earlier happenings painting is done live before an audienceon a wall Kaprow showed the audience that when painting becomeswall it functions only to put space on display Here painting as a sin-gular art object was meaningless It became a throwaway stage propand so became a demonstration of how painting as object was part ofthe larger environment in which it resides The limit condition of paint-ing as wall with viewer as spectator was the gallery as frame70

The sandwich man part ofKaprowrsquos 18 HappeningsPhoto Scott Hyde

Kaizen | Framed Space Allan Kaprow and the Spread of Painting 99

What this sequence from 18 Happenings reveals is that Kaprow hadan acute sense of the way in which the gallery as frame produces sub-ject and space together He undermined the normal function of the artgallery turning both viewer and art object into Junk Culture Throwawayviewers throwaway paintings and throwaway rooms turned the galleryspacemdasha space designed to be neutral to hide itself as the objects itcontains become the sole focus of the viewerrsquos concentrationmdashinto thelocus of planned obsolescence With the creation of happeningsKaprow used Junk Culture against the doxa of gallery space upsettingthe common sense of what a space for art is and what it does Afterhappenings the paradoxical logic of the gallery as a site for both theprivate contemplation of singular aesthetic objects as well as the pub-lic transaction of luxury goods had been (however temporarily) sub-verted In asserting the gallery space as the limit condition of paintingKaprow framed the institution as the ground of artistic production

In ldquoThe Legacy of Jackson Pollockrdquo Kaprow says ldquoPollock left us atthe point where we must become preoccupied with and even dazzled by the space and objects of our everyday liferdquo71 In ldquoAssemblageEnvironments Happeningsrdquo bridging the gap between his early andlater work he concludes ldquothis has brought sharply into focus that theroom has always been a frame or format toordquo72 Kaprowrsquos collapse ofautonomy via art into lifemdashthat environments and happenings wouldldquopartake wholly in the real nature of art and (one hopes) liferdquomdashwasonly ever a hope as he himself knew If painting had used the frameas the delimitation of a eld for composition then environments andhappenings turned the gallery into the limit condition of this fieldWhile he tried to get closer to everyday life by making art he inevitablypushed it further away This ambivalence toward the collapse of artand life runs throughout Kaprowrsquos work even as he moved out of thegallery and into everyday life following his early work with his laterldquoactivitiesrdquo The early work was even by his own estimation more adisplay of experience and not a fair representation of actual everydayexperience But this is precisely where the importance of this work liesKaprowrsquos environments and happenings extended Rauschenbergrsquossemiautonomous gap so far that they turned the screw one notchhigher autonomy returning not though the sublation of art into archi-tecture but through the medium of framed space

100 Grey Room 13

NotesThanks to the generosity and insight of Karen Kurczynski John Harwood SethMcCormick Jaleh Mansoor Beth Hinderliter Vered Maimon Benjamin Buchloh andBarry Bergdoll as well as Branden Joseph and the Editors of Grey Room

1 Brian OrsquoDoherty Inside the White Cube The Ideology of the Gallery Space(Berkeley and Los Angeles University of California Press 1999) 15

2 It was originally called ldquoPainting Environments Happeningsrdquo and publishedin a condensed form in the catalog for the exhibition New FormsmdashNew Media I at the Martha Jackson Gallery New York the rst uptown show of Kaprow and his con-temporaries It was changed to ldquoAssemblage Environments and Happeningsrdquo for nalpublication Kaprow changed the title to incorporate the recent acceptance of the termassemblage It had been used rst by Helen Comstock to describe the work of ArthurDove in the 1920s but remained obscure until Jean Dubuffet popularized its use in 1953The term as used by Dubuffet was then adopted by William Seitz for his exhibitionThe Art of Assemblage at the Museum of Modern Art See Allan Kaprow AssemblageEnvironments and Happenings (New York Harry N Abrams 1966) 150ndash208 NewFormsmdashNew Media I (New York Martha Jackson Gallery 1960) np and RogerShattuck ldquoIntroduction How Collage Became Assemblagerdquo Essays on Assemblage(New York Museum of Modern Art 1992) 119

3 ldquoWhen I am in my painting Irsquom not aware of what Irsquom doingrdquo said PollockJackson Pollock Jackson Pollock Interviews Articles Reviews ed Pepe Karmel (NewYork Museum of Modern Art 1999) 17ndash18

4 Yard was Kaprowrsquos contribution to the exhibition Environments SituationsSpaces at the Martha Jackson Gallery a follow up to New FormsndashNew Media (see n 2)

5 ldquoAllan Kaprow and Robert Watts Interviewed by Sidney Simonrdquo in Benjamin HDBuchloh and Judith F Rodenbeck Experiments in the Everyday Allan Kaprow andRobert Watts Events Objects Documents (New York Wallach Art Gallery 1999) 76

6 To cite but one example of many Thomas Hirschhorn is an artist who continuesto extend and develop Kaprowrsquos legacy today

7 On Kaprow and performance see Amelia Jones Body Art Performing the Subject(Minneapolis University of Minnesota Press 1998) 56ndash57 Paul Schimmel ldquoLeap intothe Void Performance and the Objectrdquo in Out of Actions Between Performance andthe Object 1949ndash1979 ed Paul Schimmel (New York Thames and Hudson 1998)59ndash63

8 The relationship between painting and space had been explored before partic-ularly in the period between the two world wars by the artists associated with De Stijland constructivism For more on De Stijl see Nancy Troy The De Stijl Environment(Cambridge MIT Press 1983) On constructivism see Yve-Alain Bois ldquoEl LissitzkyRadical Reversibilityrdquo Art in America 76 no 4 (April 1988) 161ndash181 and Yve-AlainBois ldquoMaterial Utopiasrdquo Art in America 79 no 6 (June 1991) 98ndash107 Another Europeanwho explored the everyday object painting and space was Kurt Schwitters in the various incarnation of his Merzbau See Elizabeth Burns Gamard Kurt SchwittersrsquoMerzbau The Cathedral of Erotic Misery (New York Princeton Architectural Press2000) Two other important precursors who bridge the European and American con-text are Lazlo Moholy-Nagy and Friedrick Kiesler For information on Moholy-Nagyrsquosearly environmental projects as well as those of Lissitzy see Joan Ockman ldquoThe RoadNot Taken Alexander Dornerrsquos Way Beyond Artrdquo in Autonomy and Ideology Positioningan Avant-Garde in America ed RE Somol (New York Monicelli Press 1997) For

Kaizen | Framed Space Allan Kaprow and the Spread of Painting 101

information on Kiesler see RL Held Endless Innovations Frederick Kieslerrsquos Theoryand Scenic Design (Ann Arbor UMI Research Press 1982) Lisa Phillips FrederickKiesler (New York The Whitney Museum of American Art 1989) Brian OrsquoDohertydraws out the connections between the prendash and postndashWorld War II manifestations ofthis relationship in Inside the White Cube

9 For Benjamin the work of art attains autonomy under modernism with theemergence of art for artrsquos sake This autonomy is then usurped by mechanical repro-duction See Walter Benjamin ldquoThe Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproductionrdquoin Illuminations ed Hanna Arendt (New York Harcourt Brace and Jovanovich Inc1968) p 224-226 For Greenberg as the above quote indicates the autonomy of artcontinues even in the face of mechanization See Clement Greenberg ldquoTowards a NewerLaocoonrdquo Perceptions and Judgments 1939ndash1944 vol 1 of Clement Greenberg TheCollected Essays and Criticism ed John OrsquoBrien (Chicago University of Chicago1986) p 32

10 Rosalind Krauss uses the term ldquopost-medium conditionrdquo to designate ldquomixed-media installationrdquo work done today While Krauss argues that only the most signi-cant artists working since the 1960s reassert the medium in their work against thegeneral postmedium condition I believe that all mixed-media installation work operates using the gallery or institution as medium See Rosalind Krauss ldquoA Voyageon the North Seardquo Art in the Age of the Post-Medium Condition (New York Thamesand Hudson 1999) for her comments on a specic contemporary artist and the rein-vention of the medium see Rosalind Krauss ldquo And Then Turn Awayrdquo An Essayon James Colemanrdquo October 81 (Summer 1997) 5ndash33

11 Allan Kaprow ldquoThe Legacy of Jackson Pollockrdquo Art News 57 no 6 (October1958) 24ndash26 55ndash57 reprinted in Allan Kaprow Essays on the Blurring of Art andLife ed Jeff Kelley (Berkeley and Los Angles University of California Press 1993) 1ndash9 Kaprow has stated that the essay was written in 1956 in ldquoAllan Kaprow andRobert Watts Interviewed by Sidney Simonrdquo 77 Kaprow had been a student of bothHans Hoffman and Meyer Schapiro

12 Harold Rosenberg ldquoThe American Action Paintersrdquo Art News 52 (December1952) 22ndash23 In a footnote that Rosenberg added when the article was republished aspart of his book of collected essays in 1959 he added the following ldquoAction Paintinghas extracted the element of decision inherent in all art in that the work is not fin-ished at its beginning but has to be carried forward by an accumulation of lsquorightrsquo ges-tures In a word Action Painting is the abstraction of the moral element in art itsmark is moral tension in detachment from moral or esthetic certainties and it judgesitself morally in declaring that picture to be worthless which is not the incorporationof a genuine struggle one which could at any point have been lostrdquo Harold RosenbergThe Tradition of the New (New York Horizon Press 1959) 33ndash34 Kaprow recountsthe influence of Rosenbergrsquos essay on his work in ldquoAllan Kaprow and Robert WattsInterviewed by Sidney Simonrdquo 77

13 There were five all told They were held as follows 5ndash23 January 1948 24Januaryndash12 February 1949 21 Novemberndash10 December 1949 28 Novemberndash16 December1950 26 Novemberndash15 December 1951 These shows had a remarkable resonance onethat extended beyond even the insular New York art world when after the secondexhibition Life magazine published the feature article ldquoJackson Pollock Is He theGreatest Living Painter in the United Statesrdquo Dorothy Sieberling Life (August 81949) 42ndash45

14 Allan Kaprow ldquoThe Legacy of Jackson Pollockrdquo in Kaprow Essays on the

102 Grey Room 13

Blurringrdquo 615 Kaprow uses both the terms scale and size to describe Pollockrsquos work but as

TJ Clark has shown these are two very different terms and Pollock is a painter of sizeand not scale For Clark it is size that engages the body ldquoNormally speaking size isliteralmdasha matter of actual physical intuition It involves grasping how big or small acertain object really is most likely in relation to the size of the grasperrsquos upright body oroutspread armsrdquo TJ Clark ldquoPollockrsquos Smallnessrdquo in Jackson Pollock New Approachesed Kirk Varnedoe and Pepe Karmel (New York Museum of Modern Art 1999) 15

16 Kaprow ldquoThe Legacy of Jackson Pollockrdquo Essays on the Blurring 617 In most of his work the paint engages with the edge of the canvas emphasizing

and bordering it and not continuing around it as if the canvas had been cut down fromsome innite expanse Kaprow claims otherwise by singling out the exceptions sayingldquo[H]is art gives the impression of going on forever [T]hough evidence points to aslackening of the attack as Pollock came to the edges of many of his canvases in thebest ones he compensated for this by tacking much of the painted surface around theback of his stretchersrdquo Kaprow ldquoThe Legacy of Jackson Pollockrdquo Essays on the Blurringof Art and Life 5 An examination of the paintings shows that more often Pollockstopped before the edge or reworked his compositions after they were stretched sothat they reengaged with the edge even when cut from larger canvas Kaprow claimsotherwise because it furthers his arguments that Pollockrsquos paintings emerge into thespace of the viewer

18 Jackson Pollock ldquoApplication for a Guggenheim Fellowship 1947rdquo in JacksonPollock Interviews 17 The inuence of Greenberg at this time is discussed in StevenNaifeh and Gregory White Smith Jackson Pollock An American Saga (Aiken SCWoodwardWhite 1989) 551 Pollock had also engaged with wall-size painting duringhis association with Joseacute Clemente Orozco and in earlier work such as Mural(1943ndash1944) painted for Peggy Guggenheimrsquos house

19 Greenbergrsquos version of modernism was most fully laid out only in 1959 andpublished in 1960 ldquoIt was the stressing of the ineluctable atness of the surface thatremained however more fundamental than anything else to the process by whichpictorial art criticized and defined itself under Modernism For flatness alone wasunique and exclusive to pictorial art Because flatness was the only conditionpainting shared with no other art Modernist painting oriented itself to atness as itdid to nothing elserdquo In Clement Greenberg ldquoModernist Paintingrdquo in Modernism witha Vengeance 1957ndash1969 vol 4 of Clement Greenberg The Collected Essays andCriticism ed John OrsquoBrien (Chicago University of Chicago Press 1993) 87

20 Clement Greenberg ldquoThe Situation at the Momentrdquo in Arrogant Purpose1945ndash1949 vol 2 of Clement Greenberg The Collected Essays and Criticism ed JohnOrsquoBrien (Chicago University of Chicago 1986) 194ndash195

21 See Greenberg ldquoTowards a Newer Laocoonrdquo throughout22 Eric Lum has done extensive work on the relationship between abstract expres-

sionism and architecture The analysis in this essay follows from his especially whereBlakersquos project is concerned but also expands on it As he jumps from Blake to PhilipJohnson and Mark Rothkorsquos Houston Chapel however Lum misses the importance ofother interventions between painting and architecture such as those made by KaprowThis is evident when he says ldquoThrough this marriage of mural and wall paintingcould become fully integrated into architecture an idealized conjecture nor realizeduntil Mark Rothkorsquos 1971 Houston Chapelrdquo Eric Lum ldquoPollockrsquos Promise Toward anAbstract Expressionist Architecturerdquo Assemblage 39 (August 1999) 68

Kaizen | Framed Space Allan Kaprow and the Spread of Painting 103

23 Blake said of his visit to Pollockrsquos studio ldquoIt was a very sunny day and thesun was shining on the paintings I felt like I was standing in the Hall of Mirrors atVersailles It was a dazzling incredible sightrdquo Naifeh and Smith 588

24 Peter Blake No Place like Utopia Modern Architecture and the Company WeKept (New York Knopf 1993) 111ndash112

25 Miesrsquos museum plan was designed at the request of the editors at ArchitecturalForum who had been publishing a series of articles ldquoto show how building might beimproved through fuller and more imaginative use of existing resourcesrdquo They requesteddesigns for a variety of buildings that could be placed in a hypothetical city of 70000inhabitants ldquoNew Buildings for 194Xrdquo Architectural Forum 78 no 5 (May 1943)69ndash85 The Barcelona Pavilion was built in 1929 for the Barcelona Universal Expositionand was destroyed when the fair ended It was subsequently rebuilt in 1981ndash86

26 Peter Blake Mies van der Rohe (New York Pelican 1960) 54 It is worth notingthat like Miesrsquos use of the Kolbe sculpture Blake had Pollock actually make smallwire sculptures splattered with paint miniatures of sculptures that Blake hopedPollock would make for the actual museum Pollock himself was experimenting withsculpture around this time building three-dimensional forms out of papier-macirccheacutethat he then splattered with paint

27 Blakersquos collage space follows from Miesrsquos The production of collages as in situmodels for Miesrsquos buildings had begun in the twenties with his work for the journal Gin association with Dadaists such as Hans Richter Neil Levine notes this creation ofa collage space in Mies particularly in the Pavilion and the Museum for a Small Cityin relation to his use of reection to layer one surface on top of another Neil LevineldquolsquoThe Signicance of Factsrsquo Miesrsquo Collages Up Close and Personalrdquo Assemblage 37(December 1998) 71ndash101

28 Blake designed his museum just as Philip Johnson was building his Glass Housewhere they both spent considerable time while planning exhibitions for the Museumof Modern Art Johnsonrsquos inuence is also evident in Blakersquos design Blake No Placelike Utopia 149ndash155

29 Arthur Drexler ldquoUnframed Space A Museum for Jackson Pollackrsquos [sic] PaintingsrdquoInteriors and Industrial Design 109 no 6 (January 1950) 90ndash91 The article was partof a special issue whose theme was ldquoInteriors to Comerdquo a recurring topic that wasmeant ldquoto show the direction in which some of our best designers are goingrdquo The termunframed space was used several times in reference to Pollockrsquos work as the title oftwo articles Drexlerrsquos and one published slightly later by Berton Rouecheacute ThoughRouecheacute in an interview in To a Violent Grave says that Lee Krasner used the phraserst Charles Pollock says that Blake was the origin of the term The fact that Drexlerrsquosarticle was written and published earlier seems to conrm this See Berton RouecheacuteldquoUnframed Spacerdquo in Jackson Pollock Interviews 18ndash19 and Jeffrey Potter To aViolent Grave (New York Pushcart Press 1985) 126

30 Drexler 9031 Blake No Place like Utopia 113ndash11432 Blake completed construction on his ldquoPinwheel Houserdquo in 1952 It is a small

beach house that he designed for himself and his family in South Hampton on NewYorkrsquos Long Island Situated on the beach the house is square in plan and its fourexterior walls slide horizontally outward each in a successive clockwise directionrevealing glass walls When the exterior walls are fully extended and the house isviewed from above it forms a shape like a pinwheel Opening the exterior wallsreveals an ever-changing view of the landscape outside turning the ocean and the

104 Grey Room 13

dunes into the picturesque framing them so that they entirely ll the space of the walland put its surface in motion Blake had discussed with Pollock the possibility of hispainting the sliding walls so that his paintings would be superimposed over the land-scape Pollock considered it but Blake couldnrsquot come up with the commission moneythat Pollock asked for They never finalized their plans and it was never clear howthe panels were to be painted Blake suggested that they might be made of glass so hebought the sheet of glass that Pollock used to paint Number 29 1950 (1950) the paintingthat Hans Namuth lmed from underneath for his documentary on Pollock His col-laboration with Blake did lead to one commission a mural-size canvas done for ahouse designed by Marcel Breuer Untitled (Mural) (1950) Shortly after his collabo-ration with Blake Pollock began another unrealized architectural project this onewith Alfonso Ossorio and Tony Smith for a church designed by Smith with murals byPollock For more on all of this see Blake No Place like Utopia 114ndash118 Naifeh andSmith 649 and Lum ldquoPollockrsquos Promiserdquo 68 85ndash88

33 Lum ldquoPollockrsquos Promiserdquo 67ndash6834 A few pages down from Drexlerrsquos article on the Pollock Museum in Interiors

and Industrial Design was another architectural response to the same problem OlgaGueftrsquos article ldquoThe Museumrsquos Oasisrdquo describes another museum this one by Gyorgyand Juliet Kepes ldquoThe Kepesesrdquo it begins ldquoare not exactly opposed to museumsrdquo how-ever it would seem that they were opposed to museums containing works of artReplacing the art objects entirely the Kepeses substituted shells driftwood plantsand animals Instead of a natural history museum they proposed a modern-dayWunderkammerwhere natural forms take the place of art as objects for contemplationldquoThe proposed galleryrdquo they declared ldquowould bridge the gap between the art museumwhich is concerned with man-made beauty and the natural history museum whichis preoccupied with nature but not particularly with naturersquos beautyrdquo Gyorgy KepesrsquosThe New Landscape exhibition at MIT a year later in 1951 (the same years as theIndependent Grouprsquos similar exhibition Growth and Form in London) and the pub-lication that followed The New Landscape in Art and Sciencewould ultimately realizethis project with blown-up photographs of natural forms (cells shells and electronmicrographs) in place of actual objects

The Kepeses seem to have taken the next logical step beyond Blake proposing aneven more radical rethinking of the wall-size work of art Eliminating the need for theartist altogether they found abstract forms in nature and turned their reproductionsinto what would elsewhere have been works of art By turning the art object into scientic vision The Kepeses proposed its total instrumentation Autonomous abstractpainting was transformed into its instrumental other a mechanically reproduced science of vision Rather than turn art into interior design The Kepesesrsquo replacementof abstract painting recast the status of scientic technology into that of high art SeeOlga Gueft ldquoThe Museumrsquos Oasisrdquo Interiors and Industrial Design 109 no 6 (January1950) 100ndash103 and Gyorgy Kepes The New Landscape in Art and Science (ChicagoPaul Theobald and Co 1956)

35 Kaprow stated that it was ldquoIn 1949 [that] I saw an exhibition of [Pollockrsquos] workfor the rst timerdquo ldquoInterviewrdquo in Allan Kaprow (Pasadena Pasadena Art Museum1967) 7

36 See Kaprow ldquoThe Legacy of Jackson Pollockrdquo Art News 25 and Kaprow ldquoTheLegacy of Jackson Pollockrdquo Essays on the Blurring 3

37 Joan Marter ldquoThe Forgotten Legacy Happenings Pop Art and Fluxus at RutgersUniversityrdquo in Off Limits Rutgers University and the Avant-Garde 1957ndash1963 ed Joan

Kaizen | Framed Space Allan Kaprow and the Spread of Painting 105

Marter (Newark The Newark Museum 1999) 438 Marter 13239 Quoted in John Cage Silence (Middletown Wesleyan University Press 1961) 10540 Branden Joseph has developed the link between Cage and Rauschenberg in several

recent essays See Branden W Joseph ldquoJohn Cage and the Architecture of SilencerdquoOctober 81 (Summer 1997) 81ndash104 and Branden Joseph ldquoWhite on Whiterdquo CriticalInquiry 27 no 1 (Summer 2001) 90ndash121

41 For Cage on Rauschenberg see Cage Silence98ndash108 For his description ofTheater Piece No 1 see ldquoInterview with John Cagerdquo in Happenings and Other Actsed Mariellen R Sandford (New York Routledge 1995) 53 Cage subsequently referredto Theater Piece No 1 as ldquothe rst happeningrdquo See John Cage ldquoAn AutobiographicalStatementrdquo Southwest Review 76 no 1 (Winter 1991) 65

42 The score itself has had various incarnations It wasnrsquot published until 1960and in this version includes a note wherein Cage describes the rst performance byTudor For more on 4rsquo33 and its various scores see Liz Kotz ldquoWords on Paper NotNecessarily Meant to Be Read as Art Postwar Media Poetics from Cage to Warholrdquo(PhD diss Columbia University 2002) 83ndash115 Kotz follows a different lineage outof Cage and into performance and happenings than the one traced in this essay

43 Marter 13244 Walter Hopps in the first survey catalog of Rauschenbergrsquos early work does

not name the black paintings as a group as he does the White Paintings He calls themeach Untitled followed by a description in brackets Hopps notes of the largest ofthese works that ldquoThese paintings with a greater vastness and ambiguity of scale thanother Rauschenberg works relate to spatial qualities of Jackson Pollockrdquo HoppsRobert Rauschenberg The Early 1950s (Houston Houston Fine Art Press 1991) 67This convention was also followed in Rauschenbergrsquos 1997 Guggenheim retrospectivecatalog and is followed in this essay Robert Rauschenberg A Retrospective ed WalterHopps and Susan Davidson (New York Solomon R Guggenheim Museum 1997)

45 The piece is called Untitled [two black panels] (1953) Hopps Robert Rauschenberg99

46 Helen Molesworth notes the importance of Rauschenbergrsquos newspaper groundin the black paintings and develops this problem in relation to the abject body as it isfurther pursued in his work throughout the 1950s Helen Molesworth ldquoBefore BedrdquoOctober 63 (Winter 1993) 68ndash82

47 Asked about this work Rauschenberg said ldquoI called them combines I had tocoin that word because I got so bored with arguments I was interested in people seeingmy work When someone would come up and I really wanted to know what they thoughtof it or wanted to sense the exposure there was always this screen that they could getbehind which was if I said lsquoIt is paintingrsquo they would say lsquoThatrsquos not painting Thatrsquossculpturersquo And they thought this was very interestingrdquo Jeanne Siegel ArtwordsDiscourse on the 60s and 70s (New York DaCapo 1985) 153

48 Allan Kaprow ldquoa Statementrdquo in Happenings An Illustrated Anthology edMichael Kirby (New York EP Dutton and Co 1965) 44ndash45

49 Benjamin Buchloh notes the importance of play in the 1950s and its link toconsumer culture During the 1950s he writes ldquoa theory of games would remerge asa cultural project at the very moment of an ever-increasing instrumentalization oflibidinal desire through consumer culturerdquo Benjamin HD Buchloh ldquoRobert WattsInanimate ObjectsmdashInanimate Subjectsrdquo in Buchloh and Rodenbeck Experiments inthe Everyday 25 n 4

86 Grey Room 13

Seeing all of the paintings on the walls andoor of the barn elicited an intense reactionin Blake The paintings seemed both trans-parent and reective dissolving the walls ofthe barn as if they captured the misty land-scape of the bay outside and also because ofPollockrsquos use of aluminum paint reectingthe light streaming in through the windowslike enormous mirrors23 Blakersquos experiencewas central to his design for a small museummeant to house Pollockrsquos work Blake recalled

I designed a large somewhat abstractldquoexhibitrdquo of his workmdasha kind of ldquoIdealMuseumrdquo in which his paintings were

suspended between the earth and the sky and set between mir-rored walls so as to extend into infinity Beyond these floatingcanvases would be the marshes and the inlets of The Springsmdashthe relentlessly horizontal landscape of that end of Long Island24

Blakersquos ldquoIdeal Museumrdquo was indebted to Ludwig Mies van der Rohewhose Barcelona Pavilion and Museum for a Small City project formedthe basis of his design25 In Blakersquos monograph on Mies he expressedhis admiration for the Barcelona Pavilion and noted that it suggested anew direction for the integration of art and architecture ldquoThe resultingcompositionrdquo he said referring to the sculpture by Georg Kolbe as it was framed by the walls in the Pavilionrsquos enclosed courtyard ldquohasbecome a favorite example of those who advocate collaboration betweenarchitects on the one hand and sculptors and painters on the other[The Kolbe sculpture] does suggest that there may be other and betterways towards integration of the artsrdquomdashways that Blake would furtherpursue in his Pollock Museum26

As in Miesrsquos project for a Museum for a Small City the exterior wallsof Blakersquos Pollock Museum were to be made entirely of glass No inte-rior walls would be interposed between the art and the landscape outside The art became the walls Paintings were to be hung on free-standing walls no bigger than the work itself so that only the art itselfwould be visible oating in space with other works of art juxtaposedagainst it and with the exterior environment as a background Blakeunframes the work of art pulling it out of its usual relationship withthe wall where it would normally sit enclosed in a traditional framereframing it to create a collaged space one where works of art are seentogether overlapping one another as the viewer moves through themuseum27 Blake attempted to replicate the relationships between theviewer and the art object that Miesrsquos Pavilion and Museum had embodied

Top Jackson Pollock andPeter Blake looking at themodel of Blakesrsquos museumdesign on display at theBetty Parsonrsquos Gallery Photo Ben Schultz

Bottom Georg Kolbe DerMorgen 1925 Shown housedin Mies van der RoheBarcelona Pavilion 1928ndash29Photo Berliner Bild-Bericht

Kaizen | Framed Space Allan Kaprow and the Spread of Painting 87

the removal of the traditional framing device (the picture frame) for anoverlapping frame of collaged space the collapse of outside and insideand the reection back onto the viewer of their somatic viewing expe-rience Like Mies Blake adopted the materials of modern distraction(plate glass in particular) and combined them with an open plan inorder to create an interior that would use the glass curtain wall to offerrespite from the city street and the speed of modernity28

The only substantive article published on the Pollock Museum atthe time was Arthur Drexlerrsquos ldquoUnframed Spacerdquo29 The title camefrom Blakersquos own assessment that his project would realize the unlim-ited extension of Pollockrsquos marks into a total environment Drexlerconcludes his short essay with words that are similar to Blakersquos ownassessment of Mies ldquoThe Project suggests a re-integration of paintingand architecture wherein painting is the architecture but this timewithout message or content Its sole purpose is to heighten our expe-rience of spacerdquo30 Contrary to Drexlerrsquos title Pollockrsquos paintings arerendered secondary to their use in framing space It is the space of thegallery that submits them to its formal logic In Blakersquos Museum theart is secondary to the space that contains it

Blakersquos Museum conates both of Miesrsquos projects from which it wasprimarily derived By using abstract paintings Blake was able to fillhis museum with art while simultaneously returning these large-sizeabstractions directly to the wall Pollockrsquos painting functions like thestone cladding on the central wall in the Barcelona Pavilion as a dec-orative surface Pollock recognized the reduction inherent in Blakersquosproject saying to him after the design was done ldquoThe trouble is youthink I am a decoratorrdquo Blakersquos reply was telling ldquoOf course I thinkhis paintings might make terric walls After all architects spend a lotof time thinking about wallsrdquo31 What kept Pollock from working directlyon the wall and what Blake as an architect recognized immediatelywas that when painting became a wall or approached this conditionthrough wall size its autonomy was destroyed It approached the

Interiors (January 1950) featuring Blakersquos Pollockmuseum

88 Grey Room 13

status of interior decoration and that was the wayBlake wanted itmdashPollock reduced to ldquoterrific wallsrdquoHe even tried to commission Pollock to paint panelsfor the moving walls of the Pinwheel House his nextproject so that when they slid shut the housersquos inte-rior would be enclosed in Pollocks surrounded bypainted wallpaper32 The paintings as walls are sub-mitted to the logic of Blakersquos architecture He destroysthe autonomy of Pollockrsquos paintings only to sublatethem into the autonomy of modernist architecturerealizing Pollockrsquos fear of turning his work into meredecoration Blakersquos project asserts architecture over

painting As painting becomes wall it is sublated into the autonomousmodernist space of Miesian architecture Pollockrsquos work is turned intoa decorative surface into an interior design for a modernist space

The Pollock Museum was never built but not because either Pollockor Blake had second thoughts Despite any misgivings that Pollock hadwith this project the model was exhibited at Betty Parsons Gallery in1949 and afterward the model remained in Pollockrsquos studio promi-nently displayed in case he could convince a visiting collector to helpfinance its construction At his next exhibition with Betty Parson in1950 the paintings were made to be the same height and almost thesame length of the walls on which they hung so that they would comeas close as possible to realizing Blakersquos design within the more tradi-tional gallery setting33

If Blakersquos project misrepresented Pollock this was only to the extentthat Pollock had already acknowledged the tendency of painting atwall size to become an object What Blakersquos project makes clear is thatwhen paintings became wall-size or as they literally became wallsthey lost their capacity to create an autonomous space divorced fromcontext While it took an architect initially to realize such a possibilityartists soon followed suit34

It is likely that Kaprow saw the 1949 exhibition of Pollockrsquos workwhich included the model for Blakersquos Museum Although in his writ-ings on Pollock he doesnrsquot mention the Museum in an interview from1967 he claimed to have rst seen a Pollock exhibition in 194935 Thiswould mean that he had seen the show at the Betty Parsons Gallerywith the model on display The model for the museum is also clearlyvisible in the photographs of Pollock working in his studio that illus-trate both the original publication of Kaprowrsquos ldquoThe Legacy of JacksonPollockrdquo and (much later) his collection of essays The Blurring of Artand Life36 Kaprow also explicitly referenced the subsequent Pollockexhibition with its wall-size works when he discussed the all-overeld Pollockrsquos work created in the space of the gallery But along with

Photograph of Pollock in hisstudio As published in Allan Kaprow ldquoThe Legacy ofJackson Pollockrdquo in Art News(October 1958) The model of Blakersquos museum is visiblein the upper-left cornerPhoto Rudy Burckhardt

Kaizen | Framed Space Allan Kaprow and the Spread of Painting 89

Pollock and Blake Kaprow also engagedwith the work of Robert Rauschenbergand John Cage two artists who had asmuch impact on his thinking about spaceas Pollock

| | | | |

In the fall of 1951 when Kaprow visitedRauschenbergrsquos studio he saw the WhitePaintings37 Rauschenberg had made theseworks during the previous summer at BlackMountain College Like Blake Rauschenberg also engaged space usingpainting but he did so as an artist not as an architect Yet rather thanreassert the autonomy of painting he established a semiautonomousspace for painting The White Paintings are a series of works paintedat matte white with no visible marks to attract the viewerrsquos eye WhileBlake submitted the autonomy of Pollockrsquos painting to the logic of hisarchitecture upholding the autonomy of modernist space in favor ofarchitecture over art Rauschenberg was far more ambivalent about thepossibility of autonomy for either art or architecture The White Paintingsexist between the two as semiautonomous objectsmdashnot quite wall notquite paintingmdashand certainly not like their nearest precursor abstractexpressionist painting with its ood of gesture and mark The WhitePaintings in their utter blankness call attention to the ephemeral effectsof light and shade that played across them Upon seeing them Kaprowwas unsure what to think until he noticed that they turned the surfaceof painting into an active plane of reception for the movement of his bodyldquoI was walking back and forth not knowing how I should take thesethingsrdquo he said ldquoand then I saw my shadows across the paintingmdashmovingrdquo38 For Kaprow the surface of these paintings became a tem-poral screen reecting the viewerrsquos body in the changing environmentof the gallery Their painterly incidence was not their whiteness perse but their ability to capture the presence of the viewer as he or shestood in front of the work The viewer activated the work so that thework the viewer and the space in between all became part of the workAs Rauschenberg wrote at the time ldquoPainting relates to both art andlife Neither can be made (I try to act in that gap between the two)rdquo39

These paintings are caught between painting as an object that is func-tionally and fundamentally separate from its architectural containerand the spread of painting into a semiautonomous state somewherebetween art architecture and the viewing subject moving through theexhibition space

Rauschenberg had developed his White Paintings in dialogue with

Photograph of Pollock in hisstudio As published in AllanKaprow Essays on theBlurring of Art and Life 1993The model of Blakersquosmuseum is visible in theupper-right corner PhotoHans Namuth

90 Grey Room 13

Cage who was also at Black Mountain in the summer of 195240 Thatsummer Cage incorporated The White Paintings into his own workTheater Piece No 141 They were suspended over the heads of theaudience members at various angles as a variety of performance eventstook place beneath them These events included Rauschenberg andDavid Tudor playing piano poets MC Richards and Charles Olsonreading poetry from atop a ladder and Merce Cunningham and othersdancing through the space and around the audience It was the WhitePaintings with their environmental quality that that led Cage to write4rsquo 33 in 1952 Tudor was the original performer of the compositionwhose score was open to interpretation42 He realized it on pianoplaying it by silently opening and closing the piano lid allowing thesounds of the audience and the ambient noises of the space to becomethe work Kaprow attended one of the rst performances of 4rsquo 33 atCarnegie Hall in 1952 and was deeply affected He compared his expe-rience of 4rsquo 33 to his experience of Rauschenbergrsquos paintings Thesounds in the space chairs creaking the air condition humming peoplecoughing and clearing their throatsmdashall the ambient sounds that lledthe space of the auditoriummdashbecame foregrounded ldquoIt was like theshadows in Bob Rauschenbergrsquos picturesrdquo Kaprow recalled ldquoThat is tosay there [wa]s no marking the boundary of the artwork or the boundaryof so-called everyday life They merge[d] And we the listeners in Cagersquosconcert and the lookers at Rauschenbergrsquos pictures were the collabo-rators of the artworkrdquo43 For Kaprow Cage like Rauschenberg col-lapsed the autonomy of art by engaging the listener as collaborator ina semiautonomous space (ldquoso-called everyday liferdquo and not true every-day life) that depended upon the interaction between work spaceand subject

On his visit to Rauschenbergrsquos studio Kaprow also saw the earliestof Rauschenbergrsquos black paintings44 This series is the antipode of thesmooth matte white surfaces of the White Paintings They are allblack monochromes most painted with a high-gloss enamel soakedinto newspaper pages that were then haphazardly stuck onto the sur-face of a canvas trapped pockets of air often causing the paintingsrsquosurfaces to bulge outward repulsively At their largest they framespace as Pollockrsquos work did but as art brut walls instead of dazzlingskeins of paint One photograph of a later diptych shows the paintingsblocking the doorway to Rauschenbergrsquos studio at Black Mountain asif they were extensions of the rough-hewn stone walls on either side45

But in this next transformation of painting as wall what seems moreimportant for the direction that both Rauschenberg and Kaprow wouldfollow out of these works was their newspaper ground As Rauschenbergrsquospaintings became wall-size their art brut surface was built on the newsof the day At rst everyday events as reported in the newspaper are

Kaizen | Framed Space Allan Kaprow and the Spread of Painting 91

painted out and hidden behind the blackpaint46 As the series proceeded he allowedincreasingly more of the news to showthrough While the White Paintings engagedwith the gap between art and life by cap-turing the viewerrsquos bodymdashas did Cagersquos4rsquo 33 at least for Kaprowmdashthe black paint-ings did so by using the everyday objectas a ground Through their use of news-paper they suggested another trajectoryout of painting and into everyday spacea trajectory whose base condition was thecommodity object

In order to get into the gap between art and life Rauschenbergrsquoswork rst had to approximate the condition of being a wall It neededto assume a relation to its architectural frame in order to move awayfrom the autonomy of painting and into semiautonomy but once it didso Rauschenberg would abandon the problem of painting as wallFollowing the White Paintings and black paintings (and then a briefseries of Red Paintings) he made his rst Combines works that rein-state the autonomy of the individual art object even while they existbetween painting sculpture and the surrealist objet trouveacute47 Ratherthan engage with space Rauschenbergrsquos Combines elevate the ready-made or found object back to the status of the autonomous art objectThe Combines formalize the everyday object into an in-between statebut one that nevertheless produces singular art objects While theblack paintings led Rauschenberg back to the art object they led Kaprowfarther off the wall and out into space

| | | | |

Kaprow wrote ldquoa statementrdquo about his work sketching the trajectoryhe took from painting through collage then out into the space of thegallery48 After his initial show of paintings in 1952 he described thedevelopment of what he called ldquoaction collagerdquo These were done asquickly as possible by throwing together readily available everydaymaterials including parts of his past work tinfoil photographsnewspaper and food Although he doesnrsquot mention particular works by name presumably these action-collages include the early piecesreproduced in Assemblage Environments and Happenings In a photo-graph of Penny Arcade (1956) we see Kaprow standing in front of a largewall-size assemblage densely layered with parts of paintings scrapsof wood and large pieces of advertising signage that look like Kaproweither found them on the side of the road or appropriated them from a

Robert RauschenbergUntitled 1952

92 Grey Room 13

storefront It also included flashing lights andsounds calling out to the viewer like a ConeyIsland carnival booth but one made all the moreconfusing with its hyperarray of upside-downand fragmented word parts While collage hadbeen delicate even dainty in its appliqueacute of smallscraps of paper to the surface of the image KaprowrsquosPenny Arcade was massive and rough-hewn Unlikeits glitzier real-world counterpart Penny Arcadelooks cobbled together a temporary faccedilade brico-laged from odds and ends Here Kaprow turnedthe gallery space into the street turning the wallinto a pseudo-storefront bringing the architec-ture of the outside world into the gallery but lteredthrough the compositional strategies of collage

and abstract expressionism Abstraction before world war II had beenundertaken in a quest to find a universal Esperanto of color and form a problem that had been transformed by abstract expressionisminto a private iconography of psychic signs In Penny Arcade Kaprowturns the private symbolism of abstraction expressionism back to the world through advertising as commodity sign He makes the private symbol public again by reconnecting prendashWorld War II modelsof collective production with postndashWorld War II models of collectiveconsumption

Another work from this time further demonstrates how Kaprowused everyday materials to partition space Alternately titled (inAssemblage) Wall Kiosk and Rearrangeable Panels (1957ndash1959) thispiece looks like an enormous folding Japanese screen Measuring eightfeet high and over twenty feet long its panels are covered in eggshellsleaves and broken mirrorsmdashnot mass-produced commodities or sig-nage but detritus and waste Several of the panels are painted one inHoffmanrsquos push-pull style two seem to nod toward Rauschenberg onepainted white one black This piece is designed to sit on the oor ofthe gallery and as its various names imply it can be placed in a varietyof positions called ldquowallrdquo when arrayed in a straight line ldquokioskrdquowhen arranged into a square and ldquorearrangeable panelsrdquo in generalor when it sits in a zigzag Each position changes the relationship ofthe object to the space that contains it Kaprow recast the painting-as-wall as a transformable piece of furniture recognizing the possibilityof ludic engagement with the viewer but withholding it because theviewer is not allowed to interact with the piece directly Once installedthe work transforms the space of the gallery but it cannot be recong-ured by the viewer49

When asked why he used junk to make his work Kaprow replied

Allan Kaprow standing infront of Penny Arcade 1956Photo WF Gainfort

Kaizen | Framed Space Allan Kaprow and the Spread of Painting 93

It was clearly part of transformingreality It gave everyone a sense ofinstant involvement in a kind of crudeeveryday reality which was quite arelief after the high-art attitude ofexclusion from the real world It alsoallowed us to give up a certain kindof seriousness that traditional artmaking required Whatrsquos more thematerials were available everywhereon street corners at night And ifyou didnrsquot sell these environmentalconstructions yoursquod just throwthem back into the garbage canWhy not just throw them out It wasvery liberating to think of oneself aspart of an endlessly transformingreal world50

The ldquocrude everyday realityrdquo capturedby Penny Arcade as with Kaprowrsquos subsequent work is predicatedupon his project of capturing the ldquoendlessly transforming real worldrdquoThis statement connects him with Rauschenberg and Cage but alsoshows how their work differs in an important and crucial way InKaprowrsquos comment describing his experience of 4rsquo33 (as quoted inthe previous section) he says ldquoAnd we the listeners in Cagersquos concertand the lookers at Rauschenbergrsquos pictures were the collaborators of[sic] the artworkrdquo ending with ldquoIt was a kind of collaborative end-lessly changing affair The artwork was simply this organism that wasaliverdquo51 For Kaprow the key word here is change and in order tomove from artwork to organism the work of art must be reconsiderednot as a ldquochance operationrdquo (to use Cagersquos term) but as a change oper-ation During this time Kaprow had begun to take classes with Cageand he was exposed to Cagersquos use of chance methods of compositionWhile he would adopt much from Cagersquos work and teaching he thoughtthat change was the most important principle for his own work52

For Kaprow change was integrally connected to the postndashworld warII environment lled with mass-produced throwaway products Theart of this timemdashhis artmdashshould necessarily reect this environmentIn opposition to the nostalgic use of the objet trouveacute in surrealism hismethod was closer to the readymade choosing everyday objects to res-cue from oblivion but spreading them out in space so that they wouldenvironmentally engulf the viewer53 Kaprow temporarily revalues thethrowaway commodity in his environments to create a space where

Allan Kaprow RearrangeablePanels 1957-9 Shown intheir ldquoKioskrdquo con gurationPhoto Robert R McElroy

94 Grey Room 13

everyday life as planned obsolescence is brought under the control ofthe artist He creates a momentary space of anti-entropy in the life ofthe commodity where it is temporarily reinvested with value only to bedisposed of once the environment is destroyed54 Citing critic LawrenceAlloway on the ldquothrowawayrdquo culture of postndashworld war II AmericaKaprow goes on to describe the importance of change in his work

Change governing both reality and art has extended from theexpression of an idea arrested in a painting to a work in whichthe usually slow mutations wrought by nature are quickened andliterally made part of the experience of it they manifest the veryprocess of creation-decay-creation almost as one watches Theuse of debris waste products or very impermanent substanceslike toilet paper or bread has of course a clear range of allusionswith obvious sociological implications the simplest being theartistrsquos positive involvement on the one hand with an everydayworld and on the other with a group of objects which beingexpendable might suggest that corresponding lack of statuswhich is supposed to be the fate of anything creative todayThese choices must not be ignored for they reveal what in oursurroundings charges the imagination as well as what is mosthuman in our art55

What is ldquomost humanrdquo in Kaprowrsquos art as he denes it is its reectionof this throwaway culture This is governed not by Cagean chance butby planned obsolescence with its endless renewal of more of thesame ldquo[My] workrdquo Kaprow says ldquois intended to last only a short timeand is destroyed immediately after the exhibition If [its] obsolescenceis not planned it is expectedrdquo56 Alloway also writing on assemblagebetter describes the overlap between the throwaway object and its usein environmental art during the 1950s

The acceptance of mass-produced objects just because they arewhat is around not because they issue from idolatrised technol-ogy is central to mid-century Junk Culture Junk Culture iscity art Its source is obsolescence the throwaway material ofcities Assemblages of such material come at the spectator asbits of life bits of the environment frequently presented interms that dramatize spread ow extension trespass The junkis obtruded into our space with the aim of achieving maximumintimacy Proximity and participation replace distance and con-templation as the communicative style of the object57

So the space of Junk Culture when used in art as assemblage or envi-ronment achieves ldquomaximum intimacyrdquo with the observer throughtheir ldquoproximity and participationrdquo with the throwaway commodity

Kaizen | Framed Space Allan Kaprow and the Spread of Painting 95

As Kaprow moves farther into the space of the gallery he does so in anincreased attempt to engage the viewer He partitions the gallery spaceso that the body of the viewer becomes a product of its participationwithin the eld of the throwaway commodity

These early wall-like constructions were for Kaprow still not closeenough to a participatory art Kaprow wanted to move further towardthe creation of environments and even events to take over the gallerywith a plenitude of throwaway objects among which the viewer wouldself-consciously circulate The action collages still maintained toomuch autonomy because they existed as individual objects and so asKaprow recalled ldquonow I simply filled the whole gallery up startingfrom one wall and ending with the otherrdquo58 With his rst environmentKaprow was no longer composing within the autonomous space ofpainting but composing the entire space of the gallery Kaprowrsquos rstenvironmentmdashmade at the Hansa Gallery in November 1958mdashwasmeant to totally engage the visitors to the gallery to make them intopart of the work itself ldquopassively or actively according to [their] talentsfor lsquoengagementrsquordquo59 From a drop ceiling of wires suspended in a gridseveral inches below the galleryrsquos original ceiling he hung variousmaterials creating a labyrinthine space divided by sheets of plastictangles of cellophane Scotch tape and more including a time-releasedmist of pine-scented deodorizer His work had taken over the galleryspace lling it with a nearly impenetrable eld of throwaway objects60

Kaprow took the ood of postndashworld war II consumer goods and usedthem to compose walls that partitioned space And composemdashin thetraditional sense of arranging shapes and forms on the surface of acanvasmdashis exactly what he did

Kaprow described his use of the full space of the gallery as a eld aterm that he derives from painting calling the second section of hisldquoAssemblagerdquo essay ldquoThe Field in Paintingrdquo ldquoThis space is in part theliteral distance between all solids included in the workrdquo Kaprowwrote ldquoBut it is also a space that is a direct heritage of paintingrdquo61

Everything in the space that he produced became part of his compo-sition including the viewer Like any other object in the work Kaprowsaid ldquoin as much as people visiting [an] environment are moving col-ored shapes [they] were counted lsquoinrsquordquo62 Each visitor as they movedthrough Kaprowrsquos labyrinth became a part of the work Art and lifehad now seemingly collapsed the autonomy of painting as a separateobjectmdashframed and isolated from the rest of its environment as a spaceonly for the eyemdashhad been abandoned for an embodied experienceViewing was now dependent upon space a space full of the objects ofeveryday life Using the materials of everyday life Kaprow invited hisviewers to get rid of their distance from the art object forcing theminto physical contact with his work This work he wrote ldquoinvites us

96 Grey Room 13

to cast aside for a moment proper manners andpartake wholly in the real nature of art and (onehopes) liferdquo63 Against the look-donrsquot-touch attitude ofmuseum and gallery Kaprow created a haptic spacewhere touch became the basis of the work where vis-itors came into physical contact with his throwawayobjects In this space as visitors threaded their waythrough the labyrinth the color of their clothes andtheir presence among these objects turned them intoa part of the work The viewer appeared as anotherthing in Kaprowrsquos composition not so different fromhis throwaway materials In his environment autonomycollapsed into participation based on the reicationof the subject as an obsolete material temporally

composited into the work While Kaprow certainly intended to includehis observers in the work he could do so only by turning them intoobjects rather than active subjects He later described his own sense ofthe failure with this exhibition that he couldnrsquot seem to engage theviewer enough but blamed it on the framing space of the galleryAfterward he said ldquoI complained immediately about the fact that therewas a sense of mystery until your eye reached a wall Then there wasa dead end At that point my disagreement with the gallery spacebeganrdquo64 But Kaprow didnrsquot abandon the gallerymdashat least not yet Toget closer to the everyday Kaprow thought he should more fully incor-porate the bodies of his viewers into his work This led to the origin ofhappenings in an attempt to make viewers into active subjects to engagethem more actively in creating the work as they became part of it

| | | | |

In 1958 Kaprow had presented two other early proto-happenings oneat Rutgers called Communication and one at George Segalrsquos farmcalled Pastorale65 Communication was based on work he had devel-oped in Cagersquos class It was close to traditional theater Presented in achapel that doubled as an auditorium for theater and music perfor-mances it included movement sound and banners unfurled from thebalconies Kaprow built ldquoplastic panelsrdquo behind which he performeda series of simple actions nally hiding himself from the audience bypainting the plastic wall in front of him and so ldquopainting himself outrdquoof the audiencersquos view66 For Pastorale he built frames that looked likeabysmal theater sets stretcher bars with torn strips of canvas runningfrom top to bottom During one part of the performance artists RobertWatts and Lucas Samaras painted on either side of one of these con-structions Inserted into the landscape these performance paintings

Part of the environment Allan Kaprow created for his piece Pastorale 1958Photo Vaughn Rachel

Kaizen | Framed Space Allan Kaprow and the Spread of Painting 97

marked the boundary between event and nonevent partitioning theground into territories and framing Pastoralersquos space using once againpainting as wall Unfortunately for Kaprow Pastorale was held during apicnic and the other participants were either too drunk or just plainunwilling to follow his directions They were engaged but refused tofollow his rules of play

18 Happenings in 6 Parts which took place in October 1959 wasthe rst ofcial happening67 Kaprow divided the inside of the galleryinto three smaller contiguous rooms using wooden two-by-fours Inphotographs of the piece as it was being installed these woodenbeams can be seen framing a space within the space of the gallerymdashnot into a proscenium stage but into an environment within the largergallery space where various events would occur Instead of wood ordrywall translucent plastic sheeting created the walls so that actioncould be partially seen from one room to the next Each room was litwith different colored lights and in each room where the audiencewas forced to sit and observe the action a group of actors movedthrough tightly scripted but simple routines as sounds came in and outand lms were projected

On the program the audience is listed under the ldquoCast of Participantsrdquowritten into the performance itself and actively engaged but only asthe subject of direction and authorial control At specific intervalsbells rang and the audience was required to change seats and to switchrooms based on instruction cards they had been given when they enteredthe gallery before the performance Kaprow had realized with his HansaGallery environment that he needed to give his viewers increasedresponsibility but he also realized that relinquishing too much con-trol could be a disaster as it had been in Pastorale As with his previ-ous work his goal with 18 Happenings was the ldquointegration of allelementsmdashenvironment constructed sections time space and peoplerdquoand the audience was once again included as just another material inhis composition68

During the fifth part of 18 Happenings one sequence of actionsseems to reveal Kaprowrsquos relationship with painting the viewer and space Kaprow had built a construction he called the ldquothe sandwich manrdquo named after its everyday counterparts paid to walkaround the city streets as human billboards Kaprowrsquos sandwich

Left The construction of thespace used for Allan Kaprowrsquos18 Happenings in 6 Parts1958

Right A view of Allan Kaprowrsquos18 Happenings whereRearrangeable Panels is partially visible on the leftThe in-set canvas panel onwhich actors painted live as part of the performance is shown at center PhotoScott Hyde

98 Grey Room 13

man was barely humanoidan automaton with forward-and backward-pointing mir-rors for a body bicycle wheelsfor feet and a gallon bucketof enamel paint for a headSticking out in front was apiece of wood for an arm end-ing in a hand that held cardslabeled ldquoXrdquo and ldquo3rdquo the adver-

tising handbill reduced to its zero degree In the middle of the sand-wich man hidden on a shelf between the two mirrors was a recordplayer and projecting out from behind it were two handles so that itcould be wheeled around the rooms As the sandwich man was wheeledfrom one room to another its mirrored body reflected the audienceback onto themselves their image taking the place of what would havebeen an advertisement They were reected not as participatory viewersnot even as active objects as in his environment but as passive objectsnow totally reied their image produced as a reection of Junk CultureHere in Brechtian fashion using a literal ldquoframing effectrdquo Kaprowturned his previous use of the viewer back into a critique of the eventitself In reecting the audiencersquos passivity back to them he forced amoment of recognition of their complicity in the production of thework They could see that as they became an ad on the sandwich manrsquosbelly so they became throwaway objects in his composition By reduc-ing the spectator to the general equivalence of these objects Kaprowrecognized the subject of the postndashWorld War II period as a product ofplanned obsolescence and consumer culture

Following this as the sandwich man was wheeled through the secondroom and into the third two men stood up from their seats one in eachroom Each took up a brush and a can of paint and approached oppo-site sides of one of the plastic walls simultaneously painting on a sec-tion of canvas set among the plastic walls and so turning the wall backinto a painting69 The canvas was left unprimed so that the simple gures that each artist painted (one was supposed to paint lines theother circles) would bleed through and so would be immediately visibleon the opposite side each mark responding to that of their partner Asin his two earlier happenings painting is done live before an audienceon a wall Kaprow showed the audience that when painting becomeswall it functions only to put space on display Here painting as a sin-gular art object was meaningless It became a throwaway stage propand so became a demonstration of how painting as object was part ofthe larger environment in which it resides The limit condition of paint-ing as wall with viewer as spectator was the gallery as frame70

The sandwich man part ofKaprowrsquos 18 HappeningsPhoto Scott Hyde

Kaizen | Framed Space Allan Kaprow and the Spread of Painting 99

What this sequence from 18 Happenings reveals is that Kaprow hadan acute sense of the way in which the gallery as frame produces sub-ject and space together He undermined the normal function of the artgallery turning both viewer and art object into Junk Culture Throwawayviewers throwaway paintings and throwaway rooms turned the galleryspacemdasha space designed to be neutral to hide itself as the objects itcontains become the sole focus of the viewerrsquos concentrationmdashinto thelocus of planned obsolescence With the creation of happeningsKaprow used Junk Culture against the doxa of gallery space upsettingthe common sense of what a space for art is and what it does Afterhappenings the paradoxical logic of the gallery as a site for both theprivate contemplation of singular aesthetic objects as well as the pub-lic transaction of luxury goods had been (however temporarily) sub-verted In asserting the gallery space as the limit condition of paintingKaprow framed the institution as the ground of artistic production

In ldquoThe Legacy of Jackson Pollockrdquo Kaprow says ldquoPollock left us atthe point where we must become preoccupied with and even dazzled by the space and objects of our everyday liferdquo71 In ldquoAssemblageEnvironments Happeningsrdquo bridging the gap between his early andlater work he concludes ldquothis has brought sharply into focus that theroom has always been a frame or format toordquo72 Kaprowrsquos collapse ofautonomy via art into lifemdashthat environments and happenings wouldldquopartake wholly in the real nature of art and (one hopes) liferdquomdashwasonly ever a hope as he himself knew If painting had used the frameas the delimitation of a eld for composition then environments andhappenings turned the gallery into the limit condition of this fieldWhile he tried to get closer to everyday life by making art he inevitablypushed it further away This ambivalence toward the collapse of artand life runs throughout Kaprowrsquos work even as he moved out of thegallery and into everyday life following his early work with his laterldquoactivitiesrdquo The early work was even by his own estimation more adisplay of experience and not a fair representation of actual everydayexperience But this is precisely where the importance of this work liesKaprowrsquos environments and happenings extended Rauschenbergrsquossemiautonomous gap so far that they turned the screw one notchhigher autonomy returning not though the sublation of art into archi-tecture but through the medium of framed space

100 Grey Room 13

NotesThanks to the generosity and insight of Karen Kurczynski John Harwood SethMcCormick Jaleh Mansoor Beth Hinderliter Vered Maimon Benjamin Buchloh andBarry Bergdoll as well as Branden Joseph and the Editors of Grey Room

1 Brian OrsquoDoherty Inside the White Cube The Ideology of the Gallery Space(Berkeley and Los Angeles University of California Press 1999) 15

2 It was originally called ldquoPainting Environments Happeningsrdquo and publishedin a condensed form in the catalog for the exhibition New FormsmdashNew Media I at the Martha Jackson Gallery New York the rst uptown show of Kaprow and his con-temporaries It was changed to ldquoAssemblage Environments and Happeningsrdquo for nalpublication Kaprow changed the title to incorporate the recent acceptance of the termassemblage It had been used rst by Helen Comstock to describe the work of ArthurDove in the 1920s but remained obscure until Jean Dubuffet popularized its use in 1953The term as used by Dubuffet was then adopted by William Seitz for his exhibitionThe Art of Assemblage at the Museum of Modern Art See Allan Kaprow AssemblageEnvironments and Happenings (New York Harry N Abrams 1966) 150ndash208 NewFormsmdashNew Media I (New York Martha Jackson Gallery 1960) np and RogerShattuck ldquoIntroduction How Collage Became Assemblagerdquo Essays on Assemblage(New York Museum of Modern Art 1992) 119

3 ldquoWhen I am in my painting Irsquom not aware of what Irsquom doingrdquo said PollockJackson Pollock Jackson Pollock Interviews Articles Reviews ed Pepe Karmel (NewYork Museum of Modern Art 1999) 17ndash18

4 Yard was Kaprowrsquos contribution to the exhibition Environments SituationsSpaces at the Martha Jackson Gallery a follow up to New FormsndashNew Media (see n 2)

5 ldquoAllan Kaprow and Robert Watts Interviewed by Sidney Simonrdquo in Benjamin HDBuchloh and Judith F Rodenbeck Experiments in the Everyday Allan Kaprow andRobert Watts Events Objects Documents (New York Wallach Art Gallery 1999) 76

6 To cite but one example of many Thomas Hirschhorn is an artist who continuesto extend and develop Kaprowrsquos legacy today

7 On Kaprow and performance see Amelia Jones Body Art Performing the Subject(Minneapolis University of Minnesota Press 1998) 56ndash57 Paul Schimmel ldquoLeap intothe Void Performance and the Objectrdquo in Out of Actions Between Performance andthe Object 1949ndash1979 ed Paul Schimmel (New York Thames and Hudson 1998)59ndash63

8 The relationship between painting and space had been explored before partic-ularly in the period between the two world wars by the artists associated with De Stijland constructivism For more on De Stijl see Nancy Troy The De Stijl Environment(Cambridge MIT Press 1983) On constructivism see Yve-Alain Bois ldquoEl LissitzkyRadical Reversibilityrdquo Art in America 76 no 4 (April 1988) 161ndash181 and Yve-AlainBois ldquoMaterial Utopiasrdquo Art in America 79 no 6 (June 1991) 98ndash107 Another Europeanwho explored the everyday object painting and space was Kurt Schwitters in the various incarnation of his Merzbau See Elizabeth Burns Gamard Kurt SchwittersrsquoMerzbau The Cathedral of Erotic Misery (New York Princeton Architectural Press2000) Two other important precursors who bridge the European and American con-text are Lazlo Moholy-Nagy and Friedrick Kiesler For information on Moholy-Nagyrsquosearly environmental projects as well as those of Lissitzy see Joan Ockman ldquoThe RoadNot Taken Alexander Dornerrsquos Way Beyond Artrdquo in Autonomy and Ideology Positioningan Avant-Garde in America ed RE Somol (New York Monicelli Press 1997) For

Kaizen | Framed Space Allan Kaprow and the Spread of Painting 101

information on Kiesler see RL Held Endless Innovations Frederick Kieslerrsquos Theoryand Scenic Design (Ann Arbor UMI Research Press 1982) Lisa Phillips FrederickKiesler (New York The Whitney Museum of American Art 1989) Brian OrsquoDohertydraws out the connections between the prendash and postndashWorld War II manifestations ofthis relationship in Inside the White Cube

9 For Benjamin the work of art attains autonomy under modernism with theemergence of art for artrsquos sake This autonomy is then usurped by mechanical repro-duction See Walter Benjamin ldquoThe Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproductionrdquoin Illuminations ed Hanna Arendt (New York Harcourt Brace and Jovanovich Inc1968) p 224-226 For Greenberg as the above quote indicates the autonomy of artcontinues even in the face of mechanization See Clement Greenberg ldquoTowards a NewerLaocoonrdquo Perceptions and Judgments 1939ndash1944 vol 1 of Clement Greenberg TheCollected Essays and Criticism ed John OrsquoBrien (Chicago University of Chicago1986) p 32

10 Rosalind Krauss uses the term ldquopost-medium conditionrdquo to designate ldquomixed-media installationrdquo work done today While Krauss argues that only the most signi-cant artists working since the 1960s reassert the medium in their work against thegeneral postmedium condition I believe that all mixed-media installation work operates using the gallery or institution as medium See Rosalind Krauss ldquoA Voyageon the North Seardquo Art in the Age of the Post-Medium Condition (New York Thamesand Hudson 1999) for her comments on a specic contemporary artist and the rein-vention of the medium see Rosalind Krauss ldquo And Then Turn Awayrdquo An Essayon James Colemanrdquo October 81 (Summer 1997) 5ndash33

11 Allan Kaprow ldquoThe Legacy of Jackson Pollockrdquo Art News 57 no 6 (October1958) 24ndash26 55ndash57 reprinted in Allan Kaprow Essays on the Blurring of Art andLife ed Jeff Kelley (Berkeley and Los Angles University of California Press 1993) 1ndash9 Kaprow has stated that the essay was written in 1956 in ldquoAllan Kaprow andRobert Watts Interviewed by Sidney Simonrdquo 77 Kaprow had been a student of bothHans Hoffman and Meyer Schapiro

12 Harold Rosenberg ldquoThe American Action Paintersrdquo Art News 52 (December1952) 22ndash23 In a footnote that Rosenberg added when the article was republished aspart of his book of collected essays in 1959 he added the following ldquoAction Paintinghas extracted the element of decision inherent in all art in that the work is not fin-ished at its beginning but has to be carried forward by an accumulation of lsquorightrsquo ges-tures In a word Action Painting is the abstraction of the moral element in art itsmark is moral tension in detachment from moral or esthetic certainties and it judgesitself morally in declaring that picture to be worthless which is not the incorporationof a genuine struggle one which could at any point have been lostrdquo Harold RosenbergThe Tradition of the New (New York Horizon Press 1959) 33ndash34 Kaprow recountsthe influence of Rosenbergrsquos essay on his work in ldquoAllan Kaprow and Robert WattsInterviewed by Sidney Simonrdquo 77

13 There were five all told They were held as follows 5ndash23 January 1948 24Januaryndash12 February 1949 21 Novemberndash10 December 1949 28 Novemberndash16 December1950 26 Novemberndash15 December 1951 These shows had a remarkable resonance onethat extended beyond even the insular New York art world when after the secondexhibition Life magazine published the feature article ldquoJackson Pollock Is He theGreatest Living Painter in the United Statesrdquo Dorothy Sieberling Life (August 81949) 42ndash45

14 Allan Kaprow ldquoThe Legacy of Jackson Pollockrdquo in Kaprow Essays on the

102 Grey Room 13

Blurringrdquo 615 Kaprow uses both the terms scale and size to describe Pollockrsquos work but as

TJ Clark has shown these are two very different terms and Pollock is a painter of sizeand not scale For Clark it is size that engages the body ldquoNormally speaking size isliteralmdasha matter of actual physical intuition It involves grasping how big or small acertain object really is most likely in relation to the size of the grasperrsquos upright body oroutspread armsrdquo TJ Clark ldquoPollockrsquos Smallnessrdquo in Jackson Pollock New Approachesed Kirk Varnedoe and Pepe Karmel (New York Museum of Modern Art 1999) 15

16 Kaprow ldquoThe Legacy of Jackson Pollockrdquo Essays on the Blurring 617 In most of his work the paint engages with the edge of the canvas emphasizing

and bordering it and not continuing around it as if the canvas had been cut down fromsome innite expanse Kaprow claims otherwise by singling out the exceptions sayingldquo[H]is art gives the impression of going on forever [T]hough evidence points to aslackening of the attack as Pollock came to the edges of many of his canvases in thebest ones he compensated for this by tacking much of the painted surface around theback of his stretchersrdquo Kaprow ldquoThe Legacy of Jackson Pollockrdquo Essays on the Blurringof Art and Life 5 An examination of the paintings shows that more often Pollockstopped before the edge or reworked his compositions after they were stretched sothat they reengaged with the edge even when cut from larger canvas Kaprow claimsotherwise because it furthers his arguments that Pollockrsquos paintings emerge into thespace of the viewer

18 Jackson Pollock ldquoApplication for a Guggenheim Fellowship 1947rdquo in JacksonPollock Interviews 17 The inuence of Greenberg at this time is discussed in StevenNaifeh and Gregory White Smith Jackson Pollock An American Saga (Aiken SCWoodwardWhite 1989) 551 Pollock had also engaged with wall-size painting duringhis association with Joseacute Clemente Orozco and in earlier work such as Mural(1943ndash1944) painted for Peggy Guggenheimrsquos house

19 Greenbergrsquos version of modernism was most fully laid out only in 1959 andpublished in 1960 ldquoIt was the stressing of the ineluctable atness of the surface thatremained however more fundamental than anything else to the process by whichpictorial art criticized and defined itself under Modernism For flatness alone wasunique and exclusive to pictorial art Because flatness was the only conditionpainting shared with no other art Modernist painting oriented itself to atness as itdid to nothing elserdquo In Clement Greenberg ldquoModernist Paintingrdquo in Modernism witha Vengeance 1957ndash1969 vol 4 of Clement Greenberg The Collected Essays andCriticism ed John OrsquoBrien (Chicago University of Chicago Press 1993) 87

20 Clement Greenberg ldquoThe Situation at the Momentrdquo in Arrogant Purpose1945ndash1949 vol 2 of Clement Greenberg The Collected Essays and Criticism ed JohnOrsquoBrien (Chicago University of Chicago 1986) 194ndash195

21 See Greenberg ldquoTowards a Newer Laocoonrdquo throughout22 Eric Lum has done extensive work on the relationship between abstract expres-

sionism and architecture The analysis in this essay follows from his especially whereBlakersquos project is concerned but also expands on it As he jumps from Blake to PhilipJohnson and Mark Rothkorsquos Houston Chapel however Lum misses the importance ofother interventions between painting and architecture such as those made by KaprowThis is evident when he says ldquoThrough this marriage of mural and wall paintingcould become fully integrated into architecture an idealized conjecture nor realizeduntil Mark Rothkorsquos 1971 Houston Chapelrdquo Eric Lum ldquoPollockrsquos Promise Toward anAbstract Expressionist Architecturerdquo Assemblage 39 (August 1999) 68

Kaizen | Framed Space Allan Kaprow and the Spread of Painting 103

23 Blake said of his visit to Pollockrsquos studio ldquoIt was a very sunny day and thesun was shining on the paintings I felt like I was standing in the Hall of Mirrors atVersailles It was a dazzling incredible sightrdquo Naifeh and Smith 588

24 Peter Blake No Place like Utopia Modern Architecture and the Company WeKept (New York Knopf 1993) 111ndash112

25 Miesrsquos museum plan was designed at the request of the editors at ArchitecturalForum who had been publishing a series of articles ldquoto show how building might beimproved through fuller and more imaginative use of existing resourcesrdquo They requesteddesigns for a variety of buildings that could be placed in a hypothetical city of 70000inhabitants ldquoNew Buildings for 194Xrdquo Architectural Forum 78 no 5 (May 1943)69ndash85 The Barcelona Pavilion was built in 1929 for the Barcelona Universal Expositionand was destroyed when the fair ended It was subsequently rebuilt in 1981ndash86

26 Peter Blake Mies van der Rohe (New York Pelican 1960) 54 It is worth notingthat like Miesrsquos use of the Kolbe sculpture Blake had Pollock actually make smallwire sculptures splattered with paint miniatures of sculptures that Blake hopedPollock would make for the actual museum Pollock himself was experimenting withsculpture around this time building three-dimensional forms out of papier-macirccheacutethat he then splattered with paint

27 Blakersquos collage space follows from Miesrsquos The production of collages as in situmodels for Miesrsquos buildings had begun in the twenties with his work for the journal Gin association with Dadaists such as Hans Richter Neil Levine notes this creation ofa collage space in Mies particularly in the Pavilion and the Museum for a Small Cityin relation to his use of reection to layer one surface on top of another Neil LevineldquolsquoThe Signicance of Factsrsquo Miesrsquo Collages Up Close and Personalrdquo Assemblage 37(December 1998) 71ndash101

28 Blake designed his museum just as Philip Johnson was building his Glass Housewhere they both spent considerable time while planning exhibitions for the Museumof Modern Art Johnsonrsquos inuence is also evident in Blakersquos design Blake No Placelike Utopia 149ndash155

29 Arthur Drexler ldquoUnframed Space A Museum for Jackson Pollackrsquos [sic] PaintingsrdquoInteriors and Industrial Design 109 no 6 (January 1950) 90ndash91 The article was partof a special issue whose theme was ldquoInteriors to Comerdquo a recurring topic that wasmeant ldquoto show the direction in which some of our best designers are goingrdquo The termunframed space was used several times in reference to Pollockrsquos work as the title oftwo articles Drexlerrsquos and one published slightly later by Berton Rouecheacute ThoughRouecheacute in an interview in To a Violent Grave says that Lee Krasner used the phraserst Charles Pollock says that Blake was the origin of the term The fact that Drexlerrsquosarticle was written and published earlier seems to conrm this See Berton RouecheacuteldquoUnframed Spacerdquo in Jackson Pollock Interviews 18ndash19 and Jeffrey Potter To aViolent Grave (New York Pushcart Press 1985) 126

30 Drexler 9031 Blake No Place like Utopia 113ndash11432 Blake completed construction on his ldquoPinwheel Houserdquo in 1952 It is a small

beach house that he designed for himself and his family in South Hampton on NewYorkrsquos Long Island Situated on the beach the house is square in plan and its fourexterior walls slide horizontally outward each in a successive clockwise directionrevealing glass walls When the exterior walls are fully extended and the house isviewed from above it forms a shape like a pinwheel Opening the exterior wallsreveals an ever-changing view of the landscape outside turning the ocean and the

104 Grey Room 13

dunes into the picturesque framing them so that they entirely ll the space of the walland put its surface in motion Blake had discussed with Pollock the possibility of hispainting the sliding walls so that his paintings would be superimposed over the land-scape Pollock considered it but Blake couldnrsquot come up with the commission moneythat Pollock asked for They never finalized their plans and it was never clear howthe panels were to be painted Blake suggested that they might be made of glass so hebought the sheet of glass that Pollock used to paint Number 29 1950 (1950) the paintingthat Hans Namuth lmed from underneath for his documentary on Pollock His col-laboration with Blake did lead to one commission a mural-size canvas done for ahouse designed by Marcel Breuer Untitled (Mural) (1950) Shortly after his collabo-ration with Blake Pollock began another unrealized architectural project this onewith Alfonso Ossorio and Tony Smith for a church designed by Smith with murals byPollock For more on all of this see Blake No Place like Utopia 114ndash118 Naifeh andSmith 649 and Lum ldquoPollockrsquos Promiserdquo 68 85ndash88

33 Lum ldquoPollockrsquos Promiserdquo 67ndash6834 A few pages down from Drexlerrsquos article on the Pollock Museum in Interiors

and Industrial Design was another architectural response to the same problem OlgaGueftrsquos article ldquoThe Museumrsquos Oasisrdquo describes another museum this one by Gyorgyand Juliet Kepes ldquoThe Kepesesrdquo it begins ldquoare not exactly opposed to museumsrdquo how-ever it would seem that they were opposed to museums containing works of artReplacing the art objects entirely the Kepeses substituted shells driftwood plantsand animals Instead of a natural history museum they proposed a modern-dayWunderkammerwhere natural forms take the place of art as objects for contemplationldquoThe proposed galleryrdquo they declared ldquowould bridge the gap between the art museumwhich is concerned with man-made beauty and the natural history museum whichis preoccupied with nature but not particularly with naturersquos beautyrdquo Gyorgy KepesrsquosThe New Landscape exhibition at MIT a year later in 1951 (the same years as theIndependent Grouprsquos similar exhibition Growth and Form in London) and the pub-lication that followed The New Landscape in Art and Sciencewould ultimately realizethis project with blown-up photographs of natural forms (cells shells and electronmicrographs) in place of actual objects

The Kepeses seem to have taken the next logical step beyond Blake proposing aneven more radical rethinking of the wall-size work of art Eliminating the need for theartist altogether they found abstract forms in nature and turned their reproductionsinto what would elsewhere have been works of art By turning the art object into scientic vision The Kepeses proposed its total instrumentation Autonomous abstractpainting was transformed into its instrumental other a mechanically reproduced science of vision Rather than turn art into interior design The Kepesesrsquo replacementof abstract painting recast the status of scientic technology into that of high art SeeOlga Gueft ldquoThe Museumrsquos Oasisrdquo Interiors and Industrial Design 109 no 6 (January1950) 100ndash103 and Gyorgy Kepes The New Landscape in Art and Science (ChicagoPaul Theobald and Co 1956)

35 Kaprow stated that it was ldquoIn 1949 [that] I saw an exhibition of [Pollockrsquos] workfor the rst timerdquo ldquoInterviewrdquo in Allan Kaprow (Pasadena Pasadena Art Museum1967) 7

36 See Kaprow ldquoThe Legacy of Jackson Pollockrdquo Art News 25 and Kaprow ldquoTheLegacy of Jackson Pollockrdquo Essays on the Blurring 3

37 Joan Marter ldquoThe Forgotten Legacy Happenings Pop Art and Fluxus at RutgersUniversityrdquo in Off Limits Rutgers University and the Avant-Garde 1957ndash1963 ed Joan

Kaizen | Framed Space Allan Kaprow and the Spread of Painting 105

Marter (Newark The Newark Museum 1999) 438 Marter 13239 Quoted in John Cage Silence (Middletown Wesleyan University Press 1961) 10540 Branden Joseph has developed the link between Cage and Rauschenberg in several

recent essays See Branden W Joseph ldquoJohn Cage and the Architecture of SilencerdquoOctober 81 (Summer 1997) 81ndash104 and Branden Joseph ldquoWhite on Whiterdquo CriticalInquiry 27 no 1 (Summer 2001) 90ndash121

41 For Cage on Rauschenberg see Cage Silence98ndash108 For his description ofTheater Piece No 1 see ldquoInterview with John Cagerdquo in Happenings and Other Actsed Mariellen R Sandford (New York Routledge 1995) 53 Cage subsequently referredto Theater Piece No 1 as ldquothe rst happeningrdquo See John Cage ldquoAn AutobiographicalStatementrdquo Southwest Review 76 no 1 (Winter 1991) 65

42 The score itself has had various incarnations It wasnrsquot published until 1960and in this version includes a note wherein Cage describes the rst performance byTudor For more on 4rsquo33 and its various scores see Liz Kotz ldquoWords on Paper NotNecessarily Meant to Be Read as Art Postwar Media Poetics from Cage to Warholrdquo(PhD diss Columbia University 2002) 83ndash115 Kotz follows a different lineage outof Cage and into performance and happenings than the one traced in this essay

43 Marter 13244 Walter Hopps in the first survey catalog of Rauschenbergrsquos early work does

not name the black paintings as a group as he does the White Paintings He calls themeach Untitled followed by a description in brackets Hopps notes of the largest ofthese works that ldquoThese paintings with a greater vastness and ambiguity of scale thanother Rauschenberg works relate to spatial qualities of Jackson Pollockrdquo HoppsRobert Rauschenberg The Early 1950s (Houston Houston Fine Art Press 1991) 67This convention was also followed in Rauschenbergrsquos 1997 Guggenheim retrospectivecatalog and is followed in this essay Robert Rauschenberg A Retrospective ed WalterHopps and Susan Davidson (New York Solomon R Guggenheim Museum 1997)

45 The piece is called Untitled [two black panels] (1953) Hopps Robert Rauschenberg99

46 Helen Molesworth notes the importance of Rauschenbergrsquos newspaper groundin the black paintings and develops this problem in relation to the abject body as it isfurther pursued in his work throughout the 1950s Helen Molesworth ldquoBefore BedrdquoOctober 63 (Winter 1993) 68ndash82

47 Asked about this work Rauschenberg said ldquoI called them combines I had tocoin that word because I got so bored with arguments I was interested in people seeingmy work When someone would come up and I really wanted to know what they thoughtof it or wanted to sense the exposure there was always this screen that they could getbehind which was if I said lsquoIt is paintingrsquo they would say lsquoThatrsquos not painting Thatrsquossculpturersquo And they thought this was very interestingrdquo Jeanne Siegel ArtwordsDiscourse on the 60s and 70s (New York DaCapo 1985) 153

48 Allan Kaprow ldquoa Statementrdquo in Happenings An Illustrated Anthology edMichael Kirby (New York EP Dutton and Co 1965) 44ndash45

49 Benjamin Buchloh notes the importance of play in the 1950s and its link toconsumer culture During the 1950s he writes ldquoa theory of games would remerge asa cultural project at the very moment of an ever-increasing instrumentalization oflibidinal desire through consumer culturerdquo Benjamin HD Buchloh ldquoRobert WattsInanimate ObjectsmdashInanimate Subjectsrdquo in Buchloh and Rodenbeck Experiments inthe Everyday 25 n 4

Kaizen | Framed Space Allan Kaprow and the Spread of Painting 87

the removal of the traditional framing device (the picture frame) for anoverlapping frame of collaged space the collapse of outside and insideand the reection back onto the viewer of their somatic viewing expe-rience Like Mies Blake adopted the materials of modern distraction(plate glass in particular) and combined them with an open plan inorder to create an interior that would use the glass curtain wall to offerrespite from the city street and the speed of modernity28

The only substantive article published on the Pollock Museum atthe time was Arthur Drexlerrsquos ldquoUnframed Spacerdquo29 The title camefrom Blakersquos own assessment that his project would realize the unlim-ited extension of Pollockrsquos marks into a total environment Drexlerconcludes his short essay with words that are similar to Blakersquos ownassessment of Mies ldquoThe Project suggests a re-integration of paintingand architecture wherein painting is the architecture but this timewithout message or content Its sole purpose is to heighten our expe-rience of spacerdquo30 Contrary to Drexlerrsquos title Pollockrsquos paintings arerendered secondary to their use in framing space It is the space of thegallery that submits them to its formal logic In Blakersquos Museum theart is secondary to the space that contains it

Blakersquos Museum conates both of Miesrsquos projects from which it wasprimarily derived By using abstract paintings Blake was able to fillhis museum with art while simultaneously returning these large-sizeabstractions directly to the wall Pollockrsquos painting functions like thestone cladding on the central wall in the Barcelona Pavilion as a dec-orative surface Pollock recognized the reduction inherent in Blakersquosproject saying to him after the design was done ldquoThe trouble is youthink I am a decoratorrdquo Blakersquos reply was telling ldquoOf course I thinkhis paintings might make terric walls After all architects spend a lotof time thinking about wallsrdquo31 What kept Pollock from working directlyon the wall and what Blake as an architect recognized immediatelywas that when painting became a wall or approached this conditionthrough wall size its autonomy was destroyed It approached the

Interiors (January 1950) featuring Blakersquos Pollockmuseum

88 Grey Room 13

status of interior decoration and that was the wayBlake wanted itmdashPollock reduced to ldquoterrific wallsrdquoHe even tried to commission Pollock to paint panelsfor the moving walls of the Pinwheel House his nextproject so that when they slid shut the housersquos inte-rior would be enclosed in Pollocks surrounded bypainted wallpaper32 The paintings as walls are sub-mitted to the logic of Blakersquos architecture He destroysthe autonomy of Pollockrsquos paintings only to sublatethem into the autonomy of modernist architecturerealizing Pollockrsquos fear of turning his work into meredecoration Blakersquos project asserts architecture over

painting As painting becomes wall it is sublated into the autonomousmodernist space of Miesian architecture Pollockrsquos work is turned intoa decorative surface into an interior design for a modernist space

The Pollock Museum was never built but not because either Pollockor Blake had second thoughts Despite any misgivings that Pollock hadwith this project the model was exhibited at Betty Parsons Gallery in1949 and afterward the model remained in Pollockrsquos studio promi-nently displayed in case he could convince a visiting collector to helpfinance its construction At his next exhibition with Betty Parson in1950 the paintings were made to be the same height and almost thesame length of the walls on which they hung so that they would comeas close as possible to realizing Blakersquos design within the more tradi-tional gallery setting33

If Blakersquos project misrepresented Pollock this was only to the extentthat Pollock had already acknowledged the tendency of painting atwall size to become an object What Blakersquos project makes clear is thatwhen paintings became wall-size or as they literally became wallsthey lost their capacity to create an autonomous space divorced fromcontext While it took an architect initially to realize such a possibilityartists soon followed suit34

It is likely that Kaprow saw the 1949 exhibition of Pollockrsquos workwhich included the model for Blakersquos Museum Although in his writ-ings on Pollock he doesnrsquot mention the Museum in an interview from1967 he claimed to have rst seen a Pollock exhibition in 194935 Thiswould mean that he had seen the show at the Betty Parsons Gallerywith the model on display The model for the museum is also clearlyvisible in the photographs of Pollock working in his studio that illus-trate both the original publication of Kaprowrsquos ldquoThe Legacy of JacksonPollockrdquo and (much later) his collection of essays The Blurring of Artand Life36 Kaprow also explicitly referenced the subsequent Pollockexhibition with its wall-size works when he discussed the all-overeld Pollockrsquos work created in the space of the gallery But along with

Photograph of Pollock in hisstudio As published in Allan Kaprow ldquoThe Legacy ofJackson Pollockrdquo in Art News(October 1958) The model of Blakersquos museum is visiblein the upper-left cornerPhoto Rudy Burckhardt

Kaizen | Framed Space Allan Kaprow and the Spread of Painting 89

Pollock and Blake Kaprow also engagedwith the work of Robert Rauschenbergand John Cage two artists who had asmuch impact on his thinking about spaceas Pollock

| | | | |

In the fall of 1951 when Kaprow visitedRauschenbergrsquos studio he saw the WhitePaintings37 Rauschenberg had made theseworks during the previous summer at BlackMountain College Like Blake Rauschenberg also engaged space usingpainting but he did so as an artist not as an architect Yet rather thanreassert the autonomy of painting he established a semiautonomousspace for painting The White Paintings are a series of works paintedat matte white with no visible marks to attract the viewerrsquos eye WhileBlake submitted the autonomy of Pollockrsquos painting to the logic of hisarchitecture upholding the autonomy of modernist space in favor ofarchitecture over art Rauschenberg was far more ambivalent about thepossibility of autonomy for either art or architecture The White Paintingsexist between the two as semiautonomous objectsmdashnot quite wall notquite paintingmdashand certainly not like their nearest precursor abstractexpressionist painting with its ood of gesture and mark The WhitePaintings in their utter blankness call attention to the ephemeral effectsof light and shade that played across them Upon seeing them Kaprowwas unsure what to think until he noticed that they turned the surfaceof painting into an active plane of reception for the movement of his bodyldquoI was walking back and forth not knowing how I should take thesethingsrdquo he said ldquoand then I saw my shadows across the paintingmdashmovingrdquo38 For Kaprow the surface of these paintings became a tem-poral screen reecting the viewerrsquos body in the changing environmentof the gallery Their painterly incidence was not their whiteness perse but their ability to capture the presence of the viewer as he or shestood in front of the work The viewer activated the work so that thework the viewer and the space in between all became part of the workAs Rauschenberg wrote at the time ldquoPainting relates to both art andlife Neither can be made (I try to act in that gap between the two)rdquo39

These paintings are caught between painting as an object that is func-tionally and fundamentally separate from its architectural containerand the spread of painting into a semiautonomous state somewherebetween art architecture and the viewing subject moving through theexhibition space

Rauschenberg had developed his White Paintings in dialogue with

Photograph of Pollock in hisstudio As published in AllanKaprow Essays on theBlurring of Art and Life 1993The model of Blakersquosmuseum is visible in theupper-right corner PhotoHans Namuth

90 Grey Room 13

Cage who was also at Black Mountain in the summer of 195240 Thatsummer Cage incorporated The White Paintings into his own workTheater Piece No 141 They were suspended over the heads of theaudience members at various angles as a variety of performance eventstook place beneath them These events included Rauschenberg andDavid Tudor playing piano poets MC Richards and Charles Olsonreading poetry from atop a ladder and Merce Cunningham and othersdancing through the space and around the audience It was the WhitePaintings with their environmental quality that that led Cage to write4rsquo 33 in 1952 Tudor was the original performer of the compositionwhose score was open to interpretation42 He realized it on pianoplaying it by silently opening and closing the piano lid allowing thesounds of the audience and the ambient noises of the space to becomethe work Kaprow attended one of the rst performances of 4rsquo 33 atCarnegie Hall in 1952 and was deeply affected He compared his expe-rience of 4rsquo 33 to his experience of Rauschenbergrsquos paintings Thesounds in the space chairs creaking the air condition humming peoplecoughing and clearing their throatsmdashall the ambient sounds that lledthe space of the auditoriummdashbecame foregrounded ldquoIt was like theshadows in Bob Rauschenbergrsquos picturesrdquo Kaprow recalled ldquoThat is tosay there [wa]s no marking the boundary of the artwork or the boundaryof so-called everyday life They merge[d] And we the listeners in Cagersquosconcert and the lookers at Rauschenbergrsquos pictures were the collabo-rators of the artworkrdquo43 For Kaprow Cage like Rauschenberg col-lapsed the autonomy of art by engaging the listener as collaborator ina semiautonomous space (ldquoso-called everyday liferdquo and not true every-day life) that depended upon the interaction between work spaceand subject

On his visit to Rauschenbergrsquos studio Kaprow also saw the earliestof Rauschenbergrsquos black paintings44 This series is the antipode of thesmooth matte white surfaces of the White Paintings They are allblack monochromes most painted with a high-gloss enamel soakedinto newspaper pages that were then haphazardly stuck onto the sur-face of a canvas trapped pockets of air often causing the paintingsrsquosurfaces to bulge outward repulsively At their largest they framespace as Pollockrsquos work did but as art brut walls instead of dazzlingskeins of paint One photograph of a later diptych shows the paintingsblocking the doorway to Rauschenbergrsquos studio at Black Mountain asif they were extensions of the rough-hewn stone walls on either side45

But in this next transformation of painting as wall what seems moreimportant for the direction that both Rauschenberg and Kaprow wouldfollow out of these works was their newspaper ground As Rauschenbergrsquospaintings became wall-size their art brut surface was built on the newsof the day At rst everyday events as reported in the newspaper are

Kaizen | Framed Space Allan Kaprow and the Spread of Painting 91

painted out and hidden behind the blackpaint46 As the series proceeded he allowedincreasingly more of the news to showthrough While the White Paintings engagedwith the gap between art and life by cap-turing the viewerrsquos bodymdashas did Cagersquos4rsquo 33 at least for Kaprowmdashthe black paint-ings did so by using the everyday objectas a ground Through their use of news-paper they suggested another trajectoryout of painting and into everyday spacea trajectory whose base condition was thecommodity object

In order to get into the gap between art and life Rauschenbergrsquoswork rst had to approximate the condition of being a wall It neededto assume a relation to its architectural frame in order to move awayfrom the autonomy of painting and into semiautonomy but once it didso Rauschenberg would abandon the problem of painting as wallFollowing the White Paintings and black paintings (and then a briefseries of Red Paintings) he made his rst Combines works that rein-state the autonomy of the individual art object even while they existbetween painting sculpture and the surrealist objet trouveacute47 Ratherthan engage with space Rauschenbergrsquos Combines elevate the ready-made or found object back to the status of the autonomous art objectThe Combines formalize the everyday object into an in-between statebut one that nevertheless produces singular art objects While theblack paintings led Rauschenberg back to the art object they led Kaprowfarther off the wall and out into space

| | | | |

Kaprow wrote ldquoa statementrdquo about his work sketching the trajectoryhe took from painting through collage then out into the space of thegallery48 After his initial show of paintings in 1952 he described thedevelopment of what he called ldquoaction collagerdquo These were done asquickly as possible by throwing together readily available everydaymaterials including parts of his past work tinfoil photographsnewspaper and food Although he doesnrsquot mention particular works by name presumably these action-collages include the early piecesreproduced in Assemblage Environments and Happenings In a photo-graph of Penny Arcade (1956) we see Kaprow standing in front of a largewall-size assemblage densely layered with parts of paintings scrapsof wood and large pieces of advertising signage that look like Kaproweither found them on the side of the road or appropriated them from a

Robert RauschenbergUntitled 1952

92 Grey Room 13

storefront It also included flashing lights andsounds calling out to the viewer like a ConeyIsland carnival booth but one made all the moreconfusing with its hyperarray of upside-downand fragmented word parts While collage hadbeen delicate even dainty in its appliqueacute of smallscraps of paper to the surface of the image KaprowrsquosPenny Arcade was massive and rough-hewn Unlikeits glitzier real-world counterpart Penny Arcadelooks cobbled together a temporary faccedilade brico-laged from odds and ends Here Kaprow turnedthe gallery space into the street turning the wallinto a pseudo-storefront bringing the architec-ture of the outside world into the gallery but lteredthrough the compositional strategies of collage

and abstract expressionism Abstraction before world war II had beenundertaken in a quest to find a universal Esperanto of color and form a problem that had been transformed by abstract expressionisminto a private iconography of psychic signs In Penny Arcade Kaprowturns the private symbolism of abstraction expressionism back to the world through advertising as commodity sign He makes the private symbol public again by reconnecting prendashWorld War II modelsof collective production with postndashWorld War II models of collectiveconsumption

Another work from this time further demonstrates how Kaprowused everyday materials to partition space Alternately titled (inAssemblage) Wall Kiosk and Rearrangeable Panels (1957ndash1959) thispiece looks like an enormous folding Japanese screen Measuring eightfeet high and over twenty feet long its panels are covered in eggshellsleaves and broken mirrorsmdashnot mass-produced commodities or sig-nage but detritus and waste Several of the panels are painted one inHoffmanrsquos push-pull style two seem to nod toward Rauschenberg onepainted white one black This piece is designed to sit on the oor ofthe gallery and as its various names imply it can be placed in a varietyof positions called ldquowallrdquo when arrayed in a straight line ldquokioskrdquowhen arranged into a square and ldquorearrangeable panelsrdquo in generalor when it sits in a zigzag Each position changes the relationship ofthe object to the space that contains it Kaprow recast the painting-as-wall as a transformable piece of furniture recognizing the possibilityof ludic engagement with the viewer but withholding it because theviewer is not allowed to interact with the piece directly Once installedthe work transforms the space of the gallery but it cannot be recong-ured by the viewer49

When asked why he used junk to make his work Kaprow replied

Allan Kaprow standing infront of Penny Arcade 1956Photo WF Gainfort

Kaizen | Framed Space Allan Kaprow and the Spread of Painting 93

It was clearly part of transformingreality It gave everyone a sense ofinstant involvement in a kind of crudeeveryday reality which was quite arelief after the high-art attitude ofexclusion from the real world It alsoallowed us to give up a certain kindof seriousness that traditional artmaking required Whatrsquos more thematerials were available everywhereon street corners at night And ifyou didnrsquot sell these environmentalconstructions yoursquod just throwthem back into the garbage canWhy not just throw them out It wasvery liberating to think of oneself aspart of an endlessly transformingreal world50

The ldquocrude everyday realityrdquo capturedby Penny Arcade as with Kaprowrsquos subsequent work is predicatedupon his project of capturing the ldquoendlessly transforming real worldrdquoThis statement connects him with Rauschenberg and Cage but alsoshows how their work differs in an important and crucial way InKaprowrsquos comment describing his experience of 4rsquo33 (as quoted inthe previous section) he says ldquoAnd we the listeners in Cagersquos concertand the lookers at Rauschenbergrsquos pictures were the collaborators of[sic] the artworkrdquo ending with ldquoIt was a kind of collaborative end-lessly changing affair The artwork was simply this organism that wasaliverdquo51 For Kaprow the key word here is change and in order tomove from artwork to organism the work of art must be reconsiderednot as a ldquochance operationrdquo (to use Cagersquos term) but as a change oper-ation During this time Kaprow had begun to take classes with Cageand he was exposed to Cagersquos use of chance methods of compositionWhile he would adopt much from Cagersquos work and teaching he thoughtthat change was the most important principle for his own work52

For Kaprow change was integrally connected to the postndashworld warII environment lled with mass-produced throwaway products Theart of this timemdashhis artmdashshould necessarily reect this environmentIn opposition to the nostalgic use of the objet trouveacute in surrealism hismethod was closer to the readymade choosing everyday objects to res-cue from oblivion but spreading them out in space so that they wouldenvironmentally engulf the viewer53 Kaprow temporarily revalues thethrowaway commodity in his environments to create a space where

Allan Kaprow RearrangeablePanels 1957-9 Shown intheir ldquoKioskrdquo con gurationPhoto Robert R McElroy

94 Grey Room 13

everyday life as planned obsolescence is brought under the control ofthe artist He creates a momentary space of anti-entropy in the life ofthe commodity where it is temporarily reinvested with value only to bedisposed of once the environment is destroyed54 Citing critic LawrenceAlloway on the ldquothrowawayrdquo culture of postndashworld war II AmericaKaprow goes on to describe the importance of change in his work

Change governing both reality and art has extended from theexpression of an idea arrested in a painting to a work in whichthe usually slow mutations wrought by nature are quickened andliterally made part of the experience of it they manifest the veryprocess of creation-decay-creation almost as one watches Theuse of debris waste products or very impermanent substanceslike toilet paper or bread has of course a clear range of allusionswith obvious sociological implications the simplest being theartistrsquos positive involvement on the one hand with an everydayworld and on the other with a group of objects which beingexpendable might suggest that corresponding lack of statuswhich is supposed to be the fate of anything creative todayThese choices must not be ignored for they reveal what in oursurroundings charges the imagination as well as what is mosthuman in our art55

What is ldquomost humanrdquo in Kaprowrsquos art as he denes it is its reectionof this throwaway culture This is governed not by Cagean chance butby planned obsolescence with its endless renewal of more of thesame ldquo[My] workrdquo Kaprow says ldquois intended to last only a short timeand is destroyed immediately after the exhibition If [its] obsolescenceis not planned it is expectedrdquo56 Alloway also writing on assemblagebetter describes the overlap between the throwaway object and its usein environmental art during the 1950s

The acceptance of mass-produced objects just because they arewhat is around not because they issue from idolatrised technol-ogy is central to mid-century Junk Culture Junk Culture iscity art Its source is obsolescence the throwaway material ofcities Assemblages of such material come at the spectator asbits of life bits of the environment frequently presented interms that dramatize spread ow extension trespass The junkis obtruded into our space with the aim of achieving maximumintimacy Proximity and participation replace distance and con-templation as the communicative style of the object57

So the space of Junk Culture when used in art as assemblage or envi-ronment achieves ldquomaximum intimacyrdquo with the observer throughtheir ldquoproximity and participationrdquo with the throwaway commodity

Kaizen | Framed Space Allan Kaprow and the Spread of Painting 95

As Kaprow moves farther into the space of the gallery he does so in anincreased attempt to engage the viewer He partitions the gallery spaceso that the body of the viewer becomes a product of its participationwithin the eld of the throwaway commodity

These early wall-like constructions were for Kaprow still not closeenough to a participatory art Kaprow wanted to move further towardthe creation of environments and even events to take over the gallerywith a plenitude of throwaway objects among which the viewer wouldself-consciously circulate The action collages still maintained toomuch autonomy because they existed as individual objects and so asKaprow recalled ldquonow I simply filled the whole gallery up startingfrom one wall and ending with the otherrdquo58 With his rst environmentKaprow was no longer composing within the autonomous space ofpainting but composing the entire space of the gallery Kaprowrsquos rstenvironmentmdashmade at the Hansa Gallery in November 1958mdashwasmeant to totally engage the visitors to the gallery to make them intopart of the work itself ldquopassively or actively according to [their] talentsfor lsquoengagementrsquordquo59 From a drop ceiling of wires suspended in a gridseveral inches below the galleryrsquos original ceiling he hung variousmaterials creating a labyrinthine space divided by sheets of plastictangles of cellophane Scotch tape and more including a time-releasedmist of pine-scented deodorizer His work had taken over the galleryspace lling it with a nearly impenetrable eld of throwaway objects60

Kaprow took the ood of postndashworld war II consumer goods and usedthem to compose walls that partitioned space And composemdashin thetraditional sense of arranging shapes and forms on the surface of acanvasmdashis exactly what he did

Kaprow described his use of the full space of the gallery as a eld aterm that he derives from painting calling the second section of hisldquoAssemblagerdquo essay ldquoThe Field in Paintingrdquo ldquoThis space is in part theliteral distance between all solids included in the workrdquo Kaprowwrote ldquoBut it is also a space that is a direct heritage of paintingrdquo61

Everything in the space that he produced became part of his compo-sition including the viewer Like any other object in the work Kaprowsaid ldquoin as much as people visiting [an] environment are moving col-ored shapes [they] were counted lsquoinrsquordquo62 Each visitor as they movedthrough Kaprowrsquos labyrinth became a part of the work Art and lifehad now seemingly collapsed the autonomy of painting as a separateobjectmdashframed and isolated from the rest of its environment as a spaceonly for the eyemdashhad been abandoned for an embodied experienceViewing was now dependent upon space a space full of the objects ofeveryday life Using the materials of everyday life Kaprow invited hisviewers to get rid of their distance from the art object forcing theminto physical contact with his work This work he wrote ldquoinvites us

96 Grey Room 13

to cast aside for a moment proper manners andpartake wholly in the real nature of art and (onehopes) liferdquo63 Against the look-donrsquot-touch attitude ofmuseum and gallery Kaprow created a haptic spacewhere touch became the basis of the work where vis-itors came into physical contact with his throwawayobjects In this space as visitors threaded their waythrough the labyrinth the color of their clothes andtheir presence among these objects turned them intoa part of the work The viewer appeared as anotherthing in Kaprowrsquos composition not so different fromhis throwaway materials In his environment autonomycollapsed into participation based on the reicationof the subject as an obsolete material temporally

composited into the work While Kaprow certainly intended to includehis observers in the work he could do so only by turning them intoobjects rather than active subjects He later described his own sense ofthe failure with this exhibition that he couldnrsquot seem to engage theviewer enough but blamed it on the framing space of the galleryAfterward he said ldquoI complained immediately about the fact that therewas a sense of mystery until your eye reached a wall Then there wasa dead end At that point my disagreement with the gallery spacebeganrdquo64 But Kaprow didnrsquot abandon the gallerymdashat least not yet Toget closer to the everyday Kaprow thought he should more fully incor-porate the bodies of his viewers into his work This led to the origin ofhappenings in an attempt to make viewers into active subjects to engagethem more actively in creating the work as they became part of it

| | | | |

In 1958 Kaprow had presented two other early proto-happenings oneat Rutgers called Communication and one at George Segalrsquos farmcalled Pastorale65 Communication was based on work he had devel-oped in Cagersquos class It was close to traditional theater Presented in achapel that doubled as an auditorium for theater and music perfor-mances it included movement sound and banners unfurled from thebalconies Kaprow built ldquoplastic panelsrdquo behind which he performeda series of simple actions nally hiding himself from the audience bypainting the plastic wall in front of him and so ldquopainting himself outrdquoof the audiencersquos view66 For Pastorale he built frames that looked likeabysmal theater sets stretcher bars with torn strips of canvas runningfrom top to bottom During one part of the performance artists RobertWatts and Lucas Samaras painted on either side of one of these con-structions Inserted into the landscape these performance paintings

Part of the environment Allan Kaprow created for his piece Pastorale 1958Photo Vaughn Rachel

Kaizen | Framed Space Allan Kaprow and the Spread of Painting 97

marked the boundary between event and nonevent partitioning theground into territories and framing Pastoralersquos space using once againpainting as wall Unfortunately for Kaprow Pastorale was held during apicnic and the other participants were either too drunk or just plainunwilling to follow his directions They were engaged but refused tofollow his rules of play

18 Happenings in 6 Parts which took place in October 1959 wasthe rst ofcial happening67 Kaprow divided the inside of the galleryinto three smaller contiguous rooms using wooden two-by-fours Inphotographs of the piece as it was being installed these woodenbeams can be seen framing a space within the space of the gallerymdashnot into a proscenium stage but into an environment within the largergallery space where various events would occur Instead of wood ordrywall translucent plastic sheeting created the walls so that actioncould be partially seen from one room to the next Each room was litwith different colored lights and in each room where the audiencewas forced to sit and observe the action a group of actors movedthrough tightly scripted but simple routines as sounds came in and outand lms were projected

On the program the audience is listed under the ldquoCast of Participantsrdquowritten into the performance itself and actively engaged but only asthe subject of direction and authorial control At specific intervalsbells rang and the audience was required to change seats and to switchrooms based on instruction cards they had been given when they enteredthe gallery before the performance Kaprow had realized with his HansaGallery environment that he needed to give his viewers increasedresponsibility but he also realized that relinquishing too much con-trol could be a disaster as it had been in Pastorale As with his previ-ous work his goal with 18 Happenings was the ldquointegration of allelementsmdashenvironment constructed sections time space and peoplerdquoand the audience was once again included as just another material inhis composition68

During the fifth part of 18 Happenings one sequence of actionsseems to reveal Kaprowrsquos relationship with painting the viewer and space Kaprow had built a construction he called the ldquothe sandwich manrdquo named after its everyday counterparts paid to walkaround the city streets as human billboards Kaprowrsquos sandwich

Left The construction of thespace used for Allan Kaprowrsquos18 Happenings in 6 Parts1958

Right A view of Allan Kaprowrsquos18 Happenings whereRearrangeable Panels is partially visible on the leftThe in-set canvas panel onwhich actors painted live as part of the performance is shown at center PhotoScott Hyde

98 Grey Room 13

man was barely humanoidan automaton with forward-and backward-pointing mir-rors for a body bicycle wheelsfor feet and a gallon bucketof enamel paint for a headSticking out in front was apiece of wood for an arm end-ing in a hand that held cardslabeled ldquoXrdquo and ldquo3rdquo the adver-

tising handbill reduced to its zero degree In the middle of the sand-wich man hidden on a shelf between the two mirrors was a recordplayer and projecting out from behind it were two handles so that itcould be wheeled around the rooms As the sandwich man was wheeledfrom one room to another its mirrored body reflected the audienceback onto themselves their image taking the place of what would havebeen an advertisement They were reected not as participatory viewersnot even as active objects as in his environment but as passive objectsnow totally reied their image produced as a reection of Junk CultureHere in Brechtian fashion using a literal ldquoframing effectrdquo Kaprowturned his previous use of the viewer back into a critique of the eventitself In reecting the audiencersquos passivity back to them he forced amoment of recognition of their complicity in the production of thework They could see that as they became an ad on the sandwich manrsquosbelly so they became throwaway objects in his composition By reduc-ing the spectator to the general equivalence of these objects Kaprowrecognized the subject of the postndashWorld War II period as a product ofplanned obsolescence and consumer culture

Following this as the sandwich man was wheeled through the secondroom and into the third two men stood up from their seats one in eachroom Each took up a brush and a can of paint and approached oppo-site sides of one of the plastic walls simultaneously painting on a sec-tion of canvas set among the plastic walls and so turning the wall backinto a painting69 The canvas was left unprimed so that the simple gures that each artist painted (one was supposed to paint lines theother circles) would bleed through and so would be immediately visibleon the opposite side each mark responding to that of their partner Asin his two earlier happenings painting is done live before an audienceon a wall Kaprow showed the audience that when painting becomeswall it functions only to put space on display Here painting as a sin-gular art object was meaningless It became a throwaway stage propand so became a demonstration of how painting as object was part ofthe larger environment in which it resides The limit condition of paint-ing as wall with viewer as spectator was the gallery as frame70

The sandwich man part ofKaprowrsquos 18 HappeningsPhoto Scott Hyde

Kaizen | Framed Space Allan Kaprow and the Spread of Painting 99

What this sequence from 18 Happenings reveals is that Kaprow hadan acute sense of the way in which the gallery as frame produces sub-ject and space together He undermined the normal function of the artgallery turning both viewer and art object into Junk Culture Throwawayviewers throwaway paintings and throwaway rooms turned the galleryspacemdasha space designed to be neutral to hide itself as the objects itcontains become the sole focus of the viewerrsquos concentrationmdashinto thelocus of planned obsolescence With the creation of happeningsKaprow used Junk Culture against the doxa of gallery space upsettingthe common sense of what a space for art is and what it does Afterhappenings the paradoxical logic of the gallery as a site for both theprivate contemplation of singular aesthetic objects as well as the pub-lic transaction of luxury goods had been (however temporarily) sub-verted In asserting the gallery space as the limit condition of paintingKaprow framed the institution as the ground of artistic production

In ldquoThe Legacy of Jackson Pollockrdquo Kaprow says ldquoPollock left us atthe point where we must become preoccupied with and even dazzled by the space and objects of our everyday liferdquo71 In ldquoAssemblageEnvironments Happeningsrdquo bridging the gap between his early andlater work he concludes ldquothis has brought sharply into focus that theroom has always been a frame or format toordquo72 Kaprowrsquos collapse ofautonomy via art into lifemdashthat environments and happenings wouldldquopartake wholly in the real nature of art and (one hopes) liferdquomdashwasonly ever a hope as he himself knew If painting had used the frameas the delimitation of a eld for composition then environments andhappenings turned the gallery into the limit condition of this fieldWhile he tried to get closer to everyday life by making art he inevitablypushed it further away This ambivalence toward the collapse of artand life runs throughout Kaprowrsquos work even as he moved out of thegallery and into everyday life following his early work with his laterldquoactivitiesrdquo The early work was even by his own estimation more adisplay of experience and not a fair representation of actual everydayexperience But this is precisely where the importance of this work liesKaprowrsquos environments and happenings extended Rauschenbergrsquossemiautonomous gap so far that they turned the screw one notchhigher autonomy returning not though the sublation of art into archi-tecture but through the medium of framed space

100 Grey Room 13

NotesThanks to the generosity and insight of Karen Kurczynski John Harwood SethMcCormick Jaleh Mansoor Beth Hinderliter Vered Maimon Benjamin Buchloh andBarry Bergdoll as well as Branden Joseph and the Editors of Grey Room

1 Brian OrsquoDoherty Inside the White Cube The Ideology of the Gallery Space(Berkeley and Los Angeles University of California Press 1999) 15

2 It was originally called ldquoPainting Environments Happeningsrdquo and publishedin a condensed form in the catalog for the exhibition New FormsmdashNew Media I at the Martha Jackson Gallery New York the rst uptown show of Kaprow and his con-temporaries It was changed to ldquoAssemblage Environments and Happeningsrdquo for nalpublication Kaprow changed the title to incorporate the recent acceptance of the termassemblage It had been used rst by Helen Comstock to describe the work of ArthurDove in the 1920s but remained obscure until Jean Dubuffet popularized its use in 1953The term as used by Dubuffet was then adopted by William Seitz for his exhibitionThe Art of Assemblage at the Museum of Modern Art See Allan Kaprow AssemblageEnvironments and Happenings (New York Harry N Abrams 1966) 150ndash208 NewFormsmdashNew Media I (New York Martha Jackson Gallery 1960) np and RogerShattuck ldquoIntroduction How Collage Became Assemblagerdquo Essays on Assemblage(New York Museum of Modern Art 1992) 119

3 ldquoWhen I am in my painting Irsquom not aware of what Irsquom doingrdquo said PollockJackson Pollock Jackson Pollock Interviews Articles Reviews ed Pepe Karmel (NewYork Museum of Modern Art 1999) 17ndash18

4 Yard was Kaprowrsquos contribution to the exhibition Environments SituationsSpaces at the Martha Jackson Gallery a follow up to New FormsndashNew Media (see n 2)

5 ldquoAllan Kaprow and Robert Watts Interviewed by Sidney Simonrdquo in Benjamin HDBuchloh and Judith F Rodenbeck Experiments in the Everyday Allan Kaprow andRobert Watts Events Objects Documents (New York Wallach Art Gallery 1999) 76

6 To cite but one example of many Thomas Hirschhorn is an artist who continuesto extend and develop Kaprowrsquos legacy today

7 On Kaprow and performance see Amelia Jones Body Art Performing the Subject(Minneapolis University of Minnesota Press 1998) 56ndash57 Paul Schimmel ldquoLeap intothe Void Performance and the Objectrdquo in Out of Actions Between Performance andthe Object 1949ndash1979 ed Paul Schimmel (New York Thames and Hudson 1998)59ndash63

8 The relationship between painting and space had been explored before partic-ularly in the period between the two world wars by the artists associated with De Stijland constructivism For more on De Stijl see Nancy Troy The De Stijl Environment(Cambridge MIT Press 1983) On constructivism see Yve-Alain Bois ldquoEl LissitzkyRadical Reversibilityrdquo Art in America 76 no 4 (April 1988) 161ndash181 and Yve-AlainBois ldquoMaterial Utopiasrdquo Art in America 79 no 6 (June 1991) 98ndash107 Another Europeanwho explored the everyday object painting and space was Kurt Schwitters in the various incarnation of his Merzbau See Elizabeth Burns Gamard Kurt SchwittersrsquoMerzbau The Cathedral of Erotic Misery (New York Princeton Architectural Press2000) Two other important precursors who bridge the European and American con-text are Lazlo Moholy-Nagy and Friedrick Kiesler For information on Moholy-Nagyrsquosearly environmental projects as well as those of Lissitzy see Joan Ockman ldquoThe RoadNot Taken Alexander Dornerrsquos Way Beyond Artrdquo in Autonomy and Ideology Positioningan Avant-Garde in America ed RE Somol (New York Monicelli Press 1997) For

Kaizen | Framed Space Allan Kaprow and the Spread of Painting 101

information on Kiesler see RL Held Endless Innovations Frederick Kieslerrsquos Theoryand Scenic Design (Ann Arbor UMI Research Press 1982) Lisa Phillips FrederickKiesler (New York The Whitney Museum of American Art 1989) Brian OrsquoDohertydraws out the connections between the prendash and postndashWorld War II manifestations ofthis relationship in Inside the White Cube

9 For Benjamin the work of art attains autonomy under modernism with theemergence of art for artrsquos sake This autonomy is then usurped by mechanical repro-duction See Walter Benjamin ldquoThe Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproductionrdquoin Illuminations ed Hanna Arendt (New York Harcourt Brace and Jovanovich Inc1968) p 224-226 For Greenberg as the above quote indicates the autonomy of artcontinues even in the face of mechanization See Clement Greenberg ldquoTowards a NewerLaocoonrdquo Perceptions and Judgments 1939ndash1944 vol 1 of Clement Greenberg TheCollected Essays and Criticism ed John OrsquoBrien (Chicago University of Chicago1986) p 32

10 Rosalind Krauss uses the term ldquopost-medium conditionrdquo to designate ldquomixed-media installationrdquo work done today While Krauss argues that only the most signi-cant artists working since the 1960s reassert the medium in their work against thegeneral postmedium condition I believe that all mixed-media installation work operates using the gallery or institution as medium See Rosalind Krauss ldquoA Voyageon the North Seardquo Art in the Age of the Post-Medium Condition (New York Thamesand Hudson 1999) for her comments on a specic contemporary artist and the rein-vention of the medium see Rosalind Krauss ldquo And Then Turn Awayrdquo An Essayon James Colemanrdquo October 81 (Summer 1997) 5ndash33

11 Allan Kaprow ldquoThe Legacy of Jackson Pollockrdquo Art News 57 no 6 (October1958) 24ndash26 55ndash57 reprinted in Allan Kaprow Essays on the Blurring of Art andLife ed Jeff Kelley (Berkeley and Los Angles University of California Press 1993) 1ndash9 Kaprow has stated that the essay was written in 1956 in ldquoAllan Kaprow andRobert Watts Interviewed by Sidney Simonrdquo 77 Kaprow had been a student of bothHans Hoffman and Meyer Schapiro

12 Harold Rosenberg ldquoThe American Action Paintersrdquo Art News 52 (December1952) 22ndash23 In a footnote that Rosenberg added when the article was republished aspart of his book of collected essays in 1959 he added the following ldquoAction Paintinghas extracted the element of decision inherent in all art in that the work is not fin-ished at its beginning but has to be carried forward by an accumulation of lsquorightrsquo ges-tures In a word Action Painting is the abstraction of the moral element in art itsmark is moral tension in detachment from moral or esthetic certainties and it judgesitself morally in declaring that picture to be worthless which is not the incorporationof a genuine struggle one which could at any point have been lostrdquo Harold RosenbergThe Tradition of the New (New York Horizon Press 1959) 33ndash34 Kaprow recountsthe influence of Rosenbergrsquos essay on his work in ldquoAllan Kaprow and Robert WattsInterviewed by Sidney Simonrdquo 77

13 There were five all told They were held as follows 5ndash23 January 1948 24Januaryndash12 February 1949 21 Novemberndash10 December 1949 28 Novemberndash16 December1950 26 Novemberndash15 December 1951 These shows had a remarkable resonance onethat extended beyond even the insular New York art world when after the secondexhibition Life magazine published the feature article ldquoJackson Pollock Is He theGreatest Living Painter in the United Statesrdquo Dorothy Sieberling Life (August 81949) 42ndash45

14 Allan Kaprow ldquoThe Legacy of Jackson Pollockrdquo in Kaprow Essays on the

102 Grey Room 13

Blurringrdquo 615 Kaprow uses both the terms scale and size to describe Pollockrsquos work but as

TJ Clark has shown these are two very different terms and Pollock is a painter of sizeand not scale For Clark it is size that engages the body ldquoNormally speaking size isliteralmdasha matter of actual physical intuition It involves grasping how big or small acertain object really is most likely in relation to the size of the grasperrsquos upright body oroutspread armsrdquo TJ Clark ldquoPollockrsquos Smallnessrdquo in Jackson Pollock New Approachesed Kirk Varnedoe and Pepe Karmel (New York Museum of Modern Art 1999) 15

16 Kaprow ldquoThe Legacy of Jackson Pollockrdquo Essays on the Blurring 617 In most of his work the paint engages with the edge of the canvas emphasizing

and bordering it and not continuing around it as if the canvas had been cut down fromsome innite expanse Kaprow claims otherwise by singling out the exceptions sayingldquo[H]is art gives the impression of going on forever [T]hough evidence points to aslackening of the attack as Pollock came to the edges of many of his canvases in thebest ones he compensated for this by tacking much of the painted surface around theback of his stretchersrdquo Kaprow ldquoThe Legacy of Jackson Pollockrdquo Essays on the Blurringof Art and Life 5 An examination of the paintings shows that more often Pollockstopped before the edge or reworked his compositions after they were stretched sothat they reengaged with the edge even when cut from larger canvas Kaprow claimsotherwise because it furthers his arguments that Pollockrsquos paintings emerge into thespace of the viewer

18 Jackson Pollock ldquoApplication for a Guggenheim Fellowship 1947rdquo in JacksonPollock Interviews 17 The inuence of Greenberg at this time is discussed in StevenNaifeh and Gregory White Smith Jackson Pollock An American Saga (Aiken SCWoodwardWhite 1989) 551 Pollock had also engaged with wall-size painting duringhis association with Joseacute Clemente Orozco and in earlier work such as Mural(1943ndash1944) painted for Peggy Guggenheimrsquos house

19 Greenbergrsquos version of modernism was most fully laid out only in 1959 andpublished in 1960 ldquoIt was the stressing of the ineluctable atness of the surface thatremained however more fundamental than anything else to the process by whichpictorial art criticized and defined itself under Modernism For flatness alone wasunique and exclusive to pictorial art Because flatness was the only conditionpainting shared with no other art Modernist painting oriented itself to atness as itdid to nothing elserdquo In Clement Greenberg ldquoModernist Paintingrdquo in Modernism witha Vengeance 1957ndash1969 vol 4 of Clement Greenberg The Collected Essays andCriticism ed John OrsquoBrien (Chicago University of Chicago Press 1993) 87

20 Clement Greenberg ldquoThe Situation at the Momentrdquo in Arrogant Purpose1945ndash1949 vol 2 of Clement Greenberg The Collected Essays and Criticism ed JohnOrsquoBrien (Chicago University of Chicago 1986) 194ndash195

21 See Greenberg ldquoTowards a Newer Laocoonrdquo throughout22 Eric Lum has done extensive work on the relationship between abstract expres-

sionism and architecture The analysis in this essay follows from his especially whereBlakersquos project is concerned but also expands on it As he jumps from Blake to PhilipJohnson and Mark Rothkorsquos Houston Chapel however Lum misses the importance ofother interventions between painting and architecture such as those made by KaprowThis is evident when he says ldquoThrough this marriage of mural and wall paintingcould become fully integrated into architecture an idealized conjecture nor realizeduntil Mark Rothkorsquos 1971 Houston Chapelrdquo Eric Lum ldquoPollockrsquos Promise Toward anAbstract Expressionist Architecturerdquo Assemblage 39 (August 1999) 68

Kaizen | Framed Space Allan Kaprow and the Spread of Painting 103

23 Blake said of his visit to Pollockrsquos studio ldquoIt was a very sunny day and thesun was shining on the paintings I felt like I was standing in the Hall of Mirrors atVersailles It was a dazzling incredible sightrdquo Naifeh and Smith 588

24 Peter Blake No Place like Utopia Modern Architecture and the Company WeKept (New York Knopf 1993) 111ndash112

25 Miesrsquos museum plan was designed at the request of the editors at ArchitecturalForum who had been publishing a series of articles ldquoto show how building might beimproved through fuller and more imaginative use of existing resourcesrdquo They requesteddesigns for a variety of buildings that could be placed in a hypothetical city of 70000inhabitants ldquoNew Buildings for 194Xrdquo Architectural Forum 78 no 5 (May 1943)69ndash85 The Barcelona Pavilion was built in 1929 for the Barcelona Universal Expositionand was destroyed when the fair ended It was subsequently rebuilt in 1981ndash86

26 Peter Blake Mies van der Rohe (New York Pelican 1960) 54 It is worth notingthat like Miesrsquos use of the Kolbe sculpture Blake had Pollock actually make smallwire sculptures splattered with paint miniatures of sculptures that Blake hopedPollock would make for the actual museum Pollock himself was experimenting withsculpture around this time building three-dimensional forms out of papier-macirccheacutethat he then splattered with paint

27 Blakersquos collage space follows from Miesrsquos The production of collages as in situmodels for Miesrsquos buildings had begun in the twenties with his work for the journal Gin association with Dadaists such as Hans Richter Neil Levine notes this creation ofa collage space in Mies particularly in the Pavilion and the Museum for a Small Cityin relation to his use of reection to layer one surface on top of another Neil LevineldquolsquoThe Signicance of Factsrsquo Miesrsquo Collages Up Close and Personalrdquo Assemblage 37(December 1998) 71ndash101

28 Blake designed his museum just as Philip Johnson was building his Glass Housewhere they both spent considerable time while planning exhibitions for the Museumof Modern Art Johnsonrsquos inuence is also evident in Blakersquos design Blake No Placelike Utopia 149ndash155

29 Arthur Drexler ldquoUnframed Space A Museum for Jackson Pollackrsquos [sic] PaintingsrdquoInteriors and Industrial Design 109 no 6 (January 1950) 90ndash91 The article was partof a special issue whose theme was ldquoInteriors to Comerdquo a recurring topic that wasmeant ldquoto show the direction in which some of our best designers are goingrdquo The termunframed space was used several times in reference to Pollockrsquos work as the title oftwo articles Drexlerrsquos and one published slightly later by Berton Rouecheacute ThoughRouecheacute in an interview in To a Violent Grave says that Lee Krasner used the phraserst Charles Pollock says that Blake was the origin of the term The fact that Drexlerrsquosarticle was written and published earlier seems to conrm this See Berton RouecheacuteldquoUnframed Spacerdquo in Jackson Pollock Interviews 18ndash19 and Jeffrey Potter To aViolent Grave (New York Pushcart Press 1985) 126

30 Drexler 9031 Blake No Place like Utopia 113ndash11432 Blake completed construction on his ldquoPinwheel Houserdquo in 1952 It is a small

beach house that he designed for himself and his family in South Hampton on NewYorkrsquos Long Island Situated on the beach the house is square in plan and its fourexterior walls slide horizontally outward each in a successive clockwise directionrevealing glass walls When the exterior walls are fully extended and the house isviewed from above it forms a shape like a pinwheel Opening the exterior wallsreveals an ever-changing view of the landscape outside turning the ocean and the

104 Grey Room 13

dunes into the picturesque framing them so that they entirely ll the space of the walland put its surface in motion Blake had discussed with Pollock the possibility of hispainting the sliding walls so that his paintings would be superimposed over the land-scape Pollock considered it but Blake couldnrsquot come up with the commission moneythat Pollock asked for They never finalized their plans and it was never clear howthe panels were to be painted Blake suggested that they might be made of glass so hebought the sheet of glass that Pollock used to paint Number 29 1950 (1950) the paintingthat Hans Namuth lmed from underneath for his documentary on Pollock His col-laboration with Blake did lead to one commission a mural-size canvas done for ahouse designed by Marcel Breuer Untitled (Mural) (1950) Shortly after his collabo-ration with Blake Pollock began another unrealized architectural project this onewith Alfonso Ossorio and Tony Smith for a church designed by Smith with murals byPollock For more on all of this see Blake No Place like Utopia 114ndash118 Naifeh andSmith 649 and Lum ldquoPollockrsquos Promiserdquo 68 85ndash88

33 Lum ldquoPollockrsquos Promiserdquo 67ndash6834 A few pages down from Drexlerrsquos article on the Pollock Museum in Interiors

and Industrial Design was another architectural response to the same problem OlgaGueftrsquos article ldquoThe Museumrsquos Oasisrdquo describes another museum this one by Gyorgyand Juliet Kepes ldquoThe Kepesesrdquo it begins ldquoare not exactly opposed to museumsrdquo how-ever it would seem that they were opposed to museums containing works of artReplacing the art objects entirely the Kepeses substituted shells driftwood plantsand animals Instead of a natural history museum they proposed a modern-dayWunderkammerwhere natural forms take the place of art as objects for contemplationldquoThe proposed galleryrdquo they declared ldquowould bridge the gap between the art museumwhich is concerned with man-made beauty and the natural history museum whichis preoccupied with nature but not particularly with naturersquos beautyrdquo Gyorgy KepesrsquosThe New Landscape exhibition at MIT a year later in 1951 (the same years as theIndependent Grouprsquos similar exhibition Growth and Form in London) and the pub-lication that followed The New Landscape in Art and Sciencewould ultimately realizethis project with blown-up photographs of natural forms (cells shells and electronmicrographs) in place of actual objects

The Kepeses seem to have taken the next logical step beyond Blake proposing aneven more radical rethinking of the wall-size work of art Eliminating the need for theartist altogether they found abstract forms in nature and turned their reproductionsinto what would elsewhere have been works of art By turning the art object into scientic vision The Kepeses proposed its total instrumentation Autonomous abstractpainting was transformed into its instrumental other a mechanically reproduced science of vision Rather than turn art into interior design The Kepesesrsquo replacementof abstract painting recast the status of scientic technology into that of high art SeeOlga Gueft ldquoThe Museumrsquos Oasisrdquo Interiors and Industrial Design 109 no 6 (January1950) 100ndash103 and Gyorgy Kepes The New Landscape in Art and Science (ChicagoPaul Theobald and Co 1956)

35 Kaprow stated that it was ldquoIn 1949 [that] I saw an exhibition of [Pollockrsquos] workfor the rst timerdquo ldquoInterviewrdquo in Allan Kaprow (Pasadena Pasadena Art Museum1967) 7

36 See Kaprow ldquoThe Legacy of Jackson Pollockrdquo Art News 25 and Kaprow ldquoTheLegacy of Jackson Pollockrdquo Essays on the Blurring 3

37 Joan Marter ldquoThe Forgotten Legacy Happenings Pop Art and Fluxus at RutgersUniversityrdquo in Off Limits Rutgers University and the Avant-Garde 1957ndash1963 ed Joan

Kaizen | Framed Space Allan Kaprow and the Spread of Painting 105

Marter (Newark The Newark Museum 1999) 438 Marter 13239 Quoted in John Cage Silence (Middletown Wesleyan University Press 1961) 10540 Branden Joseph has developed the link between Cage and Rauschenberg in several

recent essays See Branden W Joseph ldquoJohn Cage and the Architecture of SilencerdquoOctober 81 (Summer 1997) 81ndash104 and Branden Joseph ldquoWhite on Whiterdquo CriticalInquiry 27 no 1 (Summer 2001) 90ndash121

41 For Cage on Rauschenberg see Cage Silence98ndash108 For his description ofTheater Piece No 1 see ldquoInterview with John Cagerdquo in Happenings and Other Actsed Mariellen R Sandford (New York Routledge 1995) 53 Cage subsequently referredto Theater Piece No 1 as ldquothe rst happeningrdquo See John Cage ldquoAn AutobiographicalStatementrdquo Southwest Review 76 no 1 (Winter 1991) 65

42 The score itself has had various incarnations It wasnrsquot published until 1960and in this version includes a note wherein Cage describes the rst performance byTudor For more on 4rsquo33 and its various scores see Liz Kotz ldquoWords on Paper NotNecessarily Meant to Be Read as Art Postwar Media Poetics from Cage to Warholrdquo(PhD diss Columbia University 2002) 83ndash115 Kotz follows a different lineage outof Cage and into performance and happenings than the one traced in this essay

43 Marter 13244 Walter Hopps in the first survey catalog of Rauschenbergrsquos early work does

not name the black paintings as a group as he does the White Paintings He calls themeach Untitled followed by a description in brackets Hopps notes of the largest ofthese works that ldquoThese paintings with a greater vastness and ambiguity of scale thanother Rauschenberg works relate to spatial qualities of Jackson Pollockrdquo HoppsRobert Rauschenberg The Early 1950s (Houston Houston Fine Art Press 1991) 67This convention was also followed in Rauschenbergrsquos 1997 Guggenheim retrospectivecatalog and is followed in this essay Robert Rauschenberg A Retrospective ed WalterHopps and Susan Davidson (New York Solomon R Guggenheim Museum 1997)

45 The piece is called Untitled [two black panels] (1953) Hopps Robert Rauschenberg99

46 Helen Molesworth notes the importance of Rauschenbergrsquos newspaper groundin the black paintings and develops this problem in relation to the abject body as it isfurther pursued in his work throughout the 1950s Helen Molesworth ldquoBefore BedrdquoOctober 63 (Winter 1993) 68ndash82

47 Asked about this work Rauschenberg said ldquoI called them combines I had tocoin that word because I got so bored with arguments I was interested in people seeingmy work When someone would come up and I really wanted to know what they thoughtof it or wanted to sense the exposure there was always this screen that they could getbehind which was if I said lsquoIt is paintingrsquo they would say lsquoThatrsquos not painting Thatrsquossculpturersquo And they thought this was very interestingrdquo Jeanne Siegel ArtwordsDiscourse on the 60s and 70s (New York DaCapo 1985) 153

48 Allan Kaprow ldquoa Statementrdquo in Happenings An Illustrated Anthology edMichael Kirby (New York EP Dutton and Co 1965) 44ndash45

49 Benjamin Buchloh notes the importance of play in the 1950s and its link toconsumer culture During the 1950s he writes ldquoa theory of games would remerge asa cultural project at the very moment of an ever-increasing instrumentalization oflibidinal desire through consumer culturerdquo Benjamin HD Buchloh ldquoRobert WattsInanimate ObjectsmdashInanimate Subjectsrdquo in Buchloh and Rodenbeck Experiments inthe Everyday 25 n 4

88 Grey Room 13

status of interior decoration and that was the wayBlake wanted itmdashPollock reduced to ldquoterrific wallsrdquoHe even tried to commission Pollock to paint panelsfor the moving walls of the Pinwheel House his nextproject so that when they slid shut the housersquos inte-rior would be enclosed in Pollocks surrounded bypainted wallpaper32 The paintings as walls are sub-mitted to the logic of Blakersquos architecture He destroysthe autonomy of Pollockrsquos paintings only to sublatethem into the autonomy of modernist architecturerealizing Pollockrsquos fear of turning his work into meredecoration Blakersquos project asserts architecture over

painting As painting becomes wall it is sublated into the autonomousmodernist space of Miesian architecture Pollockrsquos work is turned intoa decorative surface into an interior design for a modernist space

The Pollock Museum was never built but not because either Pollockor Blake had second thoughts Despite any misgivings that Pollock hadwith this project the model was exhibited at Betty Parsons Gallery in1949 and afterward the model remained in Pollockrsquos studio promi-nently displayed in case he could convince a visiting collector to helpfinance its construction At his next exhibition with Betty Parson in1950 the paintings were made to be the same height and almost thesame length of the walls on which they hung so that they would comeas close as possible to realizing Blakersquos design within the more tradi-tional gallery setting33

If Blakersquos project misrepresented Pollock this was only to the extentthat Pollock had already acknowledged the tendency of painting atwall size to become an object What Blakersquos project makes clear is thatwhen paintings became wall-size or as they literally became wallsthey lost their capacity to create an autonomous space divorced fromcontext While it took an architect initially to realize such a possibilityartists soon followed suit34

It is likely that Kaprow saw the 1949 exhibition of Pollockrsquos workwhich included the model for Blakersquos Museum Although in his writ-ings on Pollock he doesnrsquot mention the Museum in an interview from1967 he claimed to have rst seen a Pollock exhibition in 194935 Thiswould mean that he had seen the show at the Betty Parsons Gallerywith the model on display The model for the museum is also clearlyvisible in the photographs of Pollock working in his studio that illus-trate both the original publication of Kaprowrsquos ldquoThe Legacy of JacksonPollockrdquo and (much later) his collection of essays The Blurring of Artand Life36 Kaprow also explicitly referenced the subsequent Pollockexhibition with its wall-size works when he discussed the all-overeld Pollockrsquos work created in the space of the gallery But along with

Photograph of Pollock in hisstudio As published in Allan Kaprow ldquoThe Legacy ofJackson Pollockrdquo in Art News(October 1958) The model of Blakersquos museum is visiblein the upper-left cornerPhoto Rudy Burckhardt

Kaizen | Framed Space Allan Kaprow and the Spread of Painting 89

Pollock and Blake Kaprow also engagedwith the work of Robert Rauschenbergand John Cage two artists who had asmuch impact on his thinking about spaceas Pollock

| | | | |

In the fall of 1951 when Kaprow visitedRauschenbergrsquos studio he saw the WhitePaintings37 Rauschenberg had made theseworks during the previous summer at BlackMountain College Like Blake Rauschenberg also engaged space usingpainting but he did so as an artist not as an architect Yet rather thanreassert the autonomy of painting he established a semiautonomousspace for painting The White Paintings are a series of works paintedat matte white with no visible marks to attract the viewerrsquos eye WhileBlake submitted the autonomy of Pollockrsquos painting to the logic of hisarchitecture upholding the autonomy of modernist space in favor ofarchitecture over art Rauschenberg was far more ambivalent about thepossibility of autonomy for either art or architecture The White Paintingsexist between the two as semiautonomous objectsmdashnot quite wall notquite paintingmdashand certainly not like their nearest precursor abstractexpressionist painting with its ood of gesture and mark The WhitePaintings in their utter blankness call attention to the ephemeral effectsof light and shade that played across them Upon seeing them Kaprowwas unsure what to think until he noticed that they turned the surfaceof painting into an active plane of reception for the movement of his bodyldquoI was walking back and forth not knowing how I should take thesethingsrdquo he said ldquoand then I saw my shadows across the paintingmdashmovingrdquo38 For Kaprow the surface of these paintings became a tem-poral screen reecting the viewerrsquos body in the changing environmentof the gallery Their painterly incidence was not their whiteness perse but their ability to capture the presence of the viewer as he or shestood in front of the work The viewer activated the work so that thework the viewer and the space in between all became part of the workAs Rauschenberg wrote at the time ldquoPainting relates to both art andlife Neither can be made (I try to act in that gap between the two)rdquo39

These paintings are caught between painting as an object that is func-tionally and fundamentally separate from its architectural containerand the spread of painting into a semiautonomous state somewherebetween art architecture and the viewing subject moving through theexhibition space

Rauschenberg had developed his White Paintings in dialogue with

Photograph of Pollock in hisstudio As published in AllanKaprow Essays on theBlurring of Art and Life 1993The model of Blakersquosmuseum is visible in theupper-right corner PhotoHans Namuth

90 Grey Room 13

Cage who was also at Black Mountain in the summer of 195240 Thatsummer Cage incorporated The White Paintings into his own workTheater Piece No 141 They were suspended over the heads of theaudience members at various angles as a variety of performance eventstook place beneath them These events included Rauschenberg andDavid Tudor playing piano poets MC Richards and Charles Olsonreading poetry from atop a ladder and Merce Cunningham and othersdancing through the space and around the audience It was the WhitePaintings with their environmental quality that that led Cage to write4rsquo 33 in 1952 Tudor was the original performer of the compositionwhose score was open to interpretation42 He realized it on pianoplaying it by silently opening and closing the piano lid allowing thesounds of the audience and the ambient noises of the space to becomethe work Kaprow attended one of the rst performances of 4rsquo 33 atCarnegie Hall in 1952 and was deeply affected He compared his expe-rience of 4rsquo 33 to his experience of Rauschenbergrsquos paintings Thesounds in the space chairs creaking the air condition humming peoplecoughing and clearing their throatsmdashall the ambient sounds that lledthe space of the auditoriummdashbecame foregrounded ldquoIt was like theshadows in Bob Rauschenbergrsquos picturesrdquo Kaprow recalled ldquoThat is tosay there [wa]s no marking the boundary of the artwork or the boundaryof so-called everyday life They merge[d] And we the listeners in Cagersquosconcert and the lookers at Rauschenbergrsquos pictures were the collabo-rators of the artworkrdquo43 For Kaprow Cage like Rauschenberg col-lapsed the autonomy of art by engaging the listener as collaborator ina semiautonomous space (ldquoso-called everyday liferdquo and not true every-day life) that depended upon the interaction between work spaceand subject

On his visit to Rauschenbergrsquos studio Kaprow also saw the earliestof Rauschenbergrsquos black paintings44 This series is the antipode of thesmooth matte white surfaces of the White Paintings They are allblack monochromes most painted with a high-gloss enamel soakedinto newspaper pages that were then haphazardly stuck onto the sur-face of a canvas trapped pockets of air often causing the paintingsrsquosurfaces to bulge outward repulsively At their largest they framespace as Pollockrsquos work did but as art brut walls instead of dazzlingskeins of paint One photograph of a later diptych shows the paintingsblocking the doorway to Rauschenbergrsquos studio at Black Mountain asif they were extensions of the rough-hewn stone walls on either side45

But in this next transformation of painting as wall what seems moreimportant for the direction that both Rauschenberg and Kaprow wouldfollow out of these works was their newspaper ground As Rauschenbergrsquospaintings became wall-size their art brut surface was built on the newsof the day At rst everyday events as reported in the newspaper are

Kaizen | Framed Space Allan Kaprow and the Spread of Painting 91

painted out and hidden behind the blackpaint46 As the series proceeded he allowedincreasingly more of the news to showthrough While the White Paintings engagedwith the gap between art and life by cap-turing the viewerrsquos bodymdashas did Cagersquos4rsquo 33 at least for Kaprowmdashthe black paint-ings did so by using the everyday objectas a ground Through their use of news-paper they suggested another trajectoryout of painting and into everyday spacea trajectory whose base condition was thecommodity object

In order to get into the gap between art and life Rauschenbergrsquoswork rst had to approximate the condition of being a wall It neededto assume a relation to its architectural frame in order to move awayfrom the autonomy of painting and into semiautonomy but once it didso Rauschenberg would abandon the problem of painting as wallFollowing the White Paintings and black paintings (and then a briefseries of Red Paintings) he made his rst Combines works that rein-state the autonomy of the individual art object even while they existbetween painting sculpture and the surrealist objet trouveacute47 Ratherthan engage with space Rauschenbergrsquos Combines elevate the ready-made or found object back to the status of the autonomous art objectThe Combines formalize the everyday object into an in-between statebut one that nevertheless produces singular art objects While theblack paintings led Rauschenberg back to the art object they led Kaprowfarther off the wall and out into space

| | | | |

Kaprow wrote ldquoa statementrdquo about his work sketching the trajectoryhe took from painting through collage then out into the space of thegallery48 After his initial show of paintings in 1952 he described thedevelopment of what he called ldquoaction collagerdquo These were done asquickly as possible by throwing together readily available everydaymaterials including parts of his past work tinfoil photographsnewspaper and food Although he doesnrsquot mention particular works by name presumably these action-collages include the early piecesreproduced in Assemblage Environments and Happenings In a photo-graph of Penny Arcade (1956) we see Kaprow standing in front of a largewall-size assemblage densely layered with parts of paintings scrapsof wood and large pieces of advertising signage that look like Kaproweither found them on the side of the road or appropriated them from a

Robert RauschenbergUntitled 1952

92 Grey Room 13

storefront It also included flashing lights andsounds calling out to the viewer like a ConeyIsland carnival booth but one made all the moreconfusing with its hyperarray of upside-downand fragmented word parts While collage hadbeen delicate even dainty in its appliqueacute of smallscraps of paper to the surface of the image KaprowrsquosPenny Arcade was massive and rough-hewn Unlikeits glitzier real-world counterpart Penny Arcadelooks cobbled together a temporary faccedilade brico-laged from odds and ends Here Kaprow turnedthe gallery space into the street turning the wallinto a pseudo-storefront bringing the architec-ture of the outside world into the gallery but lteredthrough the compositional strategies of collage

and abstract expressionism Abstraction before world war II had beenundertaken in a quest to find a universal Esperanto of color and form a problem that had been transformed by abstract expressionisminto a private iconography of psychic signs In Penny Arcade Kaprowturns the private symbolism of abstraction expressionism back to the world through advertising as commodity sign He makes the private symbol public again by reconnecting prendashWorld War II modelsof collective production with postndashWorld War II models of collectiveconsumption

Another work from this time further demonstrates how Kaprowused everyday materials to partition space Alternately titled (inAssemblage) Wall Kiosk and Rearrangeable Panels (1957ndash1959) thispiece looks like an enormous folding Japanese screen Measuring eightfeet high and over twenty feet long its panels are covered in eggshellsleaves and broken mirrorsmdashnot mass-produced commodities or sig-nage but detritus and waste Several of the panels are painted one inHoffmanrsquos push-pull style two seem to nod toward Rauschenberg onepainted white one black This piece is designed to sit on the oor ofthe gallery and as its various names imply it can be placed in a varietyof positions called ldquowallrdquo when arrayed in a straight line ldquokioskrdquowhen arranged into a square and ldquorearrangeable panelsrdquo in generalor when it sits in a zigzag Each position changes the relationship ofthe object to the space that contains it Kaprow recast the painting-as-wall as a transformable piece of furniture recognizing the possibilityof ludic engagement with the viewer but withholding it because theviewer is not allowed to interact with the piece directly Once installedthe work transforms the space of the gallery but it cannot be recong-ured by the viewer49

When asked why he used junk to make his work Kaprow replied

Allan Kaprow standing infront of Penny Arcade 1956Photo WF Gainfort

Kaizen | Framed Space Allan Kaprow and the Spread of Painting 93

It was clearly part of transformingreality It gave everyone a sense ofinstant involvement in a kind of crudeeveryday reality which was quite arelief after the high-art attitude ofexclusion from the real world It alsoallowed us to give up a certain kindof seriousness that traditional artmaking required Whatrsquos more thematerials were available everywhereon street corners at night And ifyou didnrsquot sell these environmentalconstructions yoursquod just throwthem back into the garbage canWhy not just throw them out It wasvery liberating to think of oneself aspart of an endlessly transformingreal world50

The ldquocrude everyday realityrdquo capturedby Penny Arcade as with Kaprowrsquos subsequent work is predicatedupon his project of capturing the ldquoendlessly transforming real worldrdquoThis statement connects him with Rauschenberg and Cage but alsoshows how their work differs in an important and crucial way InKaprowrsquos comment describing his experience of 4rsquo33 (as quoted inthe previous section) he says ldquoAnd we the listeners in Cagersquos concertand the lookers at Rauschenbergrsquos pictures were the collaborators of[sic] the artworkrdquo ending with ldquoIt was a kind of collaborative end-lessly changing affair The artwork was simply this organism that wasaliverdquo51 For Kaprow the key word here is change and in order tomove from artwork to organism the work of art must be reconsiderednot as a ldquochance operationrdquo (to use Cagersquos term) but as a change oper-ation During this time Kaprow had begun to take classes with Cageand he was exposed to Cagersquos use of chance methods of compositionWhile he would adopt much from Cagersquos work and teaching he thoughtthat change was the most important principle for his own work52

For Kaprow change was integrally connected to the postndashworld warII environment lled with mass-produced throwaway products Theart of this timemdashhis artmdashshould necessarily reect this environmentIn opposition to the nostalgic use of the objet trouveacute in surrealism hismethod was closer to the readymade choosing everyday objects to res-cue from oblivion but spreading them out in space so that they wouldenvironmentally engulf the viewer53 Kaprow temporarily revalues thethrowaway commodity in his environments to create a space where

Allan Kaprow RearrangeablePanels 1957-9 Shown intheir ldquoKioskrdquo con gurationPhoto Robert R McElroy

94 Grey Room 13

everyday life as planned obsolescence is brought under the control ofthe artist He creates a momentary space of anti-entropy in the life ofthe commodity where it is temporarily reinvested with value only to bedisposed of once the environment is destroyed54 Citing critic LawrenceAlloway on the ldquothrowawayrdquo culture of postndashworld war II AmericaKaprow goes on to describe the importance of change in his work

Change governing both reality and art has extended from theexpression of an idea arrested in a painting to a work in whichthe usually slow mutations wrought by nature are quickened andliterally made part of the experience of it they manifest the veryprocess of creation-decay-creation almost as one watches Theuse of debris waste products or very impermanent substanceslike toilet paper or bread has of course a clear range of allusionswith obvious sociological implications the simplest being theartistrsquos positive involvement on the one hand with an everydayworld and on the other with a group of objects which beingexpendable might suggest that corresponding lack of statuswhich is supposed to be the fate of anything creative todayThese choices must not be ignored for they reveal what in oursurroundings charges the imagination as well as what is mosthuman in our art55

What is ldquomost humanrdquo in Kaprowrsquos art as he denes it is its reectionof this throwaway culture This is governed not by Cagean chance butby planned obsolescence with its endless renewal of more of thesame ldquo[My] workrdquo Kaprow says ldquois intended to last only a short timeand is destroyed immediately after the exhibition If [its] obsolescenceis not planned it is expectedrdquo56 Alloway also writing on assemblagebetter describes the overlap between the throwaway object and its usein environmental art during the 1950s

The acceptance of mass-produced objects just because they arewhat is around not because they issue from idolatrised technol-ogy is central to mid-century Junk Culture Junk Culture iscity art Its source is obsolescence the throwaway material ofcities Assemblages of such material come at the spectator asbits of life bits of the environment frequently presented interms that dramatize spread ow extension trespass The junkis obtruded into our space with the aim of achieving maximumintimacy Proximity and participation replace distance and con-templation as the communicative style of the object57

So the space of Junk Culture when used in art as assemblage or envi-ronment achieves ldquomaximum intimacyrdquo with the observer throughtheir ldquoproximity and participationrdquo with the throwaway commodity

Kaizen | Framed Space Allan Kaprow and the Spread of Painting 95

As Kaprow moves farther into the space of the gallery he does so in anincreased attempt to engage the viewer He partitions the gallery spaceso that the body of the viewer becomes a product of its participationwithin the eld of the throwaway commodity

These early wall-like constructions were for Kaprow still not closeenough to a participatory art Kaprow wanted to move further towardthe creation of environments and even events to take over the gallerywith a plenitude of throwaway objects among which the viewer wouldself-consciously circulate The action collages still maintained toomuch autonomy because they existed as individual objects and so asKaprow recalled ldquonow I simply filled the whole gallery up startingfrom one wall and ending with the otherrdquo58 With his rst environmentKaprow was no longer composing within the autonomous space ofpainting but composing the entire space of the gallery Kaprowrsquos rstenvironmentmdashmade at the Hansa Gallery in November 1958mdashwasmeant to totally engage the visitors to the gallery to make them intopart of the work itself ldquopassively or actively according to [their] talentsfor lsquoengagementrsquordquo59 From a drop ceiling of wires suspended in a gridseveral inches below the galleryrsquos original ceiling he hung variousmaterials creating a labyrinthine space divided by sheets of plastictangles of cellophane Scotch tape and more including a time-releasedmist of pine-scented deodorizer His work had taken over the galleryspace lling it with a nearly impenetrable eld of throwaway objects60

Kaprow took the ood of postndashworld war II consumer goods and usedthem to compose walls that partitioned space And composemdashin thetraditional sense of arranging shapes and forms on the surface of acanvasmdashis exactly what he did

Kaprow described his use of the full space of the gallery as a eld aterm that he derives from painting calling the second section of hisldquoAssemblagerdquo essay ldquoThe Field in Paintingrdquo ldquoThis space is in part theliteral distance between all solids included in the workrdquo Kaprowwrote ldquoBut it is also a space that is a direct heritage of paintingrdquo61

Everything in the space that he produced became part of his compo-sition including the viewer Like any other object in the work Kaprowsaid ldquoin as much as people visiting [an] environment are moving col-ored shapes [they] were counted lsquoinrsquordquo62 Each visitor as they movedthrough Kaprowrsquos labyrinth became a part of the work Art and lifehad now seemingly collapsed the autonomy of painting as a separateobjectmdashframed and isolated from the rest of its environment as a spaceonly for the eyemdashhad been abandoned for an embodied experienceViewing was now dependent upon space a space full of the objects ofeveryday life Using the materials of everyday life Kaprow invited hisviewers to get rid of their distance from the art object forcing theminto physical contact with his work This work he wrote ldquoinvites us

96 Grey Room 13

to cast aside for a moment proper manners andpartake wholly in the real nature of art and (onehopes) liferdquo63 Against the look-donrsquot-touch attitude ofmuseum and gallery Kaprow created a haptic spacewhere touch became the basis of the work where vis-itors came into physical contact with his throwawayobjects In this space as visitors threaded their waythrough the labyrinth the color of their clothes andtheir presence among these objects turned them intoa part of the work The viewer appeared as anotherthing in Kaprowrsquos composition not so different fromhis throwaway materials In his environment autonomycollapsed into participation based on the reicationof the subject as an obsolete material temporally

composited into the work While Kaprow certainly intended to includehis observers in the work he could do so only by turning them intoobjects rather than active subjects He later described his own sense ofthe failure with this exhibition that he couldnrsquot seem to engage theviewer enough but blamed it on the framing space of the galleryAfterward he said ldquoI complained immediately about the fact that therewas a sense of mystery until your eye reached a wall Then there wasa dead end At that point my disagreement with the gallery spacebeganrdquo64 But Kaprow didnrsquot abandon the gallerymdashat least not yet Toget closer to the everyday Kaprow thought he should more fully incor-porate the bodies of his viewers into his work This led to the origin ofhappenings in an attempt to make viewers into active subjects to engagethem more actively in creating the work as they became part of it

| | | | |

In 1958 Kaprow had presented two other early proto-happenings oneat Rutgers called Communication and one at George Segalrsquos farmcalled Pastorale65 Communication was based on work he had devel-oped in Cagersquos class It was close to traditional theater Presented in achapel that doubled as an auditorium for theater and music perfor-mances it included movement sound and banners unfurled from thebalconies Kaprow built ldquoplastic panelsrdquo behind which he performeda series of simple actions nally hiding himself from the audience bypainting the plastic wall in front of him and so ldquopainting himself outrdquoof the audiencersquos view66 For Pastorale he built frames that looked likeabysmal theater sets stretcher bars with torn strips of canvas runningfrom top to bottom During one part of the performance artists RobertWatts and Lucas Samaras painted on either side of one of these con-structions Inserted into the landscape these performance paintings

Part of the environment Allan Kaprow created for his piece Pastorale 1958Photo Vaughn Rachel

Kaizen | Framed Space Allan Kaprow and the Spread of Painting 97

marked the boundary between event and nonevent partitioning theground into territories and framing Pastoralersquos space using once againpainting as wall Unfortunately for Kaprow Pastorale was held during apicnic and the other participants were either too drunk or just plainunwilling to follow his directions They were engaged but refused tofollow his rules of play

18 Happenings in 6 Parts which took place in October 1959 wasthe rst ofcial happening67 Kaprow divided the inside of the galleryinto three smaller contiguous rooms using wooden two-by-fours Inphotographs of the piece as it was being installed these woodenbeams can be seen framing a space within the space of the gallerymdashnot into a proscenium stage but into an environment within the largergallery space where various events would occur Instead of wood ordrywall translucent plastic sheeting created the walls so that actioncould be partially seen from one room to the next Each room was litwith different colored lights and in each room where the audiencewas forced to sit and observe the action a group of actors movedthrough tightly scripted but simple routines as sounds came in and outand lms were projected

On the program the audience is listed under the ldquoCast of Participantsrdquowritten into the performance itself and actively engaged but only asthe subject of direction and authorial control At specific intervalsbells rang and the audience was required to change seats and to switchrooms based on instruction cards they had been given when they enteredthe gallery before the performance Kaprow had realized with his HansaGallery environment that he needed to give his viewers increasedresponsibility but he also realized that relinquishing too much con-trol could be a disaster as it had been in Pastorale As with his previ-ous work his goal with 18 Happenings was the ldquointegration of allelementsmdashenvironment constructed sections time space and peoplerdquoand the audience was once again included as just another material inhis composition68

During the fifth part of 18 Happenings one sequence of actionsseems to reveal Kaprowrsquos relationship with painting the viewer and space Kaprow had built a construction he called the ldquothe sandwich manrdquo named after its everyday counterparts paid to walkaround the city streets as human billboards Kaprowrsquos sandwich

Left The construction of thespace used for Allan Kaprowrsquos18 Happenings in 6 Parts1958

Right A view of Allan Kaprowrsquos18 Happenings whereRearrangeable Panels is partially visible on the leftThe in-set canvas panel onwhich actors painted live as part of the performance is shown at center PhotoScott Hyde

98 Grey Room 13

man was barely humanoidan automaton with forward-and backward-pointing mir-rors for a body bicycle wheelsfor feet and a gallon bucketof enamel paint for a headSticking out in front was apiece of wood for an arm end-ing in a hand that held cardslabeled ldquoXrdquo and ldquo3rdquo the adver-

tising handbill reduced to its zero degree In the middle of the sand-wich man hidden on a shelf between the two mirrors was a recordplayer and projecting out from behind it were two handles so that itcould be wheeled around the rooms As the sandwich man was wheeledfrom one room to another its mirrored body reflected the audienceback onto themselves their image taking the place of what would havebeen an advertisement They were reected not as participatory viewersnot even as active objects as in his environment but as passive objectsnow totally reied their image produced as a reection of Junk CultureHere in Brechtian fashion using a literal ldquoframing effectrdquo Kaprowturned his previous use of the viewer back into a critique of the eventitself In reecting the audiencersquos passivity back to them he forced amoment of recognition of their complicity in the production of thework They could see that as they became an ad on the sandwich manrsquosbelly so they became throwaway objects in his composition By reduc-ing the spectator to the general equivalence of these objects Kaprowrecognized the subject of the postndashWorld War II period as a product ofplanned obsolescence and consumer culture

Following this as the sandwich man was wheeled through the secondroom and into the third two men stood up from their seats one in eachroom Each took up a brush and a can of paint and approached oppo-site sides of one of the plastic walls simultaneously painting on a sec-tion of canvas set among the plastic walls and so turning the wall backinto a painting69 The canvas was left unprimed so that the simple gures that each artist painted (one was supposed to paint lines theother circles) would bleed through and so would be immediately visibleon the opposite side each mark responding to that of their partner Asin his two earlier happenings painting is done live before an audienceon a wall Kaprow showed the audience that when painting becomeswall it functions only to put space on display Here painting as a sin-gular art object was meaningless It became a throwaway stage propand so became a demonstration of how painting as object was part ofthe larger environment in which it resides The limit condition of paint-ing as wall with viewer as spectator was the gallery as frame70

The sandwich man part ofKaprowrsquos 18 HappeningsPhoto Scott Hyde

Kaizen | Framed Space Allan Kaprow and the Spread of Painting 99

What this sequence from 18 Happenings reveals is that Kaprow hadan acute sense of the way in which the gallery as frame produces sub-ject and space together He undermined the normal function of the artgallery turning both viewer and art object into Junk Culture Throwawayviewers throwaway paintings and throwaway rooms turned the galleryspacemdasha space designed to be neutral to hide itself as the objects itcontains become the sole focus of the viewerrsquos concentrationmdashinto thelocus of planned obsolescence With the creation of happeningsKaprow used Junk Culture against the doxa of gallery space upsettingthe common sense of what a space for art is and what it does Afterhappenings the paradoxical logic of the gallery as a site for both theprivate contemplation of singular aesthetic objects as well as the pub-lic transaction of luxury goods had been (however temporarily) sub-verted In asserting the gallery space as the limit condition of paintingKaprow framed the institution as the ground of artistic production

In ldquoThe Legacy of Jackson Pollockrdquo Kaprow says ldquoPollock left us atthe point where we must become preoccupied with and even dazzled by the space and objects of our everyday liferdquo71 In ldquoAssemblageEnvironments Happeningsrdquo bridging the gap between his early andlater work he concludes ldquothis has brought sharply into focus that theroom has always been a frame or format toordquo72 Kaprowrsquos collapse ofautonomy via art into lifemdashthat environments and happenings wouldldquopartake wholly in the real nature of art and (one hopes) liferdquomdashwasonly ever a hope as he himself knew If painting had used the frameas the delimitation of a eld for composition then environments andhappenings turned the gallery into the limit condition of this fieldWhile he tried to get closer to everyday life by making art he inevitablypushed it further away This ambivalence toward the collapse of artand life runs throughout Kaprowrsquos work even as he moved out of thegallery and into everyday life following his early work with his laterldquoactivitiesrdquo The early work was even by his own estimation more adisplay of experience and not a fair representation of actual everydayexperience But this is precisely where the importance of this work liesKaprowrsquos environments and happenings extended Rauschenbergrsquossemiautonomous gap so far that they turned the screw one notchhigher autonomy returning not though the sublation of art into archi-tecture but through the medium of framed space

100 Grey Room 13

NotesThanks to the generosity and insight of Karen Kurczynski John Harwood SethMcCormick Jaleh Mansoor Beth Hinderliter Vered Maimon Benjamin Buchloh andBarry Bergdoll as well as Branden Joseph and the Editors of Grey Room

1 Brian OrsquoDoherty Inside the White Cube The Ideology of the Gallery Space(Berkeley and Los Angeles University of California Press 1999) 15

2 It was originally called ldquoPainting Environments Happeningsrdquo and publishedin a condensed form in the catalog for the exhibition New FormsmdashNew Media I at the Martha Jackson Gallery New York the rst uptown show of Kaprow and his con-temporaries It was changed to ldquoAssemblage Environments and Happeningsrdquo for nalpublication Kaprow changed the title to incorporate the recent acceptance of the termassemblage It had been used rst by Helen Comstock to describe the work of ArthurDove in the 1920s but remained obscure until Jean Dubuffet popularized its use in 1953The term as used by Dubuffet was then adopted by William Seitz for his exhibitionThe Art of Assemblage at the Museum of Modern Art See Allan Kaprow AssemblageEnvironments and Happenings (New York Harry N Abrams 1966) 150ndash208 NewFormsmdashNew Media I (New York Martha Jackson Gallery 1960) np and RogerShattuck ldquoIntroduction How Collage Became Assemblagerdquo Essays on Assemblage(New York Museum of Modern Art 1992) 119

3 ldquoWhen I am in my painting Irsquom not aware of what Irsquom doingrdquo said PollockJackson Pollock Jackson Pollock Interviews Articles Reviews ed Pepe Karmel (NewYork Museum of Modern Art 1999) 17ndash18

4 Yard was Kaprowrsquos contribution to the exhibition Environments SituationsSpaces at the Martha Jackson Gallery a follow up to New FormsndashNew Media (see n 2)

5 ldquoAllan Kaprow and Robert Watts Interviewed by Sidney Simonrdquo in Benjamin HDBuchloh and Judith F Rodenbeck Experiments in the Everyday Allan Kaprow andRobert Watts Events Objects Documents (New York Wallach Art Gallery 1999) 76

6 To cite but one example of many Thomas Hirschhorn is an artist who continuesto extend and develop Kaprowrsquos legacy today

7 On Kaprow and performance see Amelia Jones Body Art Performing the Subject(Minneapolis University of Minnesota Press 1998) 56ndash57 Paul Schimmel ldquoLeap intothe Void Performance and the Objectrdquo in Out of Actions Between Performance andthe Object 1949ndash1979 ed Paul Schimmel (New York Thames and Hudson 1998)59ndash63

8 The relationship between painting and space had been explored before partic-ularly in the period between the two world wars by the artists associated with De Stijland constructivism For more on De Stijl see Nancy Troy The De Stijl Environment(Cambridge MIT Press 1983) On constructivism see Yve-Alain Bois ldquoEl LissitzkyRadical Reversibilityrdquo Art in America 76 no 4 (April 1988) 161ndash181 and Yve-AlainBois ldquoMaterial Utopiasrdquo Art in America 79 no 6 (June 1991) 98ndash107 Another Europeanwho explored the everyday object painting and space was Kurt Schwitters in the various incarnation of his Merzbau See Elizabeth Burns Gamard Kurt SchwittersrsquoMerzbau The Cathedral of Erotic Misery (New York Princeton Architectural Press2000) Two other important precursors who bridge the European and American con-text are Lazlo Moholy-Nagy and Friedrick Kiesler For information on Moholy-Nagyrsquosearly environmental projects as well as those of Lissitzy see Joan Ockman ldquoThe RoadNot Taken Alexander Dornerrsquos Way Beyond Artrdquo in Autonomy and Ideology Positioningan Avant-Garde in America ed RE Somol (New York Monicelli Press 1997) For

Kaizen | Framed Space Allan Kaprow and the Spread of Painting 101

information on Kiesler see RL Held Endless Innovations Frederick Kieslerrsquos Theoryand Scenic Design (Ann Arbor UMI Research Press 1982) Lisa Phillips FrederickKiesler (New York The Whitney Museum of American Art 1989) Brian OrsquoDohertydraws out the connections between the prendash and postndashWorld War II manifestations ofthis relationship in Inside the White Cube

9 For Benjamin the work of art attains autonomy under modernism with theemergence of art for artrsquos sake This autonomy is then usurped by mechanical repro-duction See Walter Benjamin ldquoThe Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproductionrdquoin Illuminations ed Hanna Arendt (New York Harcourt Brace and Jovanovich Inc1968) p 224-226 For Greenberg as the above quote indicates the autonomy of artcontinues even in the face of mechanization See Clement Greenberg ldquoTowards a NewerLaocoonrdquo Perceptions and Judgments 1939ndash1944 vol 1 of Clement Greenberg TheCollected Essays and Criticism ed John OrsquoBrien (Chicago University of Chicago1986) p 32

10 Rosalind Krauss uses the term ldquopost-medium conditionrdquo to designate ldquomixed-media installationrdquo work done today While Krauss argues that only the most signi-cant artists working since the 1960s reassert the medium in their work against thegeneral postmedium condition I believe that all mixed-media installation work operates using the gallery or institution as medium See Rosalind Krauss ldquoA Voyageon the North Seardquo Art in the Age of the Post-Medium Condition (New York Thamesand Hudson 1999) for her comments on a specic contemporary artist and the rein-vention of the medium see Rosalind Krauss ldquo And Then Turn Awayrdquo An Essayon James Colemanrdquo October 81 (Summer 1997) 5ndash33

11 Allan Kaprow ldquoThe Legacy of Jackson Pollockrdquo Art News 57 no 6 (October1958) 24ndash26 55ndash57 reprinted in Allan Kaprow Essays on the Blurring of Art andLife ed Jeff Kelley (Berkeley and Los Angles University of California Press 1993) 1ndash9 Kaprow has stated that the essay was written in 1956 in ldquoAllan Kaprow andRobert Watts Interviewed by Sidney Simonrdquo 77 Kaprow had been a student of bothHans Hoffman and Meyer Schapiro

12 Harold Rosenberg ldquoThe American Action Paintersrdquo Art News 52 (December1952) 22ndash23 In a footnote that Rosenberg added when the article was republished aspart of his book of collected essays in 1959 he added the following ldquoAction Paintinghas extracted the element of decision inherent in all art in that the work is not fin-ished at its beginning but has to be carried forward by an accumulation of lsquorightrsquo ges-tures In a word Action Painting is the abstraction of the moral element in art itsmark is moral tension in detachment from moral or esthetic certainties and it judgesitself morally in declaring that picture to be worthless which is not the incorporationof a genuine struggle one which could at any point have been lostrdquo Harold RosenbergThe Tradition of the New (New York Horizon Press 1959) 33ndash34 Kaprow recountsthe influence of Rosenbergrsquos essay on his work in ldquoAllan Kaprow and Robert WattsInterviewed by Sidney Simonrdquo 77

13 There were five all told They were held as follows 5ndash23 January 1948 24Januaryndash12 February 1949 21 Novemberndash10 December 1949 28 Novemberndash16 December1950 26 Novemberndash15 December 1951 These shows had a remarkable resonance onethat extended beyond even the insular New York art world when after the secondexhibition Life magazine published the feature article ldquoJackson Pollock Is He theGreatest Living Painter in the United Statesrdquo Dorothy Sieberling Life (August 81949) 42ndash45

14 Allan Kaprow ldquoThe Legacy of Jackson Pollockrdquo in Kaprow Essays on the

102 Grey Room 13

Blurringrdquo 615 Kaprow uses both the terms scale and size to describe Pollockrsquos work but as

TJ Clark has shown these are two very different terms and Pollock is a painter of sizeand not scale For Clark it is size that engages the body ldquoNormally speaking size isliteralmdasha matter of actual physical intuition It involves grasping how big or small acertain object really is most likely in relation to the size of the grasperrsquos upright body oroutspread armsrdquo TJ Clark ldquoPollockrsquos Smallnessrdquo in Jackson Pollock New Approachesed Kirk Varnedoe and Pepe Karmel (New York Museum of Modern Art 1999) 15

16 Kaprow ldquoThe Legacy of Jackson Pollockrdquo Essays on the Blurring 617 In most of his work the paint engages with the edge of the canvas emphasizing

and bordering it and not continuing around it as if the canvas had been cut down fromsome innite expanse Kaprow claims otherwise by singling out the exceptions sayingldquo[H]is art gives the impression of going on forever [T]hough evidence points to aslackening of the attack as Pollock came to the edges of many of his canvases in thebest ones he compensated for this by tacking much of the painted surface around theback of his stretchersrdquo Kaprow ldquoThe Legacy of Jackson Pollockrdquo Essays on the Blurringof Art and Life 5 An examination of the paintings shows that more often Pollockstopped before the edge or reworked his compositions after they were stretched sothat they reengaged with the edge even when cut from larger canvas Kaprow claimsotherwise because it furthers his arguments that Pollockrsquos paintings emerge into thespace of the viewer

18 Jackson Pollock ldquoApplication for a Guggenheim Fellowship 1947rdquo in JacksonPollock Interviews 17 The inuence of Greenberg at this time is discussed in StevenNaifeh and Gregory White Smith Jackson Pollock An American Saga (Aiken SCWoodwardWhite 1989) 551 Pollock had also engaged with wall-size painting duringhis association with Joseacute Clemente Orozco and in earlier work such as Mural(1943ndash1944) painted for Peggy Guggenheimrsquos house

19 Greenbergrsquos version of modernism was most fully laid out only in 1959 andpublished in 1960 ldquoIt was the stressing of the ineluctable atness of the surface thatremained however more fundamental than anything else to the process by whichpictorial art criticized and defined itself under Modernism For flatness alone wasunique and exclusive to pictorial art Because flatness was the only conditionpainting shared with no other art Modernist painting oriented itself to atness as itdid to nothing elserdquo In Clement Greenberg ldquoModernist Paintingrdquo in Modernism witha Vengeance 1957ndash1969 vol 4 of Clement Greenberg The Collected Essays andCriticism ed John OrsquoBrien (Chicago University of Chicago Press 1993) 87

20 Clement Greenberg ldquoThe Situation at the Momentrdquo in Arrogant Purpose1945ndash1949 vol 2 of Clement Greenberg The Collected Essays and Criticism ed JohnOrsquoBrien (Chicago University of Chicago 1986) 194ndash195

21 See Greenberg ldquoTowards a Newer Laocoonrdquo throughout22 Eric Lum has done extensive work on the relationship between abstract expres-

sionism and architecture The analysis in this essay follows from his especially whereBlakersquos project is concerned but also expands on it As he jumps from Blake to PhilipJohnson and Mark Rothkorsquos Houston Chapel however Lum misses the importance ofother interventions between painting and architecture such as those made by KaprowThis is evident when he says ldquoThrough this marriage of mural and wall paintingcould become fully integrated into architecture an idealized conjecture nor realizeduntil Mark Rothkorsquos 1971 Houston Chapelrdquo Eric Lum ldquoPollockrsquos Promise Toward anAbstract Expressionist Architecturerdquo Assemblage 39 (August 1999) 68

Kaizen | Framed Space Allan Kaprow and the Spread of Painting 103

23 Blake said of his visit to Pollockrsquos studio ldquoIt was a very sunny day and thesun was shining on the paintings I felt like I was standing in the Hall of Mirrors atVersailles It was a dazzling incredible sightrdquo Naifeh and Smith 588

24 Peter Blake No Place like Utopia Modern Architecture and the Company WeKept (New York Knopf 1993) 111ndash112

25 Miesrsquos museum plan was designed at the request of the editors at ArchitecturalForum who had been publishing a series of articles ldquoto show how building might beimproved through fuller and more imaginative use of existing resourcesrdquo They requesteddesigns for a variety of buildings that could be placed in a hypothetical city of 70000inhabitants ldquoNew Buildings for 194Xrdquo Architectural Forum 78 no 5 (May 1943)69ndash85 The Barcelona Pavilion was built in 1929 for the Barcelona Universal Expositionand was destroyed when the fair ended It was subsequently rebuilt in 1981ndash86

26 Peter Blake Mies van der Rohe (New York Pelican 1960) 54 It is worth notingthat like Miesrsquos use of the Kolbe sculpture Blake had Pollock actually make smallwire sculptures splattered with paint miniatures of sculptures that Blake hopedPollock would make for the actual museum Pollock himself was experimenting withsculpture around this time building three-dimensional forms out of papier-macirccheacutethat he then splattered with paint

27 Blakersquos collage space follows from Miesrsquos The production of collages as in situmodels for Miesrsquos buildings had begun in the twenties with his work for the journal Gin association with Dadaists such as Hans Richter Neil Levine notes this creation ofa collage space in Mies particularly in the Pavilion and the Museum for a Small Cityin relation to his use of reection to layer one surface on top of another Neil LevineldquolsquoThe Signicance of Factsrsquo Miesrsquo Collages Up Close and Personalrdquo Assemblage 37(December 1998) 71ndash101

28 Blake designed his museum just as Philip Johnson was building his Glass Housewhere they both spent considerable time while planning exhibitions for the Museumof Modern Art Johnsonrsquos inuence is also evident in Blakersquos design Blake No Placelike Utopia 149ndash155

29 Arthur Drexler ldquoUnframed Space A Museum for Jackson Pollackrsquos [sic] PaintingsrdquoInteriors and Industrial Design 109 no 6 (January 1950) 90ndash91 The article was partof a special issue whose theme was ldquoInteriors to Comerdquo a recurring topic that wasmeant ldquoto show the direction in which some of our best designers are goingrdquo The termunframed space was used several times in reference to Pollockrsquos work as the title oftwo articles Drexlerrsquos and one published slightly later by Berton Rouecheacute ThoughRouecheacute in an interview in To a Violent Grave says that Lee Krasner used the phraserst Charles Pollock says that Blake was the origin of the term The fact that Drexlerrsquosarticle was written and published earlier seems to conrm this See Berton RouecheacuteldquoUnframed Spacerdquo in Jackson Pollock Interviews 18ndash19 and Jeffrey Potter To aViolent Grave (New York Pushcart Press 1985) 126

30 Drexler 9031 Blake No Place like Utopia 113ndash11432 Blake completed construction on his ldquoPinwheel Houserdquo in 1952 It is a small

beach house that he designed for himself and his family in South Hampton on NewYorkrsquos Long Island Situated on the beach the house is square in plan and its fourexterior walls slide horizontally outward each in a successive clockwise directionrevealing glass walls When the exterior walls are fully extended and the house isviewed from above it forms a shape like a pinwheel Opening the exterior wallsreveals an ever-changing view of the landscape outside turning the ocean and the

104 Grey Room 13

dunes into the picturesque framing them so that they entirely ll the space of the walland put its surface in motion Blake had discussed with Pollock the possibility of hispainting the sliding walls so that his paintings would be superimposed over the land-scape Pollock considered it but Blake couldnrsquot come up with the commission moneythat Pollock asked for They never finalized their plans and it was never clear howthe panels were to be painted Blake suggested that they might be made of glass so hebought the sheet of glass that Pollock used to paint Number 29 1950 (1950) the paintingthat Hans Namuth lmed from underneath for his documentary on Pollock His col-laboration with Blake did lead to one commission a mural-size canvas done for ahouse designed by Marcel Breuer Untitled (Mural) (1950) Shortly after his collabo-ration with Blake Pollock began another unrealized architectural project this onewith Alfonso Ossorio and Tony Smith for a church designed by Smith with murals byPollock For more on all of this see Blake No Place like Utopia 114ndash118 Naifeh andSmith 649 and Lum ldquoPollockrsquos Promiserdquo 68 85ndash88

33 Lum ldquoPollockrsquos Promiserdquo 67ndash6834 A few pages down from Drexlerrsquos article on the Pollock Museum in Interiors

and Industrial Design was another architectural response to the same problem OlgaGueftrsquos article ldquoThe Museumrsquos Oasisrdquo describes another museum this one by Gyorgyand Juliet Kepes ldquoThe Kepesesrdquo it begins ldquoare not exactly opposed to museumsrdquo how-ever it would seem that they were opposed to museums containing works of artReplacing the art objects entirely the Kepeses substituted shells driftwood plantsand animals Instead of a natural history museum they proposed a modern-dayWunderkammerwhere natural forms take the place of art as objects for contemplationldquoThe proposed galleryrdquo they declared ldquowould bridge the gap between the art museumwhich is concerned with man-made beauty and the natural history museum whichis preoccupied with nature but not particularly with naturersquos beautyrdquo Gyorgy KepesrsquosThe New Landscape exhibition at MIT a year later in 1951 (the same years as theIndependent Grouprsquos similar exhibition Growth and Form in London) and the pub-lication that followed The New Landscape in Art and Sciencewould ultimately realizethis project with blown-up photographs of natural forms (cells shells and electronmicrographs) in place of actual objects

The Kepeses seem to have taken the next logical step beyond Blake proposing aneven more radical rethinking of the wall-size work of art Eliminating the need for theartist altogether they found abstract forms in nature and turned their reproductionsinto what would elsewhere have been works of art By turning the art object into scientic vision The Kepeses proposed its total instrumentation Autonomous abstractpainting was transformed into its instrumental other a mechanically reproduced science of vision Rather than turn art into interior design The Kepesesrsquo replacementof abstract painting recast the status of scientic technology into that of high art SeeOlga Gueft ldquoThe Museumrsquos Oasisrdquo Interiors and Industrial Design 109 no 6 (January1950) 100ndash103 and Gyorgy Kepes The New Landscape in Art and Science (ChicagoPaul Theobald and Co 1956)

35 Kaprow stated that it was ldquoIn 1949 [that] I saw an exhibition of [Pollockrsquos] workfor the rst timerdquo ldquoInterviewrdquo in Allan Kaprow (Pasadena Pasadena Art Museum1967) 7

36 See Kaprow ldquoThe Legacy of Jackson Pollockrdquo Art News 25 and Kaprow ldquoTheLegacy of Jackson Pollockrdquo Essays on the Blurring 3

37 Joan Marter ldquoThe Forgotten Legacy Happenings Pop Art and Fluxus at RutgersUniversityrdquo in Off Limits Rutgers University and the Avant-Garde 1957ndash1963 ed Joan

Kaizen | Framed Space Allan Kaprow and the Spread of Painting 105

Marter (Newark The Newark Museum 1999) 438 Marter 13239 Quoted in John Cage Silence (Middletown Wesleyan University Press 1961) 10540 Branden Joseph has developed the link between Cage and Rauschenberg in several

recent essays See Branden W Joseph ldquoJohn Cage and the Architecture of SilencerdquoOctober 81 (Summer 1997) 81ndash104 and Branden Joseph ldquoWhite on Whiterdquo CriticalInquiry 27 no 1 (Summer 2001) 90ndash121

41 For Cage on Rauschenberg see Cage Silence98ndash108 For his description ofTheater Piece No 1 see ldquoInterview with John Cagerdquo in Happenings and Other Actsed Mariellen R Sandford (New York Routledge 1995) 53 Cage subsequently referredto Theater Piece No 1 as ldquothe rst happeningrdquo See John Cage ldquoAn AutobiographicalStatementrdquo Southwest Review 76 no 1 (Winter 1991) 65

42 The score itself has had various incarnations It wasnrsquot published until 1960and in this version includes a note wherein Cage describes the rst performance byTudor For more on 4rsquo33 and its various scores see Liz Kotz ldquoWords on Paper NotNecessarily Meant to Be Read as Art Postwar Media Poetics from Cage to Warholrdquo(PhD diss Columbia University 2002) 83ndash115 Kotz follows a different lineage outof Cage and into performance and happenings than the one traced in this essay

43 Marter 13244 Walter Hopps in the first survey catalog of Rauschenbergrsquos early work does

not name the black paintings as a group as he does the White Paintings He calls themeach Untitled followed by a description in brackets Hopps notes of the largest ofthese works that ldquoThese paintings with a greater vastness and ambiguity of scale thanother Rauschenberg works relate to spatial qualities of Jackson Pollockrdquo HoppsRobert Rauschenberg The Early 1950s (Houston Houston Fine Art Press 1991) 67This convention was also followed in Rauschenbergrsquos 1997 Guggenheim retrospectivecatalog and is followed in this essay Robert Rauschenberg A Retrospective ed WalterHopps and Susan Davidson (New York Solomon R Guggenheim Museum 1997)

45 The piece is called Untitled [two black panels] (1953) Hopps Robert Rauschenberg99

46 Helen Molesworth notes the importance of Rauschenbergrsquos newspaper groundin the black paintings and develops this problem in relation to the abject body as it isfurther pursued in his work throughout the 1950s Helen Molesworth ldquoBefore BedrdquoOctober 63 (Winter 1993) 68ndash82

47 Asked about this work Rauschenberg said ldquoI called them combines I had tocoin that word because I got so bored with arguments I was interested in people seeingmy work When someone would come up and I really wanted to know what they thoughtof it or wanted to sense the exposure there was always this screen that they could getbehind which was if I said lsquoIt is paintingrsquo they would say lsquoThatrsquos not painting Thatrsquossculpturersquo And they thought this was very interestingrdquo Jeanne Siegel ArtwordsDiscourse on the 60s and 70s (New York DaCapo 1985) 153

48 Allan Kaprow ldquoa Statementrdquo in Happenings An Illustrated Anthology edMichael Kirby (New York EP Dutton and Co 1965) 44ndash45

49 Benjamin Buchloh notes the importance of play in the 1950s and its link toconsumer culture During the 1950s he writes ldquoa theory of games would remerge asa cultural project at the very moment of an ever-increasing instrumentalization oflibidinal desire through consumer culturerdquo Benjamin HD Buchloh ldquoRobert WattsInanimate ObjectsmdashInanimate Subjectsrdquo in Buchloh and Rodenbeck Experiments inthe Everyday 25 n 4

Kaizen | Framed Space Allan Kaprow and the Spread of Painting 89

Pollock and Blake Kaprow also engagedwith the work of Robert Rauschenbergand John Cage two artists who had asmuch impact on his thinking about spaceas Pollock

| | | | |

In the fall of 1951 when Kaprow visitedRauschenbergrsquos studio he saw the WhitePaintings37 Rauschenberg had made theseworks during the previous summer at BlackMountain College Like Blake Rauschenberg also engaged space usingpainting but he did so as an artist not as an architect Yet rather thanreassert the autonomy of painting he established a semiautonomousspace for painting The White Paintings are a series of works paintedat matte white with no visible marks to attract the viewerrsquos eye WhileBlake submitted the autonomy of Pollockrsquos painting to the logic of hisarchitecture upholding the autonomy of modernist space in favor ofarchitecture over art Rauschenberg was far more ambivalent about thepossibility of autonomy for either art or architecture The White Paintingsexist between the two as semiautonomous objectsmdashnot quite wall notquite paintingmdashand certainly not like their nearest precursor abstractexpressionist painting with its ood of gesture and mark The WhitePaintings in their utter blankness call attention to the ephemeral effectsof light and shade that played across them Upon seeing them Kaprowwas unsure what to think until he noticed that they turned the surfaceof painting into an active plane of reception for the movement of his bodyldquoI was walking back and forth not knowing how I should take thesethingsrdquo he said ldquoand then I saw my shadows across the paintingmdashmovingrdquo38 For Kaprow the surface of these paintings became a tem-poral screen reecting the viewerrsquos body in the changing environmentof the gallery Their painterly incidence was not their whiteness perse but their ability to capture the presence of the viewer as he or shestood in front of the work The viewer activated the work so that thework the viewer and the space in between all became part of the workAs Rauschenberg wrote at the time ldquoPainting relates to both art andlife Neither can be made (I try to act in that gap between the two)rdquo39

These paintings are caught between painting as an object that is func-tionally and fundamentally separate from its architectural containerand the spread of painting into a semiautonomous state somewherebetween art architecture and the viewing subject moving through theexhibition space

Rauschenberg had developed his White Paintings in dialogue with

Photograph of Pollock in hisstudio As published in AllanKaprow Essays on theBlurring of Art and Life 1993The model of Blakersquosmuseum is visible in theupper-right corner PhotoHans Namuth

90 Grey Room 13

Cage who was also at Black Mountain in the summer of 195240 Thatsummer Cage incorporated The White Paintings into his own workTheater Piece No 141 They were suspended over the heads of theaudience members at various angles as a variety of performance eventstook place beneath them These events included Rauschenberg andDavid Tudor playing piano poets MC Richards and Charles Olsonreading poetry from atop a ladder and Merce Cunningham and othersdancing through the space and around the audience It was the WhitePaintings with their environmental quality that that led Cage to write4rsquo 33 in 1952 Tudor was the original performer of the compositionwhose score was open to interpretation42 He realized it on pianoplaying it by silently opening and closing the piano lid allowing thesounds of the audience and the ambient noises of the space to becomethe work Kaprow attended one of the rst performances of 4rsquo 33 atCarnegie Hall in 1952 and was deeply affected He compared his expe-rience of 4rsquo 33 to his experience of Rauschenbergrsquos paintings Thesounds in the space chairs creaking the air condition humming peoplecoughing and clearing their throatsmdashall the ambient sounds that lledthe space of the auditoriummdashbecame foregrounded ldquoIt was like theshadows in Bob Rauschenbergrsquos picturesrdquo Kaprow recalled ldquoThat is tosay there [wa]s no marking the boundary of the artwork or the boundaryof so-called everyday life They merge[d] And we the listeners in Cagersquosconcert and the lookers at Rauschenbergrsquos pictures were the collabo-rators of the artworkrdquo43 For Kaprow Cage like Rauschenberg col-lapsed the autonomy of art by engaging the listener as collaborator ina semiautonomous space (ldquoso-called everyday liferdquo and not true every-day life) that depended upon the interaction between work spaceand subject

On his visit to Rauschenbergrsquos studio Kaprow also saw the earliestof Rauschenbergrsquos black paintings44 This series is the antipode of thesmooth matte white surfaces of the White Paintings They are allblack monochromes most painted with a high-gloss enamel soakedinto newspaper pages that were then haphazardly stuck onto the sur-face of a canvas trapped pockets of air often causing the paintingsrsquosurfaces to bulge outward repulsively At their largest they framespace as Pollockrsquos work did but as art brut walls instead of dazzlingskeins of paint One photograph of a later diptych shows the paintingsblocking the doorway to Rauschenbergrsquos studio at Black Mountain asif they were extensions of the rough-hewn stone walls on either side45

But in this next transformation of painting as wall what seems moreimportant for the direction that both Rauschenberg and Kaprow wouldfollow out of these works was their newspaper ground As Rauschenbergrsquospaintings became wall-size their art brut surface was built on the newsof the day At rst everyday events as reported in the newspaper are

Kaizen | Framed Space Allan Kaprow and the Spread of Painting 91

painted out and hidden behind the blackpaint46 As the series proceeded he allowedincreasingly more of the news to showthrough While the White Paintings engagedwith the gap between art and life by cap-turing the viewerrsquos bodymdashas did Cagersquos4rsquo 33 at least for Kaprowmdashthe black paint-ings did so by using the everyday objectas a ground Through their use of news-paper they suggested another trajectoryout of painting and into everyday spacea trajectory whose base condition was thecommodity object

In order to get into the gap between art and life Rauschenbergrsquoswork rst had to approximate the condition of being a wall It neededto assume a relation to its architectural frame in order to move awayfrom the autonomy of painting and into semiautonomy but once it didso Rauschenberg would abandon the problem of painting as wallFollowing the White Paintings and black paintings (and then a briefseries of Red Paintings) he made his rst Combines works that rein-state the autonomy of the individual art object even while they existbetween painting sculpture and the surrealist objet trouveacute47 Ratherthan engage with space Rauschenbergrsquos Combines elevate the ready-made or found object back to the status of the autonomous art objectThe Combines formalize the everyday object into an in-between statebut one that nevertheless produces singular art objects While theblack paintings led Rauschenberg back to the art object they led Kaprowfarther off the wall and out into space

| | | | |

Kaprow wrote ldquoa statementrdquo about his work sketching the trajectoryhe took from painting through collage then out into the space of thegallery48 After his initial show of paintings in 1952 he described thedevelopment of what he called ldquoaction collagerdquo These were done asquickly as possible by throwing together readily available everydaymaterials including parts of his past work tinfoil photographsnewspaper and food Although he doesnrsquot mention particular works by name presumably these action-collages include the early piecesreproduced in Assemblage Environments and Happenings In a photo-graph of Penny Arcade (1956) we see Kaprow standing in front of a largewall-size assemblage densely layered with parts of paintings scrapsof wood and large pieces of advertising signage that look like Kaproweither found them on the side of the road or appropriated them from a

Robert RauschenbergUntitled 1952

92 Grey Room 13

storefront It also included flashing lights andsounds calling out to the viewer like a ConeyIsland carnival booth but one made all the moreconfusing with its hyperarray of upside-downand fragmented word parts While collage hadbeen delicate even dainty in its appliqueacute of smallscraps of paper to the surface of the image KaprowrsquosPenny Arcade was massive and rough-hewn Unlikeits glitzier real-world counterpart Penny Arcadelooks cobbled together a temporary faccedilade brico-laged from odds and ends Here Kaprow turnedthe gallery space into the street turning the wallinto a pseudo-storefront bringing the architec-ture of the outside world into the gallery but lteredthrough the compositional strategies of collage

and abstract expressionism Abstraction before world war II had beenundertaken in a quest to find a universal Esperanto of color and form a problem that had been transformed by abstract expressionisminto a private iconography of psychic signs In Penny Arcade Kaprowturns the private symbolism of abstraction expressionism back to the world through advertising as commodity sign He makes the private symbol public again by reconnecting prendashWorld War II modelsof collective production with postndashWorld War II models of collectiveconsumption

Another work from this time further demonstrates how Kaprowused everyday materials to partition space Alternately titled (inAssemblage) Wall Kiosk and Rearrangeable Panels (1957ndash1959) thispiece looks like an enormous folding Japanese screen Measuring eightfeet high and over twenty feet long its panels are covered in eggshellsleaves and broken mirrorsmdashnot mass-produced commodities or sig-nage but detritus and waste Several of the panels are painted one inHoffmanrsquos push-pull style two seem to nod toward Rauschenberg onepainted white one black This piece is designed to sit on the oor ofthe gallery and as its various names imply it can be placed in a varietyof positions called ldquowallrdquo when arrayed in a straight line ldquokioskrdquowhen arranged into a square and ldquorearrangeable panelsrdquo in generalor when it sits in a zigzag Each position changes the relationship ofthe object to the space that contains it Kaprow recast the painting-as-wall as a transformable piece of furniture recognizing the possibilityof ludic engagement with the viewer but withholding it because theviewer is not allowed to interact with the piece directly Once installedthe work transforms the space of the gallery but it cannot be recong-ured by the viewer49

When asked why he used junk to make his work Kaprow replied

Allan Kaprow standing infront of Penny Arcade 1956Photo WF Gainfort

Kaizen | Framed Space Allan Kaprow and the Spread of Painting 93

It was clearly part of transformingreality It gave everyone a sense ofinstant involvement in a kind of crudeeveryday reality which was quite arelief after the high-art attitude ofexclusion from the real world It alsoallowed us to give up a certain kindof seriousness that traditional artmaking required Whatrsquos more thematerials were available everywhereon street corners at night And ifyou didnrsquot sell these environmentalconstructions yoursquod just throwthem back into the garbage canWhy not just throw them out It wasvery liberating to think of oneself aspart of an endlessly transformingreal world50

The ldquocrude everyday realityrdquo capturedby Penny Arcade as with Kaprowrsquos subsequent work is predicatedupon his project of capturing the ldquoendlessly transforming real worldrdquoThis statement connects him with Rauschenberg and Cage but alsoshows how their work differs in an important and crucial way InKaprowrsquos comment describing his experience of 4rsquo33 (as quoted inthe previous section) he says ldquoAnd we the listeners in Cagersquos concertand the lookers at Rauschenbergrsquos pictures were the collaborators of[sic] the artworkrdquo ending with ldquoIt was a kind of collaborative end-lessly changing affair The artwork was simply this organism that wasaliverdquo51 For Kaprow the key word here is change and in order tomove from artwork to organism the work of art must be reconsiderednot as a ldquochance operationrdquo (to use Cagersquos term) but as a change oper-ation During this time Kaprow had begun to take classes with Cageand he was exposed to Cagersquos use of chance methods of compositionWhile he would adopt much from Cagersquos work and teaching he thoughtthat change was the most important principle for his own work52

For Kaprow change was integrally connected to the postndashworld warII environment lled with mass-produced throwaway products Theart of this timemdashhis artmdashshould necessarily reect this environmentIn opposition to the nostalgic use of the objet trouveacute in surrealism hismethod was closer to the readymade choosing everyday objects to res-cue from oblivion but spreading them out in space so that they wouldenvironmentally engulf the viewer53 Kaprow temporarily revalues thethrowaway commodity in his environments to create a space where

Allan Kaprow RearrangeablePanels 1957-9 Shown intheir ldquoKioskrdquo con gurationPhoto Robert R McElroy

94 Grey Room 13

everyday life as planned obsolescence is brought under the control ofthe artist He creates a momentary space of anti-entropy in the life ofthe commodity where it is temporarily reinvested with value only to bedisposed of once the environment is destroyed54 Citing critic LawrenceAlloway on the ldquothrowawayrdquo culture of postndashworld war II AmericaKaprow goes on to describe the importance of change in his work

Change governing both reality and art has extended from theexpression of an idea arrested in a painting to a work in whichthe usually slow mutations wrought by nature are quickened andliterally made part of the experience of it they manifest the veryprocess of creation-decay-creation almost as one watches Theuse of debris waste products or very impermanent substanceslike toilet paper or bread has of course a clear range of allusionswith obvious sociological implications the simplest being theartistrsquos positive involvement on the one hand with an everydayworld and on the other with a group of objects which beingexpendable might suggest that corresponding lack of statuswhich is supposed to be the fate of anything creative todayThese choices must not be ignored for they reveal what in oursurroundings charges the imagination as well as what is mosthuman in our art55

What is ldquomost humanrdquo in Kaprowrsquos art as he denes it is its reectionof this throwaway culture This is governed not by Cagean chance butby planned obsolescence with its endless renewal of more of thesame ldquo[My] workrdquo Kaprow says ldquois intended to last only a short timeand is destroyed immediately after the exhibition If [its] obsolescenceis not planned it is expectedrdquo56 Alloway also writing on assemblagebetter describes the overlap between the throwaway object and its usein environmental art during the 1950s

The acceptance of mass-produced objects just because they arewhat is around not because they issue from idolatrised technol-ogy is central to mid-century Junk Culture Junk Culture iscity art Its source is obsolescence the throwaway material ofcities Assemblages of such material come at the spectator asbits of life bits of the environment frequently presented interms that dramatize spread ow extension trespass The junkis obtruded into our space with the aim of achieving maximumintimacy Proximity and participation replace distance and con-templation as the communicative style of the object57

So the space of Junk Culture when used in art as assemblage or envi-ronment achieves ldquomaximum intimacyrdquo with the observer throughtheir ldquoproximity and participationrdquo with the throwaway commodity

Kaizen | Framed Space Allan Kaprow and the Spread of Painting 95

As Kaprow moves farther into the space of the gallery he does so in anincreased attempt to engage the viewer He partitions the gallery spaceso that the body of the viewer becomes a product of its participationwithin the eld of the throwaway commodity

These early wall-like constructions were for Kaprow still not closeenough to a participatory art Kaprow wanted to move further towardthe creation of environments and even events to take over the gallerywith a plenitude of throwaway objects among which the viewer wouldself-consciously circulate The action collages still maintained toomuch autonomy because they existed as individual objects and so asKaprow recalled ldquonow I simply filled the whole gallery up startingfrom one wall and ending with the otherrdquo58 With his rst environmentKaprow was no longer composing within the autonomous space ofpainting but composing the entire space of the gallery Kaprowrsquos rstenvironmentmdashmade at the Hansa Gallery in November 1958mdashwasmeant to totally engage the visitors to the gallery to make them intopart of the work itself ldquopassively or actively according to [their] talentsfor lsquoengagementrsquordquo59 From a drop ceiling of wires suspended in a gridseveral inches below the galleryrsquos original ceiling he hung variousmaterials creating a labyrinthine space divided by sheets of plastictangles of cellophane Scotch tape and more including a time-releasedmist of pine-scented deodorizer His work had taken over the galleryspace lling it with a nearly impenetrable eld of throwaway objects60

Kaprow took the ood of postndashworld war II consumer goods and usedthem to compose walls that partitioned space And composemdashin thetraditional sense of arranging shapes and forms on the surface of acanvasmdashis exactly what he did

Kaprow described his use of the full space of the gallery as a eld aterm that he derives from painting calling the second section of hisldquoAssemblagerdquo essay ldquoThe Field in Paintingrdquo ldquoThis space is in part theliteral distance between all solids included in the workrdquo Kaprowwrote ldquoBut it is also a space that is a direct heritage of paintingrdquo61

Everything in the space that he produced became part of his compo-sition including the viewer Like any other object in the work Kaprowsaid ldquoin as much as people visiting [an] environment are moving col-ored shapes [they] were counted lsquoinrsquordquo62 Each visitor as they movedthrough Kaprowrsquos labyrinth became a part of the work Art and lifehad now seemingly collapsed the autonomy of painting as a separateobjectmdashframed and isolated from the rest of its environment as a spaceonly for the eyemdashhad been abandoned for an embodied experienceViewing was now dependent upon space a space full of the objects ofeveryday life Using the materials of everyday life Kaprow invited hisviewers to get rid of their distance from the art object forcing theminto physical contact with his work This work he wrote ldquoinvites us

96 Grey Room 13

to cast aside for a moment proper manners andpartake wholly in the real nature of art and (onehopes) liferdquo63 Against the look-donrsquot-touch attitude ofmuseum and gallery Kaprow created a haptic spacewhere touch became the basis of the work where vis-itors came into physical contact with his throwawayobjects In this space as visitors threaded their waythrough the labyrinth the color of their clothes andtheir presence among these objects turned them intoa part of the work The viewer appeared as anotherthing in Kaprowrsquos composition not so different fromhis throwaway materials In his environment autonomycollapsed into participation based on the reicationof the subject as an obsolete material temporally

composited into the work While Kaprow certainly intended to includehis observers in the work he could do so only by turning them intoobjects rather than active subjects He later described his own sense ofthe failure with this exhibition that he couldnrsquot seem to engage theviewer enough but blamed it on the framing space of the galleryAfterward he said ldquoI complained immediately about the fact that therewas a sense of mystery until your eye reached a wall Then there wasa dead end At that point my disagreement with the gallery spacebeganrdquo64 But Kaprow didnrsquot abandon the gallerymdashat least not yet Toget closer to the everyday Kaprow thought he should more fully incor-porate the bodies of his viewers into his work This led to the origin ofhappenings in an attempt to make viewers into active subjects to engagethem more actively in creating the work as they became part of it

| | | | |

In 1958 Kaprow had presented two other early proto-happenings oneat Rutgers called Communication and one at George Segalrsquos farmcalled Pastorale65 Communication was based on work he had devel-oped in Cagersquos class It was close to traditional theater Presented in achapel that doubled as an auditorium for theater and music perfor-mances it included movement sound and banners unfurled from thebalconies Kaprow built ldquoplastic panelsrdquo behind which he performeda series of simple actions nally hiding himself from the audience bypainting the plastic wall in front of him and so ldquopainting himself outrdquoof the audiencersquos view66 For Pastorale he built frames that looked likeabysmal theater sets stretcher bars with torn strips of canvas runningfrom top to bottom During one part of the performance artists RobertWatts and Lucas Samaras painted on either side of one of these con-structions Inserted into the landscape these performance paintings

Part of the environment Allan Kaprow created for his piece Pastorale 1958Photo Vaughn Rachel

Kaizen | Framed Space Allan Kaprow and the Spread of Painting 97

marked the boundary between event and nonevent partitioning theground into territories and framing Pastoralersquos space using once againpainting as wall Unfortunately for Kaprow Pastorale was held during apicnic and the other participants were either too drunk or just plainunwilling to follow his directions They were engaged but refused tofollow his rules of play

18 Happenings in 6 Parts which took place in October 1959 wasthe rst ofcial happening67 Kaprow divided the inside of the galleryinto three smaller contiguous rooms using wooden two-by-fours Inphotographs of the piece as it was being installed these woodenbeams can be seen framing a space within the space of the gallerymdashnot into a proscenium stage but into an environment within the largergallery space where various events would occur Instead of wood ordrywall translucent plastic sheeting created the walls so that actioncould be partially seen from one room to the next Each room was litwith different colored lights and in each room where the audiencewas forced to sit and observe the action a group of actors movedthrough tightly scripted but simple routines as sounds came in and outand lms were projected

On the program the audience is listed under the ldquoCast of Participantsrdquowritten into the performance itself and actively engaged but only asthe subject of direction and authorial control At specific intervalsbells rang and the audience was required to change seats and to switchrooms based on instruction cards they had been given when they enteredthe gallery before the performance Kaprow had realized with his HansaGallery environment that he needed to give his viewers increasedresponsibility but he also realized that relinquishing too much con-trol could be a disaster as it had been in Pastorale As with his previ-ous work his goal with 18 Happenings was the ldquointegration of allelementsmdashenvironment constructed sections time space and peoplerdquoand the audience was once again included as just another material inhis composition68

During the fifth part of 18 Happenings one sequence of actionsseems to reveal Kaprowrsquos relationship with painting the viewer and space Kaprow had built a construction he called the ldquothe sandwich manrdquo named after its everyday counterparts paid to walkaround the city streets as human billboards Kaprowrsquos sandwich

Left The construction of thespace used for Allan Kaprowrsquos18 Happenings in 6 Parts1958

Right A view of Allan Kaprowrsquos18 Happenings whereRearrangeable Panels is partially visible on the leftThe in-set canvas panel onwhich actors painted live as part of the performance is shown at center PhotoScott Hyde

98 Grey Room 13

man was barely humanoidan automaton with forward-and backward-pointing mir-rors for a body bicycle wheelsfor feet and a gallon bucketof enamel paint for a headSticking out in front was apiece of wood for an arm end-ing in a hand that held cardslabeled ldquoXrdquo and ldquo3rdquo the adver-

tising handbill reduced to its zero degree In the middle of the sand-wich man hidden on a shelf between the two mirrors was a recordplayer and projecting out from behind it were two handles so that itcould be wheeled around the rooms As the sandwich man was wheeledfrom one room to another its mirrored body reflected the audienceback onto themselves their image taking the place of what would havebeen an advertisement They were reected not as participatory viewersnot even as active objects as in his environment but as passive objectsnow totally reied their image produced as a reection of Junk CultureHere in Brechtian fashion using a literal ldquoframing effectrdquo Kaprowturned his previous use of the viewer back into a critique of the eventitself In reecting the audiencersquos passivity back to them he forced amoment of recognition of their complicity in the production of thework They could see that as they became an ad on the sandwich manrsquosbelly so they became throwaway objects in his composition By reduc-ing the spectator to the general equivalence of these objects Kaprowrecognized the subject of the postndashWorld War II period as a product ofplanned obsolescence and consumer culture

Following this as the sandwich man was wheeled through the secondroom and into the third two men stood up from their seats one in eachroom Each took up a brush and a can of paint and approached oppo-site sides of one of the plastic walls simultaneously painting on a sec-tion of canvas set among the plastic walls and so turning the wall backinto a painting69 The canvas was left unprimed so that the simple gures that each artist painted (one was supposed to paint lines theother circles) would bleed through and so would be immediately visibleon the opposite side each mark responding to that of their partner Asin his two earlier happenings painting is done live before an audienceon a wall Kaprow showed the audience that when painting becomeswall it functions only to put space on display Here painting as a sin-gular art object was meaningless It became a throwaway stage propand so became a demonstration of how painting as object was part ofthe larger environment in which it resides The limit condition of paint-ing as wall with viewer as spectator was the gallery as frame70

The sandwich man part ofKaprowrsquos 18 HappeningsPhoto Scott Hyde

Kaizen | Framed Space Allan Kaprow and the Spread of Painting 99

What this sequence from 18 Happenings reveals is that Kaprow hadan acute sense of the way in which the gallery as frame produces sub-ject and space together He undermined the normal function of the artgallery turning both viewer and art object into Junk Culture Throwawayviewers throwaway paintings and throwaway rooms turned the galleryspacemdasha space designed to be neutral to hide itself as the objects itcontains become the sole focus of the viewerrsquos concentrationmdashinto thelocus of planned obsolescence With the creation of happeningsKaprow used Junk Culture against the doxa of gallery space upsettingthe common sense of what a space for art is and what it does Afterhappenings the paradoxical logic of the gallery as a site for both theprivate contemplation of singular aesthetic objects as well as the pub-lic transaction of luxury goods had been (however temporarily) sub-verted In asserting the gallery space as the limit condition of paintingKaprow framed the institution as the ground of artistic production

In ldquoThe Legacy of Jackson Pollockrdquo Kaprow says ldquoPollock left us atthe point where we must become preoccupied with and even dazzled by the space and objects of our everyday liferdquo71 In ldquoAssemblageEnvironments Happeningsrdquo bridging the gap between his early andlater work he concludes ldquothis has brought sharply into focus that theroom has always been a frame or format toordquo72 Kaprowrsquos collapse ofautonomy via art into lifemdashthat environments and happenings wouldldquopartake wholly in the real nature of art and (one hopes) liferdquomdashwasonly ever a hope as he himself knew If painting had used the frameas the delimitation of a eld for composition then environments andhappenings turned the gallery into the limit condition of this fieldWhile he tried to get closer to everyday life by making art he inevitablypushed it further away This ambivalence toward the collapse of artand life runs throughout Kaprowrsquos work even as he moved out of thegallery and into everyday life following his early work with his laterldquoactivitiesrdquo The early work was even by his own estimation more adisplay of experience and not a fair representation of actual everydayexperience But this is precisely where the importance of this work liesKaprowrsquos environments and happenings extended Rauschenbergrsquossemiautonomous gap so far that they turned the screw one notchhigher autonomy returning not though the sublation of art into archi-tecture but through the medium of framed space

100 Grey Room 13

NotesThanks to the generosity and insight of Karen Kurczynski John Harwood SethMcCormick Jaleh Mansoor Beth Hinderliter Vered Maimon Benjamin Buchloh andBarry Bergdoll as well as Branden Joseph and the Editors of Grey Room

1 Brian OrsquoDoherty Inside the White Cube The Ideology of the Gallery Space(Berkeley and Los Angeles University of California Press 1999) 15

2 It was originally called ldquoPainting Environments Happeningsrdquo and publishedin a condensed form in the catalog for the exhibition New FormsmdashNew Media I at the Martha Jackson Gallery New York the rst uptown show of Kaprow and his con-temporaries It was changed to ldquoAssemblage Environments and Happeningsrdquo for nalpublication Kaprow changed the title to incorporate the recent acceptance of the termassemblage It had been used rst by Helen Comstock to describe the work of ArthurDove in the 1920s but remained obscure until Jean Dubuffet popularized its use in 1953The term as used by Dubuffet was then adopted by William Seitz for his exhibitionThe Art of Assemblage at the Museum of Modern Art See Allan Kaprow AssemblageEnvironments and Happenings (New York Harry N Abrams 1966) 150ndash208 NewFormsmdashNew Media I (New York Martha Jackson Gallery 1960) np and RogerShattuck ldquoIntroduction How Collage Became Assemblagerdquo Essays on Assemblage(New York Museum of Modern Art 1992) 119

3 ldquoWhen I am in my painting Irsquom not aware of what Irsquom doingrdquo said PollockJackson Pollock Jackson Pollock Interviews Articles Reviews ed Pepe Karmel (NewYork Museum of Modern Art 1999) 17ndash18

4 Yard was Kaprowrsquos contribution to the exhibition Environments SituationsSpaces at the Martha Jackson Gallery a follow up to New FormsndashNew Media (see n 2)

5 ldquoAllan Kaprow and Robert Watts Interviewed by Sidney Simonrdquo in Benjamin HDBuchloh and Judith F Rodenbeck Experiments in the Everyday Allan Kaprow andRobert Watts Events Objects Documents (New York Wallach Art Gallery 1999) 76

6 To cite but one example of many Thomas Hirschhorn is an artist who continuesto extend and develop Kaprowrsquos legacy today

7 On Kaprow and performance see Amelia Jones Body Art Performing the Subject(Minneapolis University of Minnesota Press 1998) 56ndash57 Paul Schimmel ldquoLeap intothe Void Performance and the Objectrdquo in Out of Actions Between Performance andthe Object 1949ndash1979 ed Paul Schimmel (New York Thames and Hudson 1998)59ndash63

8 The relationship between painting and space had been explored before partic-ularly in the period between the two world wars by the artists associated with De Stijland constructivism For more on De Stijl see Nancy Troy The De Stijl Environment(Cambridge MIT Press 1983) On constructivism see Yve-Alain Bois ldquoEl LissitzkyRadical Reversibilityrdquo Art in America 76 no 4 (April 1988) 161ndash181 and Yve-AlainBois ldquoMaterial Utopiasrdquo Art in America 79 no 6 (June 1991) 98ndash107 Another Europeanwho explored the everyday object painting and space was Kurt Schwitters in the various incarnation of his Merzbau See Elizabeth Burns Gamard Kurt SchwittersrsquoMerzbau The Cathedral of Erotic Misery (New York Princeton Architectural Press2000) Two other important precursors who bridge the European and American con-text are Lazlo Moholy-Nagy and Friedrick Kiesler For information on Moholy-Nagyrsquosearly environmental projects as well as those of Lissitzy see Joan Ockman ldquoThe RoadNot Taken Alexander Dornerrsquos Way Beyond Artrdquo in Autonomy and Ideology Positioningan Avant-Garde in America ed RE Somol (New York Monicelli Press 1997) For

Kaizen | Framed Space Allan Kaprow and the Spread of Painting 101

information on Kiesler see RL Held Endless Innovations Frederick Kieslerrsquos Theoryand Scenic Design (Ann Arbor UMI Research Press 1982) Lisa Phillips FrederickKiesler (New York The Whitney Museum of American Art 1989) Brian OrsquoDohertydraws out the connections between the prendash and postndashWorld War II manifestations ofthis relationship in Inside the White Cube

9 For Benjamin the work of art attains autonomy under modernism with theemergence of art for artrsquos sake This autonomy is then usurped by mechanical repro-duction See Walter Benjamin ldquoThe Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproductionrdquoin Illuminations ed Hanna Arendt (New York Harcourt Brace and Jovanovich Inc1968) p 224-226 For Greenberg as the above quote indicates the autonomy of artcontinues even in the face of mechanization See Clement Greenberg ldquoTowards a NewerLaocoonrdquo Perceptions and Judgments 1939ndash1944 vol 1 of Clement Greenberg TheCollected Essays and Criticism ed John OrsquoBrien (Chicago University of Chicago1986) p 32

10 Rosalind Krauss uses the term ldquopost-medium conditionrdquo to designate ldquomixed-media installationrdquo work done today While Krauss argues that only the most signi-cant artists working since the 1960s reassert the medium in their work against thegeneral postmedium condition I believe that all mixed-media installation work operates using the gallery or institution as medium See Rosalind Krauss ldquoA Voyageon the North Seardquo Art in the Age of the Post-Medium Condition (New York Thamesand Hudson 1999) for her comments on a specic contemporary artist and the rein-vention of the medium see Rosalind Krauss ldquo And Then Turn Awayrdquo An Essayon James Colemanrdquo October 81 (Summer 1997) 5ndash33

11 Allan Kaprow ldquoThe Legacy of Jackson Pollockrdquo Art News 57 no 6 (October1958) 24ndash26 55ndash57 reprinted in Allan Kaprow Essays on the Blurring of Art andLife ed Jeff Kelley (Berkeley and Los Angles University of California Press 1993) 1ndash9 Kaprow has stated that the essay was written in 1956 in ldquoAllan Kaprow andRobert Watts Interviewed by Sidney Simonrdquo 77 Kaprow had been a student of bothHans Hoffman and Meyer Schapiro

12 Harold Rosenberg ldquoThe American Action Paintersrdquo Art News 52 (December1952) 22ndash23 In a footnote that Rosenberg added when the article was republished aspart of his book of collected essays in 1959 he added the following ldquoAction Paintinghas extracted the element of decision inherent in all art in that the work is not fin-ished at its beginning but has to be carried forward by an accumulation of lsquorightrsquo ges-tures In a word Action Painting is the abstraction of the moral element in art itsmark is moral tension in detachment from moral or esthetic certainties and it judgesitself morally in declaring that picture to be worthless which is not the incorporationof a genuine struggle one which could at any point have been lostrdquo Harold RosenbergThe Tradition of the New (New York Horizon Press 1959) 33ndash34 Kaprow recountsthe influence of Rosenbergrsquos essay on his work in ldquoAllan Kaprow and Robert WattsInterviewed by Sidney Simonrdquo 77

13 There were five all told They were held as follows 5ndash23 January 1948 24Januaryndash12 February 1949 21 Novemberndash10 December 1949 28 Novemberndash16 December1950 26 Novemberndash15 December 1951 These shows had a remarkable resonance onethat extended beyond even the insular New York art world when after the secondexhibition Life magazine published the feature article ldquoJackson Pollock Is He theGreatest Living Painter in the United Statesrdquo Dorothy Sieberling Life (August 81949) 42ndash45

14 Allan Kaprow ldquoThe Legacy of Jackson Pollockrdquo in Kaprow Essays on the

102 Grey Room 13

Blurringrdquo 615 Kaprow uses both the terms scale and size to describe Pollockrsquos work but as

TJ Clark has shown these are two very different terms and Pollock is a painter of sizeand not scale For Clark it is size that engages the body ldquoNormally speaking size isliteralmdasha matter of actual physical intuition It involves grasping how big or small acertain object really is most likely in relation to the size of the grasperrsquos upright body oroutspread armsrdquo TJ Clark ldquoPollockrsquos Smallnessrdquo in Jackson Pollock New Approachesed Kirk Varnedoe and Pepe Karmel (New York Museum of Modern Art 1999) 15

16 Kaprow ldquoThe Legacy of Jackson Pollockrdquo Essays on the Blurring 617 In most of his work the paint engages with the edge of the canvas emphasizing

and bordering it and not continuing around it as if the canvas had been cut down fromsome innite expanse Kaprow claims otherwise by singling out the exceptions sayingldquo[H]is art gives the impression of going on forever [T]hough evidence points to aslackening of the attack as Pollock came to the edges of many of his canvases in thebest ones he compensated for this by tacking much of the painted surface around theback of his stretchersrdquo Kaprow ldquoThe Legacy of Jackson Pollockrdquo Essays on the Blurringof Art and Life 5 An examination of the paintings shows that more often Pollockstopped before the edge or reworked his compositions after they were stretched sothat they reengaged with the edge even when cut from larger canvas Kaprow claimsotherwise because it furthers his arguments that Pollockrsquos paintings emerge into thespace of the viewer

18 Jackson Pollock ldquoApplication for a Guggenheim Fellowship 1947rdquo in JacksonPollock Interviews 17 The inuence of Greenberg at this time is discussed in StevenNaifeh and Gregory White Smith Jackson Pollock An American Saga (Aiken SCWoodwardWhite 1989) 551 Pollock had also engaged with wall-size painting duringhis association with Joseacute Clemente Orozco and in earlier work such as Mural(1943ndash1944) painted for Peggy Guggenheimrsquos house

19 Greenbergrsquos version of modernism was most fully laid out only in 1959 andpublished in 1960 ldquoIt was the stressing of the ineluctable atness of the surface thatremained however more fundamental than anything else to the process by whichpictorial art criticized and defined itself under Modernism For flatness alone wasunique and exclusive to pictorial art Because flatness was the only conditionpainting shared with no other art Modernist painting oriented itself to atness as itdid to nothing elserdquo In Clement Greenberg ldquoModernist Paintingrdquo in Modernism witha Vengeance 1957ndash1969 vol 4 of Clement Greenberg The Collected Essays andCriticism ed John OrsquoBrien (Chicago University of Chicago Press 1993) 87

20 Clement Greenberg ldquoThe Situation at the Momentrdquo in Arrogant Purpose1945ndash1949 vol 2 of Clement Greenberg The Collected Essays and Criticism ed JohnOrsquoBrien (Chicago University of Chicago 1986) 194ndash195

21 See Greenberg ldquoTowards a Newer Laocoonrdquo throughout22 Eric Lum has done extensive work on the relationship between abstract expres-

sionism and architecture The analysis in this essay follows from his especially whereBlakersquos project is concerned but also expands on it As he jumps from Blake to PhilipJohnson and Mark Rothkorsquos Houston Chapel however Lum misses the importance ofother interventions between painting and architecture such as those made by KaprowThis is evident when he says ldquoThrough this marriage of mural and wall paintingcould become fully integrated into architecture an idealized conjecture nor realizeduntil Mark Rothkorsquos 1971 Houston Chapelrdquo Eric Lum ldquoPollockrsquos Promise Toward anAbstract Expressionist Architecturerdquo Assemblage 39 (August 1999) 68

Kaizen | Framed Space Allan Kaprow and the Spread of Painting 103

23 Blake said of his visit to Pollockrsquos studio ldquoIt was a very sunny day and thesun was shining on the paintings I felt like I was standing in the Hall of Mirrors atVersailles It was a dazzling incredible sightrdquo Naifeh and Smith 588

24 Peter Blake No Place like Utopia Modern Architecture and the Company WeKept (New York Knopf 1993) 111ndash112

25 Miesrsquos museum plan was designed at the request of the editors at ArchitecturalForum who had been publishing a series of articles ldquoto show how building might beimproved through fuller and more imaginative use of existing resourcesrdquo They requesteddesigns for a variety of buildings that could be placed in a hypothetical city of 70000inhabitants ldquoNew Buildings for 194Xrdquo Architectural Forum 78 no 5 (May 1943)69ndash85 The Barcelona Pavilion was built in 1929 for the Barcelona Universal Expositionand was destroyed when the fair ended It was subsequently rebuilt in 1981ndash86

26 Peter Blake Mies van der Rohe (New York Pelican 1960) 54 It is worth notingthat like Miesrsquos use of the Kolbe sculpture Blake had Pollock actually make smallwire sculptures splattered with paint miniatures of sculptures that Blake hopedPollock would make for the actual museum Pollock himself was experimenting withsculpture around this time building three-dimensional forms out of papier-macirccheacutethat he then splattered with paint

27 Blakersquos collage space follows from Miesrsquos The production of collages as in situmodels for Miesrsquos buildings had begun in the twenties with his work for the journal Gin association with Dadaists such as Hans Richter Neil Levine notes this creation ofa collage space in Mies particularly in the Pavilion and the Museum for a Small Cityin relation to his use of reection to layer one surface on top of another Neil LevineldquolsquoThe Signicance of Factsrsquo Miesrsquo Collages Up Close and Personalrdquo Assemblage 37(December 1998) 71ndash101

28 Blake designed his museum just as Philip Johnson was building his Glass Housewhere they both spent considerable time while planning exhibitions for the Museumof Modern Art Johnsonrsquos inuence is also evident in Blakersquos design Blake No Placelike Utopia 149ndash155

29 Arthur Drexler ldquoUnframed Space A Museum for Jackson Pollackrsquos [sic] PaintingsrdquoInteriors and Industrial Design 109 no 6 (January 1950) 90ndash91 The article was partof a special issue whose theme was ldquoInteriors to Comerdquo a recurring topic that wasmeant ldquoto show the direction in which some of our best designers are goingrdquo The termunframed space was used several times in reference to Pollockrsquos work as the title oftwo articles Drexlerrsquos and one published slightly later by Berton Rouecheacute ThoughRouecheacute in an interview in To a Violent Grave says that Lee Krasner used the phraserst Charles Pollock says that Blake was the origin of the term The fact that Drexlerrsquosarticle was written and published earlier seems to conrm this See Berton RouecheacuteldquoUnframed Spacerdquo in Jackson Pollock Interviews 18ndash19 and Jeffrey Potter To aViolent Grave (New York Pushcart Press 1985) 126

30 Drexler 9031 Blake No Place like Utopia 113ndash11432 Blake completed construction on his ldquoPinwheel Houserdquo in 1952 It is a small

beach house that he designed for himself and his family in South Hampton on NewYorkrsquos Long Island Situated on the beach the house is square in plan and its fourexterior walls slide horizontally outward each in a successive clockwise directionrevealing glass walls When the exterior walls are fully extended and the house isviewed from above it forms a shape like a pinwheel Opening the exterior wallsreveals an ever-changing view of the landscape outside turning the ocean and the

104 Grey Room 13

dunes into the picturesque framing them so that they entirely ll the space of the walland put its surface in motion Blake had discussed with Pollock the possibility of hispainting the sliding walls so that his paintings would be superimposed over the land-scape Pollock considered it but Blake couldnrsquot come up with the commission moneythat Pollock asked for They never finalized their plans and it was never clear howthe panels were to be painted Blake suggested that they might be made of glass so hebought the sheet of glass that Pollock used to paint Number 29 1950 (1950) the paintingthat Hans Namuth lmed from underneath for his documentary on Pollock His col-laboration with Blake did lead to one commission a mural-size canvas done for ahouse designed by Marcel Breuer Untitled (Mural) (1950) Shortly after his collabo-ration with Blake Pollock began another unrealized architectural project this onewith Alfonso Ossorio and Tony Smith for a church designed by Smith with murals byPollock For more on all of this see Blake No Place like Utopia 114ndash118 Naifeh andSmith 649 and Lum ldquoPollockrsquos Promiserdquo 68 85ndash88

33 Lum ldquoPollockrsquos Promiserdquo 67ndash6834 A few pages down from Drexlerrsquos article on the Pollock Museum in Interiors

and Industrial Design was another architectural response to the same problem OlgaGueftrsquos article ldquoThe Museumrsquos Oasisrdquo describes another museum this one by Gyorgyand Juliet Kepes ldquoThe Kepesesrdquo it begins ldquoare not exactly opposed to museumsrdquo how-ever it would seem that they were opposed to museums containing works of artReplacing the art objects entirely the Kepeses substituted shells driftwood plantsand animals Instead of a natural history museum they proposed a modern-dayWunderkammerwhere natural forms take the place of art as objects for contemplationldquoThe proposed galleryrdquo they declared ldquowould bridge the gap between the art museumwhich is concerned with man-made beauty and the natural history museum whichis preoccupied with nature but not particularly with naturersquos beautyrdquo Gyorgy KepesrsquosThe New Landscape exhibition at MIT a year later in 1951 (the same years as theIndependent Grouprsquos similar exhibition Growth and Form in London) and the pub-lication that followed The New Landscape in Art and Sciencewould ultimately realizethis project with blown-up photographs of natural forms (cells shells and electronmicrographs) in place of actual objects

The Kepeses seem to have taken the next logical step beyond Blake proposing aneven more radical rethinking of the wall-size work of art Eliminating the need for theartist altogether they found abstract forms in nature and turned their reproductionsinto what would elsewhere have been works of art By turning the art object into scientic vision The Kepeses proposed its total instrumentation Autonomous abstractpainting was transformed into its instrumental other a mechanically reproduced science of vision Rather than turn art into interior design The Kepesesrsquo replacementof abstract painting recast the status of scientic technology into that of high art SeeOlga Gueft ldquoThe Museumrsquos Oasisrdquo Interiors and Industrial Design 109 no 6 (January1950) 100ndash103 and Gyorgy Kepes The New Landscape in Art and Science (ChicagoPaul Theobald and Co 1956)

35 Kaprow stated that it was ldquoIn 1949 [that] I saw an exhibition of [Pollockrsquos] workfor the rst timerdquo ldquoInterviewrdquo in Allan Kaprow (Pasadena Pasadena Art Museum1967) 7

36 See Kaprow ldquoThe Legacy of Jackson Pollockrdquo Art News 25 and Kaprow ldquoTheLegacy of Jackson Pollockrdquo Essays on the Blurring 3

37 Joan Marter ldquoThe Forgotten Legacy Happenings Pop Art and Fluxus at RutgersUniversityrdquo in Off Limits Rutgers University and the Avant-Garde 1957ndash1963 ed Joan

Kaizen | Framed Space Allan Kaprow and the Spread of Painting 105

Marter (Newark The Newark Museum 1999) 438 Marter 13239 Quoted in John Cage Silence (Middletown Wesleyan University Press 1961) 10540 Branden Joseph has developed the link between Cage and Rauschenberg in several

recent essays See Branden W Joseph ldquoJohn Cage and the Architecture of SilencerdquoOctober 81 (Summer 1997) 81ndash104 and Branden Joseph ldquoWhite on Whiterdquo CriticalInquiry 27 no 1 (Summer 2001) 90ndash121

41 For Cage on Rauschenberg see Cage Silence98ndash108 For his description ofTheater Piece No 1 see ldquoInterview with John Cagerdquo in Happenings and Other Actsed Mariellen R Sandford (New York Routledge 1995) 53 Cage subsequently referredto Theater Piece No 1 as ldquothe rst happeningrdquo See John Cage ldquoAn AutobiographicalStatementrdquo Southwest Review 76 no 1 (Winter 1991) 65

42 The score itself has had various incarnations It wasnrsquot published until 1960and in this version includes a note wherein Cage describes the rst performance byTudor For more on 4rsquo33 and its various scores see Liz Kotz ldquoWords on Paper NotNecessarily Meant to Be Read as Art Postwar Media Poetics from Cage to Warholrdquo(PhD diss Columbia University 2002) 83ndash115 Kotz follows a different lineage outof Cage and into performance and happenings than the one traced in this essay

43 Marter 13244 Walter Hopps in the first survey catalog of Rauschenbergrsquos early work does

not name the black paintings as a group as he does the White Paintings He calls themeach Untitled followed by a description in brackets Hopps notes of the largest ofthese works that ldquoThese paintings with a greater vastness and ambiguity of scale thanother Rauschenberg works relate to spatial qualities of Jackson Pollockrdquo HoppsRobert Rauschenberg The Early 1950s (Houston Houston Fine Art Press 1991) 67This convention was also followed in Rauschenbergrsquos 1997 Guggenheim retrospectivecatalog and is followed in this essay Robert Rauschenberg A Retrospective ed WalterHopps and Susan Davidson (New York Solomon R Guggenheim Museum 1997)

45 The piece is called Untitled [two black panels] (1953) Hopps Robert Rauschenberg99

46 Helen Molesworth notes the importance of Rauschenbergrsquos newspaper groundin the black paintings and develops this problem in relation to the abject body as it isfurther pursued in his work throughout the 1950s Helen Molesworth ldquoBefore BedrdquoOctober 63 (Winter 1993) 68ndash82

47 Asked about this work Rauschenberg said ldquoI called them combines I had tocoin that word because I got so bored with arguments I was interested in people seeingmy work When someone would come up and I really wanted to know what they thoughtof it or wanted to sense the exposure there was always this screen that they could getbehind which was if I said lsquoIt is paintingrsquo they would say lsquoThatrsquos not painting Thatrsquossculpturersquo And they thought this was very interestingrdquo Jeanne Siegel ArtwordsDiscourse on the 60s and 70s (New York DaCapo 1985) 153

48 Allan Kaprow ldquoa Statementrdquo in Happenings An Illustrated Anthology edMichael Kirby (New York EP Dutton and Co 1965) 44ndash45

49 Benjamin Buchloh notes the importance of play in the 1950s and its link toconsumer culture During the 1950s he writes ldquoa theory of games would remerge asa cultural project at the very moment of an ever-increasing instrumentalization oflibidinal desire through consumer culturerdquo Benjamin HD Buchloh ldquoRobert WattsInanimate ObjectsmdashInanimate Subjectsrdquo in Buchloh and Rodenbeck Experiments inthe Everyday 25 n 4

90 Grey Room 13

Cage who was also at Black Mountain in the summer of 195240 Thatsummer Cage incorporated The White Paintings into his own workTheater Piece No 141 They were suspended over the heads of theaudience members at various angles as a variety of performance eventstook place beneath them These events included Rauschenberg andDavid Tudor playing piano poets MC Richards and Charles Olsonreading poetry from atop a ladder and Merce Cunningham and othersdancing through the space and around the audience It was the WhitePaintings with their environmental quality that that led Cage to write4rsquo 33 in 1952 Tudor was the original performer of the compositionwhose score was open to interpretation42 He realized it on pianoplaying it by silently opening and closing the piano lid allowing thesounds of the audience and the ambient noises of the space to becomethe work Kaprow attended one of the rst performances of 4rsquo 33 atCarnegie Hall in 1952 and was deeply affected He compared his expe-rience of 4rsquo 33 to his experience of Rauschenbergrsquos paintings Thesounds in the space chairs creaking the air condition humming peoplecoughing and clearing their throatsmdashall the ambient sounds that lledthe space of the auditoriummdashbecame foregrounded ldquoIt was like theshadows in Bob Rauschenbergrsquos picturesrdquo Kaprow recalled ldquoThat is tosay there [wa]s no marking the boundary of the artwork or the boundaryof so-called everyday life They merge[d] And we the listeners in Cagersquosconcert and the lookers at Rauschenbergrsquos pictures were the collabo-rators of the artworkrdquo43 For Kaprow Cage like Rauschenberg col-lapsed the autonomy of art by engaging the listener as collaborator ina semiautonomous space (ldquoso-called everyday liferdquo and not true every-day life) that depended upon the interaction between work spaceand subject

On his visit to Rauschenbergrsquos studio Kaprow also saw the earliestof Rauschenbergrsquos black paintings44 This series is the antipode of thesmooth matte white surfaces of the White Paintings They are allblack monochromes most painted with a high-gloss enamel soakedinto newspaper pages that were then haphazardly stuck onto the sur-face of a canvas trapped pockets of air often causing the paintingsrsquosurfaces to bulge outward repulsively At their largest they framespace as Pollockrsquos work did but as art brut walls instead of dazzlingskeins of paint One photograph of a later diptych shows the paintingsblocking the doorway to Rauschenbergrsquos studio at Black Mountain asif they were extensions of the rough-hewn stone walls on either side45

But in this next transformation of painting as wall what seems moreimportant for the direction that both Rauschenberg and Kaprow wouldfollow out of these works was their newspaper ground As Rauschenbergrsquospaintings became wall-size their art brut surface was built on the newsof the day At rst everyday events as reported in the newspaper are

Kaizen | Framed Space Allan Kaprow and the Spread of Painting 91

painted out and hidden behind the blackpaint46 As the series proceeded he allowedincreasingly more of the news to showthrough While the White Paintings engagedwith the gap between art and life by cap-turing the viewerrsquos bodymdashas did Cagersquos4rsquo 33 at least for Kaprowmdashthe black paint-ings did so by using the everyday objectas a ground Through their use of news-paper they suggested another trajectoryout of painting and into everyday spacea trajectory whose base condition was thecommodity object

In order to get into the gap between art and life Rauschenbergrsquoswork rst had to approximate the condition of being a wall It neededto assume a relation to its architectural frame in order to move awayfrom the autonomy of painting and into semiautonomy but once it didso Rauschenberg would abandon the problem of painting as wallFollowing the White Paintings and black paintings (and then a briefseries of Red Paintings) he made his rst Combines works that rein-state the autonomy of the individual art object even while they existbetween painting sculpture and the surrealist objet trouveacute47 Ratherthan engage with space Rauschenbergrsquos Combines elevate the ready-made or found object back to the status of the autonomous art objectThe Combines formalize the everyday object into an in-between statebut one that nevertheless produces singular art objects While theblack paintings led Rauschenberg back to the art object they led Kaprowfarther off the wall and out into space

| | | | |

Kaprow wrote ldquoa statementrdquo about his work sketching the trajectoryhe took from painting through collage then out into the space of thegallery48 After his initial show of paintings in 1952 he described thedevelopment of what he called ldquoaction collagerdquo These were done asquickly as possible by throwing together readily available everydaymaterials including parts of his past work tinfoil photographsnewspaper and food Although he doesnrsquot mention particular works by name presumably these action-collages include the early piecesreproduced in Assemblage Environments and Happenings In a photo-graph of Penny Arcade (1956) we see Kaprow standing in front of a largewall-size assemblage densely layered with parts of paintings scrapsof wood and large pieces of advertising signage that look like Kaproweither found them on the side of the road or appropriated them from a

Robert RauschenbergUntitled 1952

92 Grey Room 13

storefront It also included flashing lights andsounds calling out to the viewer like a ConeyIsland carnival booth but one made all the moreconfusing with its hyperarray of upside-downand fragmented word parts While collage hadbeen delicate even dainty in its appliqueacute of smallscraps of paper to the surface of the image KaprowrsquosPenny Arcade was massive and rough-hewn Unlikeits glitzier real-world counterpart Penny Arcadelooks cobbled together a temporary faccedilade brico-laged from odds and ends Here Kaprow turnedthe gallery space into the street turning the wallinto a pseudo-storefront bringing the architec-ture of the outside world into the gallery but lteredthrough the compositional strategies of collage

and abstract expressionism Abstraction before world war II had beenundertaken in a quest to find a universal Esperanto of color and form a problem that had been transformed by abstract expressionisminto a private iconography of psychic signs In Penny Arcade Kaprowturns the private symbolism of abstraction expressionism back to the world through advertising as commodity sign He makes the private symbol public again by reconnecting prendashWorld War II modelsof collective production with postndashWorld War II models of collectiveconsumption

Another work from this time further demonstrates how Kaprowused everyday materials to partition space Alternately titled (inAssemblage) Wall Kiosk and Rearrangeable Panels (1957ndash1959) thispiece looks like an enormous folding Japanese screen Measuring eightfeet high and over twenty feet long its panels are covered in eggshellsleaves and broken mirrorsmdashnot mass-produced commodities or sig-nage but detritus and waste Several of the panels are painted one inHoffmanrsquos push-pull style two seem to nod toward Rauschenberg onepainted white one black This piece is designed to sit on the oor ofthe gallery and as its various names imply it can be placed in a varietyof positions called ldquowallrdquo when arrayed in a straight line ldquokioskrdquowhen arranged into a square and ldquorearrangeable panelsrdquo in generalor when it sits in a zigzag Each position changes the relationship ofthe object to the space that contains it Kaprow recast the painting-as-wall as a transformable piece of furniture recognizing the possibilityof ludic engagement with the viewer but withholding it because theviewer is not allowed to interact with the piece directly Once installedthe work transforms the space of the gallery but it cannot be recong-ured by the viewer49

When asked why he used junk to make his work Kaprow replied

Allan Kaprow standing infront of Penny Arcade 1956Photo WF Gainfort

Kaizen | Framed Space Allan Kaprow and the Spread of Painting 93

It was clearly part of transformingreality It gave everyone a sense ofinstant involvement in a kind of crudeeveryday reality which was quite arelief after the high-art attitude ofexclusion from the real world It alsoallowed us to give up a certain kindof seriousness that traditional artmaking required Whatrsquos more thematerials were available everywhereon street corners at night And ifyou didnrsquot sell these environmentalconstructions yoursquod just throwthem back into the garbage canWhy not just throw them out It wasvery liberating to think of oneself aspart of an endlessly transformingreal world50

The ldquocrude everyday realityrdquo capturedby Penny Arcade as with Kaprowrsquos subsequent work is predicatedupon his project of capturing the ldquoendlessly transforming real worldrdquoThis statement connects him with Rauschenberg and Cage but alsoshows how their work differs in an important and crucial way InKaprowrsquos comment describing his experience of 4rsquo33 (as quoted inthe previous section) he says ldquoAnd we the listeners in Cagersquos concertand the lookers at Rauschenbergrsquos pictures were the collaborators of[sic] the artworkrdquo ending with ldquoIt was a kind of collaborative end-lessly changing affair The artwork was simply this organism that wasaliverdquo51 For Kaprow the key word here is change and in order tomove from artwork to organism the work of art must be reconsiderednot as a ldquochance operationrdquo (to use Cagersquos term) but as a change oper-ation During this time Kaprow had begun to take classes with Cageand he was exposed to Cagersquos use of chance methods of compositionWhile he would adopt much from Cagersquos work and teaching he thoughtthat change was the most important principle for his own work52

For Kaprow change was integrally connected to the postndashworld warII environment lled with mass-produced throwaway products Theart of this timemdashhis artmdashshould necessarily reect this environmentIn opposition to the nostalgic use of the objet trouveacute in surrealism hismethod was closer to the readymade choosing everyday objects to res-cue from oblivion but spreading them out in space so that they wouldenvironmentally engulf the viewer53 Kaprow temporarily revalues thethrowaway commodity in his environments to create a space where

Allan Kaprow RearrangeablePanels 1957-9 Shown intheir ldquoKioskrdquo con gurationPhoto Robert R McElroy

94 Grey Room 13

everyday life as planned obsolescence is brought under the control ofthe artist He creates a momentary space of anti-entropy in the life ofthe commodity where it is temporarily reinvested with value only to bedisposed of once the environment is destroyed54 Citing critic LawrenceAlloway on the ldquothrowawayrdquo culture of postndashworld war II AmericaKaprow goes on to describe the importance of change in his work

Change governing both reality and art has extended from theexpression of an idea arrested in a painting to a work in whichthe usually slow mutations wrought by nature are quickened andliterally made part of the experience of it they manifest the veryprocess of creation-decay-creation almost as one watches Theuse of debris waste products or very impermanent substanceslike toilet paper or bread has of course a clear range of allusionswith obvious sociological implications the simplest being theartistrsquos positive involvement on the one hand with an everydayworld and on the other with a group of objects which beingexpendable might suggest that corresponding lack of statuswhich is supposed to be the fate of anything creative todayThese choices must not be ignored for they reveal what in oursurroundings charges the imagination as well as what is mosthuman in our art55

What is ldquomost humanrdquo in Kaprowrsquos art as he denes it is its reectionof this throwaway culture This is governed not by Cagean chance butby planned obsolescence with its endless renewal of more of thesame ldquo[My] workrdquo Kaprow says ldquois intended to last only a short timeand is destroyed immediately after the exhibition If [its] obsolescenceis not planned it is expectedrdquo56 Alloway also writing on assemblagebetter describes the overlap between the throwaway object and its usein environmental art during the 1950s

The acceptance of mass-produced objects just because they arewhat is around not because they issue from idolatrised technol-ogy is central to mid-century Junk Culture Junk Culture iscity art Its source is obsolescence the throwaway material ofcities Assemblages of such material come at the spectator asbits of life bits of the environment frequently presented interms that dramatize spread ow extension trespass The junkis obtruded into our space with the aim of achieving maximumintimacy Proximity and participation replace distance and con-templation as the communicative style of the object57

So the space of Junk Culture when used in art as assemblage or envi-ronment achieves ldquomaximum intimacyrdquo with the observer throughtheir ldquoproximity and participationrdquo with the throwaway commodity

Kaizen | Framed Space Allan Kaprow and the Spread of Painting 95

As Kaprow moves farther into the space of the gallery he does so in anincreased attempt to engage the viewer He partitions the gallery spaceso that the body of the viewer becomes a product of its participationwithin the eld of the throwaway commodity

These early wall-like constructions were for Kaprow still not closeenough to a participatory art Kaprow wanted to move further towardthe creation of environments and even events to take over the gallerywith a plenitude of throwaway objects among which the viewer wouldself-consciously circulate The action collages still maintained toomuch autonomy because they existed as individual objects and so asKaprow recalled ldquonow I simply filled the whole gallery up startingfrom one wall and ending with the otherrdquo58 With his rst environmentKaprow was no longer composing within the autonomous space ofpainting but composing the entire space of the gallery Kaprowrsquos rstenvironmentmdashmade at the Hansa Gallery in November 1958mdashwasmeant to totally engage the visitors to the gallery to make them intopart of the work itself ldquopassively or actively according to [their] talentsfor lsquoengagementrsquordquo59 From a drop ceiling of wires suspended in a gridseveral inches below the galleryrsquos original ceiling he hung variousmaterials creating a labyrinthine space divided by sheets of plastictangles of cellophane Scotch tape and more including a time-releasedmist of pine-scented deodorizer His work had taken over the galleryspace lling it with a nearly impenetrable eld of throwaway objects60

Kaprow took the ood of postndashworld war II consumer goods and usedthem to compose walls that partitioned space And composemdashin thetraditional sense of arranging shapes and forms on the surface of acanvasmdashis exactly what he did

Kaprow described his use of the full space of the gallery as a eld aterm that he derives from painting calling the second section of hisldquoAssemblagerdquo essay ldquoThe Field in Paintingrdquo ldquoThis space is in part theliteral distance between all solids included in the workrdquo Kaprowwrote ldquoBut it is also a space that is a direct heritage of paintingrdquo61

Everything in the space that he produced became part of his compo-sition including the viewer Like any other object in the work Kaprowsaid ldquoin as much as people visiting [an] environment are moving col-ored shapes [they] were counted lsquoinrsquordquo62 Each visitor as they movedthrough Kaprowrsquos labyrinth became a part of the work Art and lifehad now seemingly collapsed the autonomy of painting as a separateobjectmdashframed and isolated from the rest of its environment as a spaceonly for the eyemdashhad been abandoned for an embodied experienceViewing was now dependent upon space a space full of the objects ofeveryday life Using the materials of everyday life Kaprow invited hisviewers to get rid of their distance from the art object forcing theminto physical contact with his work This work he wrote ldquoinvites us

96 Grey Room 13

to cast aside for a moment proper manners andpartake wholly in the real nature of art and (onehopes) liferdquo63 Against the look-donrsquot-touch attitude ofmuseum and gallery Kaprow created a haptic spacewhere touch became the basis of the work where vis-itors came into physical contact with his throwawayobjects In this space as visitors threaded their waythrough the labyrinth the color of their clothes andtheir presence among these objects turned them intoa part of the work The viewer appeared as anotherthing in Kaprowrsquos composition not so different fromhis throwaway materials In his environment autonomycollapsed into participation based on the reicationof the subject as an obsolete material temporally

composited into the work While Kaprow certainly intended to includehis observers in the work he could do so only by turning them intoobjects rather than active subjects He later described his own sense ofthe failure with this exhibition that he couldnrsquot seem to engage theviewer enough but blamed it on the framing space of the galleryAfterward he said ldquoI complained immediately about the fact that therewas a sense of mystery until your eye reached a wall Then there wasa dead end At that point my disagreement with the gallery spacebeganrdquo64 But Kaprow didnrsquot abandon the gallerymdashat least not yet Toget closer to the everyday Kaprow thought he should more fully incor-porate the bodies of his viewers into his work This led to the origin ofhappenings in an attempt to make viewers into active subjects to engagethem more actively in creating the work as they became part of it

| | | | |

In 1958 Kaprow had presented two other early proto-happenings oneat Rutgers called Communication and one at George Segalrsquos farmcalled Pastorale65 Communication was based on work he had devel-oped in Cagersquos class It was close to traditional theater Presented in achapel that doubled as an auditorium for theater and music perfor-mances it included movement sound and banners unfurled from thebalconies Kaprow built ldquoplastic panelsrdquo behind which he performeda series of simple actions nally hiding himself from the audience bypainting the plastic wall in front of him and so ldquopainting himself outrdquoof the audiencersquos view66 For Pastorale he built frames that looked likeabysmal theater sets stretcher bars with torn strips of canvas runningfrom top to bottom During one part of the performance artists RobertWatts and Lucas Samaras painted on either side of one of these con-structions Inserted into the landscape these performance paintings

Part of the environment Allan Kaprow created for his piece Pastorale 1958Photo Vaughn Rachel

Kaizen | Framed Space Allan Kaprow and the Spread of Painting 97

marked the boundary between event and nonevent partitioning theground into territories and framing Pastoralersquos space using once againpainting as wall Unfortunately for Kaprow Pastorale was held during apicnic and the other participants were either too drunk or just plainunwilling to follow his directions They were engaged but refused tofollow his rules of play

18 Happenings in 6 Parts which took place in October 1959 wasthe rst ofcial happening67 Kaprow divided the inside of the galleryinto three smaller contiguous rooms using wooden two-by-fours Inphotographs of the piece as it was being installed these woodenbeams can be seen framing a space within the space of the gallerymdashnot into a proscenium stage but into an environment within the largergallery space where various events would occur Instead of wood ordrywall translucent plastic sheeting created the walls so that actioncould be partially seen from one room to the next Each room was litwith different colored lights and in each room where the audiencewas forced to sit and observe the action a group of actors movedthrough tightly scripted but simple routines as sounds came in and outand lms were projected

On the program the audience is listed under the ldquoCast of Participantsrdquowritten into the performance itself and actively engaged but only asthe subject of direction and authorial control At specific intervalsbells rang and the audience was required to change seats and to switchrooms based on instruction cards they had been given when they enteredthe gallery before the performance Kaprow had realized with his HansaGallery environment that he needed to give his viewers increasedresponsibility but he also realized that relinquishing too much con-trol could be a disaster as it had been in Pastorale As with his previ-ous work his goal with 18 Happenings was the ldquointegration of allelementsmdashenvironment constructed sections time space and peoplerdquoand the audience was once again included as just another material inhis composition68

During the fifth part of 18 Happenings one sequence of actionsseems to reveal Kaprowrsquos relationship with painting the viewer and space Kaprow had built a construction he called the ldquothe sandwich manrdquo named after its everyday counterparts paid to walkaround the city streets as human billboards Kaprowrsquos sandwich

Left The construction of thespace used for Allan Kaprowrsquos18 Happenings in 6 Parts1958

Right A view of Allan Kaprowrsquos18 Happenings whereRearrangeable Panels is partially visible on the leftThe in-set canvas panel onwhich actors painted live as part of the performance is shown at center PhotoScott Hyde

98 Grey Room 13

man was barely humanoidan automaton with forward-and backward-pointing mir-rors for a body bicycle wheelsfor feet and a gallon bucketof enamel paint for a headSticking out in front was apiece of wood for an arm end-ing in a hand that held cardslabeled ldquoXrdquo and ldquo3rdquo the adver-

tising handbill reduced to its zero degree In the middle of the sand-wich man hidden on a shelf between the two mirrors was a recordplayer and projecting out from behind it were two handles so that itcould be wheeled around the rooms As the sandwich man was wheeledfrom one room to another its mirrored body reflected the audienceback onto themselves their image taking the place of what would havebeen an advertisement They were reected not as participatory viewersnot even as active objects as in his environment but as passive objectsnow totally reied their image produced as a reection of Junk CultureHere in Brechtian fashion using a literal ldquoframing effectrdquo Kaprowturned his previous use of the viewer back into a critique of the eventitself In reecting the audiencersquos passivity back to them he forced amoment of recognition of their complicity in the production of thework They could see that as they became an ad on the sandwich manrsquosbelly so they became throwaway objects in his composition By reduc-ing the spectator to the general equivalence of these objects Kaprowrecognized the subject of the postndashWorld War II period as a product ofplanned obsolescence and consumer culture

Following this as the sandwich man was wheeled through the secondroom and into the third two men stood up from their seats one in eachroom Each took up a brush and a can of paint and approached oppo-site sides of one of the plastic walls simultaneously painting on a sec-tion of canvas set among the plastic walls and so turning the wall backinto a painting69 The canvas was left unprimed so that the simple gures that each artist painted (one was supposed to paint lines theother circles) would bleed through and so would be immediately visibleon the opposite side each mark responding to that of their partner Asin his two earlier happenings painting is done live before an audienceon a wall Kaprow showed the audience that when painting becomeswall it functions only to put space on display Here painting as a sin-gular art object was meaningless It became a throwaway stage propand so became a demonstration of how painting as object was part ofthe larger environment in which it resides The limit condition of paint-ing as wall with viewer as spectator was the gallery as frame70

The sandwich man part ofKaprowrsquos 18 HappeningsPhoto Scott Hyde

Kaizen | Framed Space Allan Kaprow and the Spread of Painting 99

What this sequence from 18 Happenings reveals is that Kaprow hadan acute sense of the way in which the gallery as frame produces sub-ject and space together He undermined the normal function of the artgallery turning both viewer and art object into Junk Culture Throwawayviewers throwaway paintings and throwaway rooms turned the galleryspacemdasha space designed to be neutral to hide itself as the objects itcontains become the sole focus of the viewerrsquos concentrationmdashinto thelocus of planned obsolescence With the creation of happeningsKaprow used Junk Culture against the doxa of gallery space upsettingthe common sense of what a space for art is and what it does Afterhappenings the paradoxical logic of the gallery as a site for both theprivate contemplation of singular aesthetic objects as well as the pub-lic transaction of luxury goods had been (however temporarily) sub-verted In asserting the gallery space as the limit condition of paintingKaprow framed the institution as the ground of artistic production

In ldquoThe Legacy of Jackson Pollockrdquo Kaprow says ldquoPollock left us atthe point where we must become preoccupied with and even dazzled by the space and objects of our everyday liferdquo71 In ldquoAssemblageEnvironments Happeningsrdquo bridging the gap between his early andlater work he concludes ldquothis has brought sharply into focus that theroom has always been a frame or format toordquo72 Kaprowrsquos collapse ofautonomy via art into lifemdashthat environments and happenings wouldldquopartake wholly in the real nature of art and (one hopes) liferdquomdashwasonly ever a hope as he himself knew If painting had used the frameas the delimitation of a eld for composition then environments andhappenings turned the gallery into the limit condition of this fieldWhile he tried to get closer to everyday life by making art he inevitablypushed it further away This ambivalence toward the collapse of artand life runs throughout Kaprowrsquos work even as he moved out of thegallery and into everyday life following his early work with his laterldquoactivitiesrdquo The early work was even by his own estimation more adisplay of experience and not a fair representation of actual everydayexperience But this is precisely where the importance of this work liesKaprowrsquos environments and happenings extended Rauschenbergrsquossemiautonomous gap so far that they turned the screw one notchhigher autonomy returning not though the sublation of art into archi-tecture but through the medium of framed space

100 Grey Room 13

NotesThanks to the generosity and insight of Karen Kurczynski John Harwood SethMcCormick Jaleh Mansoor Beth Hinderliter Vered Maimon Benjamin Buchloh andBarry Bergdoll as well as Branden Joseph and the Editors of Grey Room

1 Brian OrsquoDoherty Inside the White Cube The Ideology of the Gallery Space(Berkeley and Los Angeles University of California Press 1999) 15

2 It was originally called ldquoPainting Environments Happeningsrdquo and publishedin a condensed form in the catalog for the exhibition New FormsmdashNew Media I at the Martha Jackson Gallery New York the rst uptown show of Kaprow and his con-temporaries It was changed to ldquoAssemblage Environments and Happeningsrdquo for nalpublication Kaprow changed the title to incorporate the recent acceptance of the termassemblage It had been used rst by Helen Comstock to describe the work of ArthurDove in the 1920s but remained obscure until Jean Dubuffet popularized its use in 1953The term as used by Dubuffet was then adopted by William Seitz for his exhibitionThe Art of Assemblage at the Museum of Modern Art See Allan Kaprow AssemblageEnvironments and Happenings (New York Harry N Abrams 1966) 150ndash208 NewFormsmdashNew Media I (New York Martha Jackson Gallery 1960) np and RogerShattuck ldquoIntroduction How Collage Became Assemblagerdquo Essays on Assemblage(New York Museum of Modern Art 1992) 119

3 ldquoWhen I am in my painting Irsquom not aware of what Irsquom doingrdquo said PollockJackson Pollock Jackson Pollock Interviews Articles Reviews ed Pepe Karmel (NewYork Museum of Modern Art 1999) 17ndash18

4 Yard was Kaprowrsquos contribution to the exhibition Environments SituationsSpaces at the Martha Jackson Gallery a follow up to New FormsndashNew Media (see n 2)

5 ldquoAllan Kaprow and Robert Watts Interviewed by Sidney Simonrdquo in Benjamin HDBuchloh and Judith F Rodenbeck Experiments in the Everyday Allan Kaprow andRobert Watts Events Objects Documents (New York Wallach Art Gallery 1999) 76

6 To cite but one example of many Thomas Hirschhorn is an artist who continuesto extend and develop Kaprowrsquos legacy today

7 On Kaprow and performance see Amelia Jones Body Art Performing the Subject(Minneapolis University of Minnesota Press 1998) 56ndash57 Paul Schimmel ldquoLeap intothe Void Performance and the Objectrdquo in Out of Actions Between Performance andthe Object 1949ndash1979 ed Paul Schimmel (New York Thames and Hudson 1998)59ndash63

8 The relationship between painting and space had been explored before partic-ularly in the period between the two world wars by the artists associated with De Stijland constructivism For more on De Stijl see Nancy Troy The De Stijl Environment(Cambridge MIT Press 1983) On constructivism see Yve-Alain Bois ldquoEl LissitzkyRadical Reversibilityrdquo Art in America 76 no 4 (April 1988) 161ndash181 and Yve-AlainBois ldquoMaterial Utopiasrdquo Art in America 79 no 6 (June 1991) 98ndash107 Another Europeanwho explored the everyday object painting and space was Kurt Schwitters in the various incarnation of his Merzbau See Elizabeth Burns Gamard Kurt SchwittersrsquoMerzbau The Cathedral of Erotic Misery (New York Princeton Architectural Press2000) Two other important precursors who bridge the European and American con-text are Lazlo Moholy-Nagy and Friedrick Kiesler For information on Moholy-Nagyrsquosearly environmental projects as well as those of Lissitzy see Joan Ockman ldquoThe RoadNot Taken Alexander Dornerrsquos Way Beyond Artrdquo in Autonomy and Ideology Positioningan Avant-Garde in America ed RE Somol (New York Monicelli Press 1997) For

Kaizen | Framed Space Allan Kaprow and the Spread of Painting 101

information on Kiesler see RL Held Endless Innovations Frederick Kieslerrsquos Theoryand Scenic Design (Ann Arbor UMI Research Press 1982) Lisa Phillips FrederickKiesler (New York The Whitney Museum of American Art 1989) Brian OrsquoDohertydraws out the connections between the prendash and postndashWorld War II manifestations ofthis relationship in Inside the White Cube

9 For Benjamin the work of art attains autonomy under modernism with theemergence of art for artrsquos sake This autonomy is then usurped by mechanical repro-duction See Walter Benjamin ldquoThe Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproductionrdquoin Illuminations ed Hanna Arendt (New York Harcourt Brace and Jovanovich Inc1968) p 224-226 For Greenberg as the above quote indicates the autonomy of artcontinues even in the face of mechanization See Clement Greenberg ldquoTowards a NewerLaocoonrdquo Perceptions and Judgments 1939ndash1944 vol 1 of Clement Greenberg TheCollected Essays and Criticism ed John OrsquoBrien (Chicago University of Chicago1986) p 32

10 Rosalind Krauss uses the term ldquopost-medium conditionrdquo to designate ldquomixed-media installationrdquo work done today While Krauss argues that only the most signi-cant artists working since the 1960s reassert the medium in their work against thegeneral postmedium condition I believe that all mixed-media installation work operates using the gallery or institution as medium See Rosalind Krauss ldquoA Voyageon the North Seardquo Art in the Age of the Post-Medium Condition (New York Thamesand Hudson 1999) for her comments on a specic contemporary artist and the rein-vention of the medium see Rosalind Krauss ldquo And Then Turn Awayrdquo An Essayon James Colemanrdquo October 81 (Summer 1997) 5ndash33

11 Allan Kaprow ldquoThe Legacy of Jackson Pollockrdquo Art News 57 no 6 (October1958) 24ndash26 55ndash57 reprinted in Allan Kaprow Essays on the Blurring of Art andLife ed Jeff Kelley (Berkeley and Los Angles University of California Press 1993) 1ndash9 Kaprow has stated that the essay was written in 1956 in ldquoAllan Kaprow andRobert Watts Interviewed by Sidney Simonrdquo 77 Kaprow had been a student of bothHans Hoffman and Meyer Schapiro

12 Harold Rosenberg ldquoThe American Action Paintersrdquo Art News 52 (December1952) 22ndash23 In a footnote that Rosenberg added when the article was republished aspart of his book of collected essays in 1959 he added the following ldquoAction Paintinghas extracted the element of decision inherent in all art in that the work is not fin-ished at its beginning but has to be carried forward by an accumulation of lsquorightrsquo ges-tures In a word Action Painting is the abstraction of the moral element in art itsmark is moral tension in detachment from moral or esthetic certainties and it judgesitself morally in declaring that picture to be worthless which is not the incorporationof a genuine struggle one which could at any point have been lostrdquo Harold RosenbergThe Tradition of the New (New York Horizon Press 1959) 33ndash34 Kaprow recountsthe influence of Rosenbergrsquos essay on his work in ldquoAllan Kaprow and Robert WattsInterviewed by Sidney Simonrdquo 77

13 There were five all told They were held as follows 5ndash23 January 1948 24Januaryndash12 February 1949 21 Novemberndash10 December 1949 28 Novemberndash16 December1950 26 Novemberndash15 December 1951 These shows had a remarkable resonance onethat extended beyond even the insular New York art world when after the secondexhibition Life magazine published the feature article ldquoJackson Pollock Is He theGreatest Living Painter in the United Statesrdquo Dorothy Sieberling Life (August 81949) 42ndash45

14 Allan Kaprow ldquoThe Legacy of Jackson Pollockrdquo in Kaprow Essays on the

102 Grey Room 13

Blurringrdquo 615 Kaprow uses both the terms scale and size to describe Pollockrsquos work but as

TJ Clark has shown these are two very different terms and Pollock is a painter of sizeand not scale For Clark it is size that engages the body ldquoNormally speaking size isliteralmdasha matter of actual physical intuition It involves grasping how big or small acertain object really is most likely in relation to the size of the grasperrsquos upright body oroutspread armsrdquo TJ Clark ldquoPollockrsquos Smallnessrdquo in Jackson Pollock New Approachesed Kirk Varnedoe and Pepe Karmel (New York Museum of Modern Art 1999) 15

16 Kaprow ldquoThe Legacy of Jackson Pollockrdquo Essays on the Blurring 617 In most of his work the paint engages with the edge of the canvas emphasizing

and bordering it and not continuing around it as if the canvas had been cut down fromsome innite expanse Kaprow claims otherwise by singling out the exceptions sayingldquo[H]is art gives the impression of going on forever [T]hough evidence points to aslackening of the attack as Pollock came to the edges of many of his canvases in thebest ones he compensated for this by tacking much of the painted surface around theback of his stretchersrdquo Kaprow ldquoThe Legacy of Jackson Pollockrdquo Essays on the Blurringof Art and Life 5 An examination of the paintings shows that more often Pollockstopped before the edge or reworked his compositions after they were stretched sothat they reengaged with the edge even when cut from larger canvas Kaprow claimsotherwise because it furthers his arguments that Pollockrsquos paintings emerge into thespace of the viewer

18 Jackson Pollock ldquoApplication for a Guggenheim Fellowship 1947rdquo in JacksonPollock Interviews 17 The inuence of Greenberg at this time is discussed in StevenNaifeh and Gregory White Smith Jackson Pollock An American Saga (Aiken SCWoodwardWhite 1989) 551 Pollock had also engaged with wall-size painting duringhis association with Joseacute Clemente Orozco and in earlier work such as Mural(1943ndash1944) painted for Peggy Guggenheimrsquos house

19 Greenbergrsquos version of modernism was most fully laid out only in 1959 andpublished in 1960 ldquoIt was the stressing of the ineluctable atness of the surface thatremained however more fundamental than anything else to the process by whichpictorial art criticized and defined itself under Modernism For flatness alone wasunique and exclusive to pictorial art Because flatness was the only conditionpainting shared with no other art Modernist painting oriented itself to atness as itdid to nothing elserdquo In Clement Greenberg ldquoModernist Paintingrdquo in Modernism witha Vengeance 1957ndash1969 vol 4 of Clement Greenberg The Collected Essays andCriticism ed John OrsquoBrien (Chicago University of Chicago Press 1993) 87

20 Clement Greenberg ldquoThe Situation at the Momentrdquo in Arrogant Purpose1945ndash1949 vol 2 of Clement Greenberg The Collected Essays and Criticism ed JohnOrsquoBrien (Chicago University of Chicago 1986) 194ndash195

21 See Greenberg ldquoTowards a Newer Laocoonrdquo throughout22 Eric Lum has done extensive work on the relationship between abstract expres-

sionism and architecture The analysis in this essay follows from his especially whereBlakersquos project is concerned but also expands on it As he jumps from Blake to PhilipJohnson and Mark Rothkorsquos Houston Chapel however Lum misses the importance ofother interventions between painting and architecture such as those made by KaprowThis is evident when he says ldquoThrough this marriage of mural and wall paintingcould become fully integrated into architecture an idealized conjecture nor realizeduntil Mark Rothkorsquos 1971 Houston Chapelrdquo Eric Lum ldquoPollockrsquos Promise Toward anAbstract Expressionist Architecturerdquo Assemblage 39 (August 1999) 68

Kaizen | Framed Space Allan Kaprow and the Spread of Painting 103

23 Blake said of his visit to Pollockrsquos studio ldquoIt was a very sunny day and thesun was shining on the paintings I felt like I was standing in the Hall of Mirrors atVersailles It was a dazzling incredible sightrdquo Naifeh and Smith 588

24 Peter Blake No Place like Utopia Modern Architecture and the Company WeKept (New York Knopf 1993) 111ndash112

25 Miesrsquos museum plan was designed at the request of the editors at ArchitecturalForum who had been publishing a series of articles ldquoto show how building might beimproved through fuller and more imaginative use of existing resourcesrdquo They requesteddesigns for a variety of buildings that could be placed in a hypothetical city of 70000inhabitants ldquoNew Buildings for 194Xrdquo Architectural Forum 78 no 5 (May 1943)69ndash85 The Barcelona Pavilion was built in 1929 for the Barcelona Universal Expositionand was destroyed when the fair ended It was subsequently rebuilt in 1981ndash86

26 Peter Blake Mies van der Rohe (New York Pelican 1960) 54 It is worth notingthat like Miesrsquos use of the Kolbe sculpture Blake had Pollock actually make smallwire sculptures splattered with paint miniatures of sculptures that Blake hopedPollock would make for the actual museum Pollock himself was experimenting withsculpture around this time building three-dimensional forms out of papier-macirccheacutethat he then splattered with paint

27 Blakersquos collage space follows from Miesrsquos The production of collages as in situmodels for Miesrsquos buildings had begun in the twenties with his work for the journal Gin association with Dadaists such as Hans Richter Neil Levine notes this creation ofa collage space in Mies particularly in the Pavilion and the Museum for a Small Cityin relation to his use of reection to layer one surface on top of another Neil LevineldquolsquoThe Signicance of Factsrsquo Miesrsquo Collages Up Close and Personalrdquo Assemblage 37(December 1998) 71ndash101

28 Blake designed his museum just as Philip Johnson was building his Glass Housewhere they both spent considerable time while planning exhibitions for the Museumof Modern Art Johnsonrsquos inuence is also evident in Blakersquos design Blake No Placelike Utopia 149ndash155

29 Arthur Drexler ldquoUnframed Space A Museum for Jackson Pollackrsquos [sic] PaintingsrdquoInteriors and Industrial Design 109 no 6 (January 1950) 90ndash91 The article was partof a special issue whose theme was ldquoInteriors to Comerdquo a recurring topic that wasmeant ldquoto show the direction in which some of our best designers are goingrdquo The termunframed space was used several times in reference to Pollockrsquos work as the title oftwo articles Drexlerrsquos and one published slightly later by Berton Rouecheacute ThoughRouecheacute in an interview in To a Violent Grave says that Lee Krasner used the phraserst Charles Pollock says that Blake was the origin of the term The fact that Drexlerrsquosarticle was written and published earlier seems to conrm this See Berton RouecheacuteldquoUnframed Spacerdquo in Jackson Pollock Interviews 18ndash19 and Jeffrey Potter To aViolent Grave (New York Pushcart Press 1985) 126

30 Drexler 9031 Blake No Place like Utopia 113ndash11432 Blake completed construction on his ldquoPinwheel Houserdquo in 1952 It is a small

beach house that he designed for himself and his family in South Hampton on NewYorkrsquos Long Island Situated on the beach the house is square in plan and its fourexterior walls slide horizontally outward each in a successive clockwise directionrevealing glass walls When the exterior walls are fully extended and the house isviewed from above it forms a shape like a pinwheel Opening the exterior wallsreveals an ever-changing view of the landscape outside turning the ocean and the

104 Grey Room 13

dunes into the picturesque framing them so that they entirely ll the space of the walland put its surface in motion Blake had discussed with Pollock the possibility of hispainting the sliding walls so that his paintings would be superimposed over the land-scape Pollock considered it but Blake couldnrsquot come up with the commission moneythat Pollock asked for They never finalized their plans and it was never clear howthe panels were to be painted Blake suggested that they might be made of glass so hebought the sheet of glass that Pollock used to paint Number 29 1950 (1950) the paintingthat Hans Namuth lmed from underneath for his documentary on Pollock His col-laboration with Blake did lead to one commission a mural-size canvas done for ahouse designed by Marcel Breuer Untitled (Mural) (1950) Shortly after his collabo-ration with Blake Pollock began another unrealized architectural project this onewith Alfonso Ossorio and Tony Smith for a church designed by Smith with murals byPollock For more on all of this see Blake No Place like Utopia 114ndash118 Naifeh andSmith 649 and Lum ldquoPollockrsquos Promiserdquo 68 85ndash88

33 Lum ldquoPollockrsquos Promiserdquo 67ndash6834 A few pages down from Drexlerrsquos article on the Pollock Museum in Interiors

and Industrial Design was another architectural response to the same problem OlgaGueftrsquos article ldquoThe Museumrsquos Oasisrdquo describes another museum this one by Gyorgyand Juliet Kepes ldquoThe Kepesesrdquo it begins ldquoare not exactly opposed to museumsrdquo how-ever it would seem that they were opposed to museums containing works of artReplacing the art objects entirely the Kepeses substituted shells driftwood plantsand animals Instead of a natural history museum they proposed a modern-dayWunderkammerwhere natural forms take the place of art as objects for contemplationldquoThe proposed galleryrdquo they declared ldquowould bridge the gap between the art museumwhich is concerned with man-made beauty and the natural history museum whichis preoccupied with nature but not particularly with naturersquos beautyrdquo Gyorgy KepesrsquosThe New Landscape exhibition at MIT a year later in 1951 (the same years as theIndependent Grouprsquos similar exhibition Growth and Form in London) and the pub-lication that followed The New Landscape in Art and Sciencewould ultimately realizethis project with blown-up photographs of natural forms (cells shells and electronmicrographs) in place of actual objects

The Kepeses seem to have taken the next logical step beyond Blake proposing aneven more radical rethinking of the wall-size work of art Eliminating the need for theartist altogether they found abstract forms in nature and turned their reproductionsinto what would elsewhere have been works of art By turning the art object into scientic vision The Kepeses proposed its total instrumentation Autonomous abstractpainting was transformed into its instrumental other a mechanically reproduced science of vision Rather than turn art into interior design The Kepesesrsquo replacementof abstract painting recast the status of scientic technology into that of high art SeeOlga Gueft ldquoThe Museumrsquos Oasisrdquo Interiors and Industrial Design 109 no 6 (January1950) 100ndash103 and Gyorgy Kepes The New Landscape in Art and Science (ChicagoPaul Theobald and Co 1956)

35 Kaprow stated that it was ldquoIn 1949 [that] I saw an exhibition of [Pollockrsquos] workfor the rst timerdquo ldquoInterviewrdquo in Allan Kaprow (Pasadena Pasadena Art Museum1967) 7

36 See Kaprow ldquoThe Legacy of Jackson Pollockrdquo Art News 25 and Kaprow ldquoTheLegacy of Jackson Pollockrdquo Essays on the Blurring 3

37 Joan Marter ldquoThe Forgotten Legacy Happenings Pop Art and Fluxus at RutgersUniversityrdquo in Off Limits Rutgers University and the Avant-Garde 1957ndash1963 ed Joan

Kaizen | Framed Space Allan Kaprow and the Spread of Painting 105

Marter (Newark The Newark Museum 1999) 438 Marter 13239 Quoted in John Cage Silence (Middletown Wesleyan University Press 1961) 10540 Branden Joseph has developed the link between Cage and Rauschenberg in several

recent essays See Branden W Joseph ldquoJohn Cage and the Architecture of SilencerdquoOctober 81 (Summer 1997) 81ndash104 and Branden Joseph ldquoWhite on Whiterdquo CriticalInquiry 27 no 1 (Summer 2001) 90ndash121

41 For Cage on Rauschenberg see Cage Silence98ndash108 For his description ofTheater Piece No 1 see ldquoInterview with John Cagerdquo in Happenings and Other Actsed Mariellen R Sandford (New York Routledge 1995) 53 Cage subsequently referredto Theater Piece No 1 as ldquothe rst happeningrdquo See John Cage ldquoAn AutobiographicalStatementrdquo Southwest Review 76 no 1 (Winter 1991) 65

42 The score itself has had various incarnations It wasnrsquot published until 1960and in this version includes a note wherein Cage describes the rst performance byTudor For more on 4rsquo33 and its various scores see Liz Kotz ldquoWords on Paper NotNecessarily Meant to Be Read as Art Postwar Media Poetics from Cage to Warholrdquo(PhD diss Columbia University 2002) 83ndash115 Kotz follows a different lineage outof Cage and into performance and happenings than the one traced in this essay

43 Marter 13244 Walter Hopps in the first survey catalog of Rauschenbergrsquos early work does

not name the black paintings as a group as he does the White Paintings He calls themeach Untitled followed by a description in brackets Hopps notes of the largest ofthese works that ldquoThese paintings with a greater vastness and ambiguity of scale thanother Rauschenberg works relate to spatial qualities of Jackson Pollockrdquo HoppsRobert Rauschenberg The Early 1950s (Houston Houston Fine Art Press 1991) 67This convention was also followed in Rauschenbergrsquos 1997 Guggenheim retrospectivecatalog and is followed in this essay Robert Rauschenberg A Retrospective ed WalterHopps and Susan Davidson (New York Solomon R Guggenheim Museum 1997)

45 The piece is called Untitled [two black panels] (1953) Hopps Robert Rauschenberg99

46 Helen Molesworth notes the importance of Rauschenbergrsquos newspaper groundin the black paintings and develops this problem in relation to the abject body as it isfurther pursued in his work throughout the 1950s Helen Molesworth ldquoBefore BedrdquoOctober 63 (Winter 1993) 68ndash82

47 Asked about this work Rauschenberg said ldquoI called them combines I had tocoin that word because I got so bored with arguments I was interested in people seeingmy work When someone would come up and I really wanted to know what they thoughtof it or wanted to sense the exposure there was always this screen that they could getbehind which was if I said lsquoIt is paintingrsquo they would say lsquoThatrsquos not painting Thatrsquossculpturersquo And they thought this was very interestingrdquo Jeanne Siegel ArtwordsDiscourse on the 60s and 70s (New York DaCapo 1985) 153

48 Allan Kaprow ldquoa Statementrdquo in Happenings An Illustrated Anthology edMichael Kirby (New York EP Dutton and Co 1965) 44ndash45

49 Benjamin Buchloh notes the importance of play in the 1950s and its link toconsumer culture During the 1950s he writes ldquoa theory of games would remerge asa cultural project at the very moment of an ever-increasing instrumentalization oflibidinal desire through consumer culturerdquo Benjamin HD Buchloh ldquoRobert WattsInanimate ObjectsmdashInanimate Subjectsrdquo in Buchloh and Rodenbeck Experiments inthe Everyday 25 n 4

Kaizen | Framed Space Allan Kaprow and the Spread of Painting 91

painted out and hidden behind the blackpaint46 As the series proceeded he allowedincreasingly more of the news to showthrough While the White Paintings engagedwith the gap between art and life by cap-turing the viewerrsquos bodymdashas did Cagersquos4rsquo 33 at least for Kaprowmdashthe black paint-ings did so by using the everyday objectas a ground Through their use of news-paper they suggested another trajectoryout of painting and into everyday spacea trajectory whose base condition was thecommodity object

In order to get into the gap between art and life Rauschenbergrsquoswork rst had to approximate the condition of being a wall It neededto assume a relation to its architectural frame in order to move awayfrom the autonomy of painting and into semiautonomy but once it didso Rauschenberg would abandon the problem of painting as wallFollowing the White Paintings and black paintings (and then a briefseries of Red Paintings) he made his rst Combines works that rein-state the autonomy of the individual art object even while they existbetween painting sculpture and the surrealist objet trouveacute47 Ratherthan engage with space Rauschenbergrsquos Combines elevate the ready-made or found object back to the status of the autonomous art objectThe Combines formalize the everyday object into an in-between statebut one that nevertheless produces singular art objects While theblack paintings led Rauschenberg back to the art object they led Kaprowfarther off the wall and out into space

| | | | |

Kaprow wrote ldquoa statementrdquo about his work sketching the trajectoryhe took from painting through collage then out into the space of thegallery48 After his initial show of paintings in 1952 he described thedevelopment of what he called ldquoaction collagerdquo These were done asquickly as possible by throwing together readily available everydaymaterials including parts of his past work tinfoil photographsnewspaper and food Although he doesnrsquot mention particular works by name presumably these action-collages include the early piecesreproduced in Assemblage Environments and Happenings In a photo-graph of Penny Arcade (1956) we see Kaprow standing in front of a largewall-size assemblage densely layered with parts of paintings scrapsof wood and large pieces of advertising signage that look like Kaproweither found them on the side of the road or appropriated them from a

Robert RauschenbergUntitled 1952

92 Grey Room 13

storefront It also included flashing lights andsounds calling out to the viewer like a ConeyIsland carnival booth but one made all the moreconfusing with its hyperarray of upside-downand fragmented word parts While collage hadbeen delicate even dainty in its appliqueacute of smallscraps of paper to the surface of the image KaprowrsquosPenny Arcade was massive and rough-hewn Unlikeits glitzier real-world counterpart Penny Arcadelooks cobbled together a temporary faccedilade brico-laged from odds and ends Here Kaprow turnedthe gallery space into the street turning the wallinto a pseudo-storefront bringing the architec-ture of the outside world into the gallery but lteredthrough the compositional strategies of collage

and abstract expressionism Abstraction before world war II had beenundertaken in a quest to find a universal Esperanto of color and form a problem that had been transformed by abstract expressionisminto a private iconography of psychic signs In Penny Arcade Kaprowturns the private symbolism of abstraction expressionism back to the world through advertising as commodity sign He makes the private symbol public again by reconnecting prendashWorld War II modelsof collective production with postndashWorld War II models of collectiveconsumption

Another work from this time further demonstrates how Kaprowused everyday materials to partition space Alternately titled (inAssemblage) Wall Kiosk and Rearrangeable Panels (1957ndash1959) thispiece looks like an enormous folding Japanese screen Measuring eightfeet high and over twenty feet long its panels are covered in eggshellsleaves and broken mirrorsmdashnot mass-produced commodities or sig-nage but detritus and waste Several of the panels are painted one inHoffmanrsquos push-pull style two seem to nod toward Rauschenberg onepainted white one black This piece is designed to sit on the oor ofthe gallery and as its various names imply it can be placed in a varietyof positions called ldquowallrdquo when arrayed in a straight line ldquokioskrdquowhen arranged into a square and ldquorearrangeable panelsrdquo in generalor when it sits in a zigzag Each position changes the relationship ofthe object to the space that contains it Kaprow recast the painting-as-wall as a transformable piece of furniture recognizing the possibilityof ludic engagement with the viewer but withholding it because theviewer is not allowed to interact with the piece directly Once installedthe work transforms the space of the gallery but it cannot be recong-ured by the viewer49

When asked why he used junk to make his work Kaprow replied

Allan Kaprow standing infront of Penny Arcade 1956Photo WF Gainfort

Kaizen | Framed Space Allan Kaprow and the Spread of Painting 93

It was clearly part of transformingreality It gave everyone a sense ofinstant involvement in a kind of crudeeveryday reality which was quite arelief after the high-art attitude ofexclusion from the real world It alsoallowed us to give up a certain kindof seriousness that traditional artmaking required Whatrsquos more thematerials were available everywhereon street corners at night And ifyou didnrsquot sell these environmentalconstructions yoursquod just throwthem back into the garbage canWhy not just throw them out It wasvery liberating to think of oneself aspart of an endlessly transformingreal world50

The ldquocrude everyday realityrdquo capturedby Penny Arcade as with Kaprowrsquos subsequent work is predicatedupon his project of capturing the ldquoendlessly transforming real worldrdquoThis statement connects him with Rauschenberg and Cage but alsoshows how their work differs in an important and crucial way InKaprowrsquos comment describing his experience of 4rsquo33 (as quoted inthe previous section) he says ldquoAnd we the listeners in Cagersquos concertand the lookers at Rauschenbergrsquos pictures were the collaborators of[sic] the artworkrdquo ending with ldquoIt was a kind of collaborative end-lessly changing affair The artwork was simply this organism that wasaliverdquo51 For Kaprow the key word here is change and in order tomove from artwork to organism the work of art must be reconsiderednot as a ldquochance operationrdquo (to use Cagersquos term) but as a change oper-ation During this time Kaprow had begun to take classes with Cageand he was exposed to Cagersquos use of chance methods of compositionWhile he would adopt much from Cagersquos work and teaching he thoughtthat change was the most important principle for his own work52

For Kaprow change was integrally connected to the postndashworld warII environment lled with mass-produced throwaway products Theart of this timemdashhis artmdashshould necessarily reect this environmentIn opposition to the nostalgic use of the objet trouveacute in surrealism hismethod was closer to the readymade choosing everyday objects to res-cue from oblivion but spreading them out in space so that they wouldenvironmentally engulf the viewer53 Kaprow temporarily revalues thethrowaway commodity in his environments to create a space where

Allan Kaprow RearrangeablePanels 1957-9 Shown intheir ldquoKioskrdquo con gurationPhoto Robert R McElroy

94 Grey Room 13

everyday life as planned obsolescence is brought under the control ofthe artist He creates a momentary space of anti-entropy in the life ofthe commodity where it is temporarily reinvested with value only to bedisposed of once the environment is destroyed54 Citing critic LawrenceAlloway on the ldquothrowawayrdquo culture of postndashworld war II AmericaKaprow goes on to describe the importance of change in his work

Change governing both reality and art has extended from theexpression of an idea arrested in a painting to a work in whichthe usually slow mutations wrought by nature are quickened andliterally made part of the experience of it they manifest the veryprocess of creation-decay-creation almost as one watches Theuse of debris waste products or very impermanent substanceslike toilet paper or bread has of course a clear range of allusionswith obvious sociological implications the simplest being theartistrsquos positive involvement on the one hand with an everydayworld and on the other with a group of objects which beingexpendable might suggest that corresponding lack of statuswhich is supposed to be the fate of anything creative todayThese choices must not be ignored for they reveal what in oursurroundings charges the imagination as well as what is mosthuman in our art55

What is ldquomost humanrdquo in Kaprowrsquos art as he denes it is its reectionof this throwaway culture This is governed not by Cagean chance butby planned obsolescence with its endless renewal of more of thesame ldquo[My] workrdquo Kaprow says ldquois intended to last only a short timeand is destroyed immediately after the exhibition If [its] obsolescenceis not planned it is expectedrdquo56 Alloway also writing on assemblagebetter describes the overlap between the throwaway object and its usein environmental art during the 1950s

The acceptance of mass-produced objects just because they arewhat is around not because they issue from idolatrised technol-ogy is central to mid-century Junk Culture Junk Culture iscity art Its source is obsolescence the throwaway material ofcities Assemblages of such material come at the spectator asbits of life bits of the environment frequently presented interms that dramatize spread ow extension trespass The junkis obtruded into our space with the aim of achieving maximumintimacy Proximity and participation replace distance and con-templation as the communicative style of the object57

So the space of Junk Culture when used in art as assemblage or envi-ronment achieves ldquomaximum intimacyrdquo with the observer throughtheir ldquoproximity and participationrdquo with the throwaway commodity

Kaizen | Framed Space Allan Kaprow and the Spread of Painting 95

As Kaprow moves farther into the space of the gallery he does so in anincreased attempt to engage the viewer He partitions the gallery spaceso that the body of the viewer becomes a product of its participationwithin the eld of the throwaway commodity

These early wall-like constructions were for Kaprow still not closeenough to a participatory art Kaprow wanted to move further towardthe creation of environments and even events to take over the gallerywith a plenitude of throwaway objects among which the viewer wouldself-consciously circulate The action collages still maintained toomuch autonomy because they existed as individual objects and so asKaprow recalled ldquonow I simply filled the whole gallery up startingfrom one wall and ending with the otherrdquo58 With his rst environmentKaprow was no longer composing within the autonomous space ofpainting but composing the entire space of the gallery Kaprowrsquos rstenvironmentmdashmade at the Hansa Gallery in November 1958mdashwasmeant to totally engage the visitors to the gallery to make them intopart of the work itself ldquopassively or actively according to [their] talentsfor lsquoengagementrsquordquo59 From a drop ceiling of wires suspended in a gridseveral inches below the galleryrsquos original ceiling he hung variousmaterials creating a labyrinthine space divided by sheets of plastictangles of cellophane Scotch tape and more including a time-releasedmist of pine-scented deodorizer His work had taken over the galleryspace lling it with a nearly impenetrable eld of throwaway objects60

Kaprow took the ood of postndashworld war II consumer goods and usedthem to compose walls that partitioned space And composemdashin thetraditional sense of arranging shapes and forms on the surface of acanvasmdashis exactly what he did

Kaprow described his use of the full space of the gallery as a eld aterm that he derives from painting calling the second section of hisldquoAssemblagerdquo essay ldquoThe Field in Paintingrdquo ldquoThis space is in part theliteral distance between all solids included in the workrdquo Kaprowwrote ldquoBut it is also a space that is a direct heritage of paintingrdquo61

Everything in the space that he produced became part of his compo-sition including the viewer Like any other object in the work Kaprowsaid ldquoin as much as people visiting [an] environment are moving col-ored shapes [they] were counted lsquoinrsquordquo62 Each visitor as they movedthrough Kaprowrsquos labyrinth became a part of the work Art and lifehad now seemingly collapsed the autonomy of painting as a separateobjectmdashframed and isolated from the rest of its environment as a spaceonly for the eyemdashhad been abandoned for an embodied experienceViewing was now dependent upon space a space full of the objects ofeveryday life Using the materials of everyday life Kaprow invited hisviewers to get rid of their distance from the art object forcing theminto physical contact with his work This work he wrote ldquoinvites us

96 Grey Room 13

to cast aside for a moment proper manners andpartake wholly in the real nature of art and (onehopes) liferdquo63 Against the look-donrsquot-touch attitude ofmuseum and gallery Kaprow created a haptic spacewhere touch became the basis of the work where vis-itors came into physical contact with his throwawayobjects In this space as visitors threaded their waythrough the labyrinth the color of their clothes andtheir presence among these objects turned them intoa part of the work The viewer appeared as anotherthing in Kaprowrsquos composition not so different fromhis throwaway materials In his environment autonomycollapsed into participation based on the reicationof the subject as an obsolete material temporally

composited into the work While Kaprow certainly intended to includehis observers in the work he could do so only by turning them intoobjects rather than active subjects He later described his own sense ofthe failure with this exhibition that he couldnrsquot seem to engage theviewer enough but blamed it on the framing space of the galleryAfterward he said ldquoI complained immediately about the fact that therewas a sense of mystery until your eye reached a wall Then there wasa dead end At that point my disagreement with the gallery spacebeganrdquo64 But Kaprow didnrsquot abandon the gallerymdashat least not yet Toget closer to the everyday Kaprow thought he should more fully incor-porate the bodies of his viewers into his work This led to the origin ofhappenings in an attempt to make viewers into active subjects to engagethem more actively in creating the work as they became part of it

| | | | |

In 1958 Kaprow had presented two other early proto-happenings oneat Rutgers called Communication and one at George Segalrsquos farmcalled Pastorale65 Communication was based on work he had devel-oped in Cagersquos class It was close to traditional theater Presented in achapel that doubled as an auditorium for theater and music perfor-mances it included movement sound and banners unfurled from thebalconies Kaprow built ldquoplastic panelsrdquo behind which he performeda series of simple actions nally hiding himself from the audience bypainting the plastic wall in front of him and so ldquopainting himself outrdquoof the audiencersquos view66 For Pastorale he built frames that looked likeabysmal theater sets stretcher bars with torn strips of canvas runningfrom top to bottom During one part of the performance artists RobertWatts and Lucas Samaras painted on either side of one of these con-structions Inserted into the landscape these performance paintings

Part of the environment Allan Kaprow created for his piece Pastorale 1958Photo Vaughn Rachel

Kaizen | Framed Space Allan Kaprow and the Spread of Painting 97

marked the boundary between event and nonevent partitioning theground into territories and framing Pastoralersquos space using once againpainting as wall Unfortunately for Kaprow Pastorale was held during apicnic and the other participants were either too drunk or just plainunwilling to follow his directions They were engaged but refused tofollow his rules of play

18 Happenings in 6 Parts which took place in October 1959 wasthe rst ofcial happening67 Kaprow divided the inside of the galleryinto three smaller contiguous rooms using wooden two-by-fours Inphotographs of the piece as it was being installed these woodenbeams can be seen framing a space within the space of the gallerymdashnot into a proscenium stage but into an environment within the largergallery space where various events would occur Instead of wood ordrywall translucent plastic sheeting created the walls so that actioncould be partially seen from one room to the next Each room was litwith different colored lights and in each room where the audiencewas forced to sit and observe the action a group of actors movedthrough tightly scripted but simple routines as sounds came in and outand lms were projected

On the program the audience is listed under the ldquoCast of Participantsrdquowritten into the performance itself and actively engaged but only asthe subject of direction and authorial control At specific intervalsbells rang and the audience was required to change seats and to switchrooms based on instruction cards they had been given when they enteredthe gallery before the performance Kaprow had realized with his HansaGallery environment that he needed to give his viewers increasedresponsibility but he also realized that relinquishing too much con-trol could be a disaster as it had been in Pastorale As with his previ-ous work his goal with 18 Happenings was the ldquointegration of allelementsmdashenvironment constructed sections time space and peoplerdquoand the audience was once again included as just another material inhis composition68

During the fifth part of 18 Happenings one sequence of actionsseems to reveal Kaprowrsquos relationship with painting the viewer and space Kaprow had built a construction he called the ldquothe sandwich manrdquo named after its everyday counterparts paid to walkaround the city streets as human billboards Kaprowrsquos sandwich

Left The construction of thespace used for Allan Kaprowrsquos18 Happenings in 6 Parts1958

Right A view of Allan Kaprowrsquos18 Happenings whereRearrangeable Panels is partially visible on the leftThe in-set canvas panel onwhich actors painted live as part of the performance is shown at center PhotoScott Hyde

98 Grey Room 13

man was barely humanoidan automaton with forward-and backward-pointing mir-rors for a body bicycle wheelsfor feet and a gallon bucketof enamel paint for a headSticking out in front was apiece of wood for an arm end-ing in a hand that held cardslabeled ldquoXrdquo and ldquo3rdquo the adver-

tising handbill reduced to its zero degree In the middle of the sand-wich man hidden on a shelf between the two mirrors was a recordplayer and projecting out from behind it were two handles so that itcould be wheeled around the rooms As the sandwich man was wheeledfrom one room to another its mirrored body reflected the audienceback onto themselves their image taking the place of what would havebeen an advertisement They were reected not as participatory viewersnot even as active objects as in his environment but as passive objectsnow totally reied their image produced as a reection of Junk CultureHere in Brechtian fashion using a literal ldquoframing effectrdquo Kaprowturned his previous use of the viewer back into a critique of the eventitself In reecting the audiencersquos passivity back to them he forced amoment of recognition of their complicity in the production of thework They could see that as they became an ad on the sandwich manrsquosbelly so they became throwaway objects in his composition By reduc-ing the spectator to the general equivalence of these objects Kaprowrecognized the subject of the postndashWorld War II period as a product ofplanned obsolescence and consumer culture

Following this as the sandwich man was wheeled through the secondroom and into the third two men stood up from their seats one in eachroom Each took up a brush and a can of paint and approached oppo-site sides of one of the plastic walls simultaneously painting on a sec-tion of canvas set among the plastic walls and so turning the wall backinto a painting69 The canvas was left unprimed so that the simple gures that each artist painted (one was supposed to paint lines theother circles) would bleed through and so would be immediately visibleon the opposite side each mark responding to that of their partner Asin his two earlier happenings painting is done live before an audienceon a wall Kaprow showed the audience that when painting becomeswall it functions only to put space on display Here painting as a sin-gular art object was meaningless It became a throwaway stage propand so became a demonstration of how painting as object was part ofthe larger environment in which it resides The limit condition of paint-ing as wall with viewer as spectator was the gallery as frame70

The sandwich man part ofKaprowrsquos 18 HappeningsPhoto Scott Hyde

Kaizen | Framed Space Allan Kaprow and the Spread of Painting 99

What this sequence from 18 Happenings reveals is that Kaprow hadan acute sense of the way in which the gallery as frame produces sub-ject and space together He undermined the normal function of the artgallery turning both viewer and art object into Junk Culture Throwawayviewers throwaway paintings and throwaway rooms turned the galleryspacemdasha space designed to be neutral to hide itself as the objects itcontains become the sole focus of the viewerrsquos concentrationmdashinto thelocus of planned obsolescence With the creation of happeningsKaprow used Junk Culture against the doxa of gallery space upsettingthe common sense of what a space for art is and what it does Afterhappenings the paradoxical logic of the gallery as a site for both theprivate contemplation of singular aesthetic objects as well as the pub-lic transaction of luxury goods had been (however temporarily) sub-verted In asserting the gallery space as the limit condition of paintingKaprow framed the institution as the ground of artistic production

In ldquoThe Legacy of Jackson Pollockrdquo Kaprow says ldquoPollock left us atthe point where we must become preoccupied with and even dazzled by the space and objects of our everyday liferdquo71 In ldquoAssemblageEnvironments Happeningsrdquo bridging the gap between his early andlater work he concludes ldquothis has brought sharply into focus that theroom has always been a frame or format toordquo72 Kaprowrsquos collapse ofautonomy via art into lifemdashthat environments and happenings wouldldquopartake wholly in the real nature of art and (one hopes) liferdquomdashwasonly ever a hope as he himself knew If painting had used the frameas the delimitation of a eld for composition then environments andhappenings turned the gallery into the limit condition of this fieldWhile he tried to get closer to everyday life by making art he inevitablypushed it further away This ambivalence toward the collapse of artand life runs throughout Kaprowrsquos work even as he moved out of thegallery and into everyday life following his early work with his laterldquoactivitiesrdquo The early work was even by his own estimation more adisplay of experience and not a fair representation of actual everydayexperience But this is precisely where the importance of this work liesKaprowrsquos environments and happenings extended Rauschenbergrsquossemiautonomous gap so far that they turned the screw one notchhigher autonomy returning not though the sublation of art into archi-tecture but through the medium of framed space

100 Grey Room 13

NotesThanks to the generosity and insight of Karen Kurczynski John Harwood SethMcCormick Jaleh Mansoor Beth Hinderliter Vered Maimon Benjamin Buchloh andBarry Bergdoll as well as Branden Joseph and the Editors of Grey Room

1 Brian OrsquoDoherty Inside the White Cube The Ideology of the Gallery Space(Berkeley and Los Angeles University of California Press 1999) 15

2 It was originally called ldquoPainting Environments Happeningsrdquo and publishedin a condensed form in the catalog for the exhibition New FormsmdashNew Media I at the Martha Jackson Gallery New York the rst uptown show of Kaprow and his con-temporaries It was changed to ldquoAssemblage Environments and Happeningsrdquo for nalpublication Kaprow changed the title to incorporate the recent acceptance of the termassemblage It had been used rst by Helen Comstock to describe the work of ArthurDove in the 1920s but remained obscure until Jean Dubuffet popularized its use in 1953The term as used by Dubuffet was then adopted by William Seitz for his exhibitionThe Art of Assemblage at the Museum of Modern Art See Allan Kaprow AssemblageEnvironments and Happenings (New York Harry N Abrams 1966) 150ndash208 NewFormsmdashNew Media I (New York Martha Jackson Gallery 1960) np and RogerShattuck ldquoIntroduction How Collage Became Assemblagerdquo Essays on Assemblage(New York Museum of Modern Art 1992) 119

3 ldquoWhen I am in my painting Irsquom not aware of what Irsquom doingrdquo said PollockJackson Pollock Jackson Pollock Interviews Articles Reviews ed Pepe Karmel (NewYork Museum of Modern Art 1999) 17ndash18

4 Yard was Kaprowrsquos contribution to the exhibition Environments SituationsSpaces at the Martha Jackson Gallery a follow up to New FormsndashNew Media (see n 2)

5 ldquoAllan Kaprow and Robert Watts Interviewed by Sidney Simonrdquo in Benjamin HDBuchloh and Judith F Rodenbeck Experiments in the Everyday Allan Kaprow andRobert Watts Events Objects Documents (New York Wallach Art Gallery 1999) 76

6 To cite but one example of many Thomas Hirschhorn is an artist who continuesto extend and develop Kaprowrsquos legacy today

7 On Kaprow and performance see Amelia Jones Body Art Performing the Subject(Minneapolis University of Minnesota Press 1998) 56ndash57 Paul Schimmel ldquoLeap intothe Void Performance and the Objectrdquo in Out of Actions Between Performance andthe Object 1949ndash1979 ed Paul Schimmel (New York Thames and Hudson 1998)59ndash63

8 The relationship between painting and space had been explored before partic-ularly in the period between the two world wars by the artists associated with De Stijland constructivism For more on De Stijl see Nancy Troy The De Stijl Environment(Cambridge MIT Press 1983) On constructivism see Yve-Alain Bois ldquoEl LissitzkyRadical Reversibilityrdquo Art in America 76 no 4 (April 1988) 161ndash181 and Yve-AlainBois ldquoMaterial Utopiasrdquo Art in America 79 no 6 (June 1991) 98ndash107 Another Europeanwho explored the everyday object painting and space was Kurt Schwitters in the various incarnation of his Merzbau See Elizabeth Burns Gamard Kurt SchwittersrsquoMerzbau The Cathedral of Erotic Misery (New York Princeton Architectural Press2000) Two other important precursors who bridge the European and American con-text are Lazlo Moholy-Nagy and Friedrick Kiesler For information on Moholy-Nagyrsquosearly environmental projects as well as those of Lissitzy see Joan Ockman ldquoThe RoadNot Taken Alexander Dornerrsquos Way Beyond Artrdquo in Autonomy and Ideology Positioningan Avant-Garde in America ed RE Somol (New York Monicelli Press 1997) For

Kaizen | Framed Space Allan Kaprow and the Spread of Painting 101

information on Kiesler see RL Held Endless Innovations Frederick Kieslerrsquos Theoryand Scenic Design (Ann Arbor UMI Research Press 1982) Lisa Phillips FrederickKiesler (New York The Whitney Museum of American Art 1989) Brian OrsquoDohertydraws out the connections between the prendash and postndashWorld War II manifestations ofthis relationship in Inside the White Cube

9 For Benjamin the work of art attains autonomy under modernism with theemergence of art for artrsquos sake This autonomy is then usurped by mechanical repro-duction See Walter Benjamin ldquoThe Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproductionrdquoin Illuminations ed Hanna Arendt (New York Harcourt Brace and Jovanovich Inc1968) p 224-226 For Greenberg as the above quote indicates the autonomy of artcontinues even in the face of mechanization See Clement Greenberg ldquoTowards a NewerLaocoonrdquo Perceptions and Judgments 1939ndash1944 vol 1 of Clement Greenberg TheCollected Essays and Criticism ed John OrsquoBrien (Chicago University of Chicago1986) p 32

10 Rosalind Krauss uses the term ldquopost-medium conditionrdquo to designate ldquomixed-media installationrdquo work done today While Krauss argues that only the most signi-cant artists working since the 1960s reassert the medium in their work against thegeneral postmedium condition I believe that all mixed-media installation work operates using the gallery or institution as medium See Rosalind Krauss ldquoA Voyageon the North Seardquo Art in the Age of the Post-Medium Condition (New York Thamesand Hudson 1999) for her comments on a specic contemporary artist and the rein-vention of the medium see Rosalind Krauss ldquo And Then Turn Awayrdquo An Essayon James Colemanrdquo October 81 (Summer 1997) 5ndash33

11 Allan Kaprow ldquoThe Legacy of Jackson Pollockrdquo Art News 57 no 6 (October1958) 24ndash26 55ndash57 reprinted in Allan Kaprow Essays on the Blurring of Art andLife ed Jeff Kelley (Berkeley and Los Angles University of California Press 1993) 1ndash9 Kaprow has stated that the essay was written in 1956 in ldquoAllan Kaprow andRobert Watts Interviewed by Sidney Simonrdquo 77 Kaprow had been a student of bothHans Hoffman and Meyer Schapiro

12 Harold Rosenberg ldquoThe American Action Paintersrdquo Art News 52 (December1952) 22ndash23 In a footnote that Rosenberg added when the article was republished aspart of his book of collected essays in 1959 he added the following ldquoAction Paintinghas extracted the element of decision inherent in all art in that the work is not fin-ished at its beginning but has to be carried forward by an accumulation of lsquorightrsquo ges-tures In a word Action Painting is the abstraction of the moral element in art itsmark is moral tension in detachment from moral or esthetic certainties and it judgesitself morally in declaring that picture to be worthless which is not the incorporationof a genuine struggle one which could at any point have been lostrdquo Harold RosenbergThe Tradition of the New (New York Horizon Press 1959) 33ndash34 Kaprow recountsthe influence of Rosenbergrsquos essay on his work in ldquoAllan Kaprow and Robert WattsInterviewed by Sidney Simonrdquo 77

13 There were five all told They were held as follows 5ndash23 January 1948 24Januaryndash12 February 1949 21 Novemberndash10 December 1949 28 Novemberndash16 December1950 26 Novemberndash15 December 1951 These shows had a remarkable resonance onethat extended beyond even the insular New York art world when after the secondexhibition Life magazine published the feature article ldquoJackson Pollock Is He theGreatest Living Painter in the United Statesrdquo Dorothy Sieberling Life (August 81949) 42ndash45

14 Allan Kaprow ldquoThe Legacy of Jackson Pollockrdquo in Kaprow Essays on the

102 Grey Room 13

Blurringrdquo 615 Kaprow uses both the terms scale and size to describe Pollockrsquos work but as

TJ Clark has shown these are two very different terms and Pollock is a painter of sizeand not scale For Clark it is size that engages the body ldquoNormally speaking size isliteralmdasha matter of actual physical intuition It involves grasping how big or small acertain object really is most likely in relation to the size of the grasperrsquos upright body oroutspread armsrdquo TJ Clark ldquoPollockrsquos Smallnessrdquo in Jackson Pollock New Approachesed Kirk Varnedoe and Pepe Karmel (New York Museum of Modern Art 1999) 15

16 Kaprow ldquoThe Legacy of Jackson Pollockrdquo Essays on the Blurring 617 In most of his work the paint engages with the edge of the canvas emphasizing

and bordering it and not continuing around it as if the canvas had been cut down fromsome innite expanse Kaprow claims otherwise by singling out the exceptions sayingldquo[H]is art gives the impression of going on forever [T]hough evidence points to aslackening of the attack as Pollock came to the edges of many of his canvases in thebest ones he compensated for this by tacking much of the painted surface around theback of his stretchersrdquo Kaprow ldquoThe Legacy of Jackson Pollockrdquo Essays on the Blurringof Art and Life 5 An examination of the paintings shows that more often Pollockstopped before the edge or reworked his compositions after they were stretched sothat they reengaged with the edge even when cut from larger canvas Kaprow claimsotherwise because it furthers his arguments that Pollockrsquos paintings emerge into thespace of the viewer

18 Jackson Pollock ldquoApplication for a Guggenheim Fellowship 1947rdquo in JacksonPollock Interviews 17 The inuence of Greenberg at this time is discussed in StevenNaifeh and Gregory White Smith Jackson Pollock An American Saga (Aiken SCWoodwardWhite 1989) 551 Pollock had also engaged with wall-size painting duringhis association with Joseacute Clemente Orozco and in earlier work such as Mural(1943ndash1944) painted for Peggy Guggenheimrsquos house

19 Greenbergrsquos version of modernism was most fully laid out only in 1959 andpublished in 1960 ldquoIt was the stressing of the ineluctable atness of the surface thatremained however more fundamental than anything else to the process by whichpictorial art criticized and defined itself under Modernism For flatness alone wasunique and exclusive to pictorial art Because flatness was the only conditionpainting shared with no other art Modernist painting oriented itself to atness as itdid to nothing elserdquo In Clement Greenberg ldquoModernist Paintingrdquo in Modernism witha Vengeance 1957ndash1969 vol 4 of Clement Greenberg The Collected Essays andCriticism ed John OrsquoBrien (Chicago University of Chicago Press 1993) 87

20 Clement Greenberg ldquoThe Situation at the Momentrdquo in Arrogant Purpose1945ndash1949 vol 2 of Clement Greenberg The Collected Essays and Criticism ed JohnOrsquoBrien (Chicago University of Chicago 1986) 194ndash195

21 See Greenberg ldquoTowards a Newer Laocoonrdquo throughout22 Eric Lum has done extensive work on the relationship between abstract expres-

sionism and architecture The analysis in this essay follows from his especially whereBlakersquos project is concerned but also expands on it As he jumps from Blake to PhilipJohnson and Mark Rothkorsquos Houston Chapel however Lum misses the importance ofother interventions between painting and architecture such as those made by KaprowThis is evident when he says ldquoThrough this marriage of mural and wall paintingcould become fully integrated into architecture an idealized conjecture nor realizeduntil Mark Rothkorsquos 1971 Houston Chapelrdquo Eric Lum ldquoPollockrsquos Promise Toward anAbstract Expressionist Architecturerdquo Assemblage 39 (August 1999) 68

Kaizen | Framed Space Allan Kaprow and the Spread of Painting 103

23 Blake said of his visit to Pollockrsquos studio ldquoIt was a very sunny day and thesun was shining on the paintings I felt like I was standing in the Hall of Mirrors atVersailles It was a dazzling incredible sightrdquo Naifeh and Smith 588

24 Peter Blake No Place like Utopia Modern Architecture and the Company WeKept (New York Knopf 1993) 111ndash112

25 Miesrsquos museum plan was designed at the request of the editors at ArchitecturalForum who had been publishing a series of articles ldquoto show how building might beimproved through fuller and more imaginative use of existing resourcesrdquo They requesteddesigns for a variety of buildings that could be placed in a hypothetical city of 70000inhabitants ldquoNew Buildings for 194Xrdquo Architectural Forum 78 no 5 (May 1943)69ndash85 The Barcelona Pavilion was built in 1929 for the Barcelona Universal Expositionand was destroyed when the fair ended It was subsequently rebuilt in 1981ndash86

26 Peter Blake Mies van der Rohe (New York Pelican 1960) 54 It is worth notingthat like Miesrsquos use of the Kolbe sculpture Blake had Pollock actually make smallwire sculptures splattered with paint miniatures of sculptures that Blake hopedPollock would make for the actual museum Pollock himself was experimenting withsculpture around this time building three-dimensional forms out of papier-macirccheacutethat he then splattered with paint

27 Blakersquos collage space follows from Miesrsquos The production of collages as in situmodels for Miesrsquos buildings had begun in the twenties with his work for the journal Gin association with Dadaists such as Hans Richter Neil Levine notes this creation ofa collage space in Mies particularly in the Pavilion and the Museum for a Small Cityin relation to his use of reection to layer one surface on top of another Neil LevineldquolsquoThe Signicance of Factsrsquo Miesrsquo Collages Up Close and Personalrdquo Assemblage 37(December 1998) 71ndash101

28 Blake designed his museum just as Philip Johnson was building his Glass Housewhere they both spent considerable time while planning exhibitions for the Museumof Modern Art Johnsonrsquos inuence is also evident in Blakersquos design Blake No Placelike Utopia 149ndash155

29 Arthur Drexler ldquoUnframed Space A Museum for Jackson Pollackrsquos [sic] PaintingsrdquoInteriors and Industrial Design 109 no 6 (January 1950) 90ndash91 The article was partof a special issue whose theme was ldquoInteriors to Comerdquo a recurring topic that wasmeant ldquoto show the direction in which some of our best designers are goingrdquo The termunframed space was used several times in reference to Pollockrsquos work as the title oftwo articles Drexlerrsquos and one published slightly later by Berton Rouecheacute ThoughRouecheacute in an interview in To a Violent Grave says that Lee Krasner used the phraserst Charles Pollock says that Blake was the origin of the term The fact that Drexlerrsquosarticle was written and published earlier seems to conrm this See Berton RouecheacuteldquoUnframed Spacerdquo in Jackson Pollock Interviews 18ndash19 and Jeffrey Potter To aViolent Grave (New York Pushcart Press 1985) 126

30 Drexler 9031 Blake No Place like Utopia 113ndash11432 Blake completed construction on his ldquoPinwheel Houserdquo in 1952 It is a small

beach house that he designed for himself and his family in South Hampton on NewYorkrsquos Long Island Situated on the beach the house is square in plan and its fourexterior walls slide horizontally outward each in a successive clockwise directionrevealing glass walls When the exterior walls are fully extended and the house isviewed from above it forms a shape like a pinwheel Opening the exterior wallsreveals an ever-changing view of the landscape outside turning the ocean and the

104 Grey Room 13

dunes into the picturesque framing them so that they entirely ll the space of the walland put its surface in motion Blake had discussed with Pollock the possibility of hispainting the sliding walls so that his paintings would be superimposed over the land-scape Pollock considered it but Blake couldnrsquot come up with the commission moneythat Pollock asked for They never finalized their plans and it was never clear howthe panels were to be painted Blake suggested that they might be made of glass so hebought the sheet of glass that Pollock used to paint Number 29 1950 (1950) the paintingthat Hans Namuth lmed from underneath for his documentary on Pollock His col-laboration with Blake did lead to one commission a mural-size canvas done for ahouse designed by Marcel Breuer Untitled (Mural) (1950) Shortly after his collabo-ration with Blake Pollock began another unrealized architectural project this onewith Alfonso Ossorio and Tony Smith for a church designed by Smith with murals byPollock For more on all of this see Blake No Place like Utopia 114ndash118 Naifeh andSmith 649 and Lum ldquoPollockrsquos Promiserdquo 68 85ndash88

33 Lum ldquoPollockrsquos Promiserdquo 67ndash6834 A few pages down from Drexlerrsquos article on the Pollock Museum in Interiors

and Industrial Design was another architectural response to the same problem OlgaGueftrsquos article ldquoThe Museumrsquos Oasisrdquo describes another museum this one by Gyorgyand Juliet Kepes ldquoThe Kepesesrdquo it begins ldquoare not exactly opposed to museumsrdquo how-ever it would seem that they were opposed to museums containing works of artReplacing the art objects entirely the Kepeses substituted shells driftwood plantsand animals Instead of a natural history museum they proposed a modern-dayWunderkammerwhere natural forms take the place of art as objects for contemplationldquoThe proposed galleryrdquo they declared ldquowould bridge the gap between the art museumwhich is concerned with man-made beauty and the natural history museum whichis preoccupied with nature but not particularly with naturersquos beautyrdquo Gyorgy KepesrsquosThe New Landscape exhibition at MIT a year later in 1951 (the same years as theIndependent Grouprsquos similar exhibition Growth and Form in London) and the pub-lication that followed The New Landscape in Art and Sciencewould ultimately realizethis project with blown-up photographs of natural forms (cells shells and electronmicrographs) in place of actual objects

The Kepeses seem to have taken the next logical step beyond Blake proposing aneven more radical rethinking of the wall-size work of art Eliminating the need for theartist altogether they found abstract forms in nature and turned their reproductionsinto what would elsewhere have been works of art By turning the art object into scientic vision The Kepeses proposed its total instrumentation Autonomous abstractpainting was transformed into its instrumental other a mechanically reproduced science of vision Rather than turn art into interior design The Kepesesrsquo replacementof abstract painting recast the status of scientic technology into that of high art SeeOlga Gueft ldquoThe Museumrsquos Oasisrdquo Interiors and Industrial Design 109 no 6 (January1950) 100ndash103 and Gyorgy Kepes The New Landscape in Art and Science (ChicagoPaul Theobald and Co 1956)

35 Kaprow stated that it was ldquoIn 1949 [that] I saw an exhibition of [Pollockrsquos] workfor the rst timerdquo ldquoInterviewrdquo in Allan Kaprow (Pasadena Pasadena Art Museum1967) 7

36 See Kaprow ldquoThe Legacy of Jackson Pollockrdquo Art News 25 and Kaprow ldquoTheLegacy of Jackson Pollockrdquo Essays on the Blurring 3

37 Joan Marter ldquoThe Forgotten Legacy Happenings Pop Art and Fluxus at RutgersUniversityrdquo in Off Limits Rutgers University and the Avant-Garde 1957ndash1963 ed Joan

Kaizen | Framed Space Allan Kaprow and the Spread of Painting 105

Marter (Newark The Newark Museum 1999) 438 Marter 13239 Quoted in John Cage Silence (Middletown Wesleyan University Press 1961) 10540 Branden Joseph has developed the link between Cage and Rauschenberg in several

recent essays See Branden W Joseph ldquoJohn Cage and the Architecture of SilencerdquoOctober 81 (Summer 1997) 81ndash104 and Branden Joseph ldquoWhite on Whiterdquo CriticalInquiry 27 no 1 (Summer 2001) 90ndash121

41 For Cage on Rauschenberg see Cage Silence98ndash108 For his description ofTheater Piece No 1 see ldquoInterview with John Cagerdquo in Happenings and Other Actsed Mariellen R Sandford (New York Routledge 1995) 53 Cage subsequently referredto Theater Piece No 1 as ldquothe rst happeningrdquo See John Cage ldquoAn AutobiographicalStatementrdquo Southwest Review 76 no 1 (Winter 1991) 65

42 The score itself has had various incarnations It wasnrsquot published until 1960and in this version includes a note wherein Cage describes the rst performance byTudor For more on 4rsquo33 and its various scores see Liz Kotz ldquoWords on Paper NotNecessarily Meant to Be Read as Art Postwar Media Poetics from Cage to Warholrdquo(PhD diss Columbia University 2002) 83ndash115 Kotz follows a different lineage outof Cage and into performance and happenings than the one traced in this essay

43 Marter 13244 Walter Hopps in the first survey catalog of Rauschenbergrsquos early work does

not name the black paintings as a group as he does the White Paintings He calls themeach Untitled followed by a description in brackets Hopps notes of the largest ofthese works that ldquoThese paintings with a greater vastness and ambiguity of scale thanother Rauschenberg works relate to spatial qualities of Jackson Pollockrdquo HoppsRobert Rauschenberg The Early 1950s (Houston Houston Fine Art Press 1991) 67This convention was also followed in Rauschenbergrsquos 1997 Guggenheim retrospectivecatalog and is followed in this essay Robert Rauschenberg A Retrospective ed WalterHopps and Susan Davidson (New York Solomon R Guggenheim Museum 1997)

45 The piece is called Untitled [two black panels] (1953) Hopps Robert Rauschenberg99

46 Helen Molesworth notes the importance of Rauschenbergrsquos newspaper groundin the black paintings and develops this problem in relation to the abject body as it isfurther pursued in his work throughout the 1950s Helen Molesworth ldquoBefore BedrdquoOctober 63 (Winter 1993) 68ndash82

47 Asked about this work Rauschenberg said ldquoI called them combines I had tocoin that word because I got so bored with arguments I was interested in people seeingmy work When someone would come up and I really wanted to know what they thoughtof it or wanted to sense the exposure there was always this screen that they could getbehind which was if I said lsquoIt is paintingrsquo they would say lsquoThatrsquos not painting Thatrsquossculpturersquo And they thought this was very interestingrdquo Jeanne Siegel ArtwordsDiscourse on the 60s and 70s (New York DaCapo 1985) 153

48 Allan Kaprow ldquoa Statementrdquo in Happenings An Illustrated Anthology edMichael Kirby (New York EP Dutton and Co 1965) 44ndash45

49 Benjamin Buchloh notes the importance of play in the 1950s and its link toconsumer culture During the 1950s he writes ldquoa theory of games would remerge asa cultural project at the very moment of an ever-increasing instrumentalization oflibidinal desire through consumer culturerdquo Benjamin HD Buchloh ldquoRobert WattsInanimate ObjectsmdashInanimate Subjectsrdquo in Buchloh and Rodenbeck Experiments inthe Everyday 25 n 4

92 Grey Room 13

storefront It also included flashing lights andsounds calling out to the viewer like a ConeyIsland carnival booth but one made all the moreconfusing with its hyperarray of upside-downand fragmented word parts While collage hadbeen delicate even dainty in its appliqueacute of smallscraps of paper to the surface of the image KaprowrsquosPenny Arcade was massive and rough-hewn Unlikeits glitzier real-world counterpart Penny Arcadelooks cobbled together a temporary faccedilade brico-laged from odds and ends Here Kaprow turnedthe gallery space into the street turning the wallinto a pseudo-storefront bringing the architec-ture of the outside world into the gallery but lteredthrough the compositional strategies of collage

and abstract expressionism Abstraction before world war II had beenundertaken in a quest to find a universal Esperanto of color and form a problem that had been transformed by abstract expressionisminto a private iconography of psychic signs In Penny Arcade Kaprowturns the private symbolism of abstraction expressionism back to the world through advertising as commodity sign He makes the private symbol public again by reconnecting prendashWorld War II modelsof collective production with postndashWorld War II models of collectiveconsumption

Another work from this time further demonstrates how Kaprowused everyday materials to partition space Alternately titled (inAssemblage) Wall Kiosk and Rearrangeable Panels (1957ndash1959) thispiece looks like an enormous folding Japanese screen Measuring eightfeet high and over twenty feet long its panels are covered in eggshellsleaves and broken mirrorsmdashnot mass-produced commodities or sig-nage but detritus and waste Several of the panels are painted one inHoffmanrsquos push-pull style two seem to nod toward Rauschenberg onepainted white one black This piece is designed to sit on the oor ofthe gallery and as its various names imply it can be placed in a varietyof positions called ldquowallrdquo when arrayed in a straight line ldquokioskrdquowhen arranged into a square and ldquorearrangeable panelsrdquo in generalor when it sits in a zigzag Each position changes the relationship ofthe object to the space that contains it Kaprow recast the painting-as-wall as a transformable piece of furniture recognizing the possibilityof ludic engagement with the viewer but withholding it because theviewer is not allowed to interact with the piece directly Once installedthe work transforms the space of the gallery but it cannot be recong-ured by the viewer49

When asked why he used junk to make his work Kaprow replied

Allan Kaprow standing infront of Penny Arcade 1956Photo WF Gainfort

Kaizen | Framed Space Allan Kaprow and the Spread of Painting 93

It was clearly part of transformingreality It gave everyone a sense ofinstant involvement in a kind of crudeeveryday reality which was quite arelief after the high-art attitude ofexclusion from the real world It alsoallowed us to give up a certain kindof seriousness that traditional artmaking required Whatrsquos more thematerials were available everywhereon street corners at night And ifyou didnrsquot sell these environmentalconstructions yoursquod just throwthem back into the garbage canWhy not just throw them out It wasvery liberating to think of oneself aspart of an endlessly transformingreal world50

The ldquocrude everyday realityrdquo capturedby Penny Arcade as with Kaprowrsquos subsequent work is predicatedupon his project of capturing the ldquoendlessly transforming real worldrdquoThis statement connects him with Rauschenberg and Cage but alsoshows how their work differs in an important and crucial way InKaprowrsquos comment describing his experience of 4rsquo33 (as quoted inthe previous section) he says ldquoAnd we the listeners in Cagersquos concertand the lookers at Rauschenbergrsquos pictures were the collaborators of[sic] the artworkrdquo ending with ldquoIt was a kind of collaborative end-lessly changing affair The artwork was simply this organism that wasaliverdquo51 For Kaprow the key word here is change and in order tomove from artwork to organism the work of art must be reconsiderednot as a ldquochance operationrdquo (to use Cagersquos term) but as a change oper-ation During this time Kaprow had begun to take classes with Cageand he was exposed to Cagersquos use of chance methods of compositionWhile he would adopt much from Cagersquos work and teaching he thoughtthat change was the most important principle for his own work52

For Kaprow change was integrally connected to the postndashworld warII environment lled with mass-produced throwaway products Theart of this timemdashhis artmdashshould necessarily reect this environmentIn opposition to the nostalgic use of the objet trouveacute in surrealism hismethod was closer to the readymade choosing everyday objects to res-cue from oblivion but spreading them out in space so that they wouldenvironmentally engulf the viewer53 Kaprow temporarily revalues thethrowaway commodity in his environments to create a space where

Allan Kaprow RearrangeablePanels 1957-9 Shown intheir ldquoKioskrdquo con gurationPhoto Robert R McElroy

94 Grey Room 13

everyday life as planned obsolescence is brought under the control ofthe artist He creates a momentary space of anti-entropy in the life ofthe commodity where it is temporarily reinvested with value only to bedisposed of once the environment is destroyed54 Citing critic LawrenceAlloway on the ldquothrowawayrdquo culture of postndashworld war II AmericaKaprow goes on to describe the importance of change in his work

Change governing both reality and art has extended from theexpression of an idea arrested in a painting to a work in whichthe usually slow mutations wrought by nature are quickened andliterally made part of the experience of it they manifest the veryprocess of creation-decay-creation almost as one watches Theuse of debris waste products or very impermanent substanceslike toilet paper or bread has of course a clear range of allusionswith obvious sociological implications the simplest being theartistrsquos positive involvement on the one hand with an everydayworld and on the other with a group of objects which beingexpendable might suggest that corresponding lack of statuswhich is supposed to be the fate of anything creative todayThese choices must not be ignored for they reveal what in oursurroundings charges the imagination as well as what is mosthuman in our art55

What is ldquomost humanrdquo in Kaprowrsquos art as he denes it is its reectionof this throwaway culture This is governed not by Cagean chance butby planned obsolescence with its endless renewal of more of thesame ldquo[My] workrdquo Kaprow says ldquois intended to last only a short timeand is destroyed immediately after the exhibition If [its] obsolescenceis not planned it is expectedrdquo56 Alloway also writing on assemblagebetter describes the overlap between the throwaway object and its usein environmental art during the 1950s

The acceptance of mass-produced objects just because they arewhat is around not because they issue from idolatrised technol-ogy is central to mid-century Junk Culture Junk Culture iscity art Its source is obsolescence the throwaway material ofcities Assemblages of such material come at the spectator asbits of life bits of the environment frequently presented interms that dramatize spread ow extension trespass The junkis obtruded into our space with the aim of achieving maximumintimacy Proximity and participation replace distance and con-templation as the communicative style of the object57

So the space of Junk Culture when used in art as assemblage or envi-ronment achieves ldquomaximum intimacyrdquo with the observer throughtheir ldquoproximity and participationrdquo with the throwaway commodity

Kaizen | Framed Space Allan Kaprow and the Spread of Painting 95

As Kaprow moves farther into the space of the gallery he does so in anincreased attempt to engage the viewer He partitions the gallery spaceso that the body of the viewer becomes a product of its participationwithin the eld of the throwaway commodity

These early wall-like constructions were for Kaprow still not closeenough to a participatory art Kaprow wanted to move further towardthe creation of environments and even events to take over the gallerywith a plenitude of throwaway objects among which the viewer wouldself-consciously circulate The action collages still maintained toomuch autonomy because they existed as individual objects and so asKaprow recalled ldquonow I simply filled the whole gallery up startingfrom one wall and ending with the otherrdquo58 With his rst environmentKaprow was no longer composing within the autonomous space ofpainting but composing the entire space of the gallery Kaprowrsquos rstenvironmentmdashmade at the Hansa Gallery in November 1958mdashwasmeant to totally engage the visitors to the gallery to make them intopart of the work itself ldquopassively or actively according to [their] talentsfor lsquoengagementrsquordquo59 From a drop ceiling of wires suspended in a gridseveral inches below the galleryrsquos original ceiling he hung variousmaterials creating a labyrinthine space divided by sheets of plastictangles of cellophane Scotch tape and more including a time-releasedmist of pine-scented deodorizer His work had taken over the galleryspace lling it with a nearly impenetrable eld of throwaway objects60

Kaprow took the ood of postndashworld war II consumer goods and usedthem to compose walls that partitioned space And composemdashin thetraditional sense of arranging shapes and forms on the surface of acanvasmdashis exactly what he did

Kaprow described his use of the full space of the gallery as a eld aterm that he derives from painting calling the second section of hisldquoAssemblagerdquo essay ldquoThe Field in Paintingrdquo ldquoThis space is in part theliteral distance between all solids included in the workrdquo Kaprowwrote ldquoBut it is also a space that is a direct heritage of paintingrdquo61

Everything in the space that he produced became part of his compo-sition including the viewer Like any other object in the work Kaprowsaid ldquoin as much as people visiting [an] environment are moving col-ored shapes [they] were counted lsquoinrsquordquo62 Each visitor as they movedthrough Kaprowrsquos labyrinth became a part of the work Art and lifehad now seemingly collapsed the autonomy of painting as a separateobjectmdashframed and isolated from the rest of its environment as a spaceonly for the eyemdashhad been abandoned for an embodied experienceViewing was now dependent upon space a space full of the objects ofeveryday life Using the materials of everyday life Kaprow invited hisviewers to get rid of their distance from the art object forcing theminto physical contact with his work This work he wrote ldquoinvites us

96 Grey Room 13

to cast aside for a moment proper manners andpartake wholly in the real nature of art and (onehopes) liferdquo63 Against the look-donrsquot-touch attitude ofmuseum and gallery Kaprow created a haptic spacewhere touch became the basis of the work where vis-itors came into physical contact with his throwawayobjects In this space as visitors threaded their waythrough the labyrinth the color of their clothes andtheir presence among these objects turned them intoa part of the work The viewer appeared as anotherthing in Kaprowrsquos composition not so different fromhis throwaway materials In his environment autonomycollapsed into participation based on the reicationof the subject as an obsolete material temporally

composited into the work While Kaprow certainly intended to includehis observers in the work he could do so only by turning them intoobjects rather than active subjects He later described his own sense ofthe failure with this exhibition that he couldnrsquot seem to engage theviewer enough but blamed it on the framing space of the galleryAfterward he said ldquoI complained immediately about the fact that therewas a sense of mystery until your eye reached a wall Then there wasa dead end At that point my disagreement with the gallery spacebeganrdquo64 But Kaprow didnrsquot abandon the gallerymdashat least not yet Toget closer to the everyday Kaprow thought he should more fully incor-porate the bodies of his viewers into his work This led to the origin ofhappenings in an attempt to make viewers into active subjects to engagethem more actively in creating the work as they became part of it

| | | | |

In 1958 Kaprow had presented two other early proto-happenings oneat Rutgers called Communication and one at George Segalrsquos farmcalled Pastorale65 Communication was based on work he had devel-oped in Cagersquos class It was close to traditional theater Presented in achapel that doubled as an auditorium for theater and music perfor-mances it included movement sound and banners unfurled from thebalconies Kaprow built ldquoplastic panelsrdquo behind which he performeda series of simple actions nally hiding himself from the audience bypainting the plastic wall in front of him and so ldquopainting himself outrdquoof the audiencersquos view66 For Pastorale he built frames that looked likeabysmal theater sets stretcher bars with torn strips of canvas runningfrom top to bottom During one part of the performance artists RobertWatts and Lucas Samaras painted on either side of one of these con-structions Inserted into the landscape these performance paintings

Part of the environment Allan Kaprow created for his piece Pastorale 1958Photo Vaughn Rachel

Kaizen | Framed Space Allan Kaprow and the Spread of Painting 97

marked the boundary between event and nonevent partitioning theground into territories and framing Pastoralersquos space using once againpainting as wall Unfortunately for Kaprow Pastorale was held during apicnic and the other participants were either too drunk or just plainunwilling to follow his directions They were engaged but refused tofollow his rules of play

18 Happenings in 6 Parts which took place in October 1959 wasthe rst ofcial happening67 Kaprow divided the inside of the galleryinto three smaller contiguous rooms using wooden two-by-fours Inphotographs of the piece as it was being installed these woodenbeams can be seen framing a space within the space of the gallerymdashnot into a proscenium stage but into an environment within the largergallery space where various events would occur Instead of wood ordrywall translucent plastic sheeting created the walls so that actioncould be partially seen from one room to the next Each room was litwith different colored lights and in each room where the audiencewas forced to sit and observe the action a group of actors movedthrough tightly scripted but simple routines as sounds came in and outand lms were projected

On the program the audience is listed under the ldquoCast of Participantsrdquowritten into the performance itself and actively engaged but only asthe subject of direction and authorial control At specific intervalsbells rang and the audience was required to change seats and to switchrooms based on instruction cards they had been given when they enteredthe gallery before the performance Kaprow had realized with his HansaGallery environment that he needed to give his viewers increasedresponsibility but he also realized that relinquishing too much con-trol could be a disaster as it had been in Pastorale As with his previ-ous work his goal with 18 Happenings was the ldquointegration of allelementsmdashenvironment constructed sections time space and peoplerdquoand the audience was once again included as just another material inhis composition68

During the fifth part of 18 Happenings one sequence of actionsseems to reveal Kaprowrsquos relationship with painting the viewer and space Kaprow had built a construction he called the ldquothe sandwich manrdquo named after its everyday counterparts paid to walkaround the city streets as human billboards Kaprowrsquos sandwich

Left The construction of thespace used for Allan Kaprowrsquos18 Happenings in 6 Parts1958

Right A view of Allan Kaprowrsquos18 Happenings whereRearrangeable Panels is partially visible on the leftThe in-set canvas panel onwhich actors painted live as part of the performance is shown at center PhotoScott Hyde

98 Grey Room 13

man was barely humanoidan automaton with forward-and backward-pointing mir-rors for a body bicycle wheelsfor feet and a gallon bucketof enamel paint for a headSticking out in front was apiece of wood for an arm end-ing in a hand that held cardslabeled ldquoXrdquo and ldquo3rdquo the adver-

tising handbill reduced to its zero degree In the middle of the sand-wich man hidden on a shelf between the two mirrors was a recordplayer and projecting out from behind it were two handles so that itcould be wheeled around the rooms As the sandwich man was wheeledfrom one room to another its mirrored body reflected the audienceback onto themselves their image taking the place of what would havebeen an advertisement They were reected not as participatory viewersnot even as active objects as in his environment but as passive objectsnow totally reied their image produced as a reection of Junk CultureHere in Brechtian fashion using a literal ldquoframing effectrdquo Kaprowturned his previous use of the viewer back into a critique of the eventitself In reecting the audiencersquos passivity back to them he forced amoment of recognition of their complicity in the production of thework They could see that as they became an ad on the sandwich manrsquosbelly so they became throwaway objects in his composition By reduc-ing the spectator to the general equivalence of these objects Kaprowrecognized the subject of the postndashWorld War II period as a product ofplanned obsolescence and consumer culture

Following this as the sandwich man was wheeled through the secondroom and into the third two men stood up from their seats one in eachroom Each took up a brush and a can of paint and approached oppo-site sides of one of the plastic walls simultaneously painting on a sec-tion of canvas set among the plastic walls and so turning the wall backinto a painting69 The canvas was left unprimed so that the simple gures that each artist painted (one was supposed to paint lines theother circles) would bleed through and so would be immediately visibleon the opposite side each mark responding to that of their partner Asin his two earlier happenings painting is done live before an audienceon a wall Kaprow showed the audience that when painting becomeswall it functions only to put space on display Here painting as a sin-gular art object was meaningless It became a throwaway stage propand so became a demonstration of how painting as object was part ofthe larger environment in which it resides The limit condition of paint-ing as wall with viewer as spectator was the gallery as frame70

The sandwich man part ofKaprowrsquos 18 HappeningsPhoto Scott Hyde

Kaizen | Framed Space Allan Kaprow and the Spread of Painting 99

What this sequence from 18 Happenings reveals is that Kaprow hadan acute sense of the way in which the gallery as frame produces sub-ject and space together He undermined the normal function of the artgallery turning both viewer and art object into Junk Culture Throwawayviewers throwaway paintings and throwaway rooms turned the galleryspacemdasha space designed to be neutral to hide itself as the objects itcontains become the sole focus of the viewerrsquos concentrationmdashinto thelocus of planned obsolescence With the creation of happeningsKaprow used Junk Culture against the doxa of gallery space upsettingthe common sense of what a space for art is and what it does Afterhappenings the paradoxical logic of the gallery as a site for both theprivate contemplation of singular aesthetic objects as well as the pub-lic transaction of luxury goods had been (however temporarily) sub-verted In asserting the gallery space as the limit condition of paintingKaprow framed the institution as the ground of artistic production

In ldquoThe Legacy of Jackson Pollockrdquo Kaprow says ldquoPollock left us atthe point where we must become preoccupied with and even dazzled by the space and objects of our everyday liferdquo71 In ldquoAssemblageEnvironments Happeningsrdquo bridging the gap between his early andlater work he concludes ldquothis has brought sharply into focus that theroom has always been a frame or format toordquo72 Kaprowrsquos collapse ofautonomy via art into lifemdashthat environments and happenings wouldldquopartake wholly in the real nature of art and (one hopes) liferdquomdashwasonly ever a hope as he himself knew If painting had used the frameas the delimitation of a eld for composition then environments andhappenings turned the gallery into the limit condition of this fieldWhile he tried to get closer to everyday life by making art he inevitablypushed it further away This ambivalence toward the collapse of artand life runs throughout Kaprowrsquos work even as he moved out of thegallery and into everyday life following his early work with his laterldquoactivitiesrdquo The early work was even by his own estimation more adisplay of experience and not a fair representation of actual everydayexperience But this is precisely where the importance of this work liesKaprowrsquos environments and happenings extended Rauschenbergrsquossemiautonomous gap so far that they turned the screw one notchhigher autonomy returning not though the sublation of art into archi-tecture but through the medium of framed space

100 Grey Room 13

NotesThanks to the generosity and insight of Karen Kurczynski John Harwood SethMcCormick Jaleh Mansoor Beth Hinderliter Vered Maimon Benjamin Buchloh andBarry Bergdoll as well as Branden Joseph and the Editors of Grey Room

1 Brian OrsquoDoherty Inside the White Cube The Ideology of the Gallery Space(Berkeley and Los Angeles University of California Press 1999) 15

2 It was originally called ldquoPainting Environments Happeningsrdquo and publishedin a condensed form in the catalog for the exhibition New FormsmdashNew Media I at the Martha Jackson Gallery New York the rst uptown show of Kaprow and his con-temporaries It was changed to ldquoAssemblage Environments and Happeningsrdquo for nalpublication Kaprow changed the title to incorporate the recent acceptance of the termassemblage It had been used rst by Helen Comstock to describe the work of ArthurDove in the 1920s but remained obscure until Jean Dubuffet popularized its use in 1953The term as used by Dubuffet was then adopted by William Seitz for his exhibitionThe Art of Assemblage at the Museum of Modern Art See Allan Kaprow AssemblageEnvironments and Happenings (New York Harry N Abrams 1966) 150ndash208 NewFormsmdashNew Media I (New York Martha Jackson Gallery 1960) np and RogerShattuck ldquoIntroduction How Collage Became Assemblagerdquo Essays on Assemblage(New York Museum of Modern Art 1992) 119

3 ldquoWhen I am in my painting Irsquom not aware of what Irsquom doingrdquo said PollockJackson Pollock Jackson Pollock Interviews Articles Reviews ed Pepe Karmel (NewYork Museum of Modern Art 1999) 17ndash18

4 Yard was Kaprowrsquos contribution to the exhibition Environments SituationsSpaces at the Martha Jackson Gallery a follow up to New FormsndashNew Media (see n 2)

5 ldquoAllan Kaprow and Robert Watts Interviewed by Sidney Simonrdquo in Benjamin HDBuchloh and Judith F Rodenbeck Experiments in the Everyday Allan Kaprow andRobert Watts Events Objects Documents (New York Wallach Art Gallery 1999) 76

6 To cite but one example of many Thomas Hirschhorn is an artist who continuesto extend and develop Kaprowrsquos legacy today

7 On Kaprow and performance see Amelia Jones Body Art Performing the Subject(Minneapolis University of Minnesota Press 1998) 56ndash57 Paul Schimmel ldquoLeap intothe Void Performance and the Objectrdquo in Out of Actions Between Performance andthe Object 1949ndash1979 ed Paul Schimmel (New York Thames and Hudson 1998)59ndash63

8 The relationship between painting and space had been explored before partic-ularly in the period between the two world wars by the artists associated with De Stijland constructivism For more on De Stijl see Nancy Troy The De Stijl Environment(Cambridge MIT Press 1983) On constructivism see Yve-Alain Bois ldquoEl LissitzkyRadical Reversibilityrdquo Art in America 76 no 4 (April 1988) 161ndash181 and Yve-AlainBois ldquoMaterial Utopiasrdquo Art in America 79 no 6 (June 1991) 98ndash107 Another Europeanwho explored the everyday object painting and space was Kurt Schwitters in the various incarnation of his Merzbau See Elizabeth Burns Gamard Kurt SchwittersrsquoMerzbau The Cathedral of Erotic Misery (New York Princeton Architectural Press2000) Two other important precursors who bridge the European and American con-text are Lazlo Moholy-Nagy and Friedrick Kiesler For information on Moholy-Nagyrsquosearly environmental projects as well as those of Lissitzy see Joan Ockman ldquoThe RoadNot Taken Alexander Dornerrsquos Way Beyond Artrdquo in Autonomy and Ideology Positioningan Avant-Garde in America ed RE Somol (New York Monicelli Press 1997) For

Kaizen | Framed Space Allan Kaprow and the Spread of Painting 101

information on Kiesler see RL Held Endless Innovations Frederick Kieslerrsquos Theoryand Scenic Design (Ann Arbor UMI Research Press 1982) Lisa Phillips FrederickKiesler (New York The Whitney Museum of American Art 1989) Brian OrsquoDohertydraws out the connections between the prendash and postndashWorld War II manifestations ofthis relationship in Inside the White Cube

9 For Benjamin the work of art attains autonomy under modernism with theemergence of art for artrsquos sake This autonomy is then usurped by mechanical repro-duction See Walter Benjamin ldquoThe Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproductionrdquoin Illuminations ed Hanna Arendt (New York Harcourt Brace and Jovanovich Inc1968) p 224-226 For Greenberg as the above quote indicates the autonomy of artcontinues even in the face of mechanization See Clement Greenberg ldquoTowards a NewerLaocoonrdquo Perceptions and Judgments 1939ndash1944 vol 1 of Clement Greenberg TheCollected Essays and Criticism ed John OrsquoBrien (Chicago University of Chicago1986) p 32

10 Rosalind Krauss uses the term ldquopost-medium conditionrdquo to designate ldquomixed-media installationrdquo work done today While Krauss argues that only the most signi-cant artists working since the 1960s reassert the medium in their work against thegeneral postmedium condition I believe that all mixed-media installation work operates using the gallery or institution as medium See Rosalind Krauss ldquoA Voyageon the North Seardquo Art in the Age of the Post-Medium Condition (New York Thamesand Hudson 1999) for her comments on a specic contemporary artist and the rein-vention of the medium see Rosalind Krauss ldquo And Then Turn Awayrdquo An Essayon James Colemanrdquo October 81 (Summer 1997) 5ndash33

11 Allan Kaprow ldquoThe Legacy of Jackson Pollockrdquo Art News 57 no 6 (October1958) 24ndash26 55ndash57 reprinted in Allan Kaprow Essays on the Blurring of Art andLife ed Jeff Kelley (Berkeley and Los Angles University of California Press 1993) 1ndash9 Kaprow has stated that the essay was written in 1956 in ldquoAllan Kaprow andRobert Watts Interviewed by Sidney Simonrdquo 77 Kaprow had been a student of bothHans Hoffman and Meyer Schapiro

12 Harold Rosenberg ldquoThe American Action Paintersrdquo Art News 52 (December1952) 22ndash23 In a footnote that Rosenberg added when the article was republished aspart of his book of collected essays in 1959 he added the following ldquoAction Paintinghas extracted the element of decision inherent in all art in that the work is not fin-ished at its beginning but has to be carried forward by an accumulation of lsquorightrsquo ges-tures In a word Action Painting is the abstraction of the moral element in art itsmark is moral tension in detachment from moral or esthetic certainties and it judgesitself morally in declaring that picture to be worthless which is not the incorporationof a genuine struggle one which could at any point have been lostrdquo Harold RosenbergThe Tradition of the New (New York Horizon Press 1959) 33ndash34 Kaprow recountsthe influence of Rosenbergrsquos essay on his work in ldquoAllan Kaprow and Robert WattsInterviewed by Sidney Simonrdquo 77

13 There were five all told They were held as follows 5ndash23 January 1948 24Januaryndash12 February 1949 21 Novemberndash10 December 1949 28 Novemberndash16 December1950 26 Novemberndash15 December 1951 These shows had a remarkable resonance onethat extended beyond even the insular New York art world when after the secondexhibition Life magazine published the feature article ldquoJackson Pollock Is He theGreatest Living Painter in the United Statesrdquo Dorothy Sieberling Life (August 81949) 42ndash45

14 Allan Kaprow ldquoThe Legacy of Jackson Pollockrdquo in Kaprow Essays on the

102 Grey Room 13

Blurringrdquo 615 Kaprow uses both the terms scale and size to describe Pollockrsquos work but as

TJ Clark has shown these are two very different terms and Pollock is a painter of sizeand not scale For Clark it is size that engages the body ldquoNormally speaking size isliteralmdasha matter of actual physical intuition It involves grasping how big or small acertain object really is most likely in relation to the size of the grasperrsquos upright body oroutspread armsrdquo TJ Clark ldquoPollockrsquos Smallnessrdquo in Jackson Pollock New Approachesed Kirk Varnedoe and Pepe Karmel (New York Museum of Modern Art 1999) 15

16 Kaprow ldquoThe Legacy of Jackson Pollockrdquo Essays on the Blurring 617 In most of his work the paint engages with the edge of the canvas emphasizing

and bordering it and not continuing around it as if the canvas had been cut down fromsome innite expanse Kaprow claims otherwise by singling out the exceptions sayingldquo[H]is art gives the impression of going on forever [T]hough evidence points to aslackening of the attack as Pollock came to the edges of many of his canvases in thebest ones he compensated for this by tacking much of the painted surface around theback of his stretchersrdquo Kaprow ldquoThe Legacy of Jackson Pollockrdquo Essays on the Blurringof Art and Life 5 An examination of the paintings shows that more often Pollockstopped before the edge or reworked his compositions after they were stretched sothat they reengaged with the edge even when cut from larger canvas Kaprow claimsotherwise because it furthers his arguments that Pollockrsquos paintings emerge into thespace of the viewer

18 Jackson Pollock ldquoApplication for a Guggenheim Fellowship 1947rdquo in JacksonPollock Interviews 17 The inuence of Greenberg at this time is discussed in StevenNaifeh and Gregory White Smith Jackson Pollock An American Saga (Aiken SCWoodwardWhite 1989) 551 Pollock had also engaged with wall-size painting duringhis association with Joseacute Clemente Orozco and in earlier work such as Mural(1943ndash1944) painted for Peggy Guggenheimrsquos house

19 Greenbergrsquos version of modernism was most fully laid out only in 1959 andpublished in 1960 ldquoIt was the stressing of the ineluctable atness of the surface thatremained however more fundamental than anything else to the process by whichpictorial art criticized and defined itself under Modernism For flatness alone wasunique and exclusive to pictorial art Because flatness was the only conditionpainting shared with no other art Modernist painting oriented itself to atness as itdid to nothing elserdquo In Clement Greenberg ldquoModernist Paintingrdquo in Modernism witha Vengeance 1957ndash1969 vol 4 of Clement Greenberg The Collected Essays andCriticism ed John OrsquoBrien (Chicago University of Chicago Press 1993) 87

20 Clement Greenberg ldquoThe Situation at the Momentrdquo in Arrogant Purpose1945ndash1949 vol 2 of Clement Greenberg The Collected Essays and Criticism ed JohnOrsquoBrien (Chicago University of Chicago 1986) 194ndash195

21 See Greenberg ldquoTowards a Newer Laocoonrdquo throughout22 Eric Lum has done extensive work on the relationship between abstract expres-

sionism and architecture The analysis in this essay follows from his especially whereBlakersquos project is concerned but also expands on it As he jumps from Blake to PhilipJohnson and Mark Rothkorsquos Houston Chapel however Lum misses the importance ofother interventions between painting and architecture such as those made by KaprowThis is evident when he says ldquoThrough this marriage of mural and wall paintingcould become fully integrated into architecture an idealized conjecture nor realizeduntil Mark Rothkorsquos 1971 Houston Chapelrdquo Eric Lum ldquoPollockrsquos Promise Toward anAbstract Expressionist Architecturerdquo Assemblage 39 (August 1999) 68

Kaizen | Framed Space Allan Kaprow and the Spread of Painting 103

23 Blake said of his visit to Pollockrsquos studio ldquoIt was a very sunny day and thesun was shining on the paintings I felt like I was standing in the Hall of Mirrors atVersailles It was a dazzling incredible sightrdquo Naifeh and Smith 588

24 Peter Blake No Place like Utopia Modern Architecture and the Company WeKept (New York Knopf 1993) 111ndash112

25 Miesrsquos museum plan was designed at the request of the editors at ArchitecturalForum who had been publishing a series of articles ldquoto show how building might beimproved through fuller and more imaginative use of existing resourcesrdquo They requesteddesigns for a variety of buildings that could be placed in a hypothetical city of 70000inhabitants ldquoNew Buildings for 194Xrdquo Architectural Forum 78 no 5 (May 1943)69ndash85 The Barcelona Pavilion was built in 1929 for the Barcelona Universal Expositionand was destroyed when the fair ended It was subsequently rebuilt in 1981ndash86

26 Peter Blake Mies van der Rohe (New York Pelican 1960) 54 It is worth notingthat like Miesrsquos use of the Kolbe sculpture Blake had Pollock actually make smallwire sculptures splattered with paint miniatures of sculptures that Blake hopedPollock would make for the actual museum Pollock himself was experimenting withsculpture around this time building three-dimensional forms out of papier-macirccheacutethat he then splattered with paint

27 Blakersquos collage space follows from Miesrsquos The production of collages as in situmodels for Miesrsquos buildings had begun in the twenties with his work for the journal Gin association with Dadaists such as Hans Richter Neil Levine notes this creation ofa collage space in Mies particularly in the Pavilion and the Museum for a Small Cityin relation to his use of reection to layer one surface on top of another Neil LevineldquolsquoThe Signicance of Factsrsquo Miesrsquo Collages Up Close and Personalrdquo Assemblage 37(December 1998) 71ndash101

28 Blake designed his museum just as Philip Johnson was building his Glass Housewhere they both spent considerable time while planning exhibitions for the Museumof Modern Art Johnsonrsquos inuence is also evident in Blakersquos design Blake No Placelike Utopia 149ndash155

29 Arthur Drexler ldquoUnframed Space A Museum for Jackson Pollackrsquos [sic] PaintingsrdquoInteriors and Industrial Design 109 no 6 (January 1950) 90ndash91 The article was partof a special issue whose theme was ldquoInteriors to Comerdquo a recurring topic that wasmeant ldquoto show the direction in which some of our best designers are goingrdquo The termunframed space was used several times in reference to Pollockrsquos work as the title oftwo articles Drexlerrsquos and one published slightly later by Berton Rouecheacute ThoughRouecheacute in an interview in To a Violent Grave says that Lee Krasner used the phraserst Charles Pollock says that Blake was the origin of the term The fact that Drexlerrsquosarticle was written and published earlier seems to conrm this See Berton RouecheacuteldquoUnframed Spacerdquo in Jackson Pollock Interviews 18ndash19 and Jeffrey Potter To aViolent Grave (New York Pushcart Press 1985) 126

30 Drexler 9031 Blake No Place like Utopia 113ndash11432 Blake completed construction on his ldquoPinwheel Houserdquo in 1952 It is a small

beach house that he designed for himself and his family in South Hampton on NewYorkrsquos Long Island Situated on the beach the house is square in plan and its fourexterior walls slide horizontally outward each in a successive clockwise directionrevealing glass walls When the exterior walls are fully extended and the house isviewed from above it forms a shape like a pinwheel Opening the exterior wallsreveals an ever-changing view of the landscape outside turning the ocean and the

104 Grey Room 13

dunes into the picturesque framing them so that they entirely ll the space of the walland put its surface in motion Blake had discussed with Pollock the possibility of hispainting the sliding walls so that his paintings would be superimposed over the land-scape Pollock considered it but Blake couldnrsquot come up with the commission moneythat Pollock asked for They never finalized their plans and it was never clear howthe panels were to be painted Blake suggested that they might be made of glass so hebought the sheet of glass that Pollock used to paint Number 29 1950 (1950) the paintingthat Hans Namuth lmed from underneath for his documentary on Pollock His col-laboration with Blake did lead to one commission a mural-size canvas done for ahouse designed by Marcel Breuer Untitled (Mural) (1950) Shortly after his collabo-ration with Blake Pollock began another unrealized architectural project this onewith Alfonso Ossorio and Tony Smith for a church designed by Smith with murals byPollock For more on all of this see Blake No Place like Utopia 114ndash118 Naifeh andSmith 649 and Lum ldquoPollockrsquos Promiserdquo 68 85ndash88

33 Lum ldquoPollockrsquos Promiserdquo 67ndash6834 A few pages down from Drexlerrsquos article on the Pollock Museum in Interiors

and Industrial Design was another architectural response to the same problem OlgaGueftrsquos article ldquoThe Museumrsquos Oasisrdquo describes another museum this one by Gyorgyand Juliet Kepes ldquoThe Kepesesrdquo it begins ldquoare not exactly opposed to museumsrdquo how-ever it would seem that they were opposed to museums containing works of artReplacing the art objects entirely the Kepeses substituted shells driftwood plantsand animals Instead of a natural history museum they proposed a modern-dayWunderkammerwhere natural forms take the place of art as objects for contemplationldquoThe proposed galleryrdquo they declared ldquowould bridge the gap between the art museumwhich is concerned with man-made beauty and the natural history museum whichis preoccupied with nature but not particularly with naturersquos beautyrdquo Gyorgy KepesrsquosThe New Landscape exhibition at MIT a year later in 1951 (the same years as theIndependent Grouprsquos similar exhibition Growth and Form in London) and the pub-lication that followed The New Landscape in Art and Sciencewould ultimately realizethis project with blown-up photographs of natural forms (cells shells and electronmicrographs) in place of actual objects

The Kepeses seem to have taken the next logical step beyond Blake proposing aneven more radical rethinking of the wall-size work of art Eliminating the need for theartist altogether they found abstract forms in nature and turned their reproductionsinto what would elsewhere have been works of art By turning the art object into scientic vision The Kepeses proposed its total instrumentation Autonomous abstractpainting was transformed into its instrumental other a mechanically reproduced science of vision Rather than turn art into interior design The Kepesesrsquo replacementof abstract painting recast the status of scientic technology into that of high art SeeOlga Gueft ldquoThe Museumrsquos Oasisrdquo Interiors and Industrial Design 109 no 6 (January1950) 100ndash103 and Gyorgy Kepes The New Landscape in Art and Science (ChicagoPaul Theobald and Co 1956)

35 Kaprow stated that it was ldquoIn 1949 [that] I saw an exhibition of [Pollockrsquos] workfor the rst timerdquo ldquoInterviewrdquo in Allan Kaprow (Pasadena Pasadena Art Museum1967) 7

36 See Kaprow ldquoThe Legacy of Jackson Pollockrdquo Art News 25 and Kaprow ldquoTheLegacy of Jackson Pollockrdquo Essays on the Blurring 3

37 Joan Marter ldquoThe Forgotten Legacy Happenings Pop Art and Fluxus at RutgersUniversityrdquo in Off Limits Rutgers University and the Avant-Garde 1957ndash1963 ed Joan

Kaizen | Framed Space Allan Kaprow and the Spread of Painting 105

Marter (Newark The Newark Museum 1999) 438 Marter 13239 Quoted in John Cage Silence (Middletown Wesleyan University Press 1961) 10540 Branden Joseph has developed the link between Cage and Rauschenberg in several

recent essays See Branden W Joseph ldquoJohn Cage and the Architecture of SilencerdquoOctober 81 (Summer 1997) 81ndash104 and Branden Joseph ldquoWhite on Whiterdquo CriticalInquiry 27 no 1 (Summer 2001) 90ndash121

41 For Cage on Rauschenberg see Cage Silence98ndash108 For his description ofTheater Piece No 1 see ldquoInterview with John Cagerdquo in Happenings and Other Actsed Mariellen R Sandford (New York Routledge 1995) 53 Cage subsequently referredto Theater Piece No 1 as ldquothe rst happeningrdquo See John Cage ldquoAn AutobiographicalStatementrdquo Southwest Review 76 no 1 (Winter 1991) 65

42 The score itself has had various incarnations It wasnrsquot published until 1960and in this version includes a note wherein Cage describes the rst performance byTudor For more on 4rsquo33 and its various scores see Liz Kotz ldquoWords on Paper NotNecessarily Meant to Be Read as Art Postwar Media Poetics from Cage to Warholrdquo(PhD diss Columbia University 2002) 83ndash115 Kotz follows a different lineage outof Cage and into performance and happenings than the one traced in this essay

43 Marter 13244 Walter Hopps in the first survey catalog of Rauschenbergrsquos early work does

not name the black paintings as a group as he does the White Paintings He calls themeach Untitled followed by a description in brackets Hopps notes of the largest ofthese works that ldquoThese paintings with a greater vastness and ambiguity of scale thanother Rauschenberg works relate to spatial qualities of Jackson Pollockrdquo HoppsRobert Rauschenberg The Early 1950s (Houston Houston Fine Art Press 1991) 67This convention was also followed in Rauschenbergrsquos 1997 Guggenheim retrospectivecatalog and is followed in this essay Robert Rauschenberg A Retrospective ed WalterHopps and Susan Davidson (New York Solomon R Guggenheim Museum 1997)

45 The piece is called Untitled [two black panels] (1953) Hopps Robert Rauschenberg99

46 Helen Molesworth notes the importance of Rauschenbergrsquos newspaper groundin the black paintings and develops this problem in relation to the abject body as it isfurther pursued in his work throughout the 1950s Helen Molesworth ldquoBefore BedrdquoOctober 63 (Winter 1993) 68ndash82

47 Asked about this work Rauschenberg said ldquoI called them combines I had tocoin that word because I got so bored with arguments I was interested in people seeingmy work When someone would come up and I really wanted to know what they thoughtof it or wanted to sense the exposure there was always this screen that they could getbehind which was if I said lsquoIt is paintingrsquo they would say lsquoThatrsquos not painting Thatrsquossculpturersquo And they thought this was very interestingrdquo Jeanne Siegel ArtwordsDiscourse on the 60s and 70s (New York DaCapo 1985) 153

48 Allan Kaprow ldquoa Statementrdquo in Happenings An Illustrated Anthology edMichael Kirby (New York EP Dutton and Co 1965) 44ndash45

49 Benjamin Buchloh notes the importance of play in the 1950s and its link toconsumer culture During the 1950s he writes ldquoa theory of games would remerge asa cultural project at the very moment of an ever-increasing instrumentalization oflibidinal desire through consumer culturerdquo Benjamin HD Buchloh ldquoRobert WattsInanimate ObjectsmdashInanimate Subjectsrdquo in Buchloh and Rodenbeck Experiments inthe Everyday 25 n 4

Kaizen | Framed Space Allan Kaprow and the Spread of Painting 93

It was clearly part of transformingreality It gave everyone a sense ofinstant involvement in a kind of crudeeveryday reality which was quite arelief after the high-art attitude ofexclusion from the real world It alsoallowed us to give up a certain kindof seriousness that traditional artmaking required Whatrsquos more thematerials were available everywhereon street corners at night And ifyou didnrsquot sell these environmentalconstructions yoursquod just throwthem back into the garbage canWhy not just throw them out It wasvery liberating to think of oneself aspart of an endlessly transformingreal world50

The ldquocrude everyday realityrdquo capturedby Penny Arcade as with Kaprowrsquos subsequent work is predicatedupon his project of capturing the ldquoendlessly transforming real worldrdquoThis statement connects him with Rauschenberg and Cage but alsoshows how their work differs in an important and crucial way InKaprowrsquos comment describing his experience of 4rsquo33 (as quoted inthe previous section) he says ldquoAnd we the listeners in Cagersquos concertand the lookers at Rauschenbergrsquos pictures were the collaborators of[sic] the artworkrdquo ending with ldquoIt was a kind of collaborative end-lessly changing affair The artwork was simply this organism that wasaliverdquo51 For Kaprow the key word here is change and in order tomove from artwork to organism the work of art must be reconsiderednot as a ldquochance operationrdquo (to use Cagersquos term) but as a change oper-ation During this time Kaprow had begun to take classes with Cageand he was exposed to Cagersquos use of chance methods of compositionWhile he would adopt much from Cagersquos work and teaching he thoughtthat change was the most important principle for his own work52

For Kaprow change was integrally connected to the postndashworld warII environment lled with mass-produced throwaway products Theart of this timemdashhis artmdashshould necessarily reect this environmentIn opposition to the nostalgic use of the objet trouveacute in surrealism hismethod was closer to the readymade choosing everyday objects to res-cue from oblivion but spreading them out in space so that they wouldenvironmentally engulf the viewer53 Kaprow temporarily revalues thethrowaway commodity in his environments to create a space where

Allan Kaprow RearrangeablePanels 1957-9 Shown intheir ldquoKioskrdquo con gurationPhoto Robert R McElroy

94 Grey Room 13

everyday life as planned obsolescence is brought under the control ofthe artist He creates a momentary space of anti-entropy in the life ofthe commodity where it is temporarily reinvested with value only to bedisposed of once the environment is destroyed54 Citing critic LawrenceAlloway on the ldquothrowawayrdquo culture of postndashworld war II AmericaKaprow goes on to describe the importance of change in his work

Change governing both reality and art has extended from theexpression of an idea arrested in a painting to a work in whichthe usually slow mutations wrought by nature are quickened andliterally made part of the experience of it they manifest the veryprocess of creation-decay-creation almost as one watches Theuse of debris waste products or very impermanent substanceslike toilet paper or bread has of course a clear range of allusionswith obvious sociological implications the simplest being theartistrsquos positive involvement on the one hand with an everydayworld and on the other with a group of objects which beingexpendable might suggest that corresponding lack of statuswhich is supposed to be the fate of anything creative todayThese choices must not be ignored for they reveal what in oursurroundings charges the imagination as well as what is mosthuman in our art55

What is ldquomost humanrdquo in Kaprowrsquos art as he denes it is its reectionof this throwaway culture This is governed not by Cagean chance butby planned obsolescence with its endless renewal of more of thesame ldquo[My] workrdquo Kaprow says ldquois intended to last only a short timeand is destroyed immediately after the exhibition If [its] obsolescenceis not planned it is expectedrdquo56 Alloway also writing on assemblagebetter describes the overlap between the throwaway object and its usein environmental art during the 1950s

The acceptance of mass-produced objects just because they arewhat is around not because they issue from idolatrised technol-ogy is central to mid-century Junk Culture Junk Culture iscity art Its source is obsolescence the throwaway material ofcities Assemblages of such material come at the spectator asbits of life bits of the environment frequently presented interms that dramatize spread ow extension trespass The junkis obtruded into our space with the aim of achieving maximumintimacy Proximity and participation replace distance and con-templation as the communicative style of the object57

So the space of Junk Culture when used in art as assemblage or envi-ronment achieves ldquomaximum intimacyrdquo with the observer throughtheir ldquoproximity and participationrdquo with the throwaway commodity

Kaizen | Framed Space Allan Kaprow and the Spread of Painting 95

As Kaprow moves farther into the space of the gallery he does so in anincreased attempt to engage the viewer He partitions the gallery spaceso that the body of the viewer becomes a product of its participationwithin the eld of the throwaway commodity

These early wall-like constructions were for Kaprow still not closeenough to a participatory art Kaprow wanted to move further towardthe creation of environments and even events to take over the gallerywith a plenitude of throwaway objects among which the viewer wouldself-consciously circulate The action collages still maintained toomuch autonomy because they existed as individual objects and so asKaprow recalled ldquonow I simply filled the whole gallery up startingfrom one wall and ending with the otherrdquo58 With his rst environmentKaprow was no longer composing within the autonomous space ofpainting but composing the entire space of the gallery Kaprowrsquos rstenvironmentmdashmade at the Hansa Gallery in November 1958mdashwasmeant to totally engage the visitors to the gallery to make them intopart of the work itself ldquopassively or actively according to [their] talentsfor lsquoengagementrsquordquo59 From a drop ceiling of wires suspended in a gridseveral inches below the galleryrsquos original ceiling he hung variousmaterials creating a labyrinthine space divided by sheets of plastictangles of cellophane Scotch tape and more including a time-releasedmist of pine-scented deodorizer His work had taken over the galleryspace lling it with a nearly impenetrable eld of throwaway objects60

Kaprow took the ood of postndashworld war II consumer goods and usedthem to compose walls that partitioned space And composemdashin thetraditional sense of arranging shapes and forms on the surface of acanvasmdashis exactly what he did

Kaprow described his use of the full space of the gallery as a eld aterm that he derives from painting calling the second section of hisldquoAssemblagerdquo essay ldquoThe Field in Paintingrdquo ldquoThis space is in part theliteral distance between all solids included in the workrdquo Kaprowwrote ldquoBut it is also a space that is a direct heritage of paintingrdquo61

Everything in the space that he produced became part of his compo-sition including the viewer Like any other object in the work Kaprowsaid ldquoin as much as people visiting [an] environment are moving col-ored shapes [they] were counted lsquoinrsquordquo62 Each visitor as they movedthrough Kaprowrsquos labyrinth became a part of the work Art and lifehad now seemingly collapsed the autonomy of painting as a separateobjectmdashframed and isolated from the rest of its environment as a spaceonly for the eyemdashhad been abandoned for an embodied experienceViewing was now dependent upon space a space full of the objects ofeveryday life Using the materials of everyday life Kaprow invited hisviewers to get rid of their distance from the art object forcing theminto physical contact with his work This work he wrote ldquoinvites us

96 Grey Room 13

to cast aside for a moment proper manners andpartake wholly in the real nature of art and (onehopes) liferdquo63 Against the look-donrsquot-touch attitude ofmuseum and gallery Kaprow created a haptic spacewhere touch became the basis of the work where vis-itors came into physical contact with his throwawayobjects In this space as visitors threaded their waythrough the labyrinth the color of their clothes andtheir presence among these objects turned them intoa part of the work The viewer appeared as anotherthing in Kaprowrsquos composition not so different fromhis throwaway materials In his environment autonomycollapsed into participation based on the reicationof the subject as an obsolete material temporally

composited into the work While Kaprow certainly intended to includehis observers in the work he could do so only by turning them intoobjects rather than active subjects He later described his own sense ofthe failure with this exhibition that he couldnrsquot seem to engage theviewer enough but blamed it on the framing space of the galleryAfterward he said ldquoI complained immediately about the fact that therewas a sense of mystery until your eye reached a wall Then there wasa dead end At that point my disagreement with the gallery spacebeganrdquo64 But Kaprow didnrsquot abandon the gallerymdashat least not yet Toget closer to the everyday Kaprow thought he should more fully incor-porate the bodies of his viewers into his work This led to the origin ofhappenings in an attempt to make viewers into active subjects to engagethem more actively in creating the work as they became part of it

| | | | |

In 1958 Kaprow had presented two other early proto-happenings oneat Rutgers called Communication and one at George Segalrsquos farmcalled Pastorale65 Communication was based on work he had devel-oped in Cagersquos class It was close to traditional theater Presented in achapel that doubled as an auditorium for theater and music perfor-mances it included movement sound and banners unfurled from thebalconies Kaprow built ldquoplastic panelsrdquo behind which he performeda series of simple actions nally hiding himself from the audience bypainting the plastic wall in front of him and so ldquopainting himself outrdquoof the audiencersquos view66 For Pastorale he built frames that looked likeabysmal theater sets stretcher bars with torn strips of canvas runningfrom top to bottom During one part of the performance artists RobertWatts and Lucas Samaras painted on either side of one of these con-structions Inserted into the landscape these performance paintings

Part of the environment Allan Kaprow created for his piece Pastorale 1958Photo Vaughn Rachel

Kaizen | Framed Space Allan Kaprow and the Spread of Painting 97

marked the boundary between event and nonevent partitioning theground into territories and framing Pastoralersquos space using once againpainting as wall Unfortunately for Kaprow Pastorale was held during apicnic and the other participants were either too drunk or just plainunwilling to follow his directions They were engaged but refused tofollow his rules of play

18 Happenings in 6 Parts which took place in October 1959 wasthe rst ofcial happening67 Kaprow divided the inside of the galleryinto three smaller contiguous rooms using wooden two-by-fours Inphotographs of the piece as it was being installed these woodenbeams can be seen framing a space within the space of the gallerymdashnot into a proscenium stage but into an environment within the largergallery space where various events would occur Instead of wood ordrywall translucent plastic sheeting created the walls so that actioncould be partially seen from one room to the next Each room was litwith different colored lights and in each room where the audiencewas forced to sit and observe the action a group of actors movedthrough tightly scripted but simple routines as sounds came in and outand lms were projected

On the program the audience is listed under the ldquoCast of Participantsrdquowritten into the performance itself and actively engaged but only asthe subject of direction and authorial control At specific intervalsbells rang and the audience was required to change seats and to switchrooms based on instruction cards they had been given when they enteredthe gallery before the performance Kaprow had realized with his HansaGallery environment that he needed to give his viewers increasedresponsibility but he also realized that relinquishing too much con-trol could be a disaster as it had been in Pastorale As with his previ-ous work his goal with 18 Happenings was the ldquointegration of allelementsmdashenvironment constructed sections time space and peoplerdquoand the audience was once again included as just another material inhis composition68

During the fifth part of 18 Happenings one sequence of actionsseems to reveal Kaprowrsquos relationship with painting the viewer and space Kaprow had built a construction he called the ldquothe sandwich manrdquo named after its everyday counterparts paid to walkaround the city streets as human billboards Kaprowrsquos sandwich

Left The construction of thespace used for Allan Kaprowrsquos18 Happenings in 6 Parts1958

Right A view of Allan Kaprowrsquos18 Happenings whereRearrangeable Panels is partially visible on the leftThe in-set canvas panel onwhich actors painted live as part of the performance is shown at center PhotoScott Hyde

98 Grey Room 13

man was barely humanoidan automaton with forward-and backward-pointing mir-rors for a body bicycle wheelsfor feet and a gallon bucketof enamel paint for a headSticking out in front was apiece of wood for an arm end-ing in a hand that held cardslabeled ldquoXrdquo and ldquo3rdquo the adver-

tising handbill reduced to its zero degree In the middle of the sand-wich man hidden on a shelf between the two mirrors was a recordplayer and projecting out from behind it were two handles so that itcould be wheeled around the rooms As the sandwich man was wheeledfrom one room to another its mirrored body reflected the audienceback onto themselves their image taking the place of what would havebeen an advertisement They were reected not as participatory viewersnot even as active objects as in his environment but as passive objectsnow totally reied their image produced as a reection of Junk CultureHere in Brechtian fashion using a literal ldquoframing effectrdquo Kaprowturned his previous use of the viewer back into a critique of the eventitself In reecting the audiencersquos passivity back to them he forced amoment of recognition of their complicity in the production of thework They could see that as they became an ad on the sandwich manrsquosbelly so they became throwaway objects in his composition By reduc-ing the spectator to the general equivalence of these objects Kaprowrecognized the subject of the postndashWorld War II period as a product ofplanned obsolescence and consumer culture

Following this as the sandwich man was wheeled through the secondroom and into the third two men stood up from their seats one in eachroom Each took up a brush and a can of paint and approached oppo-site sides of one of the plastic walls simultaneously painting on a sec-tion of canvas set among the plastic walls and so turning the wall backinto a painting69 The canvas was left unprimed so that the simple gures that each artist painted (one was supposed to paint lines theother circles) would bleed through and so would be immediately visibleon the opposite side each mark responding to that of their partner Asin his two earlier happenings painting is done live before an audienceon a wall Kaprow showed the audience that when painting becomeswall it functions only to put space on display Here painting as a sin-gular art object was meaningless It became a throwaway stage propand so became a demonstration of how painting as object was part ofthe larger environment in which it resides The limit condition of paint-ing as wall with viewer as spectator was the gallery as frame70

The sandwich man part ofKaprowrsquos 18 HappeningsPhoto Scott Hyde

Kaizen | Framed Space Allan Kaprow and the Spread of Painting 99

What this sequence from 18 Happenings reveals is that Kaprow hadan acute sense of the way in which the gallery as frame produces sub-ject and space together He undermined the normal function of the artgallery turning both viewer and art object into Junk Culture Throwawayviewers throwaway paintings and throwaway rooms turned the galleryspacemdasha space designed to be neutral to hide itself as the objects itcontains become the sole focus of the viewerrsquos concentrationmdashinto thelocus of planned obsolescence With the creation of happeningsKaprow used Junk Culture against the doxa of gallery space upsettingthe common sense of what a space for art is and what it does Afterhappenings the paradoxical logic of the gallery as a site for both theprivate contemplation of singular aesthetic objects as well as the pub-lic transaction of luxury goods had been (however temporarily) sub-verted In asserting the gallery space as the limit condition of paintingKaprow framed the institution as the ground of artistic production

In ldquoThe Legacy of Jackson Pollockrdquo Kaprow says ldquoPollock left us atthe point where we must become preoccupied with and even dazzled by the space and objects of our everyday liferdquo71 In ldquoAssemblageEnvironments Happeningsrdquo bridging the gap between his early andlater work he concludes ldquothis has brought sharply into focus that theroom has always been a frame or format toordquo72 Kaprowrsquos collapse ofautonomy via art into lifemdashthat environments and happenings wouldldquopartake wholly in the real nature of art and (one hopes) liferdquomdashwasonly ever a hope as he himself knew If painting had used the frameas the delimitation of a eld for composition then environments andhappenings turned the gallery into the limit condition of this fieldWhile he tried to get closer to everyday life by making art he inevitablypushed it further away This ambivalence toward the collapse of artand life runs throughout Kaprowrsquos work even as he moved out of thegallery and into everyday life following his early work with his laterldquoactivitiesrdquo The early work was even by his own estimation more adisplay of experience and not a fair representation of actual everydayexperience But this is precisely where the importance of this work liesKaprowrsquos environments and happenings extended Rauschenbergrsquossemiautonomous gap so far that they turned the screw one notchhigher autonomy returning not though the sublation of art into archi-tecture but through the medium of framed space

100 Grey Room 13

NotesThanks to the generosity and insight of Karen Kurczynski John Harwood SethMcCormick Jaleh Mansoor Beth Hinderliter Vered Maimon Benjamin Buchloh andBarry Bergdoll as well as Branden Joseph and the Editors of Grey Room

1 Brian OrsquoDoherty Inside the White Cube The Ideology of the Gallery Space(Berkeley and Los Angeles University of California Press 1999) 15

2 It was originally called ldquoPainting Environments Happeningsrdquo and publishedin a condensed form in the catalog for the exhibition New FormsmdashNew Media I at the Martha Jackson Gallery New York the rst uptown show of Kaprow and his con-temporaries It was changed to ldquoAssemblage Environments and Happeningsrdquo for nalpublication Kaprow changed the title to incorporate the recent acceptance of the termassemblage It had been used rst by Helen Comstock to describe the work of ArthurDove in the 1920s but remained obscure until Jean Dubuffet popularized its use in 1953The term as used by Dubuffet was then adopted by William Seitz for his exhibitionThe Art of Assemblage at the Museum of Modern Art See Allan Kaprow AssemblageEnvironments and Happenings (New York Harry N Abrams 1966) 150ndash208 NewFormsmdashNew Media I (New York Martha Jackson Gallery 1960) np and RogerShattuck ldquoIntroduction How Collage Became Assemblagerdquo Essays on Assemblage(New York Museum of Modern Art 1992) 119

3 ldquoWhen I am in my painting Irsquom not aware of what Irsquom doingrdquo said PollockJackson Pollock Jackson Pollock Interviews Articles Reviews ed Pepe Karmel (NewYork Museum of Modern Art 1999) 17ndash18

4 Yard was Kaprowrsquos contribution to the exhibition Environments SituationsSpaces at the Martha Jackson Gallery a follow up to New FormsndashNew Media (see n 2)

5 ldquoAllan Kaprow and Robert Watts Interviewed by Sidney Simonrdquo in Benjamin HDBuchloh and Judith F Rodenbeck Experiments in the Everyday Allan Kaprow andRobert Watts Events Objects Documents (New York Wallach Art Gallery 1999) 76

6 To cite but one example of many Thomas Hirschhorn is an artist who continuesto extend and develop Kaprowrsquos legacy today

7 On Kaprow and performance see Amelia Jones Body Art Performing the Subject(Minneapolis University of Minnesota Press 1998) 56ndash57 Paul Schimmel ldquoLeap intothe Void Performance and the Objectrdquo in Out of Actions Between Performance andthe Object 1949ndash1979 ed Paul Schimmel (New York Thames and Hudson 1998)59ndash63

8 The relationship between painting and space had been explored before partic-ularly in the period between the two world wars by the artists associated with De Stijland constructivism For more on De Stijl see Nancy Troy The De Stijl Environment(Cambridge MIT Press 1983) On constructivism see Yve-Alain Bois ldquoEl LissitzkyRadical Reversibilityrdquo Art in America 76 no 4 (April 1988) 161ndash181 and Yve-AlainBois ldquoMaterial Utopiasrdquo Art in America 79 no 6 (June 1991) 98ndash107 Another Europeanwho explored the everyday object painting and space was Kurt Schwitters in the various incarnation of his Merzbau See Elizabeth Burns Gamard Kurt SchwittersrsquoMerzbau The Cathedral of Erotic Misery (New York Princeton Architectural Press2000) Two other important precursors who bridge the European and American con-text are Lazlo Moholy-Nagy and Friedrick Kiesler For information on Moholy-Nagyrsquosearly environmental projects as well as those of Lissitzy see Joan Ockman ldquoThe RoadNot Taken Alexander Dornerrsquos Way Beyond Artrdquo in Autonomy and Ideology Positioningan Avant-Garde in America ed RE Somol (New York Monicelli Press 1997) For

Kaizen | Framed Space Allan Kaprow and the Spread of Painting 101

information on Kiesler see RL Held Endless Innovations Frederick Kieslerrsquos Theoryand Scenic Design (Ann Arbor UMI Research Press 1982) Lisa Phillips FrederickKiesler (New York The Whitney Museum of American Art 1989) Brian OrsquoDohertydraws out the connections between the prendash and postndashWorld War II manifestations ofthis relationship in Inside the White Cube

9 For Benjamin the work of art attains autonomy under modernism with theemergence of art for artrsquos sake This autonomy is then usurped by mechanical repro-duction See Walter Benjamin ldquoThe Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproductionrdquoin Illuminations ed Hanna Arendt (New York Harcourt Brace and Jovanovich Inc1968) p 224-226 For Greenberg as the above quote indicates the autonomy of artcontinues even in the face of mechanization See Clement Greenberg ldquoTowards a NewerLaocoonrdquo Perceptions and Judgments 1939ndash1944 vol 1 of Clement Greenberg TheCollected Essays and Criticism ed John OrsquoBrien (Chicago University of Chicago1986) p 32

10 Rosalind Krauss uses the term ldquopost-medium conditionrdquo to designate ldquomixed-media installationrdquo work done today While Krauss argues that only the most signi-cant artists working since the 1960s reassert the medium in their work against thegeneral postmedium condition I believe that all mixed-media installation work operates using the gallery or institution as medium See Rosalind Krauss ldquoA Voyageon the North Seardquo Art in the Age of the Post-Medium Condition (New York Thamesand Hudson 1999) for her comments on a specic contemporary artist and the rein-vention of the medium see Rosalind Krauss ldquo And Then Turn Awayrdquo An Essayon James Colemanrdquo October 81 (Summer 1997) 5ndash33

11 Allan Kaprow ldquoThe Legacy of Jackson Pollockrdquo Art News 57 no 6 (October1958) 24ndash26 55ndash57 reprinted in Allan Kaprow Essays on the Blurring of Art andLife ed Jeff Kelley (Berkeley and Los Angles University of California Press 1993) 1ndash9 Kaprow has stated that the essay was written in 1956 in ldquoAllan Kaprow andRobert Watts Interviewed by Sidney Simonrdquo 77 Kaprow had been a student of bothHans Hoffman and Meyer Schapiro

12 Harold Rosenberg ldquoThe American Action Paintersrdquo Art News 52 (December1952) 22ndash23 In a footnote that Rosenberg added when the article was republished aspart of his book of collected essays in 1959 he added the following ldquoAction Paintinghas extracted the element of decision inherent in all art in that the work is not fin-ished at its beginning but has to be carried forward by an accumulation of lsquorightrsquo ges-tures In a word Action Painting is the abstraction of the moral element in art itsmark is moral tension in detachment from moral or esthetic certainties and it judgesitself morally in declaring that picture to be worthless which is not the incorporationof a genuine struggle one which could at any point have been lostrdquo Harold RosenbergThe Tradition of the New (New York Horizon Press 1959) 33ndash34 Kaprow recountsthe influence of Rosenbergrsquos essay on his work in ldquoAllan Kaprow and Robert WattsInterviewed by Sidney Simonrdquo 77

13 There were five all told They were held as follows 5ndash23 January 1948 24Januaryndash12 February 1949 21 Novemberndash10 December 1949 28 Novemberndash16 December1950 26 Novemberndash15 December 1951 These shows had a remarkable resonance onethat extended beyond even the insular New York art world when after the secondexhibition Life magazine published the feature article ldquoJackson Pollock Is He theGreatest Living Painter in the United Statesrdquo Dorothy Sieberling Life (August 81949) 42ndash45

14 Allan Kaprow ldquoThe Legacy of Jackson Pollockrdquo in Kaprow Essays on the

102 Grey Room 13

Blurringrdquo 615 Kaprow uses both the terms scale and size to describe Pollockrsquos work but as

TJ Clark has shown these are two very different terms and Pollock is a painter of sizeand not scale For Clark it is size that engages the body ldquoNormally speaking size isliteralmdasha matter of actual physical intuition It involves grasping how big or small acertain object really is most likely in relation to the size of the grasperrsquos upright body oroutspread armsrdquo TJ Clark ldquoPollockrsquos Smallnessrdquo in Jackson Pollock New Approachesed Kirk Varnedoe and Pepe Karmel (New York Museum of Modern Art 1999) 15

16 Kaprow ldquoThe Legacy of Jackson Pollockrdquo Essays on the Blurring 617 In most of his work the paint engages with the edge of the canvas emphasizing

and bordering it and not continuing around it as if the canvas had been cut down fromsome innite expanse Kaprow claims otherwise by singling out the exceptions sayingldquo[H]is art gives the impression of going on forever [T]hough evidence points to aslackening of the attack as Pollock came to the edges of many of his canvases in thebest ones he compensated for this by tacking much of the painted surface around theback of his stretchersrdquo Kaprow ldquoThe Legacy of Jackson Pollockrdquo Essays on the Blurringof Art and Life 5 An examination of the paintings shows that more often Pollockstopped before the edge or reworked his compositions after they were stretched sothat they reengaged with the edge even when cut from larger canvas Kaprow claimsotherwise because it furthers his arguments that Pollockrsquos paintings emerge into thespace of the viewer

18 Jackson Pollock ldquoApplication for a Guggenheim Fellowship 1947rdquo in JacksonPollock Interviews 17 The inuence of Greenberg at this time is discussed in StevenNaifeh and Gregory White Smith Jackson Pollock An American Saga (Aiken SCWoodwardWhite 1989) 551 Pollock had also engaged with wall-size painting duringhis association with Joseacute Clemente Orozco and in earlier work such as Mural(1943ndash1944) painted for Peggy Guggenheimrsquos house

19 Greenbergrsquos version of modernism was most fully laid out only in 1959 andpublished in 1960 ldquoIt was the stressing of the ineluctable atness of the surface thatremained however more fundamental than anything else to the process by whichpictorial art criticized and defined itself under Modernism For flatness alone wasunique and exclusive to pictorial art Because flatness was the only conditionpainting shared with no other art Modernist painting oriented itself to atness as itdid to nothing elserdquo In Clement Greenberg ldquoModernist Paintingrdquo in Modernism witha Vengeance 1957ndash1969 vol 4 of Clement Greenberg The Collected Essays andCriticism ed John OrsquoBrien (Chicago University of Chicago Press 1993) 87

20 Clement Greenberg ldquoThe Situation at the Momentrdquo in Arrogant Purpose1945ndash1949 vol 2 of Clement Greenberg The Collected Essays and Criticism ed JohnOrsquoBrien (Chicago University of Chicago 1986) 194ndash195

21 See Greenberg ldquoTowards a Newer Laocoonrdquo throughout22 Eric Lum has done extensive work on the relationship between abstract expres-

sionism and architecture The analysis in this essay follows from his especially whereBlakersquos project is concerned but also expands on it As he jumps from Blake to PhilipJohnson and Mark Rothkorsquos Houston Chapel however Lum misses the importance ofother interventions between painting and architecture such as those made by KaprowThis is evident when he says ldquoThrough this marriage of mural and wall paintingcould become fully integrated into architecture an idealized conjecture nor realizeduntil Mark Rothkorsquos 1971 Houston Chapelrdquo Eric Lum ldquoPollockrsquos Promise Toward anAbstract Expressionist Architecturerdquo Assemblage 39 (August 1999) 68

Kaizen | Framed Space Allan Kaprow and the Spread of Painting 103

23 Blake said of his visit to Pollockrsquos studio ldquoIt was a very sunny day and thesun was shining on the paintings I felt like I was standing in the Hall of Mirrors atVersailles It was a dazzling incredible sightrdquo Naifeh and Smith 588

24 Peter Blake No Place like Utopia Modern Architecture and the Company WeKept (New York Knopf 1993) 111ndash112

25 Miesrsquos museum plan was designed at the request of the editors at ArchitecturalForum who had been publishing a series of articles ldquoto show how building might beimproved through fuller and more imaginative use of existing resourcesrdquo They requesteddesigns for a variety of buildings that could be placed in a hypothetical city of 70000inhabitants ldquoNew Buildings for 194Xrdquo Architectural Forum 78 no 5 (May 1943)69ndash85 The Barcelona Pavilion was built in 1929 for the Barcelona Universal Expositionand was destroyed when the fair ended It was subsequently rebuilt in 1981ndash86

26 Peter Blake Mies van der Rohe (New York Pelican 1960) 54 It is worth notingthat like Miesrsquos use of the Kolbe sculpture Blake had Pollock actually make smallwire sculptures splattered with paint miniatures of sculptures that Blake hopedPollock would make for the actual museum Pollock himself was experimenting withsculpture around this time building three-dimensional forms out of papier-macirccheacutethat he then splattered with paint

27 Blakersquos collage space follows from Miesrsquos The production of collages as in situmodels for Miesrsquos buildings had begun in the twenties with his work for the journal Gin association with Dadaists such as Hans Richter Neil Levine notes this creation ofa collage space in Mies particularly in the Pavilion and the Museum for a Small Cityin relation to his use of reection to layer one surface on top of another Neil LevineldquolsquoThe Signicance of Factsrsquo Miesrsquo Collages Up Close and Personalrdquo Assemblage 37(December 1998) 71ndash101

28 Blake designed his museum just as Philip Johnson was building his Glass Housewhere they both spent considerable time while planning exhibitions for the Museumof Modern Art Johnsonrsquos inuence is also evident in Blakersquos design Blake No Placelike Utopia 149ndash155

29 Arthur Drexler ldquoUnframed Space A Museum for Jackson Pollackrsquos [sic] PaintingsrdquoInteriors and Industrial Design 109 no 6 (January 1950) 90ndash91 The article was partof a special issue whose theme was ldquoInteriors to Comerdquo a recurring topic that wasmeant ldquoto show the direction in which some of our best designers are goingrdquo The termunframed space was used several times in reference to Pollockrsquos work as the title oftwo articles Drexlerrsquos and one published slightly later by Berton Rouecheacute ThoughRouecheacute in an interview in To a Violent Grave says that Lee Krasner used the phraserst Charles Pollock says that Blake was the origin of the term The fact that Drexlerrsquosarticle was written and published earlier seems to conrm this See Berton RouecheacuteldquoUnframed Spacerdquo in Jackson Pollock Interviews 18ndash19 and Jeffrey Potter To aViolent Grave (New York Pushcart Press 1985) 126

30 Drexler 9031 Blake No Place like Utopia 113ndash11432 Blake completed construction on his ldquoPinwheel Houserdquo in 1952 It is a small

beach house that he designed for himself and his family in South Hampton on NewYorkrsquos Long Island Situated on the beach the house is square in plan and its fourexterior walls slide horizontally outward each in a successive clockwise directionrevealing glass walls When the exterior walls are fully extended and the house isviewed from above it forms a shape like a pinwheel Opening the exterior wallsreveals an ever-changing view of the landscape outside turning the ocean and the

104 Grey Room 13

dunes into the picturesque framing them so that they entirely ll the space of the walland put its surface in motion Blake had discussed with Pollock the possibility of hispainting the sliding walls so that his paintings would be superimposed over the land-scape Pollock considered it but Blake couldnrsquot come up with the commission moneythat Pollock asked for They never finalized their plans and it was never clear howthe panels were to be painted Blake suggested that they might be made of glass so hebought the sheet of glass that Pollock used to paint Number 29 1950 (1950) the paintingthat Hans Namuth lmed from underneath for his documentary on Pollock His col-laboration with Blake did lead to one commission a mural-size canvas done for ahouse designed by Marcel Breuer Untitled (Mural) (1950) Shortly after his collabo-ration with Blake Pollock began another unrealized architectural project this onewith Alfonso Ossorio and Tony Smith for a church designed by Smith with murals byPollock For more on all of this see Blake No Place like Utopia 114ndash118 Naifeh andSmith 649 and Lum ldquoPollockrsquos Promiserdquo 68 85ndash88

33 Lum ldquoPollockrsquos Promiserdquo 67ndash6834 A few pages down from Drexlerrsquos article on the Pollock Museum in Interiors

and Industrial Design was another architectural response to the same problem OlgaGueftrsquos article ldquoThe Museumrsquos Oasisrdquo describes another museum this one by Gyorgyand Juliet Kepes ldquoThe Kepesesrdquo it begins ldquoare not exactly opposed to museumsrdquo how-ever it would seem that they were opposed to museums containing works of artReplacing the art objects entirely the Kepeses substituted shells driftwood plantsand animals Instead of a natural history museum they proposed a modern-dayWunderkammerwhere natural forms take the place of art as objects for contemplationldquoThe proposed galleryrdquo they declared ldquowould bridge the gap between the art museumwhich is concerned with man-made beauty and the natural history museum whichis preoccupied with nature but not particularly with naturersquos beautyrdquo Gyorgy KepesrsquosThe New Landscape exhibition at MIT a year later in 1951 (the same years as theIndependent Grouprsquos similar exhibition Growth and Form in London) and the pub-lication that followed The New Landscape in Art and Sciencewould ultimately realizethis project with blown-up photographs of natural forms (cells shells and electronmicrographs) in place of actual objects

The Kepeses seem to have taken the next logical step beyond Blake proposing aneven more radical rethinking of the wall-size work of art Eliminating the need for theartist altogether they found abstract forms in nature and turned their reproductionsinto what would elsewhere have been works of art By turning the art object into scientic vision The Kepeses proposed its total instrumentation Autonomous abstractpainting was transformed into its instrumental other a mechanically reproduced science of vision Rather than turn art into interior design The Kepesesrsquo replacementof abstract painting recast the status of scientic technology into that of high art SeeOlga Gueft ldquoThe Museumrsquos Oasisrdquo Interiors and Industrial Design 109 no 6 (January1950) 100ndash103 and Gyorgy Kepes The New Landscape in Art and Science (ChicagoPaul Theobald and Co 1956)

35 Kaprow stated that it was ldquoIn 1949 [that] I saw an exhibition of [Pollockrsquos] workfor the rst timerdquo ldquoInterviewrdquo in Allan Kaprow (Pasadena Pasadena Art Museum1967) 7

36 See Kaprow ldquoThe Legacy of Jackson Pollockrdquo Art News 25 and Kaprow ldquoTheLegacy of Jackson Pollockrdquo Essays on the Blurring 3

37 Joan Marter ldquoThe Forgotten Legacy Happenings Pop Art and Fluxus at RutgersUniversityrdquo in Off Limits Rutgers University and the Avant-Garde 1957ndash1963 ed Joan

Kaizen | Framed Space Allan Kaprow and the Spread of Painting 105

Marter (Newark The Newark Museum 1999) 438 Marter 13239 Quoted in John Cage Silence (Middletown Wesleyan University Press 1961) 10540 Branden Joseph has developed the link between Cage and Rauschenberg in several

recent essays See Branden W Joseph ldquoJohn Cage and the Architecture of SilencerdquoOctober 81 (Summer 1997) 81ndash104 and Branden Joseph ldquoWhite on Whiterdquo CriticalInquiry 27 no 1 (Summer 2001) 90ndash121

41 For Cage on Rauschenberg see Cage Silence98ndash108 For his description ofTheater Piece No 1 see ldquoInterview with John Cagerdquo in Happenings and Other Actsed Mariellen R Sandford (New York Routledge 1995) 53 Cage subsequently referredto Theater Piece No 1 as ldquothe rst happeningrdquo See John Cage ldquoAn AutobiographicalStatementrdquo Southwest Review 76 no 1 (Winter 1991) 65

42 The score itself has had various incarnations It wasnrsquot published until 1960and in this version includes a note wherein Cage describes the rst performance byTudor For more on 4rsquo33 and its various scores see Liz Kotz ldquoWords on Paper NotNecessarily Meant to Be Read as Art Postwar Media Poetics from Cage to Warholrdquo(PhD diss Columbia University 2002) 83ndash115 Kotz follows a different lineage outof Cage and into performance and happenings than the one traced in this essay

43 Marter 13244 Walter Hopps in the first survey catalog of Rauschenbergrsquos early work does

not name the black paintings as a group as he does the White Paintings He calls themeach Untitled followed by a description in brackets Hopps notes of the largest ofthese works that ldquoThese paintings with a greater vastness and ambiguity of scale thanother Rauschenberg works relate to spatial qualities of Jackson Pollockrdquo HoppsRobert Rauschenberg The Early 1950s (Houston Houston Fine Art Press 1991) 67This convention was also followed in Rauschenbergrsquos 1997 Guggenheim retrospectivecatalog and is followed in this essay Robert Rauschenberg A Retrospective ed WalterHopps and Susan Davidson (New York Solomon R Guggenheim Museum 1997)

45 The piece is called Untitled [two black panels] (1953) Hopps Robert Rauschenberg99

46 Helen Molesworth notes the importance of Rauschenbergrsquos newspaper groundin the black paintings and develops this problem in relation to the abject body as it isfurther pursued in his work throughout the 1950s Helen Molesworth ldquoBefore BedrdquoOctober 63 (Winter 1993) 68ndash82

47 Asked about this work Rauschenberg said ldquoI called them combines I had tocoin that word because I got so bored with arguments I was interested in people seeingmy work When someone would come up and I really wanted to know what they thoughtof it or wanted to sense the exposure there was always this screen that they could getbehind which was if I said lsquoIt is paintingrsquo they would say lsquoThatrsquos not painting Thatrsquossculpturersquo And they thought this was very interestingrdquo Jeanne Siegel ArtwordsDiscourse on the 60s and 70s (New York DaCapo 1985) 153

48 Allan Kaprow ldquoa Statementrdquo in Happenings An Illustrated Anthology edMichael Kirby (New York EP Dutton and Co 1965) 44ndash45

49 Benjamin Buchloh notes the importance of play in the 1950s and its link toconsumer culture During the 1950s he writes ldquoa theory of games would remerge asa cultural project at the very moment of an ever-increasing instrumentalization oflibidinal desire through consumer culturerdquo Benjamin HD Buchloh ldquoRobert WattsInanimate ObjectsmdashInanimate Subjectsrdquo in Buchloh and Rodenbeck Experiments inthe Everyday 25 n 4

94 Grey Room 13

everyday life as planned obsolescence is brought under the control ofthe artist He creates a momentary space of anti-entropy in the life ofthe commodity where it is temporarily reinvested with value only to bedisposed of once the environment is destroyed54 Citing critic LawrenceAlloway on the ldquothrowawayrdquo culture of postndashworld war II AmericaKaprow goes on to describe the importance of change in his work

Change governing both reality and art has extended from theexpression of an idea arrested in a painting to a work in whichthe usually slow mutations wrought by nature are quickened andliterally made part of the experience of it they manifest the veryprocess of creation-decay-creation almost as one watches Theuse of debris waste products or very impermanent substanceslike toilet paper or bread has of course a clear range of allusionswith obvious sociological implications the simplest being theartistrsquos positive involvement on the one hand with an everydayworld and on the other with a group of objects which beingexpendable might suggest that corresponding lack of statuswhich is supposed to be the fate of anything creative todayThese choices must not be ignored for they reveal what in oursurroundings charges the imagination as well as what is mosthuman in our art55

What is ldquomost humanrdquo in Kaprowrsquos art as he denes it is its reectionof this throwaway culture This is governed not by Cagean chance butby planned obsolescence with its endless renewal of more of thesame ldquo[My] workrdquo Kaprow says ldquois intended to last only a short timeand is destroyed immediately after the exhibition If [its] obsolescenceis not planned it is expectedrdquo56 Alloway also writing on assemblagebetter describes the overlap between the throwaway object and its usein environmental art during the 1950s

The acceptance of mass-produced objects just because they arewhat is around not because they issue from idolatrised technol-ogy is central to mid-century Junk Culture Junk Culture iscity art Its source is obsolescence the throwaway material ofcities Assemblages of such material come at the spectator asbits of life bits of the environment frequently presented interms that dramatize spread ow extension trespass The junkis obtruded into our space with the aim of achieving maximumintimacy Proximity and participation replace distance and con-templation as the communicative style of the object57

So the space of Junk Culture when used in art as assemblage or envi-ronment achieves ldquomaximum intimacyrdquo with the observer throughtheir ldquoproximity and participationrdquo with the throwaway commodity

Kaizen | Framed Space Allan Kaprow and the Spread of Painting 95

As Kaprow moves farther into the space of the gallery he does so in anincreased attempt to engage the viewer He partitions the gallery spaceso that the body of the viewer becomes a product of its participationwithin the eld of the throwaway commodity

These early wall-like constructions were for Kaprow still not closeenough to a participatory art Kaprow wanted to move further towardthe creation of environments and even events to take over the gallerywith a plenitude of throwaway objects among which the viewer wouldself-consciously circulate The action collages still maintained toomuch autonomy because they existed as individual objects and so asKaprow recalled ldquonow I simply filled the whole gallery up startingfrom one wall and ending with the otherrdquo58 With his rst environmentKaprow was no longer composing within the autonomous space ofpainting but composing the entire space of the gallery Kaprowrsquos rstenvironmentmdashmade at the Hansa Gallery in November 1958mdashwasmeant to totally engage the visitors to the gallery to make them intopart of the work itself ldquopassively or actively according to [their] talentsfor lsquoengagementrsquordquo59 From a drop ceiling of wires suspended in a gridseveral inches below the galleryrsquos original ceiling he hung variousmaterials creating a labyrinthine space divided by sheets of plastictangles of cellophane Scotch tape and more including a time-releasedmist of pine-scented deodorizer His work had taken over the galleryspace lling it with a nearly impenetrable eld of throwaway objects60

Kaprow took the ood of postndashworld war II consumer goods and usedthem to compose walls that partitioned space And composemdashin thetraditional sense of arranging shapes and forms on the surface of acanvasmdashis exactly what he did

Kaprow described his use of the full space of the gallery as a eld aterm that he derives from painting calling the second section of hisldquoAssemblagerdquo essay ldquoThe Field in Paintingrdquo ldquoThis space is in part theliteral distance between all solids included in the workrdquo Kaprowwrote ldquoBut it is also a space that is a direct heritage of paintingrdquo61

Everything in the space that he produced became part of his compo-sition including the viewer Like any other object in the work Kaprowsaid ldquoin as much as people visiting [an] environment are moving col-ored shapes [they] were counted lsquoinrsquordquo62 Each visitor as they movedthrough Kaprowrsquos labyrinth became a part of the work Art and lifehad now seemingly collapsed the autonomy of painting as a separateobjectmdashframed and isolated from the rest of its environment as a spaceonly for the eyemdashhad been abandoned for an embodied experienceViewing was now dependent upon space a space full of the objects ofeveryday life Using the materials of everyday life Kaprow invited hisviewers to get rid of their distance from the art object forcing theminto physical contact with his work This work he wrote ldquoinvites us

96 Grey Room 13

to cast aside for a moment proper manners andpartake wholly in the real nature of art and (onehopes) liferdquo63 Against the look-donrsquot-touch attitude ofmuseum and gallery Kaprow created a haptic spacewhere touch became the basis of the work where vis-itors came into physical contact with his throwawayobjects In this space as visitors threaded their waythrough the labyrinth the color of their clothes andtheir presence among these objects turned them intoa part of the work The viewer appeared as anotherthing in Kaprowrsquos composition not so different fromhis throwaway materials In his environment autonomycollapsed into participation based on the reicationof the subject as an obsolete material temporally

composited into the work While Kaprow certainly intended to includehis observers in the work he could do so only by turning them intoobjects rather than active subjects He later described his own sense ofthe failure with this exhibition that he couldnrsquot seem to engage theviewer enough but blamed it on the framing space of the galleryAfterward he said ldquoI complained immediately about the fact that therewas a sense of mystery until your eye reached a wall Then there wasa dead end At that point my disagreement with the gallery spacebeganrdquo64 But Kaprow didnrsquot abandon the gallerymdashat least not yet Toget closer to the everyday Kaprow thought he should more fully incor-porate the bodies of his viewers into his work This led to the origin ofhappenings in an attempt to make viewers into active subjects to engagethem more actively in creating the work as they became part of it

| | | | |

In 1958 Kaprow had presented two other early proto-happenings oneat Rutgers called Communication and one at George Segalrsquos farmcalled Pastorale65 Communication was based on work he had devel-oped in Cagersquos class It was close to traditional theater Presented in achapel that doubled as an auditorium for theater and music perfor-mances it included movement sound and banners unfurled from thebalconies Kaprow built ldquoplastic panelsrdquo behind which he performeda series of simple actions nally hiding himself from the audience bypainting the plastic wall in front of him and so ldquopainting himself outrdquoof the audiencersquos view66 For Pastorale he built frames that looked likeabysmal theater sets stretcher bars with torn strips of canvas runningfrom top to bottom During one part of the performance artists RobertWatts and Lucas Samaras painted on either side of one of these con-structions Inserted into the landscape these performance paintings

Part of the environment Allan Kaprow created for his piece Pastorale 1958Photo Vaughn Rachel

Kaizen | Framed Space Allan Kaprow and the Spread of Painting 97

marked the boundary between event and nonevent partitioning theground into territories and framing Pastoralersquos space using once againpainting as wall Unfortunately for Kaprow Pastorale was held during apicnic and the other participants were either too drunk or just plainunwilling to follow his directions They were engaged but refused tofollow his rules of play

18 Happenings in 6 Parts which took place in October 1959 wasthe rst ofcial happening67 Kaprow divided the inside of the galleryinto three smaller contiguous rooms using wooden two-by-fours Inphotographs of the piece as it was being installed these woodenbeams can be seen framing a space within the space of the gallerymdashnot into a proscenium stage but into an environment within the largergallery space where various events would occur Instead of wood ordrywall translucent plastic sheeting created the walls so that actioncould be partially seen from one room to the next Each room was litwith different colored lights and in each room where the audiencewas forced to sit and observe the action a group of actors movedthrough tightly scripted but simple routines as sounds came in and outand lms were projected

On the program the audience is listed under the ldquoCast of Participantsrdquowritten into the performance itself and actively engaged but only asthe subject of direction and authorial control At specific intervalsbells rang and the audience was required to change seats and to switchrooms based on instruction cards they had been given when they enteredthe gallery before the performance Kaprow had realized with his HansaGallery environment that he needed to give his viewers increasedresponsibility but he also realized that relinquishing too much con-trol could be a disaster as it had been in Pastorale As with his previ-ous work his goal with 18 Happenings was the ldquointegration of allelementsmdashenvironment constructed sections time space and peoplerdquoand the audience was once again included as just another material inhis composition68

During the fifth part of 18 Happenings one sequence of actionsseems to reveal Kaprowrsquos relationship with painting the viewer and space Kaprow had built a construction he called the ldquothe sandwich manrdquo named after its everyday counterparts paid to walkaround the city streets as human billboards Kaprowrsquos sandwich

Left The construction of thespace used for Allan Kaprowrsquos18 Happenings in 6 Parts1958

Right A view of Allan Kaprowrsquos18 Happenings whereRearrangeable Panels is partially visible on the leftThe in-set canvas panel onwhich actors painted live as part of the performance is shown at center PhotoScott Hyde

98 Grey Room 13

man was barely humanoidan automaton with forward-and backward-pointing mir-rors for a body bicycle wheelsfor feet and a gallon bucketof enamel paint for a headSticking out in front was apiece of wood for an arm end-ing in a hand that held cardslabeled ldquoXrdquo and ldquo3rdquo the adver-

tising handbill reduced to its zero degree In the middle of the sand-wich man hidden on a shelf between the two mirrors was a recordplayer and projecting out from behind it were two handles so that itcould be wheeled around the rooms As the sandwich man was wheeledfrom one room to another its mirrored body reflected the audienceback onto themselves their image taking the place of what would havebeen an advertisement They were reected not as participatory viewersnot even as active objects as in his environment but as passive objectsnow totally reied their image produced as a reection of Junk CultureHere in Brechtian fashion using a literal ldquoframing effectrdquo Kaprowturned his previous use of the viewer back into a critique of the eventitself In reecting the audiencersquos passivity back to them he forced amoment of recognition of their complicity in the production of thework They could see that as they became an ad on the sandwich manrsquosbelly so they became throwaway objects in his composition By reduc-ing the spectator to the general equivalence of these objects Kaprowrecognized the subject of the postndashWorld War II period as a product ofplanned obsolescence and consumer culture

Following this as the sandwich man was wheeled through the secondroom and into the third two men stood up from their seats one in eachroom Each took up a brush and a can of paint and approached oppo-site sides of one of the plastic walls simultaneously painting on a sec-tion of canvas set among the plastic walls and so turning the wall backinto a painting69 The canvas was left unprimed so that the simple gures that each artist painted (one was supposed to paint lines theother circles) would bleed through and so would be immediately visibleon the opposite side each mark responding to that of their partner Asin his two earlier happenings painting is done live before an audienceon a wall Kaprow showed the audience that when painting becomeswall it functions only to put space on display Here painting as a sin-gular art object was meaningless It became a throwaway stage propand so became a demonstration of how painting as object was part ofthe larger environment in which it resides The limit condition of paint-ing as wall with viewer as spectator was the gallery as frame70

The sandwich man part ofKaprowrsquos 18 HappeningsPhoto Scott Hyde

Kaizen | Framed Space Allan Kaprow and the Spread of Painting 99

What this sequence from 18 Happenings reveals is that Kaprow hadan acute sense of the way in which the gallery as frame produces sub-ject and space together He undermined the normal function of the artgallery turning both viewer and art object into Junk Culture Throwawayviewers throwaway paintings and throwaway rooms turned the galleryspacemdasha space designed to be neutral to hide itself as the objects itcontains become the sole focus of the viewerrsquos concentrationmdashinto thelocus of planned obsolescence With the creation of happeningsKaprow used Junk Culture against the doxa of gallery space upsettingthe common sense of what a space for art is and what it does Afterhappenings the paradoxical logic of the gallery as a site for both theprivate contemplation of singular aesthetic objects as well as the pub-lic transaction of luxury goods had been (however temporarily) sub-verted In asserting the gallery space as the limit condition of paintingKaprow framed the institution as the ground of artistic production

In ldquoThe Legacy of Jackson Pollockrdquo Kaprow says ldquoPollock left us atthe point where we must become preoccupied with and even dazzled by the space and objects of our everyday liferdquo71 In ldquoAssemblageEnvironments Happeningsrdquo bridging the gap between his early andlater work he concludes ldquothis has brought sharply into focus that theroom has always been a frame or format toordquo72 Kaprowrsquos collapse ofautonomy via art into lifemdashthat environments and happenings wouldldquopartake wholly in the real nature of art and (one hopes) liferdquomdashwasonly ever a hope as he himself knew If painting had used the frameas the delimitation of a eld for composition then environments andhappenings turned the gallery into the limit condition of this fieldWhile he tried to get closer to everyday life by making art he inevitablypushed it further away This ambivalence toward the collapse of artand life runs throughout Kaprowrsquos work even as he moved out of thegallery and into everyday life following his early work with his laterldquoactivitiesrdquo The early work was even by his own estimation more adisplay of experience and not a fair representation of actual everydayexperience But this is precisely where the importance of this work liesKaprowrsquos environments and happenings extended Rauschenbergrsquossemiautonomous gap so far that they turned the screw one notchhigher autonomy returning not though the sublation of art into archi-tecture but through the medium of framed space

100 Grey Room 13

NotesThanks to the generosity and insight of Karen Kurczynski John Harwood SethMcCormick Jaleh Mansoor Beth Hinderliter Vered Maimon Benjamin Buchloh andBarry Bergdoll as well as Branden Joseph and the Editors of Grey Room

1 Brian OrsquoDoherty Inside the White Cube The Ideology of the Gallery Space(Berkeley and Los Angeles University of California Press 1999) 15

2 It was originally called ldquoPainting Environments Happeningsrdquo and publishedin a condensed form in the catalog for the exhibition New FormsmdashNew Media I at the Martha Jackson Gallery New York the rst uptown show of Kaprow and his con-temporaries It was changed to ldquoAssemblage Environments and Happeningsrdquo for nalpublication Kaprow changed the title to incorporate the recent acceptance of the termassemblage It had been used rst by Helen Comstock to describe the work of ArthurDove in the 1920s but remained obscure until Jean Dubuffet popularized its use in 1953The term as used by Dubuffet was then adopted by William Seitz for his exhibitionThe Art of Assemblage at the Museum of Modern Art See Allan Kaprow AssemblageEnvironments and Happenings (New York Harry N Abrams 1966) 150ndash208 NewFormsmdashNew Media I (New York Martha Jackson Gallery 1960) np and RogerShattuck ldquoIntroduction How Collage Became Assemblagerdquo Essays on Assemblage(New York Museum of Modern Art 1992) 119

3 ldquoWhen I am in my painting Irsquom not aware of what Irsquom doingrdquo said PollockJackson Pollock Jackson Pollock Interviews Articles Reviews ed Pepe Karmel (NewYork Museum of Modern Art 1999) 17ndash18

4 Yard was Kaprowrsquos contribution to the exhibition Environments SituationsSpaces at the Martha Jackson Gallery a follow up to New FormsndashNew Media (see n 2)

5 ldquoAllan Kaprow and Robert Watts Interviewed by Sidney Simonrdquo in Benjamin HDBuchloh and Judith F Rodenbeck Experiments in the Everyday Allan Kaprow andRobert Watts Events Objects Documents (New York Wallach Art Gallery 1999) 76

6 To cite but one example of many Thomas Hirschhorn is an artist who continuesto extend and develop Kaprowrsquos legacy today

7 On Kaprow and performance see Amelia Jones Body Art Performing the Subject(Minneapolis University of Minnesota Press 1998) 56ndash57 Paul Schimmel ldquoLeap intothe Void Performance and the Objectrdquo in Out of Actions Between Performance andthe Object 1949ndash1979 ed Paul Schimmel (New York Thames and Hudson 1998)59ndash63

8 The relationship between painting and space had been explored before partic-ularly in the period between the two world wars by the artists associated with De Stijland constructivism For more on De Stijl see Nancy Troy The De Stijl Environment(Cambridge MIT Press 1983) On constructivism see Yve-Alain Bois ldquoEl LissitzkyRadical Reversibilityrdquo Art in America 76 no 4 (April 1988) 161ndash181 and Yve-AlainBois ldquoMaterial Utopiasrdquo Art in America 79 no 6 (June 1991) 98ndash107 Another Europeanwho explored the everyday object painting and space was Kurt Schwitters in the various incarnation of his Merzbau See Elizabeth Burns Gamard Kurt SchwittersrsquoMerzbau The Cathedral of Erotic Misery (New York Princeton Architectural Press2000) Two other important precursors who bridge the European and American con-text are Lazlo Moholy-Nagy and Friedrick Kiesler For information on Moholy-Nagyrsquosearly environmental projects as well as those of Lissitzy see Joan Ockman ldquoThe RoadNot Taken Alexander Dornerrsquos Way Beyond Artrdquo in Autonomy and Ideology Positioningan Avant-Garde in America ed RE Somol (New York Monicelli Press 1997) For

Kaizen | Framed Space Allan Kaprow and the Spread of Painting 101

information on Kiesler see RL Held Endless Innovations Frederick Kieslerrsquos Theoryand Scenic Design (Ann Arbor UMI Research Press 1982) Lisa Phillips FrederickKiesler (New York The Whitney Museum of American Art 1989) Brian OrsquoDohertydraws out the connections between the prendash and postndashWorld War II manifestations ofthis relationship in Inside the White Cube

9 For Benjamin the work of art attains autonomy under modernism with theemergence of art for artrsquos sake This autonomy is then usurped by mechanical repro-duction See Walter Benjamin ldquoThe Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproductionrdquoin Illuminations ed Hanna Arendt (New York Harcourt Brace and Jovanovich Inc1968) p 224-226 For Greenberg as the above quote indicates the autonomy of artcontinues even in the face of mechanization See Clement Greenberg ldquoTowards a NewerLaocoonrdquo Perceptions and Judgments 1939ndash1944 vol 1 of Clement Greenberg TheCollected Essays and Criticism ed John OrsquoBrien (Chicago University of Chicago1986) p 32

10 Rosalind Krauss uses the term ldquopost-medium conditionrdquo to designate ldquomixed-media installationrdquo work done today While Krauss argues that only the most signi-cant artists working since the 1960s reassert the medium in their work against thegeneral postmedium condition I believe that all mixed-media installation work operates using the gallery or institution as medium See Rosalind Krauss ldquoA Voyageon the North Seardquo Art in the Age of the Post-Medium Condition (New York Thamesand Hudson 1999) for her comments on a specic contemporary artist and the rein-vention of the medium see Rosalind Krauss ldquo And Then Turn Awayrdquo An Essayon James Colemanrdquo October 81 (Summer 1997) 5ndash33

11 Allan Kaprow ldquoThe Legacy of Jackson Pollockrdquo Art News 57 no 6 (October1958) 24ndash26 55ndash57 reprinted in Allan Kaprow Essays on the Blurring of Art andLife ed Jeff Kelley (Berkeley and Los Angles University of California Press 1993) 1ndash9 Kaprow has stated that the essay was written in 1956 in ldquoAllan Kaprow andRobert Watts Interviewed by Sidney Simonrdquo 77 Kaprow had been a student of bothHans Hoffman and Meyer Schapiro

12 Harold Rosenberg ldquoThe American Action Paintersrdquo Art News 52 (December1952) 22ndash23 In a footnote that Rosenberg added when the article was republished aspart of his book of collected essays in 1959 he added the following ldquoAction Paintinghas extracted the element of decision inherent in all art in that the work is not fin-ished at its beginning but has to be carried forward by an accumulation of lsquorightrsquo ges-tures In a word Action Painting is the abstraction of the moral element in art itsmark is moral tension in detachment from moral or esthetic certainties and it judgesitself morally in declaring that picture to be worthless which is not the incorporationof a genuine struggle one which could at any point have been lostrdquo Harold RosenbergThe Tradition of the New (New York Horizon Press 1959) 33ndash34 Kaprow recountsthe influence of Rosenbergrsquos essay on his work in ldquoAllan Kaprow and Robert WattsInterviewed by Sidney Simonrdquo 77

13 There were five all told They were held as follows 5ndash23 January 1948 24Januaryndash12 February 1949 21 Novemberndash10 December 1949 28 Novemberndash16 December1950 26 Novemberndash15 December 1951 These shows had a remarkable resonance onethat extended beyond even the insular New York art world when after the secondexhibition Life magazine published the feature article ldquoJackson Pollock Is He theGreatest Living Painter in the United Statesrdquo Dorothy Sieberling Life (August 81949) 42ndash45

14 Allan Kaprow ldquoThe Legacy of Jackson Pollockrdquo in Kaprow Essays on the

102 Grey Room 13

Blurringrdquo 615 Kaprow uses both the terms scale and size to describe Pollockrsquos work but as

TJ Clark has shown these are two very different terms and Pollock is a painter of sizeand not scale For Clark it is size that engages the body ldquoNormally speaking size isliteralmdasha matter of actual physical intuition It involves grasping how big or small acertain object really is most likely in relation to the size of the grasperrsquos upright body oroutspread armsrdquo TJ Clark ldquoPollockrsquos Smallnessrdquo in Jackson Pollock New Approachesed Kirk Varnedoe and Pepe Karmel (New York Museum of Modern Art 1999) 15

16 Kaprow ldquoThe Legacy of Jackson Pollockrdquo Essays on the Blurring 617 In most of his work the paint engages with the edge of the canvas emphasizing

and bordering it and not continuing around it as if the canvas had been cut down fromsome innite expanse Kaprow claims otherwise by singling out the exceptions sayingldquo[H]is art gives the impression of going on forever [T]hough evidence points to aslackening of the attack as Pollock came to the edges of many of his canvases in thebest ones he compensated for this by tacking much of the painted surface around theback of his stretchersrdquo Kaprow ldquoThe Legacy of Jackson Pollockrdquo Essays on the Blurringof Art and Life 5 An examination of the paintings shows that more often Pollockstopped before the edge or reworked his compositions after they were stretched sothat they reengaged with the edge even when cut from larger canvas Kaprow claimsotherwise because it furthers his arguments that Pollockrsquos paintings emerge into thespace of the viewer

18 Jackson Pollock ldquoApplication for a Guggenheim Fellowship 1947rdquo in JacksonPollock Interviews 17 The inuence of Greenberg at this time is discussed in StevenNaifeh and Gregory White Smith Jackson Pollock An American Saga (Aiken SCWoodwardWhite 1989) 551 Pollock had also engaged with wall-size painting duringhis association with Joseacute Clemente Orozco and in earlier work such as Mural(1943ndash1944) painted for Peggy Guggenheimrsquos house

19 Greenbergrsquos version of modernism was most fully laid out only in 1959 andpublished in 1960 ldquoIt was the stressing of the ineluctable atness of the surface thatremained however more fundamental than anything else to the process by whichpictorial art criticized and defined itself under Modernism For flatness alone wasunique and exclusive to pictorial art Because flatness was the only conditionpainting shared with no other art Modernist painting oriented itself to atness as itdid to nothing elserdquo In Clement Greenberg ldquoModernist Paintingrdquo in Modernism witha Vengeance 1957ndash1969 vol 4 of Clement Greenberg The Collected Essays andCriticism ed John OrsquoBrien (Chicago University of Chicago Press 1993) 87

20 Clement Greenberg ldquoThe Situation at the Momentrdquo in Arrogant Purpose1945ndash1949 vol 2 of Clement Greenberg The Collected Essays and Criticism ed JohnOrsquoBrien (Chicago University of Chicago 1986) 194ndash195

21 See Greenberg ldquoTowards a Newer Laocoonrdquo throughout22 Eric Lum has done extensive work on the relationship between abstract expres-

sionism and architecture The analysis in this essay follows from his especially whereBlakersquos project is concerned but also expands on it As he jumps from Blake to PhilipJohnson and Mark Rothkorsquos Houston Chapel however Lum misses the importance ofother interventions between painting and architecture such as those made by KaprowThis is evident when he says ldquoThrough this marriage of mural and wall paintingcould become fully integrated into architecture an idealized conjecture nor realizeduntil Mark Rothkorsquos 1971 Houston Chapelrdquo Eric Lum ldquoPollockrsquos Promise Toward anAbstract Expressionist Architecturerdquo Assemblage 39 (August 1999) 68

Kaizen | Framed Space Allan Kaprow and the Spread of Painting 103

23 Blake said of his visit to Pollockrsquos studio ldquoIt was a very sunny day and thesun was shining on the paintings I felt like I was standing in the Hall of Mirrors atVersailles It was a dazzling incredible sightrdquo Naifeh and Smith 588

24 Peter Blake No Place like Utopia Modern Architecture and the Company WeKept (New York Knopf 1993) 111ndash112

25 Miesrsquos museum plan was designed at the request of the editors at ArchitecturalForum who had been publishing a series of articles ldquoto show how building might beimproved through fuller and more imaginative use of existing resourcesrdquo They requesteddesigns for a variety of buildings that could be placed in a hypothetical city of 70000inhabitants ldquoNew Buildings for 194Xrdquo Architectural Forum 78 no 5 (May 1943)69ndash85 The Barcelona Pavilion was built in 1929 for the Barcelona Universal Expositionand was destroyed when the fair ended It was subsequently rebuilt in 1981ndash86

26 Peter Blake Mies van der Rohe (New York Pelican 1960) 54 It is worth notingthat like Miesrsquos use of the Kolbe sculpture Blake had Pollock actually make smallwire sculptures splattered with paint miniatures of sculptures that Blake hopedPollock would make for the actual museum Pollock himself was experimenting withsculpture around this time building three-dimensional forms out of papier-macirccheacutethat he then splattered with paint

27 Blakersquos collage space follows from Miesrsquos The production of collages as in situmodels for Miesrsquos buildings had begun in the twenties with his work for the journal Gin association with Dadaists such as Hans Richter Neil Levine notes this creation ofa collage space in Mies particularly in the Pavilion and the Museum for a Small Cityin relation to his use of reection to layer one surface on top of another Neil LevineldquolsquoThe Signicance of Factsrsquo Miesrsquo Collages Up Close and Personalrdquo Assemblage 37(December 1998) 71ndash101

28 Blake designed his museum just as Philip Johnson was building his Glass Housewhere they both spent considerable time while planning exhibitions for the Museumof Modern Art Johnsonrsquos inuence is also evident in Blakersquos design Blake No Placelike Utopia 149ndash155

29 Arthur Drexler ldquoUnframed Space A Museum for Jackson Pollackrsquos [sic] PaintingsrdquoInteriors and Industrial Design 109 no 6 (January 1950) 90ndash91 The article was partof a special issue whose theme was ldquoInteriors to Comerdquo a recurring topic that wasmeant ldquoto show the direction in which some of our best designers are goingrdquo The termunframed space was used several times in reference to Pollockrsquos work as the title oftwo articles Drexlerrsquos and one published slightly later by Berton Rouecheacute ThoughRouecheacute in an interview in To a Violent Grave says that Lee Krasner used the phraserst Charles Pollock says that Blake was the origin of the term The fact that Drexlerrsquosarticle was written and published earlier seems to conrm this See Berton RouecheacuteldquoUnframed Spacerdquo in Jackson Pollock Interviews 18ndash19 and Jeffrey Potter To aViolent Grave (New York Pushcart Press 1985) 126

30 Drexler 9031 Blake No Place like Utopia 113ndash11432 Blake completed construction on his ldquoPinwheel Houserdquo in 1952 It is a small

beach house that he designed for himself and his family in South Hampton on NewYorkrsquos Long Island Situated on the beach the house is square in plan and its fourexterior walls slide horizontally outward each in a successive clockwise directionrevealing glass walls When the exterior walls are fully extended and the house isviewed from above it forms a shape like a pinwheel Opening the exterior wallsreveals an ever-changing view of the landscape outside turning the ocean and the

104 Grey Room 13

dunes into the picturesque framing them so that they entirely ll the space of the walland put its surface in motion Blake had discussed with Pollock the possibility of hispainting the sliding walls so that his paintings would be superimposed over the land-scape Pollock considered it but Blake couldnrsquot come up with the commission moneythat Pollock asked for They never finalized their plans and it was never clear howthe panels were to be painted Blake suggested that they might be made of glass so hebought the sheet of glass that Pollock used to paint Number 29 1950 (1950) the paintingthat Hans Namuth lmed from underneath for his documentary on Pollock His col-laboration with Blake did lead to one commission a mural-size canvas done for ahouse designed by Marcel Breuer Untitled (Mural) (1950) Shortly after his collabo-ration with Blake Pollock began another unrealized architectural project this onewith Alfonso Ossorio and Tony Smith for a church designed by Smith with murals byPollock For more on all of this see Blake No Place like Utopia 114ndash118 Naifeh andSmith 649 and Lum ldquoPollockrsquos Promiserdquo 68 85ndash88

33 Lum ldquoPollockrsquos Promiserdquo 67ndash6834 A few pages down from Drexlerrsquos article on the Pollock Museum in Interiors

and Industrial Design was another architectural response to the same problem OlgaGueftrsquos article ldquoThe Museumrsquos Oasisrdquo describes another museum this one by Gyorgyand Juliet Kepes ldquoThe Kepesesrdquo it begins ldquoare not exactly opposed to museumsrdquo how-ever it would seem that they were opposed to museums containing works of artReplacing the art objects entirely the Kepeses substituted shells driftwood plantsand animals Instead of a natural history museum they proposed a modern-dayWunderkammerwhere natural forms take the place of art as objects for contemplationldquoThe proposed galleryrdquo they declared ldquowould bridge the gap between the art museumwhich is concerned with man-made beauty and the natural history museum whichis preoccupied with nature but not particularly with naturersquos beautyrdquo Gyorgy KepesrsquosThe New Landscape exhibition at MIT a year later in 1951 (the same years as theIndependent Grouprsquos similar exhibition Growth and Form in London) and the pub-lication that followed The New Landscape in Art and Sciencewould ultimately realizethis project with blown-up photographs of natural forms (cells shells and electronmicrographs) in place of actual objects

The Kepeses seem to have taken the next logical step beyond Blake proposing aneven more radical rethinking of the wall-size work of art Eliminating the need for theartist altogether they found abstract forms in nature and turned their reproductionsinto what would elsewhere have been works of art By turning the art object into scientic vision The Kepeses proposed its total instrumentation Autonomous abstractpainting was transformed into its instrumental other a mechanically reproduced science of vision Rather than turn art into interior design The Kepesesrsquo replacementof abstract painting recast the status of scientic technology into that of high art SeeOlga Gueft ldquoThe Museumrsquos Oasisrdquo Interiors and Industrial Design 109 no 6 (January1950) 100ndash103 and Gyorgy Kepes The New Landscape in Art and Science (ChicagoPaul Theobald and Co 1956)

35 Kaprow stated that it was ldquoIn 1949 [that] I saw an exhibition of [Pollockrsquos] workfor the rst timerdquo ldquoInterviewrdquo in Allan Kaprow (Pasadena Pasadena Art Museum1967) 7

36 See Kaprow ldquoThe Legacy of Jackson Pollockrdquo Art News 25 and Kaprow ldquoTheLegacy of Jackson Pollockrdquo Essays on the Blurring 3

37 Joan Marter ldquoThe Forgotten Legacy Happenings Pop Art and Fluxus at RutgersUniversityrdquo in Off Limits Rutgers University and the Avant-Garde 1957ndash1963 ed Joan

Kaizen | Framed Space Allan Kaprow and the Spread of Painting 105

Marter (Newark The Newark Museum 1999) 438 Marter 13239 Quoted in John Cage Silence (Middletown Wesleyan University Press 1961) 10540 Branden Joseph has developed the link between Cage and Rauschenberg in several

recent essays See Branden W Joseph ldquoJohn Cage and the Architecture of SilencerdquoOctober 81 (Summer 1997) 81ndash104 and Branden Joseph ldquoWhite on Whiterdquo CriticalInquiry 27 no 1 (Summer 2001) 90ndash121

41 For Cage on Rauschenberg see Cage Silence98ndash108 For his description ofTheater Piece No 1 see ldquoInterview with John Cagerdquo in Happenings and Other Actsed Mariellen R Sandford (New York Routledge 1995) 53 Cage subsequently referredto Theater Piece No 1 as ldquothe rst happeningrdquo See John Cage ldquoAn AutobiographicalStatementrdquo Southwest Review 76 no 1 (Winter 1991) 65

42 The score itself has had various incarnations It wasnrsquot published until 1960and in this version includes a note wherein Cage describes the rst performance byTudor For more on 4rsquo33 and its various scores see Liz Kotz ldquoWords on Paper NotNecessarily Meant to Be Read as Art Postwar Media Poetics from Cage to Warholrdquo(PhD diss Columbia University 2002) 83ndash115 Kotz follows a different lineage outof Cage and into performance and happenings than the one traced in this essay

43 Marter 13244 Walter Hopps in the first survey catalog of Rauschenbergrsquos early work does

not name the black paintings as a group as he does the White Paintings He calls themeach Untitled followed by a description in brackets Hopps notes of the largest ofthese works that ldquoThese paintings with a greater vastness and ambiguity of scale thanother Rauschenberg works relate to spatial qualities of Jackson Pollockrdquo HoppsRobert Rauschenberg The Early 1950s (Houston Houston Fine Art Press 1991) 67This convention was also followed in Rauschenbergrsquos 1997 Guggenheim retrospectivecatalog and is followed in this essay Robert Rauschenberg A Retrospective ed WalterHopps and Susan Davidson (New York Solomon R Guggenheim Museum 1997)

45 The piece is called Untitled [two black panels] (1953) Hopps Robert Rauschenberg99

46 Helen Molesworth notes the importance of Rauschenbergrsquos newspaper groundin the black paintings and develops this problem in relation to the abject body as it isfurther pursued in his work throughout the 1950s Helen Molesworth ldquoBefore BedrdquoOctober 63 (Winter 1993) 68ndash82

47 Asked about this work Rauschenberg said ldquoI called them combines I had tocoin that word because I got so bored with arguments I was interested in people seeingmy work When someone would come up and I really wanted to know what they thoughtof it or wanted to sense the exposure there was always this screen that they could getbehind which was if I said lsquoIt is paintingrsquo they would say lsquoThatrsquos not painting Thatrsquossculpturersquo And they thought this was very interestingrdquo Jeanne Siegel ArtwordsDiscourse on the 60s and 70s (New York DaCapo 1985) 153

48 Allan Kaprow ldquoa Statementrdquo in Happenings An Illustrated Anthology edMichael Kirby (New York EP Dutton and Co 1965) 44ndash45

49 Benjamin Buchloh notes the importance of play in the 1950s and its link toconsumer culture During the 1950s he writes ldquoa theory of games would remerge asa cultural project at the very moment of an ever-increasing instrumentalization oflibidinal desire through consumer culturerdquo Benjamin HD Buchloh ldquoRobert WattsInanimate ObjectsmdashInanimate Subjectsrdquo in Buchloh and Rodenbeck Experiments inthe Everyday 25 n 4

Kaizen | Framed Space Allan Kaprow and the Spread of Painting 95

As Kaprow moves farther into the space of the gallery he does so in anincreased attempt to engage the viewer He partitions the gallery spaceso that the body of the viewer becomes a product of its participationwithin the eld of the throwaway commodity

These early wall-like constructions were for Kaprow still not closeenough to a participatory art Kaprow wanted to move further towardthe creation of environments and even events to take over the gallerywith a plenitude of throwaway objects among which the viewer wouldself-consciously circulate The action collages still maintained toomuch autonomy because they existed as individual objects and so asKaprow recalled ldquonow I simply filled the whole gallery up startingfrom one wall and ending with the otherrdquo58 With his rst environmentKaprow was no longer composing within the autonomous space ofpainting but composing the entire space of the gallery Kaprowrsquos rstenvironmentmdashmade at the Hansa Gallery in November 1958mdashwasmeant to totally engage the visitors to the gallery to make them intopart of the work itself ldquopassively or actively according to [their] talentsfor lsquoengagementrsquordquo59 From a drop ceiling of wires suspended in a gridseveral inches below the galleryrsquos original ceiling he hung variousmaterials creating a labyrinthine space divided by sheets of plastictangles of cellophane Scotch tape and more including a time-releasedmist of pine-scented deodorizer His work had taken over the galleryspace lling it with a nearly impenetrable eld of throwaway objects60

Kaprow took the ood of postndashworld war II consumer goods and usedthem to compose walls that partitioned space And composemdashin thetraditional sense of arranging shapes and forms on the surface of acanvasmdashis exactly what he did

Kaprow described his use of the full space of the gallery as a eld aterm that he derives from painting calling the second section of hisldquoAssemblagerdquo essay ldquoThe Field in Paintingrdquo ldquoThis space is in part theliteral distance between all solids included in the workrdquo Kaprowwrote ldquoBut it is also a space that is a direct heritage of paintingrdquo61

Everything in the space that he produced became part of his compo-sition including the viewer Like any other object in the work Kaprowsaid ldquoin as much as people visiting [an] environment are moving col-ored shapes [they] were counted lsquoinrsquordquo62 Each visitor as they movedthrough Kaprowrsquos labyrinth became a part of the work Art and lifehad now seemingly collapsed the autonomy of painting as a separateobjectmdashframed and isolated from the rest of its environment as a spaceonly for the eyemdashhad been abandoned for an embodied experienceViewing was now dependent upon space a space full of the objects ofeveryday life Using the materials of everyday life Kaprow invited hisviewers to get rid of their distance from the art object forcing theminto physical contact with his work This work he wrote ldquoinvites us

96 Grey Room 13

to cast aside for a moment proper manners andpartake wholly in the real nature of art and (onehopes) liferdquo63 Against the look-donrsquot-touch attitude ofmuseum and gallery Kaprow created a haptic spacewhere touch became the basis of the work where vis-itors came into physical contact with his throwawayobjects In this space as visitors threaded their waythrough the labyrinth the color of their clothes andtheir presence among these objects turned them intoa part of the work The viewer appeared as anotherthing in Kaprowrsquos composition not so different fromhis throwaway materials In his environment autonomycollapsed into participation based on the reicationof the subject as an obsolete material temporally

composited into the work While Kaprow certainly intended to includehis observers in the work he could do so only by turning them intoobjects rather than active subjects He later described his own sense ofthe failure with this exhibition that he couldnrsquot seem to engage theviewer enough but blamed it on the framing space of the galleryAfterward he said ldquoI complained immediately about the fact that therewas a sense of mystery until your eye reached a wall Then there wasa dead end At that point my disagreement with the gallery spacebeganrdquo64 But Kaprow didnrsquot abandon the gallerymdashat least not yet Toget closer to the everyday Kaprow thought he should more fully incor-porate the bodies of his viewers into his work This led to the origin ofhappenings in an attempt to make viewers into active subjects to engagethem more actively in creating the work as they became part of it

| | | | |

In 1958 Kaprow had presented two other early proto-happenings oneat Rutgers called Communication and one at George Segalrsquos farmcalled Pastorale65 Communication was based on work he had devel-oped in Cagersquos class It was close to traditional theater Presented in achapel that doubled as an auditorium for theater and music perfor-mances it included movement sound and banners unfurled from thebalconies Kaprow built ldquoplastic panelsrdquo behind which he performeda series of simple actions nally hiding himself from the audience bypainting the plastic wall in front of him and so ldquopainting himself outrdquoof the audiencersquos view66 For Pastorale he built frames that looked likeabysmal theater sets stretcher bars with torn strips of canvas runningfrom top to bottom During one part of the performance artists RobertWatts and Lucas Samaras painted on either side of one of these con-structions Inserted into the landscape these performance paintings

Part of the environment Allan Kaprow created for his piece Pastorale 1958Photo Vaughn Rachel

Kaizen | Framed Space Allan Kaprow and the Spread of Painting 97

marked the boundary between event and nonevent partitioning theground into territories and framing Pastoralersquos space using once againpainting as wall Unfortunately for Kaprow Pastorale was held during apicnic and the other participants were either too drunk or just plainunwilling to follow his directions They were engaged but refused tofollow his rules of play

18 Happenings in 6 Parts which took place in October 1959 wasthe rst ofcial happening67 Kaprow divided the inside of the galleryinto three smaller contiguous rooms using wooden two-by-fours Inphotographs of the piece as it was being installed these woodenbeams can be seen framing a space within the space of the gallerymdashnot into a proscenium stage but into an environment within the largergallery space where various events would occur Instead of wood ordrywall translucent plastic sheeting created the walls so that actioncould be partially seen from one room to the next Each room was litwith different colored lights and in each room where the audiencewas forced to sit and observe the action a group of actors movedthrough tightly scripted but simple routines as sounds came in and outand lms were projected

On the program the audience is listed under the ldquoCast of Participantsrdquowritten into the performance itself and actively engaged but only asthe subject of direction and authorial control At specific intervalsbells rang and the audience was required to change seats and to switchrooms based on instruction cards they had been given when they enteredthe gallery before the performance Kaprow had realized with his HansaGallery environment that he needed to give his viewers increasedresponsibility but he also realized that relinquishing too much con-trol could be a disaster as it had been in Pastorale As with his previ-ous work his goal with 18 Happenings was the ldquointegration of allelementsmdashenvironment constructed sections time space and peoplerdquoand the audience was once again included as just another material inhis composition68

During the fifth part of 18 Happenings one sequence of actionsseems to reveal Kaprowrsquos relationship with painting the viewer and space Kaprow had built a construction he called the ldquothe sandwich manrdquo named after its everyday counterparts paid to walkaround the city streets as human billboards Kaprowrsquos sandwich

Left The construction of thespace used for Allan Kaprowrsquos18 Happenings in 6 Parts1958

Right A view of Allan Kaprowrsquos18 Happenings whereRearrangeable Panels is partially visible on the leftThe in-set canvas panel onwhich actors painted live as part of the performance is shown at center PhotoScott Hyde

98 Grey Room 13

man was barely humanoidan automaton with forward-and backward-pointing mir-rors for a body bicycle wheelsfor feet and a gallon bucketof enamel paint for a headSticking out in front was apiece of wood for an arm end-ing in a hand that held cardslabeled ldquoXrdquo and ldquo3rdquo the adver-

tising handbill reduced to its zero degree In the middle of the sand-wich man hidden on a shelf between the two mirrors was a recordplayer and projecting out from behind it were two handles so that itcould be wheeled around the rooms As the sandwich man was wheeledfrom one room to another its mirrored body reflected the audienceback onto themselves their image taking the place of what would havebeen an advertisement They were reected not as participatory viewersnot even as active objects as in his environment but as passive objectsnow totally reied their image produced as a reection of Junk CultureHere in Brechtian fashion using a literal ldquoframing effectrdquo Kaprowturned his previous use of the viewer back into a critique of the eventitself In reecting the audiencersquos passivity back to them he forced amoment of recognition of their complicity in the production of thework They could see that as they became an ad on the sandwich manrsquosbelly so they became throwaway objects in his composition By reduc-ing the spectator to the general equivalence of these objects Kaprowrecognized the subject of the postndashWorld War II period as a product ofplanned obsolescence and consumer culture

Following this as the sandwich man was wheeled through the secondroom and into the third two men stood up from their seats one in eachroom Each took up a brush and a can of paint and approached oppo-site sides of one of the plastic walls simultaneously painting on a sec-tion of canvas set among the plastic walls and so turning the wall backinto a painting69 The canvas was left unprimed so that the simple gures that each artist painted (one was supposed to paint lines theother circles) would bleed through and so would be immediately visibleon the opposite side each mark responding to that of their partner Asin his two earlier happenings painting is done live before an audienceon a wall Kaprow showed the audience that when painting becomeswall it functions only to put space on display Here painting as a sin-gular art object was meaningless It became a throwaway stage propand so became a demonstration of how painting as object was part ofthe larger environment in which it resides The limit condition of paint-ing as wall with viewer as spectator was the gallery as frame70

The sandwich man part ofKaprowrsquos 18 HappeningsPhoto Scott Hyde

Kaizen | Framed Space Allan Kaprow and the Spread of Painting 99

What this sequence from 18 Happenings reveals is that Kaprow hadan acute sense of the way in which the gallery as frame produces sub-ject and space together He undermined the normal function of the artgallery turning both viewer and art object into Junk Culture Throwawayviewers throwaway paintings and throwaway rooms turned the galleryspacemdasha space designed to be neutral to hide itself as the objects itcontains become the sole focus of the viewerrsquos concentrationmdashinto thelocus of planned obsolescence With the creation of happeningsKaprow used Junk Culture against the doxa of gallery space upsettingthe common sense of what a space for art is and what it does Afterhappenings the paradoxical logic of the gallery as a site for both theprivate contemplation of singular aesthetic objects as well as the pub-lic transaction of luxury goods had been (however temporarily) sub-verted In asserting the gallery space as the limit condition of paintingKaprow framed the institution as the ground of artistic production

In ldquoThe Legacy of Jackson Pollockrdquo Kaprow says ldquoPollock left us atthe point where we must become preoccupied with and even dazzled by the space and objects of our everyday liferdquo71 In ldquoAssemblageEnvironments Happeningsrdquo bridging the gap between his early andlater work he concludes ldquothis has brought sharply into focus that theroom has always been a frame or format toordquo72 Kaprowrsquos collapse ofautonomy via art into lifemdashthat environments and happenings wouldldquopartake wholly in the real nature of art and (one hopes) liferdquomdashwasonly ever a hope as he himself knew If painting had used the frameas the delimitation of a eld for composition then environments andhappenings turned the gallery into the limit condition of this fieldWhile he tried to get closer to everyday life by making art he inevitablypushed it further away This ambivalence toward the collapse of artand life runs throughout Kaprowrsquos work even as he moved out of thegallery and into everyday life following his early work with his laterldquoactivitiesrdquo The early work was even by his own estimation more adisplay of experience and not a fair representation of actual everydayexperience But this is precisely where the importance of this work liesKaprowrsquos environments and happenings extended Rauschenbergrsquossemiautonomous gap so far that they turned the screw one notchhigher autonomy returning not though the sublation of art into archi-tecture but through the medium of framed space

100 Grey Room 13

NotesThanks to the generosity and insight of Karen Kurczynski John Harwood SethMcCormick Jaleh Mansoor Beth Hinderliter Vered Maimon Benjamin Buchloh andBarry Bergdoll as well as Branden Joseph and the Editors of Grey Room

1 Brian OrsquoDoherty Inside the White Cube The Ideology of the Gallery Space(Berkeley and Los Angeles University of California Press 1999) 15

2 It was originally called ldquoPainting Environments Happeningsrdquo and publishedin a condensed form in the catalog for the exhibition New FormsmdashNew Media I at the Martha Jackson Gallery New York the rst uptown show of Kaprow and his con-temporaries It was changed to ldquoAssemblage Environments and Happeningsrdquo for nalpublication Kaprow changed the title to incorporate the recent acceptance of the termassemblage It had been used rst by Helen Comstock to describe the work of ArthurDove in the 1920s but remained obscure until Jean Dubuffet popularized its use in 1953The term as used by Dubuffet was then adopted by William Seitz for his exhibitionThe Art of Assemblage at the Museum of Modern Art See Allan Kaprow AssemblageEnvironments and Happenings (New York Harry N Abrams 1966) 150ndash208 NewFormsmdashNew Media I (New York Martha Jackson Gallery 1960) np and RogerShattuck ldquoIntroduction How Collage Became Assemblagerdquo Essays on Assemblage(New York Museum of Modern Art 1992) 119

3 ldquoWhen I am in my painting Irsquom not aware of what Irsquom doingrdquo said PollockJackson Pollock Jackson Pollock Interviews Articles Reviews ed Pepe Karmel (NewYork Museum of Modern Art 1999) 17ndash18

4 Yard was Kaprowrsquos contribution to the exhibition Environments SituationsSpaces at the Martha Jackson Gallery a follow up to New FormsndashNew Media (see n 2)

5 ldquoAllan Kaprow and Robert Watts Interviewed by Sidney Simonrdquo in Benjamin HDBuchloh and Judith F Rodenbeck Experiments in the Everyday Allan Kaprow andRobert Watts Events Objects Documents (New York Wallach Art Gallery 1999) 76

6 To cite but one example of many Thomas Hirschhorn is an artist who continuesto extend and develop Kaprowrsquos legacy today

7 On Kaprow and performance see Amelia Jones Body Art Performing the Subject(Minneapolis University of Minnesota Press 1998) 56ndash57 Paul Schimmel ldquoLeap intothe Void Performance and the Objectrdquo in Out of Actions Between Performance andthe Object 1949ndash1979 ed Paul Schimmel (New York Thames and Hudson 1998)59ndash63

8 The relationship between painting and space had been explored before partic-ularly in the period between the two world wars by the artists associated with De Stijland constructivism For more on De Stijl see Nancy Troy The De Stijl Environment(Cambridge MIT Press 1983) On constructivism see Yve-Alain Bois ldquoEl LissitzkyRadical Reversibilityrdquo Art in America 76 no 4 (April 1988) 161ndash181 and Yve-AlainBois ldquoMaterial Utopiasrdquo Art in America 79 no 6 (June 1991) 98ndash107 Another Europeanwho explored the everyday object painting and space was Kurt Schwitters in the various incarnation of his Merzbau See Elizabeth Burns Gamard Kurt SchwittersrsquoMerzbau The Cathedral of Erotic Misery (New York Princeton Architectural Press2000) Two other important precursors who bridge the European and American con-text are Lazlo Moholy-Nagy and Friedrick Kiesler For information on Moholy-Nagyrsquosearly environmental projects as well as those of Lissitzy see Joan Ockman ldquoThe RoadNot Taken Alexander Dornerrsquos Way Beyond Artrdquo in Autonomy and Ideology Positioningan Avant-Garde in America ed RE Somol (New York Monicelli Press 1997) For

Kaizen | Framed Space Allan Kaprow and the Spread of Painting 101

information on Kiesler see RL Held Endless Innovations Frederick Kieslerrsquos Theoryand Scenic Design (Ann Arbor UMI Research Press 1982) Lisa Phillips FrederickKiesler (New York The Whitney Museum of American Art 1989) Brian OrsquoDohertydraws out the connections between the prendash and postndashWorld War II manifestations ofthis relationship in Inside the White Cube

9 For Benjamin the work of art attains autonomy under modernism with theemergence of art for artrsquos sake This autonomy is then usurped by mechanical repro-duction See Walter Benjamin ldquoThe Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproductionrdquoin Illuminations ed Hanna Arendt (New York Harcourt Brace and Jovanovich Inc1968) p 224-226 For Greenberg as the above quote indicates the autonomy of artcontinues even in the face of mechanization See Clement Greenberg ldquoTowards a NewerLaocoonrdquo Perceptions and Judgments 1939ndash1944 vol 1 of Clement Greenberg TheCollected Essays and Criticism ed John OrsquoBrien (Chicago University of Chicago1986) p 32

10 Rosalind Krauss uses the term ldquopost-medium conditionrdquo to designate ldquomixed-media installationrdquo work done today While Krauss argues that only the most signi-cant artists working since the 1960s reassert the medium in their work against thegeneral postmedium condition I believe that all mixed-media installation work operates using the gallery or institution as medium See Rosalind Krauss ldquoA Voyageon the North Seardquo Art in the Age of the Post-Medium Condition (New York Thamesand Hudson 1999) for her comments on a specic contemporary artist and the rein-vention of the medium see Rosalind Krauss ldquo And Then Turn Awayrdquo An Essayon James Colemanrdquo October 81 (Summer 1997) 5ndash33

11 Allan Kaprow ldquoThe Legacy of Jackson Pollockrdquo Art News 57 no 6 (October1958) 24ndash26 55ndash57 reprinted in Allan Kaprow Essays on the Blurring of Art andLife ed Jeff Kelley (Berkeley and Los Angles University of California Press 1993) 1ndash9 Kaprow has stated that the essay was written in 1956 in ldquoAllan Kaprow andRobert Watts Interviewed by Sidney Simonrdquo 77 Kaprow had been a student of bothHans Hoffman and Meyer Schapiro

12 Harold Rosenberg ldquoThe American Action Paintersrdquo Art News 52 (December1952) 22ndash23 In a footnote that Rosenberg added when the article was republished aspart of his book of collected essays in 1959 he added the following ldquoAction Paintinghas extracted the element of decision inherent in all art in that the work is not fin-ished at its beginning but has to be carried forward by an accumulation of lsquorightrsquo ges-tures In a word Action Painting is the abstraction of the moral element in art itsmark is moral tension in detachment from moral or esthetic certainties and it judgesitself morally in declaring that picture to be worthless which is not the incorporationof a genuine struggle one which could at any point have been lostrdquo Harold RosenbergThe Tradition of the New (New York Horizon Press 1959) 33ndash34 Kaprow recountsthe influence of Rosenbergrsquos essay on his work in ldquoAllan Kaprow and Robert WattsInterviewed by Sidney Simonrdquo 77

13 There were five all told They were held as follows 5ndash23 January 1948 24Januaryndash12 February 1949 21 Novemberndash10 December 1949 28 Novemberndash16 December1950 26 Novemberndash15 December 1951 These shows had a remarkable resonance onethat extended beyond even the insular New York art world when after the secondexhibition Life magazine published the feature article ldquoJackson Pollock Is He theGreatest Living Painter in the United Statesrdquo Dorothy Sieberling Life (August 81949) 42ndash45

14 Allan Kaprow ldquoThe Legacy of Jackson Pollockrdquo in Kaprow Essays on the

102 Grey Room 13

Blurringrdquo 615 Kaprow uses both the terms scale and size to describe Pollockrsquos work but as

TJ Clark has shown these are two very different terms and Pollock is a painter of sizeand not scale For Clark it is size that engages the body ldquoNormally speaking size isliteralmdasha matter of actual physical intuition It involves grasping how big or small acertain object really is most likely in relation to the size of the grasperrsquos upright body oroutspread armsrdquo TJ Clark ldquoPollockrsquos Smallnessrdquo in Jackson Pollock New Approachesed Kirk Varnedoe and Pepe Karmel (New York Museum of Modern Art 1999) 15

16 Kaprow ldquoThe Legacy of Jackson Pollockrdquo Essays on the Blurring 617 In most of his work the paint engages with the edge of the canvas emphasizing

and bordering it and not continuing around it as if the canvas had been cut down fromsome innite expanse Kaprow claims otherwise by singling out the exceptions sayingldquo[H]is art gives the impression of going on forever [T]hough evidence points to aslackening of the attack as Pollock came to the edges of many of his canvases in thebest ones he compensated for this by tacking much of the painted surface around theback of his stretchersrdquo Kaprow ldquoThe Legacy of Jackson Pollockrdquo Essays on the Blurringof Art and Life 5 An examination of the paintings shows that more often Pollockstopped before the edge or reworked his compositions after they were stretched sothat they reengaged with the edge even when cut from larger canvas Kaprow claimsotherwise because it furthers his arguments that Pollockrsquos paintings emerge into thespace of the viewer

18 Jackson Pollock ldquoApplication for a Guggenheim Fellowship 1947rdquo in JacksonPollock Interviews 17 The inuence of Greenberg at this time is discussed in StevenNaifeh and Gregory White Smith Jackson Pollock An American Saga (Aiken SCWoodwardWhite 1989) 551 Pollock had also engaged with wall-size painting duringhis association with Joseacute Clemente Orozco and in earlier work such as Mural(1943ndash1944) painted for Peggy Guggenheimrsquos house

19 Greenbergrsquos version of modernism was most fully laid out only in 1959 andpublished in 1960 ldquoIt was the stressing of the ineluctable atness of the surface thatremained however more fundamental than anything else to the process by whichpictorial art criticized and defined itself under Modernism For flatness alone wasunique and exclusive to pictorial art Because flatness was the only conditionpainting shared with no other art Modernist painting oriented itself to atness as itdid to nothing elserdquo In Clement Greenberg ldquoModernist Paintingrdquo in Modernism witha Vengeance 1957ndash1969 vol 4 of Clement Greenberg The Collected Essays andCriticism ed John OrsquoBrien (Chicago University of Chicago Press 1993) 87

20 Clement Greenberg ldquoThe Situation at the Momentrdquo in Arrogant Purpose1945ndash1949 vol 2 of Clement Greenberg The Collected Essays and Criticism ed JohnOrsquoBrien (Chicago University of Chicago 1986) 194ndash195

21 See Greenberg ldquoTowards a Newer Laocoonrdquo throughout22 Eric Lum has done extensive work on the relationship between abstract expres-

sionism and architecture The analysis in this essay follows from his especially whereBlakersquos project is concerned but also expands on it As he jumps from Blake to PhilipJohnson and Mark Rothkorsquos Houston Chapel however Lum misses the importance ofother interventions between painting and architecture such as those made by KaprowThis is evident when he says ldquoThrough this marriage of mural and wall paintingcould become fully integrated into architecture an idealized conjecture nor realizeduntil Mark Rothkorsquos 1971 Houston Chapelrdquo Eric Lum ldquoPollockrsquos Promise Toward anAbstract Expressionist Architecturerdquo Assemblage 39 (August 1999) 68

Kaizen | Framed Space Allan Kaprow and the Spread of Painting 103

23 Blake said of his visit to Pollockrsquos studio ldquoIt was a very sunny day and thesun was shining on the paintings I felt like I was standing in the Hall of Mirrors atVersailles It was a dazzling incredible sightrdquo Naifeh and Smith 588

24 Peter Blake No Place like Utopia Modern Architecture and the Company WeKept (New York Knopf 1993) 111ndash112

25 Miesrsquos museum plan was designed at the request of the editors at ArchitecturalForum who had been publishing a series of articles ldquoto show how building might beimproved through fuller and more imaginative use of existing resourcesrdquo They requesteddesigns for a variety of buildings that could be placed in a hypothetical city of 70000inhabitants ldquoNew Buildings for 194Xrdquo Architectural Forum 78 no 5 (May 1943)69ndash85 The Barcelona Pavilion was built in 1929 for the Barcelona Universal Expositionand was destroyed when the fair ended It was subsequently rebuilt in 1981ndash86

26 Peter Blake Mies van der Rohe (New York Pelican 1960) 54 It is worth notingthat like Miesrsquos use of the Kolbe sculpture Blake had Pollock actually make smallwire sculptures splattered with paint miniatures of sculptures that Blake hopedPollock would make for the actual museum Pollock himself was experimenting withsculpture around this time building three-dimensional forms out of papier-macirccheacutethat he then splattered with paint

27 Blakersquos collage space follows from Miesrsquos The production of collages as in situmodels for Miesrsquos buildings had begun in the twenties with his work for the journal Gin association with Dadaists such as Hans Richter Neil Levine notes this creation ofa collage space in Mies particularly in the Pavilion and the Museum for a Small Cityin relation to his use of reection to layer one surface on top of another Neil LevineldquolsquoThe Signicance of Factsrsquo Miesrsquo Collages Up Close and Personalrdquo Assemblage 37(December 1998) 71ndash101

28 Blake designed his museum just as Philip Johnson was building his Glass Housewhere they both spent considerable time while planning exhibitions for the Museumof Modern Art Johnsonrsquos inuence is also evident in Blakersquos design Blake No Placelike Utopia 149ndash155

29 Arthur Drexler ldquoUnframed Space A Museum for Jackson Pollackrsquos [sic] PaintingsrdquoInteriors and Industrial Design 109 no 6 (January 1950) 90ndash91 The article was partof a special issue whose theme was ldquoInteriors to Comerdquo a recurring topic that wasmeant ldquoto show the direction in which some of our best designers are goingrdquo The termunframed space was used several times in reference to Pollockrsquos work as the title oftwo articles Drexlerrsquos and one published slightly later by Berton Rouecheacute ThoughRouecheacute in an interview in To a Violent Grave says that Lee Krasner used the phraserst Charles Pollock says that Blake was the origin of the term The fact that Drexlerrsquosarticle was written and published earlier seems to conrm this See Berton RouecheacuteldquoUnframed Spacerdquo in Jackson Pollock Interviews 18ndash19 and Jeffrey Potter To aViolent Grave (New York Pushcart Press 1985) 126

30 Drexler 9031 Blake No Place like Utopia 113ndash11432 Blake completed construction on his ldquoPinwheel Houserdquo in 1952 It is a small

beach house that he designed for himself and his family in South Hampton on NewYorkrsquos Long Island Situated on the beach the house is square in plan and its fourexterior walls slide horizontally outward each in a successive clockwise directionrevealing glass walls When the exterior walls are fully extended and the house isviewed from above it forms a shape like a pinwheel Opening the exterior wallsreveals an ever-changing view of the landscape outside turning the ocean and the

104 Grey Room 13

dunes into the picturesque framing them so that they entirely ll the space of the walland put its surface in motion Blake had discussed with Pollock the possibility of hispainting the sliding walls so that his paintings would be superimposed over the land-scape Pollock considered it but Blake couldnrsquot come up with the commission moneythat Pollock asked for They never finalized their plans and it was never clear howthe panels were to be painted Blake suggested that they might be made of glass so hebought the sheet of glass that Pollock used to paint Number 29 1950 (1950) the paintingthat Hans Namuth lmed from underneath for his documentary on Pollock His col-laboration with Blake did lead to one commission a mural-size canvas done for ahouse designed by Marcel Breuer Untitled (Mural) (1950) Shortly after his collabo-ration with Blake Pollock began another unrealized architectural project this onewith Alfonso Ossorio and Tony Smith for a church designed by Smith with murals byPollock For more on all of this see Blake No Place like Utopia 114ndash118 Naifeh andSmith 649 and Lum ldquoPollockrsquos Promiserdquo 68 85ndash88

33 Lum ldquoPollockrsquos Promiserdquo 67ndash6834 A few pages down from Drexlerrsquos article on the Pollock Museum in Interiors

and Industrial Design was another architectural response to the same problem OlgaGueftrsquos article ldquoThe Museumrsquos Oasisrdquo describes another museum this one by Gyorgyand Juliet Kepes ldquoThe Kepesesrdquo it begins ldquoare not exactly opposed to museumsrdquo how-ever it would seem that they were opposed to museums containing works of artReplacing the art objects entirely the Kepeses substituted shells driftwood plantsand animals Instead of a natural history museum they proposed a modern-dayWunderkammerwhere natural forms take the place of art as objects for contemplationldquoThe proposed galleryrdquo they declared ldquowould bridge the gap between the art museumwhich is concerned with man-made beauty and the natural history museum whichis preoccupied with nature but not particularly with naturersquos beautyrdquo Gyorgy KepesrsquosThe New Landscape exhibition at MIT a year later in 1951 (the same years as theIndependent Grouprsquos similar exhibition Growth and Form in London) and the pub-lication that followed The New Landscape in Art and Sciencewould ultimately realizethis project with blown-up photographs of natural forms (cells shells and electronmicrographs) in place of actual objects

The Kepeses seem to have taken the next logical step beyond Blake proposing aneven more radical rethinking of the wall-size work of art Eliminating the need for theartist altogether they found abstract forms in nature and turned their reproductionsinto what would elsewhere have been works of art By turning the art object into scientic vision The Kepeses proposed its total instrumentation Autonomous abstractpainting was transformed into its instrumental other a mechanically reproduced science of vision Rather than turn art into interior design The Kepesesrsquo replacementof abstract painting recast the status of scientic technology into that of high art SeeOlga Gueft ldquoThe Museumrsquos Oasisrdquo Interiors and Industrial Design 109 no 6 (January1950) 100ndash103 and Gyorgy Kepes The New Landscape in Art and Science (ChicagoPaul Theobald and Co 1956)

35 Kaprow stated that it was ldquoIn 1949 [that] I saw an exhibition of [Pollockrsquos] workfor the rst timerdquo ldquoInterviewrdquo in Allan Kaprow (Pasadena Pasadena Art Museum1967) 7

36 See Kaprow ldquoThe Legacy of Jackson Pollockrdquo Art News 25 and Kaprow ldquoTheLegacy of Jackson Pollockrdquo Essays on the Blurring 3

37 Joan Marter ldquoThe Forgotten Legacy Happenings Pop Art and Fluxus at RutgersUniversityrdquo in Off Limits Rutgers University and the Avant-Garde 1957ndash1963 ed Joan

Kaizen | Framed Space Allan Kaprow and the Spread of Painting 105

Marter (Newark The Newark Museum 1999) 438 Marter 13239 Quoted in John Cage Silence (Middletown Wesleyan University Press 1961) 10540 Branden Joseph has developed the link between Cage and Rauschenberg in several

recent essays See Branden W Joseph ldquoJohn Cage and the Architecture of SilencerdquoOctober 81 (Summer 1997) 81ndash104 and Branden Joseph ldquoWhite on Whiterdquo CriticalInquiry 27 no 1 (Summer 2001) 90ndash121

41 For Cage on Rauschenberg see Cage Silence98ndash108 For his description ofTheater Piece No 1 see ldquoInterview with John Cagerdquo in Happenings and Other Actsed Mariellen R Sandford (New York Routledge 1995) 53 Cage subsequently referredto Theater Piece No 1 as ldquothe rst happeningrdquo See John Cage ldquoAn AutobiographicalStatementrdquo Southwest Review 76 no 1 (Winter 1991) 65

42 The score itself has had various incarnations It wasnrsquot published until 1960and in this version includes a note wherein Cage describes the rst performance byTudor For more on 4rsquo33 and its various scores see Liz Kotz ldquoWords on Paper NotNecessarily Meant to Be Read as Art Postwar Media Poetics from Cage to Warholrdquo(PhD diss Columbia University 2002) 83ndash115 Kotz follows a different lineage outof Cage and into performance and happenings than the one traced in this essay

43 Marter 13244 Walter Hopps in the first survey catalog of Rauschenbergrsquos early work does

not name the black paintings as a group as he does the White Paintings He calls themeach Untitled followed by a description in brackets Hopps notes of the largest ofthese works that ldquoThese paintings with a greater vastness and ambiguity of scale thanother Rauschenberg works relate to spatial qualities of Jackson Pollockrdquo HoppsRobert Rauschenberg The Early 1950s (Houston Houston Fine Art Press 1991) 67This convention was also followed in Rauschenbergrsquos 1997 Guggenheim retrospectivecatalog and is followed in this essay Robert Rauschenberg A Retrospective ed WalterHopps and Susan Davidson (New York Solomon R Guggenheim Museum 1997)

45 The piece is called Untitled [two black panels] (1953) Hopps Robert Rauschenberg99

46 Helen Molesworth notes the importance of Rauschenbergrsquos newspaper groundin the black paintings and develops this problem in relation to the abject body as it isfurther pursued in his work throughout the 1950s Helen Molesworth ldquoBefore BedrdquoOctober 63 (Winter 1993) 68ndash82

47 Asked about this work Rauschenberg said ldquoI called them combines I had tocoin that word because I got so bored with arguments I was interested in people seeingmy work When someone would come up and I really wanted to know what they thoughtof it or wanted to sense the exposure there was always this screen that they could getbehind which was if I said lsquoIt is paintingrsquo they would say lsquoThatrsquos not painting Thatrsquossculpturersquo And they thought this was very interestingrdquo Jeanne Siegel ArtwordsDiscourse on the 60s and 70s (New York DaCapo 1985) 153

48 Allan Kaprow ldquoa Statementrdquo in Happenings An Illustrated Anthology edMichael Kirby (New York EP Dutton and Co 1965) 44ndash45

49 Benjamin Buchloh notes the importance of play in the 1950s and its link toconsumer culture During the 1950s he writes ldquoa theory of games would remerge asa cultural project at the very moment of an ever-increasing instrumentalization oflibidinal desire through consumer culturerdquo Benjamin HD Buchloh ldquoRobert WattsInanimate ObjectsmdashInanimate Subjectsrdquo in Buchloh and Rodenbeck Experiments inthe Everyday 25 n 4

96 Grey Room 13

to cast aside for a moment proper manners andpartake wholly in the real nature of art and (onehopes) liferdquo63 Against the look-donrsquot-touch attitude ofmuseum and gallery Kaprow created a haptic spacewhere touch became the basis of the work where vis-itors came into physical contact with his throwawayobjects In this space as visitors threaded their waythrough the labyrinth the color of their clothes andtheir presence among these objects turned them intoa part of the work The viewer appeared as anotherthing in Kaprowrsquos composition not so different fromhis throwaway materials In his environment autonomycollapsed into participation based on the reicationof the subject as an obsolete material temporally

composited into the work While Kaprow certainly intended to includehis observers in the work he could do so only by turning them intoobjects rather than active subjects He later described his own sense ofthe failure with this exhibition that he couldnrsquot seem to engage theviewer enough but blamed it on the framing space of the galleryAfterward he said ldquoI complained immediately about the fact that therewas a sense of mystery until your eye reached a wall Then there wasa dead end At that point my disagreement with the gallery spacebeganrdquo64 But Kaprow didnrsquot abandon the gallerymdashat least not yet Toget closer to the everyday Kaprow thought he should more fully incor-porate the bodies of his viewers into his work This led to the origin ofhappenings in an attempt to make viewers into active subjects to engagethem more actively in creating the work as they became part of it

| | | | |

In 1958 Kaprow had presented two other early proto-happenings oneat Rutgers called Communication and one at George Segalrsquos farmcalled Pastorale65 Communication was based on work he had devel-oped in Cagersquos class It was close to traditional theater Presented in achapel that doubled as an auditorium for theater and music perfor-mances it included movement sound and banners unfurled from thebalconies Kaprow built ldquoplastic panelsrdquo behind which he performeda series of simple actions nally hiding himself from the audience bypainting the plastic wall in front of him and so ldquopainting himself outrdquoof the audiencersquos view66 For Pastorale he built frames that looked likeabysmal theater sets stretcher bars with torn strips of canvas runningfrom top to bottom During one part of the performance artists RobertWatts and Lucas Samaras painted on either side of one of these con-structions Inserted into the landscape these performance paintings

Part of the environment Allan Kaprow created for his piece Pastorale 1958Photo Vaughn Rachel

Kaizen | Framed Space Allan Kaprow and the Spread of Painting 97

marked the boundary between event and nonevent partitioning theground into territories and framing Pastoralersquos space using once againpainting as wall Unfortunately for Kaprow Pastorale was held during apicnic and the other participants were either too drunk or just plainunwilling to follow his directions They were engaged but refused tofollow his rules of play

18 Happenings in 6 Parts which took place in October 1959 wasthe rst ofcial happening67 Kaprow divided the inside of the galleryinto three smaller contiguous rooms using wooden two-by-fours Inphotographs of the piece as it was being installed these woodenbeams can be seen framing a space within the space of the gallerymdashnot into a proscenium stage but into an environment within the largergallery space where various events would occur Instead of wood ordrywall translucent plastic sheeting created the walls so that actioncould be partially seen from one room to the next Each room was litwith different colored lights and in each room where the audiencewas forced to sit and observe the action a group of actors movedthrough tightly scripted but simple routines as sounds came in and outand lms were projected

On the program the audience is listed under the ldquoCast of Participantsrdquowritten into the performance itself and actively engaged but only asthe subject of direction and authorial control At specific intervalsbells rang and the audience was required to change seats and to switchrooms based on instruction cards they had been given when they enteredthe gallery before the performance Kaprow had realized with his HansaGallery environment that he needed to give his viewers increasedresponsibility but he also realized that relinquishing too much con-trol could be a disaster as it had been in Pastorale As with his previ-ous work his goal with 18 Happenings was the ldquointegration of allelementsmdashenvironment constructed sections time space and peoplerdquoand the audience was once again included as just another material inhis composition68

During the fifth part of 18 Happenings one sequence of actionsseems to reveal Kaprowrsquos relationship with painting the viewer and space Kaprow had built a construction he called the ldquothe sandwich manrdquo named after its everyday counterparts paid to walkaround the city streets as human billboards Kaprowrsquos sandwich

Left The construction of thespace used for Allan Kaprowrsquos18 Happenings in 6 Parts1958

Right A view of Allan Kaprowrsquos18 Happenings whereRearrangeable Panels is partially visible on the leftThe in-set canvas panel onwhich actors painted live as part of the performance is shown at center PhotoScott Hyde

98 Grey Room 13

man was barely humanoidan automaton with forward-and backward-pointing mir-rors for a body bicycle wheelsfor feet and a gallon bucketof enamel paint for a headSticking out in front was apiece of wood for an arm end-ing in a hand that held cardslabeled ldquoXrdquo and ldquo3rdquo the adver-

tising handbill reduced to its zero degree In the middle of the sand-wich man hidden on a shelf between the two mirrors was a recordplayer and projecting out from behind it were two handles so that itcould be wheeled around the rooms As the sandwich man was wheeledfrom one room to another its mirrored body reflected the audienceback onto themselves their image taking the place of what would havebeen an advertisement They were reected not as participatory viewersnot even as active objects as in his environment but as passive objectsnow totally reied their image produced as a reection of Junk CultureHere in Brechtian fashion using a literal ldquoframing effectrdquo Kaprowturned his previous use of the viewer back into a critique of the eventitself In reecting the audiencersquos passivity back to them he forced amoment of recognition of their complicity in the production of thework They could see that as they became an ad on the sandwich manrsquosbelly so they became throwaway objects in his composition By reduc-ing the spectator to the general equivalence of these objects Kaprowrecognized the subject of the postndashWorld War II period as a product ofplanned obsolescence and consumer culture

Following this as the sandwich man was wheeled through the secondroom and into the third two men stood up from their seats one in eachroom Each took up a brush and a can of paint and approached oppo-site sides of one of the plastic walls simultaneously painting on a sec-tion of canvas set among the plastic walls and so turning the wall backinto a painting69 The canvas was left unprimed so that the simple gures that each artist painted (one was supposed to paint lines theother circles) would bleed through and so would be immediately visibleon the opposite side each mark responding to that of their partner Asin his two earlier happenings painting is done live before an audienceon a wall Kaprow showed the audience that when painting becomeswall it functions only to put space on display Here painting as a sin-gular art object was meaningless It became a throwaway stage propand so became a demonstration of how painting as object was part ofthe larger environment in which it resides The limit condition of paint-ing as wall with viewer as spectator was the gallery as frame70

The sandwich man part ofKaprowrsquos 18 HappeningsPhoto Scott Hyde

Kaizen | Framed Space Allan Kaprow and the Spread of Painting 99

What this sequence from 18 Happenings reveals is that Kaprow hadan acute sense of the way in which the gallery as frame produces sub-ject and space together He undermined the normal function of the artgallery turning both viewer and art object into Junk Culture Throwawayviewers throwaway paintings and throwaway rooms turned the galleryspacemdasha space designed to be neutral to hide itself as the objects itcontains become the sole focus of the viewerrsquos concentrationmdashinto thelocus of planned obsolescence With the creation of happeningsKaprow used Junk Culture against the doxa of gallery space upsettingthe common sense of what a space for art is and what it does Afterhappenings the paradoxical logic of the gallery as a site for both theprivate contemplation of singular aesthetic objects as well as the pub-lic transaction of luxury goods had been (however temporarily) sub-verted In asserting the gallery space as the limit condition of paintingKaprow framed the institution as the ground of artistic production

In ldquoThe Legacy of Jackson Pollockrdquo Kaprow says ldquoPollock left us atthe point where we must become preoccupied with and even dazzled by the space and objects of our everyday liferdquo71 In ldquoAssemblageEnvironments Happeningsrdquo bridging the gap between his early andlater work he concludes ldquothis has brought sharply into focus that theroom has always been a frame or format toordquo72 Kaprowrsquos collapse ofautonomy via art into lifemdashthat environments and happenings wouldldquopartake wholly in the real nature of art and (one hopes) liferdquomdashwasonly ever a hope as he himself knew If painting had used the frameas the delimitation of a eld for composition then environments andhappenings turned the gallery into the limit condition of this fieldWhile he tried to get closer to everyday life by making art he inevitablypushed it further away This ambivalence toward the collapse of artand life runs throughout Kaprowrsquos work even as he moved out of thegallery and into everyday life following his early work with his laterldquoactivitiesrdquo The early work was even by his own estimation more adisplay of experience and not a fair representation of actual everydayexperience But this is precisely where the importance of this work liesKaprowrsquos environments and happenings extended Rauschenbergrsquossemiautonomous gap so far that they turned the screw one notchhigher autonomy returning not though the sublation of art into archi-tecture but through the medium of framed space

100 Grey Room 13

NotesThanks to the generosity and insight of Karen Kurczynski John Harwood SethMcCormick Jaleh Mansoor Beth Hinderliter Vered Maimon Benjamin Buchloh andBarry Bergdoll as well as Branden Joseph and the Editors of Grey Room

1 Brian OrsquoDoherty Inside the White Cube The Ideology of the Gallery Space(Berkeley and Los Angeles University of California Press 1999) 15

2 It was originally called ldquoPainting Environments Happeningsrdquo and publishedin a condensed form in the catalog for the exhibition New FormsmdashNew Media I at the Martha Jackson Gallery New York the rst uptown show of Kaprow and his con-temporaries It was changed to ldquoAssemblage Environments and Happeningsrdquo for nalpublication Kaprow changed the title to incorporate the recent acceptance of the termassemblage It had been used rst by Helen Comstock to describe the work of ArthurDove in the 1920s but remained obscure until Jean Dubuffet popularized its use in 1953The term as used by Dubuffet was then adopted by William Seitz for his exhibitionThe Art of Assemblage at the Museum of Modern Art See Allan Kaprow AssemblageEnvironments and Happenings (New York Harry N Abrams 1966) 150ndash208 NewFormsmdashNew Media I (New York Martha Jackson Gallery 1960) np and RogerShattuck ldquoIntroduction How Collage Became Assemblagerdquo Essays on Assemblage(New York Museum of Modern Art 1992) 119

3 ldquoWhen I am in my painting Irsquom not aware of what Irsquom doingrdquo said PollockJackson Pollock Jackson Pollock Interviews Articles Reviews ed Pepe Karmel (NewYork Museum of Modern Art 1999) 17ndash18

4 Yard was Kaprowrsquos contribution to the exhibition Environments SituationsSpaces at the Martha Jackson Gallery a follow up to New FormsndashNew Media (see n 2)

5 ldquoAllan Kaprow and Robert Watts Interviewed by Sidney Simonrdquo in Benjamin HDBuchloh and Judith F Rodenbeck Experiments in the Everyday Allan Kaprow andRobert Watts Events Objects Documents (New York Wallach Art Gallery 1999) 76

6 To cite but one example of many Thomas Hirschhorn is an artist who continuesto extend and develop Kaprowrsquos legacy today

7 On Kaprow and performance see Amelia Jones Body Art Performing the Subject(Minneapolis University of Minnesota Press 1998) 56ndash57 Paul Schimmel ldquoLeap intothe Void Performance and the Objectrdquo in Out of Actions Between Performance andthe Object 1949ndash1979 ed Paul Schimmel (New York Thames and Hudson 1998)59ndash63

8 The relationship between painting and space had been explored before partic-ularly in the period between the two world wars by the artists associated with De Stijland constructivism For more on De Stijl see Nancy Troy The De Stijl Environment(Cambridge MIT Press 1983) On constructivism see Yve-Alain Bois ldquoEl LissitzkyRadical Reversibilityrdquo Art in America 76 no 4 (April 1988) 161ndash181 and Yve-AlainBois ldquoMaterial Utopiasrdquo Art in America 79 no 6 (June 1991) 98ndash107 Another Europeanwho explored the everyday object painting and space was Kurt Schwitters in the various incarnation of his Merzbau See Elizabeth Burns Gamard Kurt SchwittersrsquoMerzbau The Cathedral of Erotic Misery (New York Princeton Architectural Press2000) Two other important precursors who bridge the European and American con-text are Lazlo Moholy-Nagy and Friedrick Kiesler For information on Moholy-Nagyrsquosearly environmental projects as well as those of Lissitzy see Joan Ockman ldquoThe RoadNot Taken Alexander Dornerrsquos Way Beyond Artrdquo in Autonomy and Ideology Positioningan Avant-Garde in America ed RE Somol (New York Monicelli Press 1997) For

Kaizen | Framed Space Allan Kaprow and the Spread of Painting 101

information on Kiesler see RL Held Endless Innovations Frederick Kieslerrsquos Theoryand Scenic Design (Ann Arbor UMI Research Press 1982) Lisa Phillips FrederickKiesler (New York The Whitney Museum of American Art 1989) Brian OrsquoDohertydraws out the connections between the prendash and postndashWorld War II manifestations ofthis relationship in Inside the White Cube

9 For Benjamin the work of art attains autonomy under modernism with theemergence of art for artrsquos sake This autonomy is then usurped by mechanical repro-duction See Walter Benjamin ldquoThe Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproductionrdquoin Illuminations ed Hanna Arendt (New York Harcourt Brace and Jovanovich Inc1968) p 224-226 For Greenberg as the above quote indicates the autonomy of artcontinues even in the face of mechanization See Clement Greenberg ldquoTowards a NewerLaocoonrdquo Perceptions and Judgments 1939ndash1944 vol 1 of Clement Greenberg TheCollected Essays and Criticism ed John OrsquoBrien (Chicago University of Chicago1986) p 32

10 Rosalind Krauss uses the term ldquopost-medium conditionrdquo to designate ldquomixed-media installationrdquo work done today While Krauss argues that only the most signi-cant artists working since the 1960s reassert the medium in their work against thegeneral postmedium condition I believe that all mixed-media installation work operates using the gallery or institution as medium See Rosalind Krauss ldquoA Voyageon the North Seardquo Art in the Age of the Post-Medium Condition (New York Thamesand Hudson 1999) for her comments on a specic contemporary artist and the rein-vention of the medium see Rosalind Krauss ldquo And Then Turn Awayrdquo An Essayon James Colemanrdquo October 81 (Summer 1997) 5ndash33

11 Allan Kaprow ldquoThe Legacy of Jackson Pollockrdquo Art News 57 no 6 (October1958) 24ndash26 55ndash57 reprinted in Allan Kaprow Essays on the Blurring of Art andLife ed Jeff Kelley (Berkeley and Los Angles University of California Press 1993) 1ndash9 Kaprow has stated that the essay was written in 1956 in ldquoAllan Kaprow andRobert Watts Interviewed by Sidney Simonrdquo 77 Kaprow had been a student of bothHans Hoffman and Meyer Schapiro

12 Harold Rosenberg ldquoThe American Action Paintersrdquo Art News 52 (December1952) 22ndash23 In a footnote that Rosenberg added when the article was republished aspart of his book of collected essays in 1959 he added the following ldquoAction Paintinghas extracted the element of decision inherent in all art in that the work is not fin-ished at its beginning but has to be carried forward by an accumulation of lsquorightrsquo ges-tures In a word Action Painting is the abstraction of the moral element in art itsmark is moral tension in detachment from moral or esthetic certainties and it judgesitself morally in declaring that picture to be worthless which is not the incorporationof a genuine struggle one which could at any point have been lostrdquo Harold RosenbergThe Tradition of the New (New York Horizon Press 1959) 33ndash34 Kaprow recountsthe influence of Rosenbergrsquos essay on his work in ldquoAllan Kaprow and Robert WattsInterviewed by Sidney Simonrdquo 77

13 There were five all told They were held as follows 5ndash23 January 1948 24Januaryndash12 February 1949 21 Novemberndash10 December 1949 28 Novemberndash16 December1950 26 Novemberndash15 December 1951 These shows had a remarkable resonance onethat extended beyond even the insular New York art world when after the secondexhibition Life magazine published the feature article ldquoJackson Pollock Is He theGreatest Living Painter in the United Statesrdquo Dorothy Sieberling Life (August 81949) 42ndash45

14 Allan Kaprow ldquoThe Legacy of Jackson Pollockrdquo in Kaprow Essays on the

102 Grey Room 13

Blurringrdquo 615 Kaprow uses both the terms scale and size to describe Pollockrsquos work but as

TJ Clark has shown these are two very different terms and Pollock is a painter of sizeand not scale For Clark it is size that engages the body ldquoNormally speaking size isliteralmdasha matter of actual physical intuition It involves grasping how big or small acertain object really is most likely in relation to the size of the grasperrsquos upright body oroutspread armsrdquo TJ Clark ldquoPollockrsquos Smallnessrdquo in Jackson Pollock New Approachesed Kirk Varnedoe and Pepe Karmel (New York Museum of Modern Art 1999) 15

16 Kaprow ldquoThe Legacy of Jackson Pollockrdquo Essays on the Blurring 617 In most of his work the paint engages with the edge of the canvas emphasizing

and bordering it and not continuing around it as if the canvas had been cut down fromsome innite expanse Kaprow claims otherwise by singling out the exceptions sayingldquo[H]is art gives the impression of going on forever [T]hough evidence points to aslackening of the attack as Pollock came to the edges of many of his canvases in thebest ones he compensated for this by tacking much of the painted surface around theback of his stretchersrdquo Kaprow ldquoThe Legacy of Jackson Pollockrdquo Essays on the Blurringof Art and Life 5 An examination of the paintings shows that more often Pollockstopped before the edge or reworked his compositions after they were stretched sothat they reengaged with the edge even when cut from larger canvas Kaprow claimsotherwise because it furthers his arguments that Pollockrsquos paintings emerge into thespace of the viewer

18 Jackson Pollock ldquoApplication for a Guggenheim Fellowship 1947rdquo in JacksonPollock Interviews 17 The inuence of Greenberg at this time is discussed in StevenNaifeh and Gregory White Smith Jackson Pollock An American Saga (Aiken SCWoodwardWhite 1989) 551 Pollock had also engaged with wall-size painting duringhis association with Joseacute Clemente Orozco and in earlier work such as Mural(1943ndash1944) painted for Peggy Guggenheimrsquos house

19 Greenbergrsquos version of modernism was most fully laid out only in 1959 andpublished in 1960 ldquoIt was the stressing of the ineluctable atness of the surface thatremained however more fundamental than anything else to the process by whichpictorial art criticized and defined itself under Modernism For flatness alone wasunique and exclusive to pictorial art Because flatness was the only conditionpainting shared with no other art Modernist painting oriented itself to atness as itdid to nothing elserdquo In Clement Greenberg ldquoModernist Paintingrdquo in Modernism witha Vengeance 1957ndash1969 vol 4 of Clement Greenberg The Collected Essays andCriticism ed John OrsquoBrien (Chicago University of Chicago Press 1993) 87

20 Clement Greenberg ldquoThe Situation at the Momentrdquo in Arrogant Purpose1945ndash1949 vol 2 of Clement Greenberg The Collected Essays and Criticism ed JohnOrsquoBrien (Chicago University of Chicago 1986) 194ndash195

21 See Greenberg ldquoTowards a Newer Laocoonrdquo throughout22 Eric Lum has done extensive work on the relationship between abstract expres-

sionism and architecture The analysis in this essay follows from his especially whereBlakersquos project is concerned but also expands on it As he jumps from Blake to PhilipJohnson and Mark Rothkorsquos Houston Chapel however Lum misses the importance ofother interventions between painting and architecture such as those made by KaprowThis is evident when he says ldquoThrough this marriage of mural and wall paintingcould become fully integrated into architecture an idealized conjecture nor realizeduntil Mark Rothkorsquos 1971 Houston Chapelrdquo Eric Lum ldquoPollockrsquos Promise Toward anAbstract Expressionist Architecturerdquo Assemblage 39 (August 1999) 68

Kaizen | Framed Space Allan Kaprow and the Spread of Painting 103

23 Blake said of his visit to Pollockrsquos studio ldquoIt was a very sunny day and thesun was shining on the paintings I felt like I was standing in the Hall of Mirrors atVersailles It was a dazzling incredible sightrdquo Naifeh and Smith 588

24 Peter Blake No Place like Utopia Modern Architecture and the Company WeKept (New York Knopf 1993) 111ndash112

25 Miesrsquos museum plan was designed at the request of the editors at ArchitecturalForum who had been publishing a series of articles ldquoto show how building might beimproved through fuller and more imaginative use of existing resourcesrdquo They requesteddesigns for a variety of buildings that could be placed in a hypothetical city of 70000inhabitants ldquoNew Buildings for 194Xrdquo Architectural Forum 78 no 5 (May 1943)69ndash85 The Barcelona Pavilion was built in 1929 for the Barcelona Universal Expositionand was destroyed when the fair ended It was subsequently rebuilt in 1981ndash86

26 Peter Blake Mies van der Rohe (New York Pelican 1960) 54 It is worth notingthat like Miesrsquos use of the Kolbe sculpture Blake had Pollock actually make smallwire sculptures splattered with paint miniatures of sculptures that Blake hopedPollock would make for the actual museum Pollock himself was experimenting withsculpture around this time building three-dimensional forms out of papier-macirccheacutethat he then splattered with paint

27 Blakersquos collage space follows from Miesrsquos The production of collages as in situmodels for Miesrsquos buildings had begun in the twenties with his work for the journal Gin association with Dadaists such as Hans Richter Neil Levine notes this creation ofa collage space in Mies particularly in the Pavilion and the Museum for a Small Cityin relation to his use of reection to layer one surface on top of another Neil LevineldquolsquoThe Signicance of Factsrsquo Miesrsquo Collages Up Close and Personalrdquo Assemblage 37(December 1998) 71ndash101

28 Blake designed his museum just as Philip Johnson was building his Glass Housewhere they both spent considerable time while planning exhibitions for the Museumof Modern Art Johnsonrsquos inuence is also evident in Blakersquos design Blake No Placelike Utopia 149ndash155

29 Arthur Drexler ldquoUnframed Space A Museum for Jackson Pollackrsquos [sic] PaintingsrdquoInteriors and Industrial Design 109 no 6 (January 1950) 90ndash91 The article was partof a special issue whose theme was ldquoInteriors to Comerdquo a recurring topic that wasmeant ldquoto show the direction in which some of our best designers are goingrdquo The termunframed space was used several times in reference to Pollockrsquos work as the title oftwo articles Drexlerrsquos and one published slightly later by Berton Rouecheacute ThoughRouecheacute in an interview in To a Violent Grave says that Lee Krasner used the phraserst Charles Pollock says that Blake was the origin of the term The fact that Drexlerrsquosarticle was written and published earlier seems to conrm this See Berton RouecheacuteldquoUnframed Spacerdquo in Jackson Pollock Interviews 18ndash19 and Jeffrey Potter To aViolent Grave (New York Pushcart Press 1985) 126

30 Drexler 9031 Blake No Place like Utopia 113ndash11432 Blake completed construction on his ldquoPinwheel Houserdquo in 1952 It is a small

beach house that he designed for himself and his family in South Hampton on NewYorkrsquos Long Island Situated on the beach the house is square in plan and its fourexterior walls slide horizontally outward each in a successive clockwise directionrevealing glass walls When the exterior walls are fully extended and the house isviewed from above it forms a shape like a pinwheel Opening the exterior wallsreveals an ever-changing view of the landscape outside turning the ocean and the

104 Grey Room 13

dunes into the picturesque framing them so that they entirely ll the space of the walland put its surface in motion Blake had discussed with Pollock the possibility of hispainting the sliding walls so that his paintings would be superimposed over the land-scape Pollock considered it but Blake couldnrsquot come up with the commission moneythat Pollock asked for They never finalized their plans and it was never clear howthe panels were to be painted Blake suggested that they might be made of glass so hebought the sheet of glass that Pollock used to paint Number 29 1950 (1950) the paintingthat Hans Namuth lmed from underneath for his documentary on Pollock His col-laboration with Blake did lead to one commission a mural-size canvas done for ahouse designed by Marcel Breuer Untitled (Mural) (1950) Shortly after his collabo-ration with Blake Pollock began another unrealized architectural project this onewith Alfonso Ossorio and Tony Smith for a church designed by Smith with murals byPollock For more on all of this see Blake No Place like Utopia 114ndash118 Naifeh andSmith 649 and Lum ldquoPollockrsquos Promiserdquo 68 85ndash88

33 Lum ldquoPollockrsquos Promiserdquo 67ndash6834 A few pages down from Drexlerrsquos article on the Pollock Museum in Interiors

and Industrial Design was another architectural response to the same problem OlgaGueftrsquos article ldquoThe Museumrsquos Oasisrdquo describes another museum this one by Gyorgyand Juliet Kepes ldquoThe Kepesesrdquo it begins ldquoare not exactly opposed to museumsrdquo how-ever it would seem that they were opposed to museums containing works of artReplacing the art objects entirely the Kepeses substituted shells driftwood plantsand animals Instead of a natural history museum they proposed a modern-dayWunderkammerwhere natural forms take the place of art as objects for contemplationldquoThe proposed galleryrdquo they declared ldquowould bridge the gap between the art museumwhich is concerned with man-made beauty and the natural history museum whichis preoccupied with nature but not particularly with naturersquos beautyrdquo Gyorgy KepesrsquosThe New Landscape exhibition at MIT a year later in 1951 (the same years as theIndependent Grouprsquos similar exhibition Growth and Form in London) and the pub-lication that followed The New Landscape in Art and Sciencewould ultimately realizethis project with blown-up photographs of natural forms (cells shells and electronmicrographs) in place of actual objects

The Kepeses seem to have taken the next logical step beyond Blake proposing aneven more radical rethinking of the wall-size work of art Eliminating the need for theartist altogether they found abstract forms in nature and turned their reproductionsinto what would elsewhere have been works of art By turning the art object into scientic vision The Kepeses proposed its total instrumentation Autonomous abstractpainting was transformed into its instrumental other a mechanically reproduced science of vision Rather than turn art into interior design The Kepesesrsquo replacementof abstract painting recast the status of scientic technology into that of high art SeeOlga Gueft ldquoThe Museumrsquos Oasisrdquo Interiors and Industrial Design 109 no 6 (January1950) 100ndash103 and Gyorgy Kepes The New Landscape in Art and Science (ChicagoPaul Theobald and Co 1956)

35 Kaprow stated that it was ldquoIn 1949 [that] I saw an exhibition of [Pollockrsquos] workfor the rst timerdquo ldquoInterviewrdquo in Allan Kaprow (Pasadena Pasadena Art Museum1967) 7

36 See Kaprow ldquoThe Legacy of Jackson Pollockrdquo Art News 25 and Kaprow ldquoTheLegacy of Jackson Pollockrdquo Essays on the Blurring 3

37 Joan Marter ldquoThe Forgotten Legacy Happenings Pop Art and Fluxus at RutgersUniversityrdquo in Off Limits Rutgers University and the Avant-Garde 1957ndash1963 ed Joan

Kaizen | Framed Space Allan Kaprow and the Spread of Painting 105

Marter (Newark The Newark Museum 1999) 438 Marter 13239 Quoted in John Cage Silence (Middletown Wesleyan University Press 1961) 10540 Branden Joseph has developed the link between Cage and Rauschenberg in several

recent essays See Branden W Joseph ldquoJohn Cage and the Architecture of SilencerdquoOctober 81 (Summer 1997) 81ndash104 and Branden Joseph ldquoWhite on Whiterdquo CriticalInquiry 27 no 1 (Summer 2001) 90ndash121

41 For Cage on Rauschenberg see Cage Silence98ndash108 For his description ofTheater Piece No 1 see ldquoInterview with John Cagerdquo in Happenings and Other Actsed Mariellen R Sandford (New York Routledge 1995) 53 Cage subsequently referredto Theater Piece No 1 as ldquothe rst happeningrdquo See John Cage ldquoAn AutobiographicalStatementrdquo Southwest Review 76 no 1 (Winter 1991) 65

42 The score itself has had various incarnations It wasnrsquot published until 1960and in this version includes a note wherein Cage describes the rst performance byTudor For more on 4rsquo33 and its various scores see Liz Kotz ldquoWords on Paper NotNecessarily Meant to Be Read as Art Postwar Media Poetics from Cage to Warholrdquo(PhD diss Columbia University 2002) 83ndash115 Kotz follows a different lineage outof Cage and into performance and happenings than the one traced in this essay

43 Marter 13244 Walter Hopps in the first survey catalog of Rauschenbergrsquos early work does

not name the black paintings as a group as he does the White Paintings He calls themeach Untitled followed by a description in brackets Hopps notes of the largest ofthese works that ldquoThese paintings with a greater vastness and ambiguity of scale thanother Rauschenberg works relate to spatial qualities of Jackson Pollockrdquo HoppsRobert Rauschenberg The Early 1950s (Houston Houston Fine Art Press 1991) 67This convention was also followed in Rauschenbergrsquos 1997 Guggenheim retrospectivecatalog and is followed in this essay Robert Rauschenberg A Retrospective ed WalterHopps and Susan Davidson (New York Solomon R Guggenheim Museum 1997)

45 The piece is called Untitled [two black panels] (1953) Hopps Robert Rauschenberg99

46 Helen Molesworth notes the importance of Rauschenbergrsquos newspaper groundin the black paintings and develops this problem in relation to the abject body as it isfurther pursued in his work throughout the 1950s Helen Molesworth ldquoBefore BedrdquoOctober 63 (Winter 1993) 68ndash82

47 Asked about this work Rauschenberg said ldquoI called them combines I had tocoin that word because I got so bored with arguments I was interested in people seeingmy work When someone would come up and I really wanted to know what they thoughtof it or wanted to sense the exposure there was always this screen that they could getbehind which was if I said lsquoIt is paintingrsquo they would say lsquoThatrsquos not painting Thatrsquossculpturersquo And they thought this was very interestingrdquo Jeanne Siegel ArtwordsDiscourse on the 60s and 70s (New York DaCapo 1985) 153

48 Allan Kaprow ldquoa Statementrdquo in Happenings An Illustrated Anthology edMichael Kirby (New York EP Dutton and Co 1965) 44ndash45

49 Benjamin Buchloh notes the importance of play in the 1950s and its link toconsumer culture During the 1950s he writes ldquoa theory of games would remerge asa cultural project at the very moment of an ever-increasing instrumentalization oflibidinal desire through consumer culturerdquo Benjamin HD Buchloh ldquoRobert WattsInanimate ObjectsmdashInanimate Subjectsrdquo in Buchloh and Rodenbeck Experiments inthe Everyday 25 n 4

Kaizen | Framed Space Allan Kaprow and the Spread of Painting 97

marked the boundary between event and nonevent partitioning theground into territories and framing Pastoralersquos space using once againpainting as wall Unfortunately for Kaprow Pastorale was held during apicnic and the other participants were either too drunk or just plainunwilling to follow his directions They were engaged but refused tofollow his rules of play

18 Happenings in 6 Parts which took place in October 1959 wasthe rst ofcial happening67 Kaprow divided the inside of the galleryinto three smaller contiguous rooms using wooden two-by-fours Inphotographs of the piece as it was being installed these woodenbeams can be seen framing a space within the space of the gallerymdashnot into a proscenium stage but into an environment within the largergallery space where various events would occur Instead of wood ordrywall translucent plastic sheeting created the walls so that actioncould be partially seen from one room to the next Each room was litwith different colored lights and in each room where the audiencewas forced to sit and observe the action a group of actors movedthrough tightly scripted but simple routines as sounds came in and outand lms were projected

On the program the audience is listed under the ldquoCast of Participantsrdquowritten into the performance itself and actively engaged but only asthe subject of direction and authorial control At specific intervalsbells rang and the audience was required to change seats and to switchrooms based on instruction cards they had been given when they enteredthe gallery before the performance Kaprow had realized with his HansaGallery environment that he needed to give his viewers increasedresponsibility but he also realized that relinquishing too much con-trol could be a disaster as it had been in Pastorale As with his previ-ous work his goal with 18 Happenings was the ldquointegration of allelementsmdashenvironment constructed sections time space and peoplerdquoand the audience was once again included as just another material inhis composition68

During the fifth part of 18 Happenings one sequence of actionsseems to reveal Kaprowrsquos relationship with painting the viewer and space Kaprow had built a construction he called the ldquothe sandwich manrdquo named after its everyday counterparts paid to walkaround the city streets as human billboards Kaprowrsquos sandwich

Left The construction of thespace used for Allan Kaprowrsquos18 Happenings in 6 Parts1958

Right A view of Allan Kaprowrsquos18 Happenings whereRearrangeable Panels is partially visible on the leftThe in-set canvas panel onwhich actors painted live as part of the performance is shown at center PhotoScott Hyde

98 Grey Room 13

man was barely humanoidan automaton with forward-and backward-pointing mir-rors for a body bicycle wheelsfor feet and a gallon bucketof enamel paint for a headSticking out in front was apiece of wood for an arm end-ing in a hand that held cardslabeled ldquoXrdquo and ldquo3rdquo the adver-

tising handbill reduced to its zero degree In the middle of the sand-wich man hidden on a shelf between the two mirrors was a recordplayer and projecting out from behind it were two handles so that itcould be wheeled around the rooms As the sandwich man was wheeledfrom one room to another its mirrored body reflected the audienceback onto themselves their image taking the place of what would havebeen an advertisement They were reected not as participatory viewersnot even as active objects as in his environment but as passive objectsnow totally reied their image produced as a reection of Junk CultureHere in Brechtian fashion using a literal ldquoframing effectrdquo Kaprowturned his previous use of the viewer back into a critique of the eventitself In reecting the audiencersquos passivity back to them he forced amoment of recognition of their complicity in the production of thework They could see that as they became an ad on the sandwich manrsquosbelly so they became throwaway objects in his composition By reduc-ing the spectator to the general equivalence of these objects Kaprowrecognized the subject of the postndashWorld War II period as a product ofplanned obsolescence and consumer culture

Following this as the sandwich man was wheeled through the secondroom and into the third two men stood up from their seats one in eachroom Each took up a brush and a can of paint and approached oppo-site sides of one of the plastic walls simultaneously painting on a sec-tion of canvas set among the plastic walls and so turning the wall backinto a painting69 The canvas was left unprimed so that the simple gures that each artist painted (one was supposed to paint lines theother circles) would bleed through and so would be immediately visibleon the opposite side each mark responding to that of their partner Asin his two earlier happenings painting is done live before an audienceon a wall Kaprow showed the audience that when painting becomeswall it functions only to put space on display Here painting as a sin-gular art object was meaningless It became a throwaway stage propand so became a demonstration of how painting as object was part ofthe larger environment in which it resides The limit condition of paint-ing as wall with viewer as spectator was the gallery as frame70

The sandwich man part ofKaprowrsquos 18 HappeningsPhoto Scott Hyde

Kaizen | Framed Space Allan Kaprow and the Spread of Painting 99

What this sequence from 18 Happenings reveals is that Kaprow hadan acute sense of the way in which the gallery as frame produces sub-ject and space together He undermined the normal function of the artgallery turning both viewer and art object into Junk Culture Throwawayviewers throwaway paintings and throwaway rooms turned the galleryspacemdasha space designed to be neutral to hide itself as the objects itcontains become the sole focus of the viewerrsquos concentrationmdashinto thelocus of planned obsolescence With the creation of happeningsKaprow used Junk Culture against the doxa of gallery space upsettingthe common sense of what a space for art is and what it does Afterhappenings the paradoxical logic of the gallery as a site for both theprivate contemplation of singular aesthetic objects as well as the pub-lic transaction of luxury goods had been (however temporarily) sub-verted In asserting the gallery space as the limit condition of paintingKaprow framed the institution as the ground of artistic production

In ldquoThe Legacy of Jackson Pollockrdquo Kaprow says ldquoPollock left us atthe point where we must become preoccupied with and even dazzled by the space and objects of our everyday liferdquo71 In ldquoAssemblageEnvironments Happeningsrdquo bridging the gap between his early andlater work he concludes ldquothis has brought sharply into focus that theroom has always been a frame or format toordquo72 Kaprowrsquos collapse ofautonomy via art into lifemdashthat environments and happenings wouldldquopartake wholly in the real nature of art and (one hopes) liferdquomdashwasonly ever a hope as he himself knew If painting had used the frameas the delimitation of a eld for composition then environments andhappenings turned the gallery into the limit condition of this fieldWhile he tried to get closer to everyday life by making art he inevitablypushed it further away This ambivalence toward the collapse of artand life runs throughout Kaprowrsquos work even as he moved out of thegallery and into everyday life following his early work with his laterldquoactivitiesrdquo The early work was even by his own estimation more adisplay of experience and not a fair representation of actual everydayexperience But this is precisely where the importance of this work liesKaprowrsquos environments and happenings extended Rauschenbergrsquossemiautonomous gap so far that they turned the screw one notchhigher autonomy returning not though the sublation of art into archi-tecture but through the medium of framed space

100 Grey Room 13

NotesThanks to the generosity and insight of Karen Kurczynski John Harwood SethMcCormick Jaleh Mansoor Beth Hinderliter Vered Maimon Benjamin Buchloh andBarry Bergdoll as well as Branden Joseph and the Editors of Grey Room

1 Brian OrsquoDoherty Inside the White Cube The Ideology of the Gallery Space(Berkeley and Los Angeles University of California Press 1999) 15

2 It was originally called ldquoPainting Environments Happeningsrdquo and publishedin a condensed form in the catalog for the exhibition New FormsmdashNew Media I at the Martha Jackson Gallery New York the rst uptown show of Kaprow and his con-temporaries It was changed to ldquoAssemblage Environments and Happeningsrdquo for nalpublication Kaprow changed the title to incorporate the recent acceptance of the termassemblage It had been used rst by Helen Comstock to describe the work of ArthurDove in the 1920s but remained obscure until Jean Dubuffet popularized its use in 1953The term as used by Dubuffet was then adopted by William Seitz for his exhibitionThe Art of Assemblage at the Museum of Modern Art See Allan Kaprow AssemblageEnvironments and Happenings (New York Harry N Abrams 1966) 150ndash208 NewFormsmdashNew Media I (New York Martha Jackson Gallery 1960) np and RogerShattuck ldquoIntroduction How Collage Became Assemblagerdquo Essays on Assemblage(New York Museum of Modern Art 1992) 119

3 ldquoWhen I am in my painting Irsquom not aware of what Irsquom doingrdquo said PollockJackson Pollock Jackson Pollock Interviews Articles Reviews ed Pepe Karmel (NewYork Museum of Modern Art 1999) 17ndash18

4 Yard was Kaprowrsquos contribution to the exhibition Environments SituationsSpaces at the Martha Jackson Gallery a follow up to New FormsndashNew Media (see n 2)

5 ldquoAllan Kaprow and Robert Watts Interviewed by Sidney Simonrdquo in Benjamin HDBuchloh and Judith F Rodenbeck Experiments in the Everyday Allan Kaprow andRobert Watts Events Objects Documents (New York Wallach Art Gallery 1999) 76

6 To cite but one example of many Thomas Hirschhorn is an artist who continuesto extend and develop Kaprowrsquos legacy today

7 On Kaprow and performance see Amelia Jones Body Art Performing the Subject(Minneapolis University of Minnesota Press 1998) 56ndash57 Paul Schimmel ldquoLeap intothe Void Performance and the Objectrdquo in Out of Actions Between Performance andthe Object 1949ndash1979 ed Paul Schimmel (New York Thames and Hudson 1998)59ndash63

8 The relationship between painting and space had been explored before partic-ularly in the period between the two world wars by the artists associated with De Stijland constructivism For more on De Stijl see Nancy Troy The De Stijl Environment(Cambridge MIT Press 1983) On constructivism see Yve-Alain Bois ldquoEl LissitzkyRadical Reversibilityrdquo Art in America 76 no 4 (April 1988) 161ndash181 and Yve-AlainBois ldquoMaterial Utopiasrdquo Art in America 79 no 6 (June 1991) 98ndash107 Another Europeanwho explored the everyday object painting and space was Kurt Schwitters in the various incarnation of his Merzbau See Elizabeth Burns Gamard Kurt SchwittersrsquoMerzbau The Cathedral of Erotic Misery (New York Princeton Architectural Press2000) Two other important precursors who bridge the European and American con-text are Lazlo Moholy-Nagy and Friedrick Kiesler For information on Moholy-Nagyrsquosearly environmental projects as well as those of Lissitzy see Joan Ockman ldquoThe RoadNot Taken Alexander Dornerrsquos Way Beyond Artrdquo in Autonomy and Ideology Positioningan Avant-Garde in America ed RE Somol (New York Monicelli Press 1997) For

Kaizen | Framed Space Allan Kaprow and the Spread of Painting 101

information on Kiesler see RL Held Endless Innovations Frederick Kieslerrsquos Theoryand Scenic Design (Ann Arbor UMI Research Press 1982) Lisa Phillips FrederickKiesler (New York The Whitney Museum of American Art 1989) Brian OrsquoDohertydraws out the connections between the prendash and postndashWorld War II manifestations ofthis relationship in Inside the White Cube

9 For Benjamin the work of art attains autonomy under modernism with theemergence of art for artrsquos sake This autonomy is then usurped by mechanical repro-duction See Walter Benjamin ldquoThe Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproductionrdquoin Illuminations ed Hanna Arendt (New York Harcourt Brace and Jovanovich Inc1968) p 224-226 For Greenberg as the above quote indicates the autonomy of artcontinues even in the face of mechanization See Clement Greenberg ldquoTowards a NewerLaocoonrdquo Perceptions and Judgments 1939ndash1944 vol 1 of Clement Greenberg TheCollected Essays and Criticism ed John OrsquoBrien (Chicago University of Chicago1986) p 32

10 Rosalind Krauss uses the term ldquopost-medium conditionrdquo to designate ldquomixed-media installationrdquo work done today While Krauss argues that only the most signi-cant artists working since the 1960s reassert the medium in their work against thegeneral postmedium condition I believe that all mixed-media installation work operates using the gallery or institution as medium See Rosalind Krauss ldquoA Voyageon the North Seardquo Art in the Age of the Post-Medium Condition (New York Thamesand Hudson 1999) for her comments on a specic contemporary artist and the rein-vention of the medium see Rosalind Krauss ldquo And Then Turn Awayrdquo An Essayon James Colemanrdquo October 81 (Summer 1997) 5ndash33

11 Allan Kaprow ldquoThe Legacy of Jackson Pollockrdquo Art News 57 no 6 (October1958) 24ndash26 55ndash57 reprinted in Allan Kaprow Essays on the Blurring of Art andLife ed Jeff Kelley (Berkeley and Los Angles University of California Press 1993) 1ndash9 Kaprow has stated that the essay was written in 1956 in ldquoAllan Kaprow andRobert Watts Interviewed by Sidney Simonrdquo 77 Kaprow had been a student of bothHans Hoffman and Meyer Schapiro

12 Harold Rosenberg ldquoThe American Action Paintersrdquo Art News 52 (December1952) 22ndash23 In a footnote that Rosenberg added when the article was republished aspart of his book of collected essays in 1959 he added the following ldquoAction Paintinghas extracted the element of decision inherent in all art in that the work is not fin-ished at its beginning but has to be carried forward by an accumulation of lsquorightrsquo ges-tures In a word Action Painting is the abstraction of the moral element in art itsmark is moral tension in detachment from moral or esthetic certainties and it judgesitself morally in declaring that picture to be worthless which is not the incorporationof a genuine struggle one which could at any point have been lostrdquo Harold RosenbergThe Tradition of the New (New York Horizon Press 1959) 33ndash34 Kaprow recountsthe influence of Rosenbergrsquos essay on his work in ldquoAllan Kaprow and Robert WattsInterviewed by Sidney Simonrdquo 77

13 There were five all told They were held as follows 5ndash23 January 1948 24Januaryndash12 February 1949 21 Novemberndash10 December 1949 28 Novemberndash16 December1950 26 Novemberndash15 December 1951 These shows had a remarkable resonance onethat extended beyond even the insular New York art world when after the secondexhibition Life magazine published the feature article ldquoJackson Pollock Is He theGreatest Living Painter in the United Statesrdquo Dorothy Sieberling Life (August 81949) 42ndash45

14 Allan Kaprow ldquoThe Legacy of Jackson Pollockrdquo in Kaprow Essays on the

102 Grey Room 13

Blurringrdquo 615 Kaprow uses both the terms scale and size to describe Pollockrsquos work but as

TJ Clark has shown these are two very different terms and Pollock is a painter of sizeand not scale For Clark it is size that engages the body ldquoNormally speaking size isliteralmdasha matter of actual physical intuition It involves grasping how big or small acertain object really is most likely in relation to the size of the grasperrsquos upright body oroutspread armsrdquo TJ Clark ldquoPollockrsquos Smallnessrdquo in Jackson Pollock New Approachesed Kirk Varnedoe and Pepe Karmel (New York Museum of Modern Art 1999) 15

16 Kaprow ldquoThe Legacy of Jackson Pollockrdquo Essays on the Blurring 617 In most of his work the paint engages with the edge of the canvas emphasizing

and bordering it and not continuing around it as if the canvas had been cut down fromsome innite expanse Kaprow claims otherwise by singling out the exceptions sayingldquo[H]is art gives the impression of going on forever [T]hough evidence points to aslackening of the attack as Pollock came to the edges of many of his canvases in thebest ones he compensated for this by tacking much of the painted surface around theback of his stretchersrdquo Kaprow ldquoThe Legacy of Jackson Pollockrdquo Essays on the Blurringof Art and Life 5 An examination of the paintings shows that more often Pollockstopped before the edge or reworked his compositions after they were stretched sothat they reengaged with the edge even when cut from larger canvas Kaprow claimsotherwise because it furthers his arguments that Pollockrsquos paintings emerge into thespace of the viewer

18 Jackson Pollock ldquoApplication for a Guggenheim Fellowship 1947rdquo in JacksonPollock Interviews 17 The inuence of Greenberg at this time is discussed in StevenNaifeh and Gregory White Smith Jackson Pollock An American Saga (Aiken SCWoodwardWhite 1989) 551 Pollock had also engaged with wall-size painting duringhis association with Joseacute Clemente Orozco and in earlier work such as Mural(1943ndash1944) painted for Peggy Guggenheimrsquos house

19 Greenbergrsquos version of modernism was most fully laid out only in 1959 andpublished in 1960 ldquoIt was the stressing of the ineluctable atness of the surface thatremained however more fundamental than anything else to the process by whichpictorial art criticized and defined itself under Modernism For flatness alone wasunique and exclusive to pictorial art Because flatness was the only conditionpainting shared with no other art Modernist painting oriented itself to atness as itdid to nothing elserdquo In Clement Greenberg ldquoModernist Paintingrdquo in Modernism witha Vengeance 1957ndash1969 vol 4 of Clement Greenberg The Collected Essays andCriticism ed John OrsquoBrien (Chicago University of Chicago Press 1993) 87

20 Clement Greenberg ldquoThe Situation at the Momentrdquo in Arrogant Purpose1945ndash1949 vol 2 of Clement Greenberg The Collected Essays and Criticism ed JohnOrsquoBrien (Chicago University of Chicago 1986) 194ndash195

21 See Greenberg ldquoTowards a Newer Laocoonrdquo throughout22 Eric Lum has done extensive work on the relationship between abstract expres-

sionism and architecture The analysis in this essay follows from his especially whereBlakersquos project is concerned but also expands on it As he jumps from Blake to PhilipJohnson and Mark Rothkorsquos Houston Chapel however Lum misses the importance ofother interventions between painting and architecture such as those made by KaprowThis is evident when he says ldquoThrough this marriage of mural and wall paintingcould become fully integrated into architecture an idealized conjecture nor realizeduntil Mark Rothkorsquos 1971 Houston Chapelrdquo Eric Lum ldquoPollockrsquos Promise Toward anAbstract Expressionist Architecturerdquo Assemblage 39 (August 1999) 68

Kaizen | Framed Space Allan Kaprow and the Spread of Painting 103

23 Blake said of his visit to Pollockrsquos studio ldquoIt was a very sunny day and thesun was shining on the paintings I felt like I was standing in the Hall of Mirrors atVersailles It was a dazzling incredible sightrdquo Naifeh and Smith 588

24 Peter Blake No Place like Utopia Modern Architecture and the Company WeKept (New York Knopf 1993) 111ndash112

25 Miesrsquos museum plan was designed at the request of the editors at ArchitecturalForum who had been publishing a series of articles ldquoto show how building might beimproved through fuller and more imaginative use of existing resourcesrdquo They requesteddesigns for a variety of buildings that could be placed in a hypothetical city of 70000inhabitants ldquoNew Buildings for 194Xrdquo Architectural Forum 78 no 5 (May 1943)69ndash85 The Barcelona Pavilion was built in 1929 for the Barcelona Universal Expositionand was destroyed when the fair ended It was subsequently rebuilt in 1981ndash86

26 Peter Blake Mies van der Rohe (New York Pelican 1960) 54 It is worth notingthat like Miesrsquos use of the Kolbe sculpture Blake had Pollock actually make smallwire sculptures splattered with paint miniatures of sculptures that Blake hopedPollock would make for the actual museum Pollock himself was experimenting withsculpture around this time building three-dimensional forms out of papier-macirccheacutethat he then splattered with paint

27 Blakersquos collage space follows from Miesrsquos The production of collages as in situmodels for Miesrsquos buildings had begun in the twenties with his work for the journal Gin association with Dadaists such as Hans Richter Neil Levine notes this creation ofa collage space in Mies particularly in the Pavilion and the Museum for a Small Cityin relation to his use of reection to layer one surface on top of another Neil LevineldquolsquoThe Signicance of Factsrsquo Miesrsquo Collages Up Close and Personalrdquo Assemblage 37(December 1998) 71ndash101

28 Blake designed his museum just as Philip Johnson was building his Glass Housewhere they both spent considerable time while planning exhibitions for the Museumof Modern Art Johnsonrsquos inuence is also evident in Blakersquos design Blake No Placelike Utopia 149ndash155

29 Arthur Drexler ldquoUnframed Space A Museum for Jackson Pollackrsquos [sic] PaintingsrdquoInteriors and Industrial Design 109 no 6 (January 1950) 90ndash91 The article was partof a special issue whose theme was ldquoInteriors to Comerdquo a recurring topic that wasmeant ldquoto show the direction in which some of our best designers are goingrdquo The termunframed space was used several times in reference to Pollockrsquos work as the title oftwo articles Drexlerrsquos and one published slightly later by Berton Rouecheacute ThoughRouecheacute in an interview in To a Violent Grave says that Lee Krasner used the phraserst Charles Pollock says that Blake was the origin of the term The fact that Drexlerrsquosarticle was written and published earlier seems to conrm this See Berton RouecheacuteldquoUnframed Spacerdquo in Jackson Pollock Interviews 18ndash19 and Jeffrey Potter To aViolent Grave (New York Pushcart Press 1985) 126

30 Drexler 9031 Blake No Place like Utopia 113ndash11432 Blake completed construction on his ldquoPinwheel Houserdquo in 1952 It is a small

beach house that he designed for himself and his family in South Hampton on NewYorkrsquos Long Island Situated on the beach the house is square in plan and its fourexterior walls slide horizontally outward each in a successive clockwise directionrevealing glass walls When the exterior walls are fully extended and the house isviewed from above it forms a shape like a pinwheel Opening the exterior wallsreveals an ever-changing view of the landscape outside turning the ocean and the

104 Grey Room 13

dunes into the picturesque framing them so that they entirely ll the space of the walland put its surface in motion Blake had discussed with Pollock the possibility of hispainting the sliding walls so that his paintings would be superimposed over the land-scape Pollock considered it but Blake couldnrsquot come up with the commission moneythat Pollock asked for They never finalized their plans and it was never clear howthe panels were to be painted Blake suggested that they might be made of glass so hebought the sheet of glass that Pollock used to paint Number 29 1950 (1950) the paintingthat Hans Namuth lmed from underneath for his documentary on Pollock His col-laboration with Blake did lead to one commission a mural-size canvas done for ahouse designed by Marcel Breuer Untitled (Mural) (1950) Shortly after his collabo-ration with Blake Pollock began another unrealized architectural project this onewith Alfonso Ossorio and Tony Smith for a church designed by Smith with murals byPollock For more on all of this see Blake No Place like Utopia 114ndash118 Naifeh andSmith 649 and Lum ldquoPollockrsquos Promiserdquo 68 85ndash88

33 Lum ldquoPollockrsquos Promiserdquo 67ndash6834 A few pages down from Drexlerrsquos article on the Pollock Museum in Interiors

and Industrial Design was another architectural response to the same problem OlgaGueftrsquos article ldquoThe Museumrsquos Oasisrdquo describes another museum this one by Gyorgyand Juliet Kepes ldquoThe Kepesesrdquo it begins ldquoare not exactly opposed to museumsrdquo how-ever it would seem that they were opposed to museums containing works of artReplacing the art objects entirely the Kepeses substituted shells driftwood plantsand animals Instead of a natural history museum they proposed a modern-dayWunderkammerwhere natural forms take the place of art as objects for contemplationldquoThe proposed galleryrdquo they declared ldquowould bridge the gap between the art museumwhich is concerned with man-made beauty and the natural history museum whichis preoccupied with nature but not particularly with naturersquos beautyrdquo Gyorgy KepesrsquosThe New Landscape exhibition at MIT a year later in 1951 (the same years as theIndependent Grouprsquos similar exhibition Growth and Form in London) and the pub-lication that followed The New Landscape in Art and Sciencewould ultimately realizethis project with blown-up photographs of natural forms (cells shells and electronmicrographs) in place of actual objects

The Kepeses seem to have taken the next logical step beyond Blake proposing aneven more radical rethinking of the wall-size work of art Eliminating the need for theartist altogether they found abstract forms in nature and turned their reproductionsinto what would elsewhere have been works of art By turning the art object into scientic vision The Kepeses proposed its total instrumentation Autonomous abstractpainting was transformed into its instrumental other a mechanically reproduced science of vision Rather than turn art into interior design The Kepesesrsquo replacementof abstract painting recast the status of scientic technology into that of high art SeeOlga Gueft ldquoThe Museumrsquos Oasisrdquo Interiors and Industrial Design 109 no 6 (January1950) 100ndash103 and Gyorgy Kepes The New Landscape in Art and Science (ChicagoPaul Theobald and Co 1956)

35 Kaprow stated that it was ldquoIn 1949 [that] I saw an exhibition of [Pollockrsquos] workfor the rst timerdquo ldquoInterviewrdquo in Allan Kaprow (Pasadena Pasadena Art Museum1967) 7

36 See Kaprow ldquoThe Legacy of Jackson Pollockrdquo Art News 25 and Kaprow ldquoTheLegacy of Jackson Pollockrdquo Essays on the Blurring 3

37 Joan Marter ldquoThe Forgotten Legacy Happenings Pop Art and Fluxus at RutgersUniversityrdquo in Off Limits Rutgers University and the Avant-Garde 1957ndash1963 ed Joan

Kaizen | Framed Space Allan Kaprow and the Spread of Painting 105

Marter (Newark The Newark Museum 1999) 438 Marter 13239 Quoted in John Cage Silence (Middletown Wesleyan University Press 1961) 10540 Branden Joseph has developed the link between Cage and Rauschenberg in several

recent essays See Branden W Joseph ldquoJohn Cage and the Architecture of SilencerdquoOctober 81 (Summer 1997) 81ndash104 and Branden Joseph ldquoWhite on Whiterdquo CriticalInquiry 27 no 1 (Summer 2001) 90ndash121

41 For Cage on Rauschenberg see Cage Silence98ndash108 For his description ofTheater Piece No 1 see ldquoInterview with John Cagerdquo in Happenings and Other Actsed Mariellen R Sandford (New York Routledge 1995) 53 Cage subsequently referredto Theater Piece No 1 as ldquothe rst happeningrdquo See John Cage ldquoAn AutobiographicalStatementrdquo Southwest Review 76 no 1 (Winter 1991) 65

42 The score itself has had various incarnations It wasnrsquot published until 1960and in this version includes a note wherein Cage describes the rst performance byTudor For more on 4rsquo33 and its various scores see Liz Kotz ldquoWords on Paper NotNecessarily Meant to Be Read as Art Postwar Media Poetics from Cage to Warholrdquo(PhD diss Columbia University 2002) 83ndash115 Kotz follows a different lineage outof Cage and into performance and happenings than the one traced in this essay

43 Marter 13244 Walter Hopps in the first survey catalog of Rauschenbergrsquos early work does

not name the black paintings as a group as he does the White Paintings He calls themeach Untitled followed by a description in brackets Hopps notes of the largest ofthese works that ldquoThese paintings with a greater vastness and ambiguity of scale thanother Rauschenberg works relate to spatial qualities of Jackson Pollockrdquo HoppsRobert Rauschenberg The Early 1950s (Houston Houston Fine Art Press 1991) 67This convention was also followed in Rauschenbergrsquos 1997 Guggenheim retrospectivecatalog and is followed in this essay Robert Rauschenberg A Retrospective ed WalterHopps and Susan Davidson (New York Solomon R Guggenheim Museum 1997)

45 The piece is called Untitled [two black panels] (1953) Hopps Robert Rauschenberg99

46 Helen Molesworth notes the importance of Rauschenbergrsquos newspaper groundin the black paintings and develops this problem in relation to the abject body as it isfurther pursued in his work throughout the 1950s Helen Molesworth ldquoBefore BedrdquoOctober 63 (Winter 1993) 68ndash82

47 Asked about this work Rauschenberg said ldquoI called them combines I had tocoin that word because I got so bored with arguments I was interested in people seeingmy work When someone would come up and I really wanted to know what they thoughtof it or wanted to sense the exposure there was always this screen that they could getbehind which was if I said lsquoIt is paintingrsquo they would say lsquoThatrsquos not painting Thatrsquossculpturersquo And they thought this was very interestingrdquo Jeanne Siegel ArtwordsDiscourse on the 60s and 70s (New York DaCapo 1985) 153

48 Allan Kaprow ldquoa Statementrdquo in Happenings An Illustrated Anthology edMichael Kirby (New York EP Dutton and Co 1965) 44ndash45

49 Benjamin Buchloh notes the importance of play in the 1950s and its link toconsumer culture During the 1950s he writes ldquoa theory of games would remerge asa cultural project at the very moment of an ever-increasing instrumentalization oflibidinal desire through consumer culturerdquo Benjamin HD Buchloh ldquoRobert WattsInanimate ObjectsmdashInanimate Subjectsrdquo in Buchloh and Rodenbeck Experiments inthe Everyday 25 n 4

98 Grey Room 13

man was barely humanoidan automaton with forward-and backward-pointing mir-rors for a body bicycle wheelsfor feet and a gallon bucketof enamel paint for a headSticking out in front was apiece of wood for an arm end-ing in a hand that held cardslabeled ldquoXrdquo and ldquo3rdquo the adver-

tising handbill reduced to its zero degree In the middle of the sand-wich man hidden on a shelf between the two mirrors was a recordplayer and projecting out from behind it were two handles so that itcould be wheeled around the rooms As the sandwich man was wheeledfrom one room to another its mirrored body reflected the audienceback onto themselves their image taking the place of what would havebeen an advertisement They were reected not as participatory viewersnot even as active objects as in his environment but as passive objectsnow totally reied their image produced as a reection of Junk CultureHere in Brechtian fashion using a literal ldquoframing effectrdquo Kaprowturned his previous use of the viewer back into a critique of the eventitself In reecting the audiencersquos passivity back to them he forced amoment of recognition of their complicity in the production of thework They could see that as they became an ad on the sandwich manrsquosbelly so they became throwaway objects in his composition By reduc-ing the spectator to the general equivalence of these objects Kaprowrecognized the subject of the postndashWorld War II period as a product ofplanned obsolescence and consumer culture

Following this as the sandwich man was wheeled through the secondroom and into the third two men stood up from their seats one in eachroom Each took up a brush and a can of paint and approached oppo-site sides of one of the plastic walls simultaneously painting on a sec-tion of canvas set among the plastic walls and so turning the wall backinto a painting69 The canvas was left unprimed so that the simple gures that each artist painted (one was supposed to paint lines theother circles) would bleed through and so would be immediately visibleon the opposite side each mark responding to that of their partner Asin his two earlier happenings painting is done live before an audienceon a wall Kaprow showed the audience that when painting becomeswall it functions only to put space on display Here painting as a sin-gular art object was meaningless It became a throwaway stage propand so became a demonstration of how painting as object was part ofthe larger environment in which it resides The limit condition of paint-ing as wall with viewer as spectator was the gallery as frame70

The sandwich man part ofKaprowrsquos 18 HappeningsPhoto Scott Hyde

Kaizen | Framed Space Allan Kaprow and the Spread of Painting 99

What this sequence from 18 Happenings reveals is that Kaprow hadan acute sense of the way in which the gallery as frame produces sub-ject and space together He undermined the normal function of the artgallery turning both viewer and art object into Junk Culture Throwawayviewers throwaway paintings and throwaway rooms turned the galleryspacemdasha space designed to be neutral to hide itself as the objects itcontains become the sole focus of the viewerrsquos concentrationmdashinto thelocus of planned obsolescence With the creation of happeningsKaprow used Junk Culture against the doxa of gallery space upsettingthe common sense of what a space for art is and what it does Afterhappenings the paradoxical logic of the gallery as a site for both theprivate contemplation of singular aesthetic objects as well as the pub-lic transaction of luxury goods had been (however temporarily) sub-verted In asserting the gallery space as the limit condition of paintingKaprow framed the institution as the ground of artistic production

In ldquoThe Legacy of Jackson Pollockrdquo Kaprow says ldquoPollock left us atthe point where we must become preoccupied with and even dazzled by the space and objects of our everyday liferdquo71 In ldquoAssemblageEnvironments Happeningsrdquo bridging the gap between his early andlater work he concludes ldquothis has brought sharply into focus that theroom has always been a frame or format toordquo72 Kaprowrsquos collapse ofautonomy via art into lifemdashthat environments and happenings wouldldquopartake wholly in the real nature of art and (one hopes) liferdquomdashwasonly ever a hope as he himself knew If painting had used the frameas the delimitation of a eld for composition then environments andhappenings turned the gallery into the limit condition of this fieldWhile he tried to get closer to everyday life by making art he inevitablypushed it further away This ambivalence toward the collapse of artand life runs throughout Kaprowrsquos work even as he moved out of thegallery and into everyday life following his early work with his laterldquoactivitiesrdquo The early work was even by his own estimation more adisplay of experience and not a fair representation of actual everydayexperience But this is precisely where the importance of this work liesKaprowrsquos environments and happenings extended Rauschenbergrsquossemiautonomous gap so far that they turned the screw one notchhigher autonomy returning not though the sublation of art into archi-tecture but through the medium of framed space

100 Grey Room 13

NotesThanks to the generosity and insight of Karen Kurczynski John Harwood SethMcCormick Jaleh Mansoor Beth Hinderliter Vered Maimon Benjamin Buchloh andBarry Bergdoll as well as Branden Joseph and the Editors of Grey Room

1 Brian OrsquoDoherty Inside the White Cube The Ideology of the Gallery Space(Berkeley and Los Angeles University of California Press 1999) 15

2 It was originally called ldquoPainting Environments Happeningsrdquo and publishedin a condensed form in the catalog for the exhibition New FormsmdashNew Media I at the Martha Jackson Gallery New York the rst uptown show of Kaprow and his con-temporaries It was changed to ldquoAssemblage Environments and Happeningsrdquo for nalpublication Kaprow changed the title to incorporate the recent acceptance of the termassemblage It had been used rst by Helen Comstock to describe the work of ArthurDove in the 1920s but remained obscure until Jean Dubuffet popularized its use in 1953The term as used by Dubuffet was then adopted by William Seitz for his exhibitionThe Art of Assemblage at the Museum of Modern Art See Allan Kaprow AssemblageEnvironments and Happenings (New York Harry N Abrams 1966) 150ndash208 NewFormsmdashNew Media I (New York Martha Jackson Gallery 1960) np and RogerShattuck ldquoIntroduction How Collage Became Assemblagerdquo Essays on Assemblage(New York Museum of Modern Art 1992) 119

3 ldquoWhen I am in my painting Irsquom not aware of what Irsquom doingrdquo said PollockJackson Pollock Jackson Pollock Interviews Articles Reviews ed Pepe Karmel (NewYork Museum of Modern Art 1999) 17ndash18

4 Yard was Kaprowrsquos contribution to the exhibition Environments SituationsSpaces at the Martha Jackson Gallery a follow up to New FormsndashNew Media (see n 2)

5 ldquoAllan Kaprow and Robert Watts Interviewed by Sidney Simonrdquo in Benjamin HDBuchloh and Judith F Rodenbeck Experiments in the Everyday Allan Kaprow andRobert Watts Events Objects Documents (New York Wallach Art Gallery 1999) 76

6 To cite but one example of many Thomas Hirschhorn is an artist who continuesto extend and develop Kaprowrsquos legacy today

7 On Kaprow and performance see Amelia Jones Body Art Performing the Subject(Minneapolis University of Minnesota Press 1998) 56ndash57 Paul Schimmel ldquoLeap intothe Void Performance and the Objectrdquo in Out of Actions Between Performance andthe Object 1949ndash1979 ed Paul Schimmel (New York Thames and Hudson 1998)59ndash63

8 The relationship between painting and space had been explored before partic-ularly in the period between the two world wars by the artists associated with De Stijland constructivism For more on De Stijl see Nancy Troy The De Stijl Environment(Cambridge MIT Press 1983) On constructivism see Yve-Alain Bois ldquoEl LissitzkyRadical Reversibilityrdquo Art in America 76 no 4 (April 1988) 161ndash181 and Yve-AlainBois ldquoMaterial Utopiasrdquo Art in America 79 no 6 (June 1991) 98ndash107 Another Europeanwho explored the everyday object painting and space was Kurt Schwitters in the various incarnation of his Merzbau See Elizabeth Burns Gamard Kurt SchwittersrsquoMerzbau The Cathedral of Erotic Misery (New York Princeton Architectural Press2000) Two other important precursors who bridge the European and American con-text are Lazlo Moholy-Nagy and Friedrick Kiesler For information on Moholy-Nagyrsquosearly environmental projects as well as those of Lissitzy see Joan Ockman ldquoThe RoadNot Taken Alexander Dornerrsquos Way Beyond Artrdquo in Autonomy and Ideology Positioningan Avant-Garde in America ed RE Somol (New York Monicelli Press 1997) For

Kaizen | Framed Space Allan Kaprow and the Spread of Painting 101

information on Kiesler see RL Held Endless Innovations Frederick Kieslerrsquos Theoryand Scenic Design (Ann Arbor UMI Research Press 1982) Lisa Phillips FrederickKiesler (New York The Whitney Museum of American Art 1989) Brian OrsquoDohertydraws out the connections between the prendash and postndashWorld War II manifestations ofthis relationship in Inside the White Cube

9 For Benjamin the work of art attains autonomy under modernism with theemergence of art for artrsquos sake This autonomy is then usurped by mechanical repro-duction See Walter Benjamin ldquoThe Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproductionrdquoin Illuminations ed Hanna Arendt (New York Harcourt Brace and Jovanovich Inc1968) p 224-226 For Greenberg as the above quote indicates the autonomy of artcontinues even in the face of mechanization See Clement Greenberg ldquoTowards a NewerLaocoonrdquo Perceptions and Judgments 1939ndash1944 vol 1 of Clement Greenberg TheCollected Essays and Criticism ed John OrsquoBrien (Chicago University of Chicago1986) p 32

10 Rosalind Krauss uses the term ldquopost-medium conditionrdquo to designate ldquomixed-media installationrdquo work done today While Krauss argues that only the most signi-cant artists working since the 1960s reassert the medium in their work against thegeneral postmedium condition I believe that all mixed-media installation work operates using the gallery or institution as medium See Rosalind Krauss ldquoA Voyageon the North Seardquo Art in the Age of the Post-Medium Condition (New York Thamesand Hudson 1999) for her comments on a specic contemporary artist and the rein-vention of the medium see Rosalind Krauss ldquo And Then Turn Awayrdquo An Essayon James Colemanrdquo October 81 (Summer 1997) 5ndash33

11 Allan Kaprow ldquoThe Legacy of Jackson Pollockrdquo Art News 57 no 6 (October1958) 24ndash26 55ndash57 reprinted in Allan Kaprow Essays on the Blurring of Art andLife ed Jeff Kelley (Berkeley and Los Angles University of California Press 1993) 1ndash9 Kaprow has stated that the essay was written in 1956 in ldquoAllan Kaprow andRobert Watts Interviewed by Sidney Simonrdquo 77 Kaprow had been a student of bothHans Hoffman and Meyer Schapiro

12 Harold Rosenberg ldquoThe American Action Paintersrdquo Art News 52 (December1952) 22ndash23 In a footnote that Rosenberg added when the article was republished aspart of his book of collected essays in 1959 he added the following ldquoAction Paintinghas extracted the element of decision inherent in all art in that the work is not fin-ished at its beginning but has to be carried forward by an accumulation of lsquorightrsquo ges-tures In a word Action Painting is the abstraction of the moral element in art itsmark is moral tension in detachment from moral or esthetic certainties and it judgesitself morally in declaring that picture to be worthless which is not the incorporationof a genuine struggle one which could at any point have been lostrdquo Harold RosenbergThe Tradition of the New (New York Horizon Press 1959) 33ndash34 Kaprow recountsthe influence of Rosenbergrsquos essay on his work in ldquoAllan Kaprow and Robert WattsInterviewed by Sidney Simonrdquo 77

13 There were five all told They were held as follows 5ndash23 January 1948 24Januaryndash12 February 1949 21 Novemberndash10 December 1949 28 Novemberndash16 December1950 26 Novemberndash15 December 1951 These shows had a remarkable resonance onethat extended beyond even the insular New York art world when after the secondexhibition Life magazine published the feature article ldquoJackson Pollock Is He theGreatest Living Painter in the United Statesrdquo Dorothy Sieberling Life (August 81949) 42ndash45

14 Allan Kaprow ldquoThe Legacy of Jackson Pollockrdquo in Kaprow Essays on the

102 Grey Room 13

Blurringrdquo 615 Kaprow uses both the terms scale and size to describe Pollockrsquos work but as

TJ Clark has shown these are two very different terms and Pollock is a painter of sizeand not scale For Clark it is size that engages the body ldquoNormally speaking size isliteralmdasha matter of actual physical intuition It involves grasping how big or small acertain object really is most likely in relation to the size of the grasperrsquos upright body oroutspread armsrdquo TJ Clark ldquoPollockrsquos Smallnessrdquo in Jackson Pollock New Approachesed Kirk Varnedoe and Pepe Karmel (New York Museum of Modern Art 1999) 15

16 Kaprow ldquoThe Legacy of Jackson Pollockrdquo Essays on the Blurring 617 In most of his work the paint engages with the edge of the canvas emphasizing

and bordering it and not continuing around it as if the canvas had been cut down fromsome innite expanse Kaprow claims otherwise by singling out the exceptions sayingldquo[H]is art gives the impression of going on forever [T]hough evidence points to aslackening of the attack as Pollock came to the edges of many of his canvases in thebest ones he compensated for this by tacking much of the painted surface around theback of his stretchersrdquo Kaprow ldquoThe Legacy of Jackson Pollockrdquo Essays on the Blurringof Art and Life 5 An examination of the paintings shows that more often Pollockstopped before the edge or reworked his compositions after they were stretched sothat they reengaged with the edge even when cut from larger canvas Kaprow claimsotherwise because it furthers his arguments that Pollockrsquos paintings emerge into thespace of the viewer

18 Jackson Pollock ldquoApplication for a Guggenheim Fellowship 1947rdquo in JacksonPollock Interviews 17 The inuence of Greenberg at this time is discussed in StevenNaifeh and Gregory White Smith Jackson Pollock An American Saga (Aiken SCWoodwardWhite 1989) 551 Pollock had also engaged with wall-size painting duringhis association with Joseacute Clemente Orozco and in earlier work such as Mural(1943ndash1944) painted for Peggy Guggenheimrsquos house

19 Greenbergrsquos version of modernism was most fully laid out only in 1959 andpublished in 1960 ldquoIt was the stressing of the ineluctable atness of the surface thatremained however more fundamental than anything else to the process by whichpictorial art criticized and defined itself under Modernism For flatness alone wasunique and exclusive to pictorial art Because flatness was the only conditionpainting shared with no other art Modernist painting oriented itself to atness as itdid to nothing elserdquo In Clement Greenberg ldquoModernist Paintingrdquo in Modernism witha Vengeance 1957ndash1969 vol 4 of Clement Greenberg The Collected Essays andCriticism ed John OrsquoBrien (Chicago University of Chicago Press 1993) 87

20 Clement Greenberg ldquoThe Situation at the Momentrdquo in Arrogant Purpose1945ndash1949 vol 2 of Clement Greenberg The Collected Essays and Criticism ed JohnOrsquoBrien (Chicago University of Chicago 1986) 194ndash195

21 See Greenberg ldquoTowards a Newer Laocoonrdquo throughout22 Eric Lum has done extensive work on the relationship between abstract expres-

sionism and architecture The analysis in this essay follows from his especially whereBlakersquos project is concerned but also expands on it As he jumps from Blake to PhilipJohnson and Mark Rothkorsquos Houston Chapel however Lum misses the importance ofother interventions between painting and architecture such as those made by KaprowThis is evident when he says ldquoThrough this marriage of mural and wall paintingcould become fully integrated into architecture an idealized conjecture nor realizeduntil Mark Rothkorsquos 1971 Houston Chapelrdquo Eric Lum ldquoPollockrsquos Promise Toward anAbstract Expressionist Architecturerdquo Assemblage 39 (August 1999) 68

Kaizen | Framed Space Allan Kaprow and the Spread of Painting 103

23 Blake said of his visit to Pollockrsquos studio ldquoIt was a very sunny day and thesun was shining on the paintings I felt like I was standing in the Hall of Mirrors atVersailles It was a dazzling incredible sightrdquo Naifeh and Smith 588

24 Peter Blake No Place like Utopia Modern Architecture and the Company WeKept (New York Knopf 1993) 111ndash112

25 Miesrsquos museum plan was designed at the request of the editors at ArchitecturalForum who had been publishing a series of articles ldquoto show how building might beimproved through fuller and more imaginative use of existing resourcesrdquo They requesteddesigns for a variety of buildings that could be placed in a hypothetical city of 70000inhabitants ldquoNew Buildings for 194Xrdquo Architectural Forum 78 no 5 (May 1943)69ndash85 The Barcelona Pavilion was built in 1929 for the Barcelona Universal Expositionand was destroyed when the fair ended It was subsequently rebuilt in 1981ndash86

26 Peter Blake Mies van der Rohe (New York Pelican 1960) 54 It is worth notingthat like Miesrsquos use of the Kolbe sculpture Blake had Pollock actually make smallwire sculptures splattered with paint miniatures of sculptures that Blake hopedPollock would make for the actual museum Pollock himself was experimenting withsculpture around this time building three-dimensional forms out of papier-macirccheacutethat he then splattered with paint

27 Blakersquos collage space follows from Miesrsquos The production of collages as in situmodels for Miesrsquos buildings had begun in the twenties with his work for the journal Gin association with Dadaists such as Hans Richter Neil Levine notes this creation ofa collage space in Mies particularly in the Pavilion and the Museum for a Small Cityin relation to his use of reection to layer one surface on top of another Neil LevineldquolsquoThe Signicance of Factsrsquo Miesrsquo Collages Up Close and Personalrdquo Assemblage 37(December 1998) 71ndash101

28 Blake designed his museum just as Philip Johnson was building his Glass Housewhere they both spent considerable time while planning exhibitions for the Museumof Modern Art Johnsonrsquos inuence is also evident in Blakersquos design Blake No Placelike Utopia 149ndash155

29 Arthur Drexler ldquoUnframed Space A Museum for Jackson Pollackrsquos [sic] PaintingsrdquoInteriors and Industrial Design 109 no 6 (January 1950) 90ndash91 The article was partof a special issue whose theme was ldquoInteriors to Comerdquo a recurring topic that wasmeant ldquoto show the direction in which some of our best designers are goingrdquo The termunframed space was used several times in reference to Pollockrsquos work as the title oftwo articles Drexlerrsquos and one published slightly later by Berton Rouecheacute ThoughRouecheacute in an interview in To a Violent Grave says that Lee Krasner used the phraserst Charles Pollock says that Blake was the origin of the term The fact that Drexlerrsquosarticle was written and published earlier seems to conrm this See Berton RouecheacuteldquoUnframed Spacerdquo in Jackson Pollock Interviews 18ndash19 and Jeffrey Potter To aViolent Grave (New York Pushcart Press 1985) 126

30 Drexler 9031 Blake No Place like Utopia 113ndash11432 Blake completed construction on his ldquoPinwheel Houserdquo in 1952 It is a small

beach house that he designed for himself and his family in South Hampton on NewYorkrsquos Long Island Situated on the beach the house is square in plan and its fourexterior walls slide horizontally outward each in a successive clockwise directionrevealing glass walls When the exterior walls are fully extended and the house isviewed from above it forms a shape like a pinwheel Opening the exterior wallsreveals an ever-changing view of the landscape outside turning the ocean and the

104 Grey Room 13

dunes into the picturesque framing them so that they entirely ll the space of the walland put its surface in motion Blake had discussed with Pollock the possibility of hispainting the sliding walls so that his paintings would be superimposed over the land-scape Pollock considered it but Blake couldnrsquot come up with the commission moneythat Pollock asked for They never finalized their plans and it was never clear howthe panels were to be painted Blake suggested that they might be made of glass so hebought the sheet of glass that Pollock used to paint Number 29 1950 (1950) the paintingthat Hans Namuth lmed from underneath for his documentary on Pollock His col-laboration with Blake did lead to one commission a mural-size canvas done for ahouse designed by Marcel Breuer Untitled (Mural) (1950) Shortly after his collabo-ration with Blake Pollock began another unrealized architectural project this onewith Alfonso Ossorio and Tony Smith for a church designed by Smith with murals byPollock For more on all of this see Blake No Place like Utopia 114ndash118 Naifeh andSmith 649 and Lum ldquoPollockrsquos Promiserdquo 68 85ndash88

33 Lum ldquoPollockrsquos Promiserdquo 67ndash6834 A few pages down from Drexlerrsquos article on the Pollock Museum in Interiors

and Industrial Design was another architectural response to the same problem OlgaGueftrsquos article ldquoThe Museumrsquos Oasisrdquo describes another museum this one by Gyorgyand Juliet Kepes ldquoThe Kepesesrdquo it begins ldquoare not exactly opposed to museumsrdquo how-ever it would seem that they were opposed to museums containing works of artReplacing the art objects entirely the Kepeses substituted shells driftwood plantsand animals Instead of a natural history museum they proposed a modern-dayWunderkammerwhere natural forms take the place of art as objects for contemplationldquoThe proposed galleryrdquo they declared ldquowould bridge the gap between the art museumwhich is concerned with man-made beauty and the natural history museum whichis preoccupied with nature but not particularly with naturersquos beautyrdquo Gyorgy KepesrsquosThe New Landscape exhibition at MIT a year later in 1951 (the same years as theIndependent Grouprsquos similar exhibition Growth and Form in London) and the pub-lication that followed The New Landscape in Art and Sciencewould ultimately realizethis project with blown-up photographs of natural forms (cells shells and electronmicrographs) in place of actual objects

The Kepeses seem to have taken the next logical step beyond Blake proposing aneven more radical rethinking of the wall-size work of art Eliminating the need for theartist altogether they found abstract forms in nature and turned their reproductionsinto what would elsewhere have been works of art By turning the art object into scientic vision The Kepeses proposed its total instrumentation Autonomous abstractpainting was transformed into its instrumental other a mechanically reproduced science of vision Rather than turn art into interior design The Kepesesrsquo replacementof abstract painting recast the status of scientic technology into that of high art SeeOlga Gueft ldquoThe Museumrsquos Oasisrdquo Interiors and Industrial Design 109 no 6 (January1950) 100ndash103 and Gyorgy Kepes The New Landscape in Art and Science (ChicagoPaul Theobald and Co 1956)

35 Kaprow stated that it was ldquoIn 1949 [that] I saw an exhibition of [Pollockrsquos] workfor the rst timerdquo ldquoInterviewrdquo in Allan Kaprow (Pasadena Pasadena Art Museum1967) 7

36 See Kaprow ldquoThe Legacy of Jackson Pollockrdquo Art News 25 and Kaprow ldquoTheLegacy of Jackson Pollockrdquo Essays on the Blurring 3

37 Joan Marter ldquoThe Forgotten Legacy Happenings Pop Art and Fluxus at RutgersUniversityrdquo in Off Limits Rutgers University and the Avant-Garde 1957ndash1963 ed Joan

Kaizen | Framed Space Allan Kaprow and the Spread of Painting 105

Marter (Newark The Newark Museum 1999) 438 Marter 13239 Quoted in John Cage Silence (Middletown Wesleyan University Press 1961) 10540 Branden Joseph has developed the link between Cage and Rauschenberg in several

recent essays See Branden W Joseph ldquoJohn Cage and the Architecture of SilencerdquoOctober 81 (Summer 1997) 81ndash104 and Branden Joseph ldquoWhite on Whiterdquo CriticalInquiry 27 no 1 (Summer 2001) 90ndash121

41 For Cage on Rauschenberg see Cage Silence98ndash108 For his description ofTheater Piece No 1 see ldquoInterview with John Cagerdquo in Happenings and Other Actsed Mariellen R Sandford (New York Routledge 1995) 53 Cage subsequently referredto Theater Piece No 1 as ldquothe rst happeningrdquo See John Cage ldquoAn AutobiographicalStatementrdquo Southwest Review 76 no 1 (Winter 1991) 65

42 The score itself has had various incarnations It wasnrsquot published until 1960and in this version includes a note wherein Cage describes the rst performance byTudor For more on 4rsquo33 and its various scores see Liz Kotz ldquoWords on Paper NotNecessarily Meant to Be Read as Art Postwar Media Poetics from Cage to Warholrdquo(PhD diss Columbia University 2002) 83ndash115 Kotz follows a different lineage outof Cage and into performance and happenings than the one traced in this essay

43 Marter 13244 Walter Hopps in the first survey catalog of Rauschenbergrsquos early work does

not name the black paintings as a group as he does the White Paintings He calls themeach Untitled followed by a description in brackets Hopps notes of the largest ofthese works that ldquoThese paintings with a greater vastness and ambiguity of scale thanother Rauschenberg works relate to spatial qualities of Jackson Pollockrdquo HoppsRobert Rauschenberg The Early 1950s (Houston Houston Fine Art Press 1991) 67This convention was also followed in Rauschenbergrsquos 1997 Guggenheim retrospectivecatalog and is followed in this essay Robert Rauschenberg A Retrospective ed WalterHopps and Susan Davidson (New York Solomon R Guggenheim Museum 1997)

45 The piece is called Untitled [two black panels] (1953) Hopps Robert Rauschenberg99

46 Helen Molesworth notes the importance of Rauschenbergrsquos newspaper groundin the black paintings and develops this problem in relation to the abject body as it isfurther pursued in his work throughout the 1950s Helen Molesworth ldquoBefore BedrdquoOctober 63 (Winter 1993) 68ndash82

47 Asked about this work Rauschenberg said ldquoI called them combines I had tocoin that word because I got so bored with arguments I was interested in people seeingmy work When someone would come up and I really wanted to know what they thoughtof it or wanted to sense the exposure there was always this screen that they could getbehind which was if I said lsquoIt is paintingrsquo they would say lsquoThatrsquos not painting Thatrsquossculpturersquo And they thought this was very interestingrdquo Jeanne Siegel ArtwordsDiscourse on the 60s and 70s (New York DaCapo 1985) 153

48 Allan Kaprow ldquoa Statementrdquo in Happenings An Illustrated Anthology edMichael Kirby (New York EP Dutton and Co 1965) 44ndash45

49 Benjamin Buchloh notes the importance of play in the 1950s and its link toconsumer culture During the 1950s he writes ldquoa theory of games would remerge asa cultural project at the very moment of an ever-increasing instrumentalization oflibidinal desire through consumer culturerdquo Benjamin HD Buchloh ldquoRobert WattsInanimate ObjectsmdashInanimate Subjectsrdquo in Buchloh and Rodenbeck Experiments inthe Everyday 25 n 4

Kaizen | Framed Space Allan Kaprow and the Spread of Painting 99

What this sequence from 18 Happenings reveals is that Kaprow hadan acute sense of the way in which the gallery as frame produces sub-ject and space together He undermined the normal function of the artgallery turning both viewer and art object into Junk Culture Throwawayviewers throwaway paintings and throwaway rooms turned the galleryspacemdasha space designed to be neutral to hide itself as the objects itcontains become the sole focus of the viewerrsquos concentrationmdashinto thelocus of planned obsolescence With the creation of happeningsKaprow used Junk Culture against the doxa of gallery space upsettingthe common sense of what a space for art is and what it does Afterhappenings the paradoxical logic of the gallery as a site for both theprivate contemplation of singular aesthetic objects as well as the pub-lic transaction of luxury goods had been (however temporarily) sub-verted In asserting the gallery space as the limit condition of paintingKaprow framed the institution as the ground of artistic production

In ldquoThe Legacy of Jackson Pollockrdquo Kaprow says ldquoPollock left us atthe point where we must become preoccupied with and even dazzled by the space and objects of our everyday liferdquo71 In ldquoAssemblageEnvironments Happeningsrdquo bridging the gap between his early andlater work he concludes ldquothis has brought sharply into focus that theroom has always been a frame or format toordquo72 Kaprowrsquos collapse ofautonomy via art into lifemdashthat environments and happenings wouldldquopartake wholly in the real nature of art and (one hopes) liferdquomdashwasonly ever a hope as he himself knew If painting had used the frameas the delimitation of a eld for composition then environments andhappenings turned the gallery into the limit condition of this fieldWhile he tried to get closer to everyday life by making art he inevitablypushed it further away This ambivalence toward the collapse of artand life runs throughout Kaprowrsquos work even as he moved out of thegallery and into everyday life following his early work with his laterldquoactivitiesrdquo The early work was even by his own estimation more adisplay of experience and not a fair representation of actual everydayexperience But this is precisely where the importance of this work liesKaprowrsquos environments and happenings extended Rauschenbergrsquossemiautonomous gap so far that they turned the screw one notchhigher autonomy returning not though the sublation of art into archi-tecture but through the medium of framed space

100 Grey Room 13

NotesThanks to the generosity and insight of Karen Kurczynski John Harwood SethMcCormick Jaleh Mansoor Beth Hinderliter Vered Maimon Benjamin Buchloh andBarry Bergdoll as well as Branden Joseph and the Editors of Grey Room

1 Brian OrsquoDoherty Inside the White Cube The Ideology of the Gallery Space(Berkeley and Los Angeles University of California Press 1999) 15

2 It was originally called ldquoPainting Environments Happeningsrdquo and publishedin a condensed form in the catalog for the exhibition New FormsmdashNew Media I at the Martha Jackson Gallery New York the rst uptown show of Kaprow and his con-temporaries It was changed to ldquoAssemblage Environments and Happeningsrdquo for nalpublication Kaprow changed the title to incorporate the recent acceptance of the termassemblage It had been used rst by Helen Comstock to describe the work of ArthurDove in the 1920s but remained obscure until Jean Dubuffet popularized its use in 1953The term as used by Dubuffet was then adopted by William Seitz for his exhibitionThe Art of Assemblage at the Museum of Modern Art See Allan Kaprow AssemblageEnvironments and Happenings (New York Harry N Abrams 1966) 150ndash208 NewFormsmdashNew Media I (New York Martha Jackson Gallery 1960) np and RogerShattuck ldquoIntroduction How Collage Became Assemblagerdquo Essays on Assemblage(New York Museum of Modern Art 1992) 119

3 ldquoWhen I am in my painting Irsquom not aware of what Irsquom doingrdquo said PollockJackson Pollock Jackson Pollock Interviews Articles Reviews ed Pepe Karmel (NewYork Museum of Modern Art 1999) 17ndash18

4 Yard was Kaprowrsquos contribution to the exhibition Environments SituationsSpaces at the Martha Jackson Gallery a follow up to New FormsndashNew Media (see n 2)

5 ldquoAllan Kaprow and Robert Watts Interviewed by Sidney Simonrdquo in Benjamin HDBuchloh and Judith F Rodenbeck Experiments in the Everyday Allan Kaprow andRobert Watts Events Objects Documents (New York Wallach Art Gallery 1999) 76

6 To cite but one example of many Thomas Hirschhorn is an artist who continuesto extend and develop Kaprowrsquos legacy today

7 On Kaprow and performance see Amelia Jones Body Art Performing the Subject(Minneapolis University of Minnesota Press 1998) 56ndash57 Paul Schimmel ldquoLeap intothe Void Performance and the Objectrdquo in Out of Actions Between Performance andthe Object 1949ndash1979 ed Paul Schimmel (New York Thames and Hudson 1998)59ndash63

8 The relationship between painting and space had been explored before partic-ularly in the period between the two world wars by the artists associated with De Stijland constructivism For more on De Stijl see Nancy Troy The De Stijl Environment(Cambridge MIT Press 1983) On constructivism see Yve-Alain Bois ldquoEl LissitzkyRadical Reversibilityrdquo Art in America 76 no 4 (April 1988) 161ndash181 and Yve-AlainBois ldquoMaterial Utopiasrdquo Art in America 79 no 6 (June 1991) 98ndash107 Another Europeanwho explored the everyday object painting and space was Kurt Schwitters in the various incarnation of his Merzbau See Elizabeth Burns Gamard Kurt SchwittersrsquoMerzbau The Cathedral of Erotic Misery (New York Princeton Architectural Press2000) Two other important precursors who bridge the European and American con-text are Lazlo Moholy-Nagy and Friedrick Kiesler For information on Moholy-Nagyrsquosearly environmental projects as well as those of Lissitzy see Joan Ockman ldquoThe RoadNot Taken Alexander Dornerrsquos Way Beyond Artrdquo in Autonomy and Ideology Positioningan Avant-Garde in America ed RE Somol (New York Monicelli Press 1997) For

Kaizen | Framed Space Allan Kaprow and the Spread of Painting 101

information on Kiesler see RL Held Endless Innovations Frederick Kieslerrsquos Theoryand Scenic Design (Ann Arbor UMI Research Press 1982) Lisa Phillips FrederickKiesler (New York The Whitney Museum of American Art 1989) Brian OrsquoDohertydraws out the connections between the prendash and postndashWorld War II manifestations ofthis relationship in Inside the White Cube

9 For Benjamin the work of art attains autonomy under modernism with theemergence of art for artrsquos sake This autonomy is then usurped by mechanical repro-duction See Walter Benjamin ldquoThe Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproductionrdquoin Illuminations ed Hanna Arendt (New York Harcourt Brace and Jovanovich Inc1968) p 224-226 For Greenberg as the above quote indicates the autonomy of artcontinues even in the face of mechanization See Clement Greenberg ldquoTowards a NewerLaocoonrdquo Perceptions and Judgments 1939ndash1944 vol 1 of Clement Greenberg TheCollected Essays and Criticism ed John OrsquoBrien (Chicago University of Chicago1986) p 32

10 Rosalind Krauss uses the term ldquopost-medium conditionrdquo to designate ldquomixed-media installationrdquo work done today While Krauss argues that only the most signi-cant artists working since the 1960s reassert the medium in their work against thegeneral postmedium condition I believe that all mixed-media installation work operates using the gallery or institution as medium See Rosalind Krauss ldquoA Voyageon the North Seardquo Art in the Age of the Post-Medium Condition (New York Thamesand Hudson 1999) for her comments on a specic contemporary artist and the rein-vention of the medium see Rosalind Krauss ldquo And Then Turn Awayrdquo An Essayon James Colemanrdquo October 81 (Summer 1997) 5ndash33

11 Allan Kaprow ldquoThe Legacy of Jackson Pollockrdquo Art News 57 no 6 (October1958) 24ndash26 55ndash57 reprinted in Allan Kaprow Essays on the Blurring of Art andLife ed Jeff Kelley (Berkeley and Los Angles University of California Press 1993) 1ndash9 Kaprow has stated that the essay was written in 1956 in ldquoAllan Kaprow andRobert Watts Interviewed by Sidney Simonrdquo 77 Kaprow had been a student of bothHans Hoffman and Meyer Schapiro

12 Harold Rosenberg ldquoThe American Action Paintersrdquo Art News 52 (December1952) 22ndash23 In a footnote that Rosenberg added when the article was republished aspart of his book of collected essays in 1959 he added the following ldquoAction Paintinghas extracted the element of decision inherent in all art in that the work is not fin-ished at its beginning but has to be carried forward by an accumulation of lsquorightrsquo ges-tures In a word Action Painting is the abstraction of the moral element in art itsmark is moral tension in detachment from moral or esthetic certainties and it judgesitself morally in declaring that picture to be worthless which is not the incorporationof a genuine struggle one which could at any point have been lostrdquo Harold RosenbergThe Tradition of the New (New York Horizon Press 1959) 33ndash34 Kaprow recountsthe influence of Rosenbergrsquos essay on his work in ldquoAllan Kaprow and Robert WattsInterviewed by Sidney Simonrdquo 77

13 There were five all told They were held as follows 5ndash23 January 1948 24Januaryndash12 February 1949 21 Novemberndash10 December 1949 28 Novemberndash16 December1950 26 Novemberndash15 December 1951 These shows had a remarkable resonance onethat extended beyond even the insular New York art world when after the secondexhibition Life magazine published the feature article ldquoJackson Pollock Is He theGreatest Living Painter in the United Statesrdquo Dorothy Sieberling Life (August 81949) 42ndash45

14 Allan Kaprow ldquoThe Legacy of Jackson Pollockrdquo in Kaprow Essays on the

102 Grey Room 13

Blurringrdquo 615 Kaprow uses both the terms scale and size to describe Pollockrsquos work but as

TJ Clark has shown these are two very different terms and Pollock is a painter of sizeand not scale For Clark it is size that engages the body ldquoNormally speaking size isliteralmdasha matter of actual physical intuition It involves grasping how big or small acertain object really is most likely in relation to the size of the grasperrsquos upright body oroutspread armsrdquo TJ Clark ldquoPollockrsquos Smallnessrdquo in Jackson Pollock New Approachesed Kirk Varnedoe and Pepe Karmel (New York Museum of Modern Art 1999) 15

16 Kaprow ldquoThe Legacy of Jackson Pollockrdquo Essays on the Blurring 617 In most of his work the paint engages with the edge of the canvas emphasizing

and bordering it and not continuing around it as if the canvas had been cut down fromsome innite expanse Kaprow claims otherwise by singling out the exceptions sayingldquo[H]is art gives the impression of going on forever [T]hough evidence points to aslackening of the attack as Pollock came to the edges of many of his canvases in thebest ones he compensated for this by tacking much of the painted surface around theback of his stretchersrdquo Kaprow ldquoThe Legacy of Jackson Pollockrdquo Essays on the Blurringof Art and Life 5 An examination of the paintings shows that more often Pollockstopped before the edge or reworked his compositions after they were stretched sothat they reengaged with the edge even when cut from larger canvas Kaprow claimsotherwise because it furthers his arguments that Pollockrsquos paintings emerge into thespace of the viewer

18 Jackson Pollock ldquoApplication for a Guggenheim Fellowship 1947rdquo in JacksonPollock Interviews 17 The inuence of Greenberg at this time is discussed in StevenNaifeh and Gregory White Smith Jackson Pollock An American Saga (Aiken SCWoodwardWhite 1989) 551 Pollock had also engaged with wall-size painting duringhis association with Joseacute Clemente Orozco and in earlier work such as Mural(1943ndash1944) painted for Peggy Guggenheimrsquos house

19 Greenbergrsquos version of modernism was most fully laid out only in 1959 andpublished in 1960 ldquoIt was the stressing of the ineluctable atness of the surface thatremained however more fundamental than anything else to the process by whichpictorial art criticized and defined itself under Modernism For flatness alone wasunique and exclusive to pictorial art Because flatness was the only conditionpainting shared with no other art Modernist painting oriented itself to atness as itdid to nothing elserdquo In Clement Greenberg ldquoModernist Paintingrdquo in Modernism witha Vengeance 1957ndash1969 vol 4 of Clement Greenberg The Collected Essays andCriticism ed John OrsquoBrien (Chicago University of Chicago Press 1993) 87

20 Clement Greenberg ldquoThe Situation at the Momentrdquo in Arrogant Purpose1945ndash1949 vol 2 of Clement Greenberg The Collected Essays and Criticism ed JohnOrsquoBrien (Chicago University of Chicago 1986) 194ndash195

21 See Greenberg ldquoTowards a Newer Laocoonrdquo throughout22 Eric Lum has done extensive work on the relationship between abstract expres-

sionism and architecture The analysis in this essay follows from his especially whereBlakersquos project is concerned but also expands on it As he jumps from Blake to PhilipJohnson and Mark Rothkorsquos Houston Chapel however Lum misses the importance ofother interventions between painting and architecture such as those made by KaprowThis is evident when he says ldquoThrough this marriage of mural and wall paintingcould become fully integrated into architecture an idealized conjecture nor realizeduntil Mark Rothkorsquos 1971 Houston Chapelrdquo Eric Lum ldquoPollockrsquos Promise Toward anAbstract Expressionist Architecturerdquo Assemblage 39 (August 1999) 68

Kaizen | Framed Space Allan Kaprow and the Spread of Painting 103

23 Blake said of his visit to Pollockrsquos studio ldquoIt was a very sunny day and thesun was shining on the paintings I felt like I was standing in the Hall of Mirrors atVersailles It was a dazzling incredible sightrdquo Naifeh and Smith 588

24 Peter Blake No Place like Utopia Modern Architecture and the Company WeKept (New York Knopf 1993) 111ndash112

25 Miesrsquos museum plan was designed at the request of the editors at ArchitecturalForum who had been publishing a series of articles ldquoto show how building might beimproved through fuller and more imaginative use of existing resourcesrdquo They requesteddesigns for a variety of buildings that could be placed in a hypothetical city of 70000inhabitants ldquoNew Buildings for 194Xrdquo Architectural Forum 78 no 5 (May 1943)69ndash85 The Barcelona Pavilion was built in 1929 for the Barcelona Universal Expositionand was destroyed when the fair ended It was subsequently rebuilt in 1981ndash86

26 Peter Blake Mies van der Rohe (New York Pelican 1960) 54 It is worth notingthat like Miesrsquos use of the Kolbe sculpture Blake had Pollock actually make smallwire sculptures splattered with paint miniatures of sculptures that Blake hopedPollock would make for the actual museum Pollock himself was experimenting withsculpture around this time building three-dimensional forms out of papier-macirccheacutethat he then splattered with paint

27 Blakersquos collage space follows from Miesrsquos The production of collages as in situmodels for Miesrsquos buildings had begun in the twenties with his work for the journal Gin association with Dadaists such as Hans Richter Neil Levine notes this creation ofa collage space in Mies particularly in the Pavilion and the Museum for a Small Cityin relation to his use of reection to layer one surface on top of another Neil LevineldquolsquoThe Signicance of Factsrsquo Miesrsquo Collages Up Close and Personalrdquo Assemblage 37(December 1998) 71ndash101

28 Blake designed his museum just as Philip Johnson was building his Glass Housewhere they both spent considerable time while planning exhibitions for the Museumof Modern Art Johnsonrsquos inuence is also evident in Blakersquos design Blake No Placelike Utopia 149ndash155

29 Arthur Drexler ldquoUnframed Space A Museum for Jackson Pollackrsquos [sic] PaintingsrdquoInteriors and Industrial Design 109 no 6 (January 1950) 90ndash91 The article was partof a special issue whose theme was ldquoInteriors to Comerdquo a recurring topic that wasmeant ldquoto show the direction in which some of our best designers are goingrdquo The termunframed space was used several times in reference to Pollockrsquos work as the title oftwo articles Drexlerrsquos and one published slightly later by Berton Rouecheacute ThoughRouecheacute in an interview in To a Violent Grave says that Lee Krasner used the phraserst Charles Pollock says that Blake was the origin of the term The fact that Drexlerrsquosarticle was written and published earlier seems to conrm this See Berton RouecheacuteldquoUnframed Spacerdquo in Jackson Pollock Interviews 18ndash19 and Jeffrey Potter To aViolent Grave (New York Pushcart Press 1985) 126

30 Drexler 9031 Blake No Place like Utopia 113ndash11432 Blake completed construction on his ldquoPinwheel Houserdquo in 1952 It is a small

beach house that he designed for himself and his family in South Hampton on NewYorkrsquos Long Island Situated on the beach the house is square in plan and its fourexterior walls slide horizontally outward each in a successive clockwise directionrevealing glass walls When the exterior walls are fully extended and the house isviewed from above it forms a shape like a pinwheel Opening the exterior wallsreveals an ever-changing view of the landscape outside turning the ocean and the

104 Grey Room 13

dunes into the picturesque framing them so that they entirely ll the space of the walland put its surface in motion Blake had discussed with Pollock the possibility of hispainting the sliding walls so that his paintings would be superimposed over the land-scape Pollock considered it but Blake couldnrsquot come up with the commission moneythat Pollock asked for They never finalized their plans and it was never clear howthe panels were to be painted Blake suggested that they might be made of glass so hebought the sheet of glass that Pollock used to paint Number 29 1950 (1950) the paintingthat Hans Namuth lmed from underneath for his documentary on Pollock His col-laboration with Blake did lead to one commission a mural-size canvas done for ahouse designed by Marcel Breuer Untitled (Mural) (1950) Shortly after his collabo-ration with Blake Pollock began another unrealized architectural project this onewith Alfonso Ossorio and Tony Smith for a church designed by Smith with murals byPollock For more on all of this see Blake No Place like Utopia 114ndash118 Naifeh andSmith 649 and Lum ldquoPollockrsquos Promiserdquo 68 85ndash88

33 Lum ldquoPollockrsquos Promiserdquo 67ndash6834 A few pages down from Drexlerrsquos article on the Pollock Museum in Interiors

and Industrial Design was another architectural response to the same problem OlgaGueftrsquos article ldquoThe Museumrsquos Oasisrdquo describes another museum this one by Gyorgyand Juliet Kepes ldquoThe Kepesesrdquo it begins ldquoare not exactly opposed to museumsrdquo how-ever it would seem that they were opposed to museums containing works of artReplacing the art objects entirely the Kepeses substituted shells driftwood plantsand animals Instead of a natural history museum they proposed a modern-dayWunderkammerwhere natural forms take the place of art as objects for contemplationldquoThe proposed galleryrdquo they declared ldquowould bridge the gap between the art museumwhich is concerned with man-made beauty and the natural history museum whichis preoccupied with nature but not particularly with naturersquos beautyrdquo Gyorgy KepesrsquosThe New Landscape exhibition at MIT a year later in 1951 (the same years as theIndependent Grouprsquos similar exhibition Growth and Form in London) and the pub-lication that followed The New Landscape in Art and Sciencewould ultimately realizethis project with blown-up photographs of natural forms (cells shells and electronmicrographs) in place of actual objects

The Kepeses seem to have taken the next logical step beyond Blake proposing aneven more radical rethinking of the wall-size work of art Eliminating the need for theartist altogether they found abstract forms in nature and turned their reproductionsinto what would elsewhere have been works of art By turning the art object into scientic vision The Kepeses proposed its total instrumentation Autonomous abstractpainting was transformed into its instrumental other a mechanically reproduced science of vision Rather than turn art into interior design The Kepesesrsquo replacementof abstract painting recast the status of scientic technology into that of high art SeeOlga Gueft ldquoThe Museumrsquos Oasisrdquo Interiors and Industrial Design 109 no 6 (January1950) 100ndash103 and Gyorgy Kepes The New Landscape in Art and Science (ChicagoPaul Theobald and Co 1956)

35 Kaprow stated that it was ldquoIn 1949 [that] I saw an exhibition of [Pollockrsquos] workfor the rst timerdquo ldquoInterviewrdquo in Allan Kaprow (Pasadena Pasadena Art Museum1967) 7

36 See Kaprow ldquoThe Legacy of Jackson Pollockrdquo Art News 25 and Kaprow ldquoTheLegacy of Jackson Pollockrdquo Essays on the Blurring 3

37 Joan Marter ldquoThe Forgotten Legacy Happenings Pop Art and Fluxus at RutgersUniversityrdquo in Off Limits Rutgers University and the Avant-Garde 1957ndash1963 ed Joan

Kaizen | Framed Space Allan Kaprow and the Spread of Painting 105

Marter (Newark The Newark Museum 1999) 438 Marter 13239 Quoted in John Cage Silence (Middletown Wesleyan University Press 1961) 10540 Branden Joseph has developed the link between Cage and Rauschenberg in several

recent essays See Branden W Joseph ldquoJohn Cage and the Architecture of SilencerdquoOctober 81 (Summer 1997) 81ndash104 and Branden Joseph ldquoWhite on Whiterdquo CriticalInquiry 27 no 1 (Summer 2001) 90ndash121

41 For Cage on Rauschenberg see Cage Silence98ndash108 For his description ofTheater Piece No 1 see ldquoInterview with John Cagerdquo in Happenings and Other Actsed Mariellen R Sandford (New York Routledge 1995) 53 Cage subsequently referredto Theater Piece No 1 as ldquothe rst happeningrdquo See John Cage ldquoAn AutobiographicalStatementrdquo Southwest Review 76 no 1 (Winter 1991) 65

42 The score itself has had various incarnations It wasnrsquot published until 1960and in this version includes a note wherein Cage describes the rst performance byTudor For more on 4rsquo33 and its various scores see Liz Kotz ldquoWords on Paper NotNecessarily Meant to Be Read as Art Postwar Media Poetics from Cage to Warholrdquo(PhD diss Columbia University 2002) 83ndash115 Kotz follows a different lineage outof Cage and into performance and happenings than the one traced in this essay

43 Marter 13244 Walter Hopps in the first survey catalog of Rauschenbergrsquos early work does

not name the black paintings as a group as he does the White Paintings He calls themeach Untitled followed by a description in brackets Hopps notes of the largest ofthese works that ldquoThese paintings with a greater vastness and ambiguity of scale thanother Rauschenberg works relate to spatial qualities of Jackson Pollockrdquo HoppsRobert Rauschenberg The Early 1950s (Houston Houston Fine Art Press 1991) 67This convention was also followed in Rauschenbergrsquos 1997 Guggenheim retrospectivecatalog and is followed in this essay Robert Rauschenberg A Retrospective ed WalterHopps and Susan Davidson (New York Solomon R Guggenheim Museum 1997)

45 The piece is called Untitled [two black panels] (1953) Hopps Robert Rauschenberg99

46 Helen Molesworth notes the importance of Rauschenbergrsquos newspaper groundin the black paintings and develops this problem in relation to the abject body as it isfurther pursued in his work throughout the 1950s Helen Molesworth ldquoBefore BedrdquoOctober 63 (Winter 1993) 68ndash82

47 Asked about this work Rauschenberg said ldquoI called them combines I had tocoin that word because I got so bored with arguments I was interested in people seeingmy work When someone would come up and I really wanted to know what they thoughtof it or wanted to sense the exposure there was always this screen that they could getbehind which was if I said lsquoIt is paintingrsquo they would say lsquoThatrsquos not painting Thatrsquossculpturersquo And they thought this was very interestingrdquo Jeanne Siegel ArtwordsDiscourse on the 60s and 70s (New York DaCapo 1985) 153

48 Allan Kaprow ldquoa Statementrdquo in Happenings An Illustrated Anthology edMichael Kirby (New York EP Dutton and Co 1965) 44ndash45

49 Benjamin Buchloh notes the importance of play in the 1950s and its link toconsumer culture During the 1950s he writes ldquoa theory of games would remerge asa cultural project at the very moment of an ever-increasing instrumentalization oflibidinal desire through consumer culturerdquo Benjamin HD Buchloh ldquoRobert WattsInanimate ObjectsmdashInanimate Subjectsrdquo in Buchloh and Rodenbeck Experiments inthe Everyday 25 n 4

100 Grey Room 13

NotesThanks to the generosity and insight of Karen Kurczynski John Harwood SethMcCormick Jaleh Mansoor Beth Hinderliter Vered Maimon Benjamin Buchloh andBarry Bergdoll as well as Branden Joseph and the Editors of Grey Room

1 Brian OrsquoDoherty Inside the White Cube The Ideology of the Gallery Space(Berkeley and Los Angeles University of California Press 1999) 15

2 It was originally called ldquoPainting Environments Happeningsrdquo and publishedin a condensed form in the catalog for the exhibition New FormsmdashNew Media I at the Martha Jackson Gallery New York the rst uptown show of Kaprow and his con-temporaries It was changed to ldquoAssemblage Environments and Happeningsrdquo for nalpublication Kaprow changed the title to incorporate the recent acceptance of the termassemblage It had been used rst by Helen Comstock to describe the work of ArthurDove in the 1920s but remained obscure until Jean Dubuffet popularized its use in 1953The term as used by Dubuffet was then adopted by William Seitz for his exhibitionThe Art of Assemblage at the Museum of Modern Art See Allan Kaprow AssemblageEnvironments and Happenings (New York Harry N Abrams 1966) 150ndash208 NewFormsmdashNew Media I (New York Martha Jackson Gallery 1960) np and RogerShattuck ldquoIntroduction How Collage Became Assemblagerdquo Essays on Assemblage(New York Museum of Modern Art 1992) 119

3 ldquoWhen I am in my painting Irsquom not aware of what Irsquom doingrdquo said PollockJackson Pollock Jackson Pollock Interviews Articles Reviews ed Pepe Karmel (NewYork Museum of Modern Art 1999) 17ndash18

4 Yard was Kaprowrsquos contribution to the exhibition Environments SituationsSpaces at the Martha Jackson Gallery a follow up to New FormsndashNew Media (see n 2)

5 ldquoAllan Kaprow and Robert Watts Interviewed by Sidney Simonrdquo in Benjamin HDBuchloh and Judith F Rodenbeck Experiments in the Everyday Allan Kaprow andRobert Watts Events Objects Documents (New York Wallach Art Gallery 1999) 76

6 To cite but one example of many Thomas Hirschhorn is an artist who continuesto extend and develop Kaprowrsquos legacy today

7 On Kaprow and performance see Amelia Jones Body Art Performing the Subject(Minneapolis University of Minnesota Press 1998) 56ndash57 Paul Schimmel ldquoLeap intothe Void Performance and the Objectrdquo in Out of Actions Between Performance andthe Object 1949ndash1979 ed Paul Schimmel (New York Thames and Hudson 1998)59ndash63

8 The relationship between painting and space had been explored before partic-ularly in the period between the two world wars by the artists associated with De Stijland constructivism For more on De Stijl see Nancy Troy The De Stijl Environment(Cambridge MIT Press 1983) On constructivism see Yve-Alain Bois ldquoEl LissitzkyRadical Reversibilityrdquo Art in America 76 no 4 (April 1988) 161ndash181 and Yve-AlainBois ldquoMaterial Utopiasrdquo Art in America 79 no 6 (June 1991) 98ndash107 Another Europeanwho explored the everyday object painting and space was Kurt Schwitters in the various incarnation of his Merzbau See Elizabeth Burns Gamard Kurt SchwittersrsquoMerzbau The Cathedral of Erotic Misery (New York Princeton Architectural Press2000) Two other important precursors who bridge the European and American con-text are Lazlo Moholy-Nagy and Friedrick Kiesler For information on Moholy-Nagyrsquosearly environmental projects as well as those of Lissitzy see Joan Ockman ldquoThe RoadNot Taken Alexander Dornerrsquos Way Beyond Artrdquo in Autonomy and Ideology Positioningan Avant-Garde in America ed RE Somol (New York Monicelli Press 1997) For

Kaizen | Framed Space Allan Kaprow and the Spread of Painting 101

information on Kiesler see RL Held Endless Innovations Frederick Kieslerrsquos Theoryand Scenic Design (Ann Arbor UMI Research Press 1982) Lisa Phillips FrederickKiesler (New York The Whitney Museum of American Art 1989) Brian OrsquoDohertydraws out the connections between the prendash and postndashWorld War II manifestations ofthis relationship in Inside the White Cube

9 For Benjamin the work of art attains autonomy under modernism with theemergence of art for artrsquos sake This autonomy is then usurped by mechanical repro-duction See Walter Benjamin ldquoThe Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproductionrdquoin Illuminations ed Hanna Arendt (New York Harcourt Brace and Jovanovich Inc1968) p 224-226 For Greenberg as the above quote indicates the autonomy of artcontinues even in the face of mechanization See Clement Greenberg ldquoTowards a NewerLaocoonrdquo Perceptions and Judgments 1939ndash1944 vol 1 of Clement Greenberg TheCollected Essays and Criticism ed John OrsquoBrien (Chicago University of Chicago1986) p 32

10 Rosalind Krauss uses the term ldquopost-medium conditionrdquo to designate ldquomixed-media installationrdquo work done today While Krauss argues that only the most signi-cant artists working since the 1960s reassert the medium in their work against thegeneral postmedium condition I believe that all mixed-media installation work operates using the gallery or institution as medium See Rosalind Krauss ldquoA Voyageon the North Seardquo Art in the Age of the Post-Medium Condition (New York Thamesand Hudson 1999) for her comments on a specic contemporary artist and the rein-vention of the medium see Rosalind Krauss ldquo And Then Turn Awayrdquo An Essayon James Colemanrdquo October 81 (Summer 1997) 5ndash33

11 Allan Kaprow ldquoThe Legacy of Jackson Pollockrdquo Art News 57 no 6 (October1958) 24ndash26 55ndash57 reprinted in Allan Kaprow Essays on the Blurring of Art andLife ed Jeff Kelley (Berkeley and Los Angles University of California Press 1993) 1ndash9 Kaprow has stated that the essay was written in 1956 in ldquoAllan Kaprow andRobert Watts Interviewed by Sidney Simonrdquo 77 Kaprow had been a student of bothHans Hoffman and Meyer Schapiro

12 Harold Rosenberg ldquoThe American Action Paintersrdquo Art News 52 (December1952) 22ndash23 In a footnote that Rosenberg added when the article was republished aspart of his book of collected essays in 1959 he added the following ldquoAction Paintinghas extracted the element of decision inherent in all art in that the work is not fin-ished at its beginning but has to be carried forward by an accumulation of lsquorightrsquo ges-tures In a word Action Painting is the abstraction of the moral element in art itsmark is moral tension in detachment from moral or esthetic certainties and it judgesitself morally in declaring that picture to be worthless which is not the incorporationof a genuine struggle one which could at any point have been lostrdquo Harold RosenbergThe Tradition of the New (New York Horizon Press 1959) 33ndash34 Kaprow recountsthe influence of Rosenbergrsquos essay on his work in ldquoAllan Kaprow and Robert WattsInterviewed by Sidney Simonrdquo 77

13 There were five all told They were held as follows 5ndash23 January 1948 24Januaryndash12 February 1949 21 Novemberndash10 December 1949 28 Novemberndash16 December1950 26 Novemberndash15 December 1951 These shows had a remarkable resonance onethat extended beyond even the insular New York art world when after the secondexhibition Life magazine published the feature article ldquoJackson Pollock Is He theGreatest Living Painter in the United Statesrdquo Dorothy Sieberling Life (August 81949) 42ndash45

14 Allan Kaprow ldquoThe Legacy of Jackson Pollockrdquo in Kaprow Essays on the

102 Grey Room 13

Blurringrdquo 615 Kaprow uses both the terms scale and size to describe Pollockrsquos work but as

TJ Clark has shown these are two very different terms and Pollock is a painter of sizeand not scale For Clark it is size that engages the body ldquoNormally speaking size isliteralmdasha matter of actual physical intuition It involves grasping how big or small acertain object really is most likely in relation to the size of the grasperrsquos upright body oroutspread armsrdquo TJ Clark ldquoPollockrsquos Smallnessrdquo in Jackson Pollock New Approachesed Kirk Varnedoe and Pepe Karmel (New York Museum of Modern Art 1999) 15

16 Kaprow ldquoThe Legacy of Jackson Pollockrdquo Essays on the Blurring 617 In most of his work the paint engages with the edge of the canvas emphasizing

and bordering it and not continuing around it as if the canvas had been cut down fromsome innite expanse Kaprow claims otherwise by singling out the exceptions sayingldquo[H]is art gives the impression of going on forever [T]hough evidence points to aslackening of the attack as Pollock came to the edges of many of his canvases in thebest ones he compensated for this by tacking much of the painted surface around theback of his stretchersrdquo Kaprow ldquoThe Legacy of Jackson Pollockrdquo Essays on the Blurringof Art and Life 5 An examination of the paintings shows that more often Pollockstopped before the edge or reworked his compositions after they were stretched sothat they reengaged with the edge even when cut from larger canvas Kaprow claimsotherwise because it furthers his arguments that Pollockrsquos paintings emerge into thespace of the viewer

18 Jackson Pollock ldquoApplication for a Guggenheim Fellowship 1947rdquo in JacksonPollock Interviews 17 The inuence of Greenberg at this time is discussed in StevenNaifeh and Gregory White Smith Jackson Pollock An American Saga (Aiken SCWoodwardWhite 1989) 551 Pollock had also engaged with wall-size painting duringhis association with Joseacute Clemente Orozco and in earlier work such as Mural(1943ndash1944) painted for Peggy Guggenheimrsquos house

19 Greenbergrsquos version of modernism was most fully laid out only in 1959 andpublished in 1960 ldquoIt was the stressing of the ineluctable atness of the surface thatremained however more fundamental than anything else to the process by whichpictorial art criticized and defined itself under Modernism For flatness alone wasunique and exclusive to pictorial art Because flatness was the only conditionpainting shared with no other art Modernist painting oriented itself to atness as itdid to nothing elserdquo In Clement Greenberg ldquoModernist Paintingrdquo in Modernism witha Vengeance 1957ndash1969 vol 4 of Clement Greenberg The Collected Essays andCriticism ed John OrsquoBrien (Chicago University of Chicago Press 1993) 87

20 Clement Greenberg ldquoThe Situation at the Momentrdquo in Arrogant Purpose1945ndash1949 vol 2 of Clement Greenberg The Collected Essays and Criticism ed JohnOrsquoBrien (Chicago University of Chicago 1986) 194ndash195

21 See Greenberg ldquoTowards a Newer Laocoonrdquo throughout22 Eric Lum has done extensive work on the relationship between abstract expres-

sionism and architecture The analysis in this essay follows from his especially whereBlakersquos project is concerned but also expands on it As he jumps from Blake to PhilipJohnson and Mark Rothkorsquos Houston Chapel however Lum misses the importance ofother interventions between painting and architecture such as those made by KaprowThis is evident when he says ldquoThrough this marriage of mural and wall paintingcould become fully integrated into architecture an idealized conjecture nor realizeduntil Mark Rothkorsquos 1971 Houston Chapelrdquo Eric Lum ldquoPollockrsquos Promise Toward anAbstract Expressionist Architecturerdquo Assemblage 39 (August 1999) 68

Kaizen | Framed Space Allan Kaprow and the Spread of Painting 103

23 Blake said of his visit to Pollockrsquos studio ldquoIt was a very sunny day and thesun was shining on the paintings I felt like I was standing in the Hall of Mirrors atVersailles It was a dazzling incredible sightrdquo Naifeh and Smith 588

24 Peter Blake No Place like Utopia Modern Architecture and the Company WeKept (New York Knopf 1993) 111ndash112

25 Miesrsquos museum plan was designed at the request of the editors at ArchitecturalForum who had been publishing a series of articles ldquoto show how building might beimproved through fuller and more imaginative use of existing resourcesrdquo They requesteddesigns for a variety of buildings that could be placed in a hypothetical city of 70000inhabitants ldquoNew Buildings for 194Xrdquo Architectural Forum 78 no 5 (May 1943)69ndash85 The Barcelona Pavilion was built in 1929 for the Barcelona Universal Expositionand was destroyed when the fair ended It was subsequently rebuilt in 1981ndash86

26 Peter Blake Mies van der Rohe (New York Pelican 1960) 54 It is worth notingthat like Miesrsquos use of the Kolbe sculpture Blake had Pollock actually make smallwire sculptures splattered with paint miniatures of sculptures that Blake hopedPollock would make for the actual museum Pollock himself was experimenting withsculpture around this time building three-dimensional forms out of papier-macirccheacutethat he then splattered with paint

27 Blakersquos collage space follows from Miesrsquos The production of collages as in situmodels for Miesrsquos buildings had begun in the twenties with his work for the journal Gin association with Dadaists such as Hans Richter Neil Levine notes this creation ofa collage space in Mies particularly in the Pavilion and the Museum for a Small Cityin relation to his use of reection to layer one surface on top of another Neil LevineldquolsquoThe Signicance of Factsrsquo Miesrsquo Collages Up Close and Personalrdquo Assemblage 37(December 1998) 71ndash101

28 Blake designed his museum just as Philip Johnson was building his Glass Housewhere they both spent considerable time while planning exhibitions for the Museumof Modern Art Johnsonrsquos inuence is also evident in Blakersquos design Blake No Placelike Utopia 149ndash155

29 Arthur Drexler ldquoUnframed Space A Museum for Jackson Pollackrsquos [sic] PaintingsrdquoInteriors and Industrial Design 109 no 6 (January 1950) 90ndash91 The article was partof a special issue whose theme was ldquoInteriors to Comerdquo a recurring topic that wasmeant ldquoto show the direction in which some of our best designers are goingrdquo The termunframed space was used several times in reference to Pollockrsquos work as the title oftwo articles Drexlerrsquos and one published slightly later by Berton Rouecheacute ThoughRouecheacute in an interview in To a Violent Grave says that Lee Krasner used the phraserst Charles Pollock says that Blake was the origin of the term The fact that Drexlerrsquosarticle was written and published earlier seems to conrm this See Berton RouecheacuteldquoUnframed Spacerdquo in Jackson Pollock Interviews 18ndash19 and Jeffrey Potter To aViolent Grave (New York Pushcart Press 1985) 126

30 Drexler 9031 Blake No Place like Utopia 113ndash11432 Blake completed construction on his ldquoPinwheel Houserdquo in 1952 It is a small

beach house that he designed for himself and his family in South Hampton on NewYorkrsquos Long Island Situated on the beach the house is square in plan and its fourexterior walls slide horizontally outward each in a successive clockwise directionrevealing glass walls When the exterior walls are fully extended and the house isviewed from above it forms a shape like a pinwheel Opening the exterior wallsreveals an ever-changing view of the landscape outside turning the ocean and the

104 Grey Room 13

dunes into the picturesque framing them so that they entirely ll the space of the walland put its surface in motion Blake had discussed with Pollock the possibility of hispainting the sliding walls so that his paintings would be superimposed over the land-scape Pollock considered it but Blake couldnrsquot come up with the commission moneythat Pollock asked for They never finalized their plans and it was never clear howthe panels were to be painted Blake suggested that they might be made of glass so hebought the sheet of glass that Pollock used to paint Number 29 1950 (1950) the paintingthat Hans Namuth lmed from underneath for his documentary on Pollock His col-laboration with Blake did lead to one commission a mural-size canvas done for ahouse designed by Marcel Breuer Untitled (Mural) (1950) Shortly after his collabo-ration with Blake Pollock began another unrealized architectural project this onewith Alfonso Ossorio and Tony Smith for a church designed by Smith with murals byPollock For more on all of this see Blake No Place like Utopia 114ndash118 Naifeh andSmith 649 and Lum ldquoPollockrsquos Promiserdquo 68 85ndash88

33 Lum ldquoPollockrsquos Promiserdquo 67ndash6834 A few pages down from Drexlerrsquos article on the Pollock Museum in Interiors

and Industrial Design was another architectural response to the same problem OlgaGueftrsquos article ldquoThe Museumrsquos Oasisrdquo describes another museum this one by Gyorgyand Juliet Kepes ldquoThe Kepesesrdquo it begins ldquoare not exactly opposed to museumsrdquo how-ever it would seem that they were opposed to museums containing works of artReplacing the art objects entirely the Kepeses substituted shells driftwood plantsand animals Instead of a natural history museum they proposed a modern-dayWunderkammerwhere natural forms take the place of art as objects for contemplationldquoThe proposed galleryrdquo they declared ldquowould bridge the gap between the art museumwhich is concerned with man-made beauty and the natural history museum whichis preoccupied with nature but not particularly with naturersquos beautyrdquo Gyorgy KepesrsquosThe New Landscape exhibition at MIT a year later in 1951 (the same years as theIndependent Grouprsquos similar exhibition Growth and Form in London) and the pub-lication that followed The New Landscape in Art and Sciencewould ultimately realizethis project with blown-up photographs of natural forms (cells shells and electronmicrographs) in place of actual objects

The Kepeses seem to have taken the next logical step beyond Blake proposing aneven more radical rethinking of the wall-size work of art Eliminating the need for theartist altogether they found abstract forms in nature and turned their reproductionsinto what would elsewhere have been works of art By turning the art object into scientic vision The Kepeses proposed its total instrumentation Autonomous abstractpainting was transformed into its instrumental other a mechanically reproduced science of vision Rather than turn art into interior design The Kepesesrsquo replacementof abstract painting recast the status of scientic technology into that of high art SeeOlga Gueft ldquoThe Museumrsquos Oasisrdquo Interiors and Industrial Design 109 no 6 (January1950) 100ndash103 and Gyorgy Kepes The New Landscape in Art and Science (ChicagoPaul Theobald and Co 1956)

35 Kaprow stated that it was ldquoIn 1949 [that] I saw an exhibition of [Pollockrsquos] workfor the rst timerdquo ldquoInterviewrdquo in Allan Kaprow (Pasadena Pasadena Art Museum1967) 7

36 See Kaprow ldquoThe Legacy of Jackson Pollockrdquo Art News 25 and Kaprow ldquoTheLegacy of Jackson Pollockrdquo Essays on the Blurring 3

37 Joan Marter ldquoThe Forgotten Legacy Happenings Pop Art and Fluxus at RutgersUniversityrdquo in Off Limits Rutgers University and the Avant-Garde 1957ndash1963 ed Joan

Kaizen | Framed Space Allan Kaprow and the Spread of Painting 105

Marter (Newark The Newark Museum 1999) 438 Marter 13239 Quoted in John Cage Silence (Middletown Wesleyan University Press 1961) 10540 Branden Joseph has developed the link between Cage and Rauschenberg in several

recent essays See Branden W Joseph ldquoJohn Cage and the Architecture of SilencerdquoOctober 81 (Summer 1997) 81ndash104 and Branden Joseph ldquoWhite on Whiterdquo CriticalInquiry 27 no 1 (Summer 2001) 90ndash121

41 For Cage on Rauschenberg see Cage Silence98ndash108 For his description ofTheater Piece No 1 see ldquoInterview with John Cagerdquo in Happenings and Other Actsed Mariellen R Sandford (New York Routledge 1995) 53 Cage subsequently referredto Theater Piece No 1 as ldquothe rst happeningrdquo See John Cage ldquoAn AutobiographicalStatementrdquo Southwest Review 76 no 1 (Winter 1991) 65

42 The score itself has had various incarnations It wasnrsquot published until 1960and in this version includes a note wherein Cage describes the rst performance byTudor For more on 4rsquo33 and its various scores see Liz Kotz ldquoWords on Paper NotNecessarily Meant to Be Read as Art Postwar Media Poetics from Cage to Warholrdquo(PhD diss Columbia University 2002) 83ndash115 Kotz follows a different lineage outof Cage and into performance and happenings than the one traced in this essay

43 Marter 13244 Walter Hopps in the first survey catalog of Rauschenbergrsquos early work does

not name the black paintings as a group as he does the White Paintings He calls themeach Untitled followed by a description in brackets Hopps notes of the largest ofthese works that ldquoThese paintings with a greater vastness and ambiguity of scale thanother Rauschenberg works relate to spatial qualities of Jackson Pollockrdquo HoppsRobert Rauschenberg The Early 1950s (Houston Houston Fine Art Press 1991) 67This convention was also followed in Rauschenbergrsquos 1997 Guggenheim retrospectivecatalog and is followed in this essay Robert Rauschenberg A Retrospective ed WalterHopps and Susan Davidson (New York Solomon R Guggenheim Museum 1997)

45 The piece is called Untitled [two black panels] (1953) Hopps Robert Rauschenberg99

46 Helen Molesworth notes the importance of Rauschenbergrsquos newspaper groundin the black paintings and develops this problem in relation to the abject body as it isfurther pursued in his work throughout the 1950s Helen Molesworth ldquoBefore BedrdquoOctober 63 (Winter 1993) 68ndash82

47 Asked about this work Rauschenberg said ldquoI called them combines I had tocoin that word because I got so bored with arguments I was interested in people seeingmy work When someone would come up and I really wanted to know what they thoughtof it or wanted to sense the exposure there was always this screen that they could getbehind which was if I said lsquoIt is paintingrsquo they would say lsquoThatrsquos not painting Thatrsquossculpturersquo And they thought this was very interestingrdquo Jeanne Siegel ArtwordsDiscourse on the 60s and 70s (New York DaCapo 1985) 153

48 Allan Kaprow ldquoa Statementrdquo in Happenings An Illustrated Anthology edMichael Kirby (New York EP Dutton and Co 1965) 44ndash45

49 Benjamin Buchloh notes the importance of play in the 1950s and its link toconsumer culture During the 1950s he writes ldquoa theory of games would remerge asa cultural project at the very moment of an ever-increasing instrumentalization oflibidinal desire through consumer culturerdquo Benjamin HD Buchloh ldquoRobert WattsInanimate ObjectsmdashInanimate Subjectsrdquo in Buchloh and Rodenbeck Experiments inthe Everyday 25 n 4

Kaizen | Framed Space Allan Kaprow and the Spread of Painting 101

information on Kiesler see RL Held Endless Innovations Frederick Kieslerrsquos Theoryand Scenic Design (Ann Arbor UMI Research Press 1982) Lisa Phillips FrederickKiesler (New York The Whitney Museum of American Art 1989) Brian OrsquoDohertydraws out the connections between the prendash and postndashWorld War II manifestations ofthis relationship in Inside the White Cube

9 For Benjamin the work of art attains autonomy under modernism with theemergence of art for artrsquos sake This autonomy is then usurped by mechanical repro-duction See Walter Benjamin ldquoThe Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproductionrdquoin Illuminations ed Hanna Arendt (New York Harcourt Brace and Jovanovich Inc1968) p 224-226 For Greenberg as the above quote indicates the autonomy of artcontinues even in the face of mechanization See Clement Greenberg ldquoTowards a NewerLaocoonrdquo Perceptions and Judgments 1939ndash1944 vol 1 of Clement Greenberg TheCollected Essays and Criticism ed John OrsquoBrien (Chicago University of Chicago1986) p 32

10 Rosalind Krauss uses the term ldquopost-medium conditionrdquo to designate ldquomixed-media installationrdquo work done today While Krauss argues that only the most signi-cant artists working since the 1960s reassert the medium in their work against thegeneral postmedium condition I believe that all mixed-media installation work operates using the gallery or institution as medium See Rosalind Krauss ldquoA Voyageon the North Seardquo Art in the Age of the Post-Medium Condition (New York Thamesand Hudson 1999) for her comments on a specic contemporary artist and the rein-vention of the medium see Rosalind Krauss ldquo And Then Turn Awayrdquo An Essayon James Colemanrdquo October 81 (Summer 1997) 5ndash33

11 Allan Kaprow ldquoThe Legacy of Jackson Pollockrdquo Art News 57 no 6 (October1958) 24ndash26 55ndash57 reprinted in Allan Kaprow Essays on the Blurring of Art andLife ed Jeff Kelley (Berkeley and Los Angles University of California Press 1993) 1ndash9 Kaprow has stated that the essay was written in 1956 in ldquoAllan Kaprow andRobert Watts Interviewed by Sidney Simonrdquo 77 Kaprow had been a student of bothHans Hoffman and Meyer Schapiro

12 Harold Rosenberg ldquoThe American Action Paintersrdquo Art News 52 (December1952) 22ndash23 In a footnote that Rosenberg added when the article was republished aspart of his book of collected essays in 1959 he added the following ldquoAction Paintinghas extracted the element of decision inherent in all art in that the work is not fin-ished at its beginning but has to be carried forward by an accumulation of lsquorightrsquo ges-tures In a word Action Painting is the abstraction of the moral element in art itsmark is moral tension in detachment from moral or esthetic certainties and it judgesitself morally in declaring that picture to be worthless which is not the incorporationof a genuine struggle one which could at any point have been lostrdquo Harold RosenbergThe Tradition of the New (New York Horizon Press 1959) 33ndash34 Kaprow recountsthe influence of Rosenbergrsquos essay on his work in ldquoAllan Kaprow and Robert WattsInterviewed by Sidney Simonrdquo 77

13 There were five all told They were held as follows 5ndash23 January 1948 24Januaryndash12 February 1949 21 Novemberndash10 December 1949 28 Novemberndash16 December1950 26 Novemberndash15 December 1951 These shows had a remarkable resonance onethat extended beyond even the insular New York art world when after the secondexhibition Life magazine published the feature article ldquoJackson Pollock Is He theGreatest Living Painter in the United Statesrdquo Dorothy Sieberling Life (August 81949) 42ndash45

14 Allan Kaprow ldquoThe Legacy of Jackson Pollockrdquo in Kaprow Essays on the

102 Grey Room 13

Blurringrdquo 615 Kaprow uses both the terms scale and size to describe Pollockrsquos work but as

TJ Clark has shown these are two very different terms and Pollock is a painter of sizeand not scale For Clark it is size that engages the body ldquoNormally speaking size isliteralmdasha matter of actual physical intuition It involves grasping how big or small acertain object really is most likely in relation to the size of the grasperrsquos upright body oroutspread armsrdquo TJ Clark ldquoPollockrsquos Smallnessrdquo in Jackson Pollock New Approachesed Kirk Varnedoe and Pepe Karmel (New York Museum of Modern Art 1999) 15

16 Kaprow ldquoThe Legacy of Jackson Pollockrdquo Essays on the Blurring 617 In most of his work the paint engages with the edge of the canvas emphasizing

and bordering it and not continuing around it as if the canvas had been cut down fromsome innite expanse Kaprow claims otherwise by singling out the exceptions sayingldquo[H]is art gives the impression of going on forever [T]hough evidence points to aslackening of the attack as Pollock came to the edges of many of his canvases in thebest ones he compensated for this by tacking much of the painted surface around theback of his stretchersrdquo Kaprow ldquoThe Legacy of Jackson Pollockrdquo Essays on the Blurringof Art and Life 5 An examination of the paintings shows that more often Pollockstopped before the edge or reworked his compositions after they were stretched sothat they reengaged with the edge even when cut from larger canvas Kaprow claimsotherwise because it furthers his arguments that Pollockrsquos paintings emerge into thespace of the viewer

18 Jackson Pollock ldquoApplication for a Guggenheim Fellowship 1947rdquo in JacksonPollock Interviews 17 The inuence of Greenberg at this time is discussed in StevenNaifeh and Gregory White Smith Jackson Pollock An American Saga (Aiken SCWoodwardWhite 1989) 551 Pollock had also engaged with wall-size painting duringhis association with Joseacute Clemente Orozco and in earlier work such as Mural(1943ndash1944) painted for Peggy Guggenheimrsquos house

19 Greenbergrsquos version of modernism was most fully laid out only in 1959 andpublished in 1960 ldquoIt was the stressing of the ineluctable atness of the surface thatremained however more fundamental than anything else to the process by whichpictorial art criticized and defined itself under Modernism For flatness alone wasunique and exclusive to pictorial art Because flatness was the only conditionpainting shared with no other art Modernist painting oriented itself to atness as itdid to nothing elserdquo In Clement Greenberg ldquoModernist Paintingrdquo in Modernism witha Vengeance 1957ndash1969 vol 4 of Clement Greenberg The Collected Essays andCriticism ed John OrsquoBrien (Chicago University of Chicago Press 1993) 87

20 Clement Greenberg ldquoThe Situation at the Momentrdquo in Arrogant Purpose1945ndash1949 vol 2 of Clement Greenberg The Collected Essays and Criticism ed JohnOrsquoBrien (Chicago University of Chicago 1986) 194ndash195

21 See Greenberg ldquoTowards a Newer Laocoonrdquo throughout22 Eric Lum has done extensive work on the relationship between abstract expres-

sionism and architecture The analysis in this essay follows from his especially whereBlakersquos project is concerned but also expands on it As he jumps from Blake to PhilipJohnson and Mark Rothkorsquos Houston Chapel however Lum misses the importance ofother interventions between painting and architecture such as those made by KaprowThis is evident when he says ldquoThrough this marriage of mural and wall paintingcould become fully integrated into architecture an idealized conjecture nor realizeduntil Mark Rothkorsquos 1971 Houston Chapelrdquo Eric Lum ldquoPollockrsquos Promise Toward anAbstract Expressionist Architecturerdquo Assemblage 39 (August 1999) 68

Kaizen | Framed Space Allan Kaprow and the Spread of Painting 103

23 Blake said of his visit to Pollockrsquos studio ldquoIt was a very sunny day and thesun was shining on the paintings I felt like I was standing in the Hall of Mirrors atVersailles It was a dazzling incredible sightrdquo Naifeh and Smith 588

24 Peter Blake No Place like Utopia Modern Architecture and the Company WeKept (New York Knopf 1993) 111ndash112

25 Miesrsquos museum plan was designed at the request of the editors at ArchitecturalForum who had been publishing a series of articles ldquoto show how building might beimproved through fuller and more imaginative use of existing resourcesrdquo They requesteddesigns for a variety of buildings that could be placed in a hypothetical city of 70000inhabitants ldquoNew Buildings for 194Xrdquo Architectural Forum 78 no 5 (May 1943)69ndash85 The Barcelona Pavilion was built in 1929 for the Barcelona Universal Expositionand was destroyed when the fair ended It was subsequently rebuilt in 1981ndash86

26 Peter Blake Mies van der Rohe (New York Pelican 1960) 54 It is worth notingthat like Miesrsquos use of the Kolbe sculpture Blake had Pollock actually make smallwire sculptures splattered with paint miniatures of sculptures that Blake hopedPollock would make for the actual museum Pollock himself was experimenting withsculpture around this time building three-dimensional forms out of papier-macirccheacutethat he then splattered with paint

27 Blakersquos collage space follows from Miesrsquos The production of collages as in situmodels for Miesrsquos buildings had begun in the twenties with his work for the journal Gin association with Dadaists such as Hans Richter Neil Levine notes this creation ofa collage space in Mies particularly in the Pavilion and the Museum for a Small Cityin relation to his use of reection to layer one surface on top of another Neil LevineldquolsquoThe Signicance of Factsrsquo Miesrsquo Collages Up Close and Personalrdquo Assemblage 37(December 1998) 71ndash101

28 Blake designed his museum just as Philip Johnson was building his Glass Housewhere they both spent considerable time while planning exhibitions for the Museumof Modern Art Johnsonrsquos inuence is also evident in Blakersquos design Blake No Placelike Utopia 149ndash155

29 Arthur Drexler ldquoUnframed Space A Museum for Jackson Pollackrsquos [sic] PaintingsrdquoInteriors and Industrial Design 109 no 6 (January 1950) 90ndash91 The article was partof a special issue whose theme was ldquoInteriors to Comerdquo a recurring topic that wasmeant ldquoto show the direction in which some of our best designers are goingrdquo The termunframed space was used several times in reference to Pollockrsquos work as the title oftwo articles Drexlerrsquos and one published slightly later by Berton Rouecheacute ThoughRouecheacute in an interview in To a Violent Grave says that Lee Krasner used the phraserst Charles Pollock says that Blake was the origin of the term The fact that Drexlerrsquosarticle was written and published earlier seems to conrm this See Berton RouecheacuteldquoUnframed Spacerdquo in Jackson Pollock Interviews 18ndash19 and Jeffrey Potter To aViolent Grave (New York Pushcart Press 1985) 126

30 Drexler 9031 Blake No Place like Utopia 113ndash11432 Blake completed construction on his ldquoPinwheel Houserdquo in 1952 It is a small

beach house that he designed for himself and his family in South Hampton on NewYorkrsquos Long Island Situated on the beach the house is square in plan and its fourexterior walls slide horizontally outward each in a successive clockwise directionrevealing glass walls When the exterior walls are fully extended and the house isviewed from above it forms a shape like a pinwheel Opening the exterior wallsreveals an ever-changing view of the landscape outside turning the ocean and the

104 Grey Room 13

dunes into the picturesque framing them so that they entirely ll the space of the walland put its surface in motion Blake had discussed with Pollock the possibility of hispainting the sliding walls so that his paintings would be superimposed over the land-scape Pollock considered it but Blake couldnrsquot come up with the commission moneythat Pollock asked for They never finalized their plans and it was never clear howthe panels were to be painted Blake suggested that they might be made of glass so hebought the sheet of glass that Pollock used to paint Number 29 1950 (1950) the paintingthat Hans Namuth lmed from underneath for his documentary on Pollock His col-laboration with Blake did lead to one commission a mural-size canvas done for ahouse designed by Marcel Breuer Untitled (Mural) (1950) Shortly after his collabo-ration with Blake Pollock began another unrealized architectural project this onewith Alfonso Ossorio and Tony Smith for a church designed by Smith with murals byPollock For more on all of this see Blake No Place like Utopia 114ndash118 Naifeh andSmith 649 and Lum ldquoPollockrsquos Promiserdquo 68 85ndash88

33 Lum ldquoPollockrsquos Promiserdquo 67ndash6834 A few pages down from Drexlerrsquos article on the Pollock Museum in Interiors

and Industrial Design was another architectural response to the same problem OlgaGueftrsquos article ldquoThe Museumrsquos Oasisrdquo describes another museum this one by Gyorgyand Juliet Kepes ldquoThe Kepesesrdquo it begins ldquoare not exactly opposed to museumsrdquo how-ever it would seem that they were opposed to museums containing works of artReplacing the art objects entirely the Kepeses substituted shells driftwood plantsand animals Instead of a natural history museum they proposed a modern-dayWunderkammerwhere natural forms take the place of art as objects for contemplationldquoThe proposed galleryrdquo they declared ldquowould bridge the gap between the art museumwhich is concerned with man-made beauty and the natural history museum whichis preoccupied with nature but not particularly with naturersquos beautyrdquo Gyorgy KepesrsquosThe New Landscape exhibition at MIT a year later in 1951 (the same years as theIndependent Grouprsquos similar exhibition Growth and Form in London) and the pub-lication that followed The New Landscape in Art and Sciencewould ultimately realizethis project with blown-up photographs of natural forms (cells shells and electronmicrographs) in place of actual objects

The Kepeses seem to have taken the next logical step beyond Blake proposing aneven more radical rethinking of the wall-size work of art Eliminating the need for theartist altogether they found abstract forms in nature and turned their reproductionsinto what would elsewhere have been works of art By turning the art object into scientic vision The Kepeses proposed its total instrumentation Autonomous abstractpainting was transformed into its instrumental other a mechanically reproduced science of vision Rather than turn art into interior design The Kepesesrsquo replacementof abstract painting recast the status of scientic technology into that of high art SeeOlga Gueft ldquoThe Museumrsquos Oasisrdquo Interiors and Industrial Design 109 no 6 (January1950) 100ndash103 and Gyorgy Kepes The New Landscape in Art and Science (ChicagoPaul Theobald and Co 1956)

35 Kaprow stated that it was ldquoIn 1949 [that] I saw an exhibition of [Pollockrsquos] workfor the rst timerdquo ldquoInterviewrdquo in Allan Kaprow (Pasadena Pasadena Art Museum1967) 7

36 See Kaprow ldquoThe Legacy of Jackson Pollockrdquo Art News 25 and Kaprow ldquoTheLegacy of Jackson Pollockrdquo Essays on the Blurring 3

37 Joan Marter ldquoThe Forgotten Legacy Happenings Pop Art and Fluxus at RutgersUniversityrdquo in Off Limits Rutgers University and the Avant-Garde 1957ndash1963 ed Joan

Kaizen | Framed Space Allan Kaprow and the Spread of Painting 105

Marter (Newark The Newark Museum 1999) 438 Marter 13239 Quoted in John Cage Silence (Middletown Wesleyan University Press 1961) 10540 Branden Joseph has developed the link between Cage and Rauschenberg in several

recent essays See Branden W Joseph ldquoJohn Cage and the Architecture of SilencerdquoOctober 81 (Summer 1997) 81ndash104 and Branden Joseph ldquoWhite on Whiterdquo CriticalInquiry 27 no 1 (Summer 2001) 90ndash121

41 For Cage on Rauschenberg see Cage Silence98ndash108 For his description ofTheater Piece No 1 see ldquoInterview with John Cagerdquo in Happenings and Other Actsed Mariellen R Sandford (New York Routledge 1995) 53 Cage subsequently referredto Theater Piece No 1 as ldquothe rst happeningrdquo See John Cage ldquoAn AutobiographicalStatementrdquo Southwest Review 76 no 1 (Winter 1991) 65

42 The score itself has had various incarnations It wasnrsquot published until 1960and in this version includes a note wherein Cage describes the rst performance byTudor For more on 4rsquo33 and its various scores see Liz Kotz ldquoWords on Paper NotNecessarily Meant to Be Read as Art Postwar Media Poetics from Cage to Warholrdquo(PhD diss Columbia University 2002) 83ndash115 Kotz follows a different lineage outof Cage and into performance and happenings than the one traced in this essay

43 Marter 13244 Walter Hopps in the first survey catalog of Rauschenbergrsquos early work does

not name the black paintings as a group as he does the White Paintings He calls themeach Untitled followed by a description in brackets Hopps notes of the largest ofthese works that ldquoThese paintings with a greater vastness and ambiguity of scale thanother Rauschenberg works relate to spatial qualities of Jackson Pollockrdquo HoppsRobert Rauschenberg The Early 1950s (Houston Houston Fine Art Press 1991) 67This convention was also followed in Rauschenbergrsquos 1997 Guggenheim retrospectivecatalog and is followed in this essay Robert Rauschenberg A Retrospective ed WalterHopps and Susan Davidson (New York Solomon R Guggenheim Museum 1997)

45 The piece is called Untitled [two black panels] (1953) Hopps Robert Rauschenberg99

46 Helen Molesworth notes the importance of Rauschenbergrsquos newspaper groundin the black paintings and develops this problem in relation to the abject body as it isfurther pursued in his work throughout the 1950s Helen Molesworth ldquoBefore BedrdquoOctober 63 (Winter 1993) 68ndash82

47 Asked about this work Rauschenberg said ldquoI called them combines I had tocoin that word because I got so bored with arguments I was interested in people seeingmy work When someone would come up and I really wanted to know what they thoughtof it or wanted to sense the exposure there was always this screen that they could getbehind which was if I said lsquoIt is paintingrsquo they would say lsquoThatrsquos not painting Thatrsquossculpturersquo And they thought this was very interestingrdquo Jeanne Siegel ArtwordsDiscourse on the 60s and 70s (New York DaCapo 1985) 153

48 Allan Kaprow ldquoa Statementrdquo in Happenings An Illustrated Anthology edMichael Kirby (New York EP Dutton and Co 1965) 44ndash45

49 Benjamin Buchloh notes the importance of play in the 1950s and its link toconsumer culture During the 1950s he writes ldquoa theory of games would remerge asa cultural project at the very moment of an ever-increasing instrumentalization oflibidinal desire through consumer culturerdquo Benjamin HD Buchloh ldquoRobert WattsInanimate ObjectsmdashInanimate Subjectsrdquo in Buchloh and Rodenbeck Experiments inthe Everyday 25 n 4

102 Grey Room 13

Blurringrdquo 615 Kaprow uses both the terms scale and size to describe Pollockrsquos work but as

TJ Clark has shown these are two very different terms and Pollock is a painter of sizeand not scale For Clark it is size that engages the body ldquoNormally speaking size isliteralmdasha matter of actual physical intuition It involves grasping how big or small acertain object really is most likely in relation to the size of the grasperrsquos upright body oroutspread armsrdquo TJ Clark ldquoPollockrsquos Smallnessrdquo in Jackson Pollock New Approachesed Kirk Varnedoe and Pepe Karmel (New York Museum of Modern Art 1999) 15

16 Kaprow ldquoThe Legacy of Jackson Pollockrdquo Essays on the Blurring 617 In most of his work the paint engages with the edge of the canvas emphasizing

and bordering it and not continuing around it as if the canvas had been cut down fromsome innite expanse Kaprow claims otherwise by singling out the exceptions sayingldquo[H]is art gives the impression of going on forever [T]hough evidence points to aslackening of the attack as Pollock came to the edges of many of his canvases in thebest ones he compensated for this by tacking much of the painted surface around theback of his stretchersrdquo Kaprow ldquoThe Legacy of Jackson Pollockrdquo Essays on the Blurringof Art and Life 5 An examination of the paintings shows that more often Pollockstopped before the edge or reworked his compositions after they were stretched sothat they reengaged with the edge even when cut from larger canvas Kaprow claimsotherwise because it furthers his arguments that Pollockrsquos paintings emerge into thespace of the viewer

18 Jackson Pollock ldquoApplication for a Guggenheim Fellowship 1947rdquo in JacksonPollock Interviews 17 The inuence of Greenberg at this time is discussed in StevenNaifeh and Gregory White Smith Jackson Pollock An American Saga (Aiken SCWoodwardWhite 1989) 551 Pollock had also engaged with wall-size painting duringhis association with Joseacute Clemente Orozco and in earlier work such as Mural(1943ndash1944) painted for Peggy Guggenheimrsquos house

19 Greenbergrsquos version of modernism was most fully laid out only in 1959 andpublished in 1960 ldquoIt was the stressing of the ineluctable atness of the surface thatremained however more fundamental than anything else to the process by whichpictorial art criticized and defined itself under Modernism For flatness alone wasunique and exclusive to pictorial art Because flatness was the only conditionpainting shared with no other art Modernist painting oriented itself to atness as itdid to nothing elserdquo In Clement Greenberg ldquoModernist Paintingrdquo in Modernism witha Vengeance 1957ndash1969 vol 4 of Clement Greenberg The Collected Essays andCriticism ed John OrsquoBrien (Chicago University of Chicago Press 1993) 87

20 Clement Greenberg ldquoThe Situation at the Momentrdquo in Arrogant Purpose1945ndash1949 vol 2 of Clement Greenberg The Collected Essays and Criticism ed JohnOrsquoBrien (Chicago University of Chicago 1986) 194ndash195

21 See Greenberg ldquoTowards a Newer Laocoonrdquo throughout22 Eric Lum has done extensive work on the relationship between abstract expres-

sionism and architecture The analysis in this essay follows from his especially whereBlakersquos project is concerned but also expands on it As he jumps from Blake to PhilipJohnson and Mark Rothkorsquos Houston Chapel however Lum misses the importance ofother interventions between painting and architecture such as those made by KaprowThis is evident when he says ldquoThrough this marriage of mural and wall paintingcould become fully integrated into architecture an idealized conjecture nor realizeduntil Mark Rothkorsquos 1971 Houston Chapelrdquo Eric Lum ldquoPollockrsquos Promise Toward anAbstract Expressionist Architecturerdquo Assemblage 39 (August 1999) 68

Kaizen | Framed Space Allan Kaprow and the Spread of Painting 103

23 Blake said of his visit to Pollockrsquos studio ldquoIt was a very sunny day and thesun was shining on the paintings I felt like I was standing in the Hall of Mirrors atVersailles It was a dazzling incredible sightrdquo Naifeh and Smith 588

24 Peter Blake No Place like Utopia Modern Architecture and the Company WeKept (New York Knopf 1993) 111ndash112

25 Miesrsquos museum plan was designed at the request of the editors at ArchitecturalForum who had been publishing a series of articles ldquoto show how building might beimproved through fuller and more imaginative use of existing resourcesrdquo They requesteddesigns for a variety of buildings that could be placed in a hypothetical city of 70000inhabitants ldquoNew Buildings for 194Xrdquo Architectural Forum 78 no 5 (May 1943)69ndash85 The Barcelona Pavilion was built in 1929 for the Barcelona Universal Expositionand was destroyed when the fair ended It was subsequently rebuilt in 1981ndash86

26 Peter Blake Mies van der Rohe (New York Pelican 1960) 54 It is worth notingthat like Miesrsquos use of the Kolbe sculpture Blake had Pollock actually make smallwire sculptures splattered with paint miniatures of sculptures that Blake hopedPollock would make for the actual museum Pollock himself was experimenting withsculpture around this time building three-dimensional forms out of papier-macirccheacutethat he then splattered with paint

27 Blakersquos collage space follows from Miesrsquos The production of collages as in situmodels for Miesrsquos buildings had begun in the twenties with his work for the journal Gin association with Dadaists such as Hans Richter Neil Levine notes this creation ofa collage space in Mies particularly in the Pavilion and the Museum for a Small Cityin relation to his use of reection to layer one surface on top of another Neil LevineldquolsquoThe Signicance of Factsrsquo Miesrsquo Collages Up Close and Personalrdquo Assemblage 37(December 1998) 71ndash101

28 Blake designed his museum just as Philip Johnson was building his Glass Housewhere they both spent considerable time while planning exhibitions for the Museumof Modern Art Johnsonrsquos inuence is also evident in Blakersquos design Blake No Placelike Utopia 149ndash155

29 Arthur Drexler ldquoUnframed Space A Museum for Jackson Pollackrsquos [sic] PaintingsrdquoInteriors and Industrial Design 109 no 6 (January 1950) 90ndash91 The article was partof a special issue whose theme was ldquoInteriors to Comerdquo a recurring topic that wasmeant ldquoto show the direction in which some of our best designers are goingrdquo The termunframed space was used several times in reference to Pollockrsquos work as the title oftwo articles Drexlerrsquos and one published slightly later by Berton Rouecheacute ThoughRouecheacute in an interview in To a Violent Grave says that Lee Krasner used the phraserst Charles Pollock says that Blake was the origin of the term The fact that Drexlerrsquosarticle was written and published earlier seems to conrm this See Berton RouecheacuteldquoUnframed Spacerdquo in Jackson Pollock Interviews 18ndash19 and Jeffrey Potter To aViolent Grave (New York Pushcart Press 1985) 126

30 Drexler 9031 Blake No Place like Utopia 113ndash11432 Blake completed construction on his ldquoPinwheel Houserdquo in 1952 It is a small

beach house that he designed for himself and his family in South Hampton on NewYorkrsquos Long Island Situated on the beach the house is square in plan and its fourexterior walls slide horizontally outward each in a successive clockwise directionrevealing glass walls When the exterior walls are fully extended and the house isviewed from above it forms a shape like a pinwheel Opening the exterior wallsreveals an ever-changing view of the landscape outside turning the ocean and the

104 Grey Room 13

dunes into the picturesque framing them so that they entirely ll the space of the walland put its surface in motion Blake had discussed with Pollock the possibility of hispainting the sliding walls so that his paintings would be superimposed over the land-scape Pollock considered it but Blake couldnrsquot come up with the commission moneythat Pollock asked for They never finalized their plans and it was never clear howthe panels were to be painted Blake suggested that they might be made of glass so hebought the sheet of glass that Pollock used to paint Number 29 1950 (1950) the paintingthat Hans Namuth lmed from underneath for his documentary on Pollock His col-laboration with Blake did lead to one commission a mural-size canvas done for ahouse designed by Marcel Breuer Untitled (Mural) (1950) Shortly after his collabo-ration with Blake Pollock began another unrealized architectural project this onewith Alfonso Ossorio and Tony Smith for a church designed by Smith with murals byPollock For more on all of this see Blake No Place like Utopia 114ndash118 Naifeh andSmith 649 and Lum ldquoPollockrsquos Promiserdquo 68 85ndash88

33 Lum ldquoPollockrsquos Promiserdquo 67ndash6834 A few pages down from Drexlerrsquos article on the Pollock Museum in Interiors

and Industrial Design was another architectural response to the same problem OlgaGueftrsquos article ldquoThe Museumrsquos Oasisrdquo describes another museum this one by Gyorgyand Juliet Kepes ldquoThe Kepesesrdquo it begins ldquoare not exactly opposed to museumsrdquo how-ever it would seem that they were opposed to museums containing works of artReplacing the art objects entirely the Kepeses substituted shells driftwood plantsand animals Instead of a natural history museum they proposed a modern-dayWunderkammerwhere natural forms take the place of art as objects for contemplationldquoThe proposed galleryrdquo they declared ldquowould bridge the gap between the art museumwhich is concerned with man-made beauty and the natural history museum whichis preoccupied with nature but not particularly with naturersquos beautyrdquo Gyorgy KepesrsquosThe New Landscape exhibition at MIT a year later in 1951 (the same years as theIndependent Grouprsquos similar exhibition Growth and Form in London) and the pub-lication that followed The New Landscape in Art and Sciencewould ultimately realizethis project with blown-up photographs of natural forms (cells shells and electronmicrographs) in place of actual objects

The Kepeses seem to have taken the next logical step beyond Blake proposing aneven more radical rethinking of the wall-size work of art Eliminating the need for theartist altogether they found abstract forms in nature and turned their reproductionsinto what would elsewhere have been works of art By turning the art object into scientic vision The Kepeses proposed its total instrumentation Autonomous abstractpainting was transformed into its instrumental other a mechanically reproduced science of vision Rather than turn art into interior design The Kepesesrsquo replacementof abstract painting recast the status of scientic technology into that of high art SeeOlga Gueft ldquoThe Museumrsquos Oasisrdquo Interiors and Industrial Design 109 no 6 (January1950) 100ndash103 and Gyorgy Kepes The New Landscape in Art and Science (ChicagoPaul Theobald and Co 1956)

35 Kaprow stated that it was ldquoIn 1949 [that] I saw an exhibition of [Pollockrsquos] workfor the rst timerdquo ldquoInterviewrdquo in Allan Kaprow (Pasadena Pasadena Art Museum1967) 7

36 See Kaprow ldquoThe Legacy of Jackson Pollockrdquo Art News 25 and Kaprow ldquoTheLegacy of Jackson Pollockrdquo Essays on the Blurring 3

37 Joan Marter ldquoThe Forgotten Legacy Happenings Pop Art and Fluxus at RutgersUniversityrdquo in Off Limits Rutgers University and the Avant-Garde 1957ndash1963 ed Joan

Kaizen | Framed Space Allan Kaprow and the Spread of Painting 105

Marter (Newark The Newark Museum 1999) 438 Marter 13239 Quoted in John Cage Silence (Middletown Wesleyan University Press 1961) 10540 Branden Joseph has developed the link between Cage and Rauschenberg in several

recent essays See Branden W Joseph ldquoJohn Cage and the Architecture of SilencerdquoOctober 81 (Summer 1997) 81ndash104 and Branden Joseph ldquoWhite on Whiterdquo CriticalInquiry 27 no 1 (Summer 2001) 90ndash121

41 For Cage on Rauschenberg see Cage Silence98ndash108 For his description ofTheater Piece No 1 see ldquoInterview with John Cagerdquo in Happenings and Other Actsed Mariellen R Sandford (New York Routledge 1995) 53 Cage subsequently referredto Theater Piece No 1 as ldquothe rst happeningrdquo See John Cage ldquoAn AutobiographicalStatementrdquo Southwest Review 76 no 1 (Winter 1991) 65

42 The score itself has had various incarnations It wasnrsquot published until 1960and in this version includes a note wherein Cage describes the rst performance byTudor For more on 4rsquo33 and its various scores see Liz Kotz ldquoWords on Paper NotNecessarily Meant to Be Read as Art Postwar Media Poetics from Cage to Warholrdquo(PhD diss Columbia University 2002) 83ndash115 Kotz follows a different lineage outof Cage and into performance and happenings than the one traced in this essay

43 Marter 13244 Walter Hopps in the first survey catalog of Rauschenbergrsquos early work does

not name the black paintings as a group as he does the White Paintings He calls themeach Untitled followed by a description in brackets Hopps notes of the largest ofthese works that ldquoThese paintings with a greater vastness and ambiguity of scale thanother Rauschenberg works relate to spatial qualities of Jackson Pollockrdquo HoppsRobert Rauschenberg The Early 1950s (Houston Houston Fine Art Press 1991) 67This convention was also followed in Rauschenbergrsquos 1997 Guggenheim retrospectivecatalog and is followed in this essay Robert Rauschenberg A Retrospective ed WalterHopps and Susan Davidson (New York Solomon R Guggenheim Museum 1997)

45 The piece is called Untitled [two black panels] (1953) Hopps Robert Rauschenberg99

46 Helen Molesworth notes the importance of Rauschenbergrsquos newspaper groundin the black paintings and develops this problem in relation to the abject body as it isfurther pursued in his work throughout the 1950s Helen Molesworth ldquoBefore BedrdquoOctober 63 (Winter 1993) 68ndash82

47 Asked about this work Rauschenberg said ldquoI called them combines I had tocoin that word because I got so bored with arguments I was interested in people seeingmy work When someone would come up and I really wanted to know what they thoughtof it or wanted to sense the exposure there was always this screen that they could getbehind which was if I said lsquoIt is paintingrsquo they would say lsquoThatrsquos not painting Thatrsquossculpturersquo And they thought this was very interestingrdquo Jeanne Siegel ArtwordsDiscourse on the 60s and 70s (New York DaCapo 1985) 153

48 Allan Kaprow ldquoa Statementrdquo in Happenings An Illustrated Anthology edMichael Kirby (New York EP Dutton and Co 1965) 44ndash45

49 Benjamin Buchloh notes the importance of play in the 1950s and its link toconsumer culture During the 1950s he writes ldquoa theory of games would remerge asa cultural project at the very moment of an ever-increasing instrumentalization oflibidinal desire through consumer culturerdquo Benjamin HD Buchloh ldquoRobert WattsInanimate ObjectsmdashInanimate Subjectsrdquo in Buchloh and Rodenbeck Experiments inthe Everyday 25 n 4

Kaizen | Framed Space Allan Kaprow and the Spread of Painting 103

23 Blake said of his visit to Pollockrsquos studio ldquoIt was a very sunny day and thesun was shining on the paintings I felt like I was standing in the Hall of Mirrors atVersailles It was a dazzling incredible sightrdquo Naifeh and Smith 588

24 Peter Blake No Place like Utopia Modern Architecture and the Company WeKept (New York Knopf 1993) 111ndash112

25 Miesrsquos museum plan was designed at the request of the editors at ArchitecturalForum who had been publishing a series of articles ldquoto show how building might beimproved through fuller and more imaginative use of existing resourcesrdquo They requesteddesigns for a variety of buildings that could be placed in a hypothetical city of 70000inhabitants ldquoNew Buildings for 194Xrdquo Architectural Forum 78 no 5 (May 1943)69ndash85 The Barcelona Pavilion was built in 1929 for the Barcelona Universal Expositionand was destroyed when the fair ended It was subsequently rebuilt in 1981ndash86

26 Peter Blake Mies van der Rohe (New York Pelican 1960) 54 It is worth notingthat like Miesrsquos use of the Kolbe sculpture Blake had Pollock actually make smallwire sculptures splattered with paint miniatures of sculptures that Blake hopedPollock would make for the actual museum Pollock himself was experimenting withsculpture around this time building three-dimensional forms out of papier-macirccheacutethat he then splattered with paint

27 Blakersquos collage space follows from Miesrsquos The production of collages as in situmodels for Miesrsquos buildings had begun in the twenties with his work for the journal Gin association with Dadaists such as Hans Richter Neil Levine notes this creation ofa collage space in Mies particularly in the Pavilion and the Museum for a Small Cityin relation to his use of reection to layer one surface on top of another Neil LevineldquolsquoThe Signicance of Factsrsquo Miesrsquo Collages Up Close and Personalrdquo Assemblage 37(December 1998) 71ndash101

28 Blake designed his museum just as Philip Johnson was building his Glass Housewhere they both spent considerable time while planning exhibitions for the Museumof Modern Art Johnsonrsquos inuence is also evident in Blakersquos design Blake No Placelike Utopia 149ndash155

29 Arthur Drexler ldquoUnframed Space A Museum for Jackson Pollackrsquos [sic] PaintingsrdquoInteriors and Industrial Design 109 no 6 (January 1950) 90ndash91 The article was partof a special issue whose theme was ldquoInteriors to Comerdquo a recurring topic that wasmeant ldquoto show the direction in which some of our best designers are goingrdquo The termunframed space was used several times in reference to Pollockrsquos work as the title oftwo articles Drexlerrsquos and one published slightly later by Berton Rouecheacute ThoughRouecheacute in an interview in To a Violent Grave says that Lee Krasner used the phraserst Charles Pollock says that Blake was the origin of the term The fact that Drexlerrsquosarticle was written and published earlier seems to conrm this See Berton RouecheacuteldquoUnframed Spacerdquo in Jackson Pollock Interviews 18ndash19 and Jeffrey Potter To aViolent Grave (New York Pushcart Press 1985) 126

30 Drexler 9031 Blake No Place like Utopia 113ndash11432 Blake completed construction on his ldquoPinwheel Houserdquo in 1952 It is a small

beach house that he designed for himself and his family in South Hampton on NewYorkrsquos Long Island Situated on the beach the house is square in plan and its fourexterior walls slide horizontally outward each in a successive clockwise directionrevealing glass walls When the exterior walls are fully extended and the house isviewed from above it forms a shape like a pinwheel Opening the exterior wallsreveals an ever-changing view of the landscape outside turning the ocean and the

104 Grey Room 13

dunes into the picturesque framing them so that they entirely ll the space of the walland put its surface in motion Blake had discussed with Pollock the possibility of hispainting the sliding walls so that his paintings would be superimposed over the land-scape Pollock considered it but Blake couldnrsquot come up with the commission moneythat Pollock asked for They never finalized their plans and it was never clear howthe panels were to be painted Blake suggested that they might be made of glass so hebought the sheet of glass that Pollock used to paint Number 29 1950 (1950) the paintingthat Hans Namuth lmed from underneath for his documentary on Pollock His col-laboration with Blake did lead to one commission a mural-size canvas done for ahouse designed by Marcel Breuer Untitled (Mural) (1950) Shortly after his collabo-ration with Blake Pollock began another unrealized architectural project this onewith Alfonso Ossorio and Tony Smith for a church designed by Smith with murals byPollock For more on all of this see Blake No Place like Utopia 114ndash118 Naifeh andSmith 649 and Lum ldquoPollockrsquos Promiserdquo 68 85ndash88

33 Lum ldquoPollockrsquos Promiserdquo 67ndash6834 A few pages down from Drexlerrsquos article on the Pollock Museum in Interiors

and Industrial Design was another architectural response to the same problem OlgaGueftrsquos article ldquoThe Museumrsquos Oasisrdquo describes another museum this one by Gyorgyand Juliet Kepes ldquoThe Kepesesrdquo it begins ldquoare not exactly opposed to museumsrdquo how-ever it would seem that they were opposed to museums containing works of artReplacing the art objects entirely the Kepeses substituted shells driftwood plantsand animals Instead of a natural history museum they proposed a modern-dayWunderkammerwhere natural forms take the place of art as objects for contemplationldquoThe proposed galleryrdquo they declared ldquowould bridge the gap between the art museumwhich is concerned with man-made beauty and the natural history museum whichis preoccupied with nature but not particularly with naturersquos beautyrdquo Gyorgy KepesrsquosThe New Landscape exhibition at MIT a year later in 1951 (the same years as theIndependent Grouprsquos similar exhibition Growth and Form in London) and the pub-lication that followed The New Landscape in Art and Sciencewould ultimately realizethis project with blown-up photographs of natural forms (cells shells and electronmicrographs) in place of actual objects

The Kepeses seem to have taken the next logical step beyond Blake proposing aneven more radical rethinking of the wall-size work of art Eliminating the need for theartist altogether they found abstract forms in nature and turned their reproductionsinto what would elsewhere have been works of art By turning the art object into scientic vision The Kepeses proposed its total instrumentation Autonomous abstractpainting was transformed into its instrumental other a mechanically reproduced science of vision Rather than turn art into interior design The Kepesesrsquo replacementof abstract painting recast the status of scientic technology into that of high art SeeOlga Gueft ldquoThe Museumrsquos Oasisrdquo Interiors and Industrial Design 109 no 6 (January1950) 100ndash103 and Gyorgy Kepes The New Landscape in Art and Science (ChicagoPaul Theobald and Co 1956)

35 Kaprow stated that it was ldquoIn 1949 [that] I saw an exhibition of [Pollockrsquos] workfor the rst timerdquo ldquoInterviewrdquo in Allan Kaprow (Pasadena Pasadena Art Museum1967) 7

36 See Kaprow ldquoThe Legacy of Jackson Pollockrdquo Art News 25 and Kaprow ldquoTheLegacy of Jackson Pollockrdquo Essays on the Blurring 3

37 Joan Marter ldquoThe Forgotten Legacy Happenings Pop Art and Fluxus at RutgersUniversityrdquo in Off Limits Rutgers University and the Avant-Garde 1957ndash1963 ed Joan

Kaizen | Framed Space Allan Kaprow and the Spread of Painting 105

Marter (Newark The Newark Museum 1999) 438 Marter 13239 Quoted in John Cage Silence (Middletown Wesleyan University Press 1961) 10540 Branden Joseph has developed the link between Cage and Rauschenberg in several

recent essays See Branden W Joseph ldquoJohn Cage and the Architecture of SilencerdquoOctober 81 (Summer 1997) 81ndash104 and Branden Joseph ldquoWhite on Whiterdquo CriticalInquiry 27 no 1 (Summer 2001) 90ndash121

41 For Cage on Rauschenberg see Cage Silence98ndash108 For his description ofTheater Piece No 1 see ldquoInterview with John Cagerdquo in Happenings and Other Actsed Mariellen R Sandford (New York Routledge 1995) 53 Cage subsequently referredto Theater Piece No 1 as ldquothe rst happeningrdquo See John Cage ldquoAn AutobiographicalStatementrdquo Southwest Review 76 no 1 (Winter 1991) 65

42 The score itself has had various incarnations It wasnrsquot published until 1960and in this version includes a note wherein Cage describes the rst performance byTudor For more on 4rsquo33 and its various scores see Liz Kotz ldquoWords on Paper NotNecessarily Meant to Be Read as Art Postwar Media Poetics from Cage to Warholrdquo(PhD diss Columbia University 2002) 83ndash115 Kotz follows a different lineage outof Cage and into performance and happenings than the one traced in this essay

43 Marter 13244 Walter Hopps in the first survey catalog of Rauschenbergrsquos early work does

not name the black paintings as a group as he does the White Paintings He calls themeach Untitled followed by a description in brackets Hopps notes of the largest ofthese works that ldquoThese paintings with a greater vastness and ambiguity of scale thanother Rauschenberg works relate to spatial qualities of Jackson Pollockrdquo HoppsRobert Rauschenberg The Early 1950s (Houston Houston Fine Art Press 1991) 67This convention was also followed in Rauschenbergrsquos 1997 Guggenheim retrospectivecatalog and is followed in this essay Robert Rauschenberg A Retrospective ed WalterHopps and Susan Davidson (New York Solomon R Guggenheim Museum 1997)

45 The piece is called Untitled [two black panels] (1953) Hopps Robert Rauschenberg99

46 Helen Molesworth notes the importance of Rauschenbergrsquos newspaper groundin the black paintings and develops this problem in relation to the abject body as it isfurther pursued in his work throughout the 1950s Helen Molesworth ldquoBefore BedrdquoOctober 63 (Winter 1993) 68ndash82

47 Asked about this work Rauschenberg said ldquoI called them combines I had tocoin that word because I got so bored with arguments I was interested in people seeingmy work When someone would come up and I really wanted to know what they thoughtof it or wanted to sense the exposure there was always this screen that they could getbehind which was if I said lsquoIt is paintingrsquo they would say lsquoThatrsquos not painting Thatrsquossculpturersquo And they thought this was very interestingrdquo Jeanne Siegel ArtwordsDiscourse on the 60s and 70s (New York DaCapo 1985) 153

48 Allan Kaprow ldquoa Statementrdquo in Happenings An Illustrated Anthology edMichael Kirby (New York EP Dutton and Co 1965) 44ndash45

49 Benjamin Buchloh notes the importance of play in the 1950s and its link toconsumer culture During the 1950s he writes ldquoa theory of games would remerge asa cultural project at the very moment of an ever-increasing instrumentalization oflibidinal desire through consumer culturerdquo Benjamin HD Buchloh ldquoRobert WattsInanimate ObjectsmdashInanimate Subjectsrdquo in Buchloh and Rodenbeck Experiments inthe Everyday 25 n 4

104 Grey Room 13

dunes into the picturesque framing them so that they entirely ll the space of the walland put its surface in motion Blake had discussed with Pollock the possibility of hispainting the sliding walls so that his paintings would be superimposed over the land-scape Pollock considered it but Blake couldnrsquot come up with the commission moneythat Pollock asked for They never finalized their plans and it was never clear howthe panels were to be painted Blake suggested that they might be made of glass so hebought the sheet of glass that Pollock used to paint Number 29 1950 (1950) the paintingthat Hans Namuth lmed from underneath for his documentary on Pollock His col-laboration with Blake did lead to one commission a mural-size canvas done for ahouse designed by Marcel Breuer Untitled (Mural) (1950) Shortly after his collabo-ration with Blake Pollock began another unrealized architectural project this onewith Alfonso Ossorio and Tony Smith for a church designed by Smith with murals byPollock For more on all of this see Blake No Place like Utopia 114ndash118 Naifeh andSmith 649 and Lum ldquoPollockrsquos Promiserdquo 68 85ndash88

33 Lum ldquoPollockrsquos Promiserdquo 67ndash6834 A few pages down from Drexlerrsquos article on the Pollock Museum in Interiors

and Industrial Design was another architectural response to the same problem OlgaGueftrsquos article ldquoThe Museumrsquos Oasisrdquo describes another museum this one by Gyorgyand Juliet Kepes ldquoThe Kepesesrdquo it begins ldquoare not exactly opposed to museumsrdquo how-ever it would seem that they were opposed to museums containing works of artReplacing the art objects entirely the Kepeses substituted shells driftwood plantsand animals Instead of a natural history museum they proposed a modern-dayWunderkammerwhere natural forms take the place of art as objects for contemplationldquoThe proposed galleryrdquo they declared ldquowould bridge the gap between the art museumwhich is concerned with man-made beauty and the natural history museum whichis preoccupied with nature but not particularly with naturersquos beautyrdquo Gyorgy KepesrsquosThe New Landscape exhibition at MIT a year later in 1951 (the same years as theIndependent Grouprsquos similar exhibition Growth and Form in London) and the pub-lication that followed The New Landscape in Art and Sciencewould ultimately realizethis project with blown-up photographs of natural forms (cells shells and electronmicrographs) in place of actual objects

The Kepeses seem to have taken the next logical step beyond Blake proposing aneven more radical rethinking of the wall-size work of art Eliminating the need for theartist altogether they found abstract forms in nature and turned their reproductionsinto what would elsewhere have been works of art By turning the art object into scientic vision The Kepeses proposed its total instrumentation Autonomous abstractpainting was transformed into its instrumental other a mechanically reproduced science of vision Rather than turn art into interior design The Kepesesrsquo replacementof abstract painting recast the status of scientic technology into that of high art SeeOlga Gueft ldquoThe Museumrsquos Oasisrdquo Interiors and Industrial Design 109 no 6 (January1950) 100ndash103 and Gyorgy Kepes The New Landscape in Art and Science (ChicagoPaul Theobald and Co 1956)

35 Kaprow stated that it was ldquoIn 1949 [that] I saw an exhibition of [Pollockrsquos] workfor the rst timerdquo ldquoInterviewrdquo in Allan Kaprow (Pasadena Pasadena Art Museum1967) 7

36 See Kaprow ldquoThe Legacy of Jackson Pollockrdquo Art News 25 and Kaprow ldquoTheLegacy of Jackson Pollockrdquo Essays on the Blurring 3

37 Joan Marter ldquoThe Forgotten Legacy Happenings Pop Art and Fluxus at RutgersUniversityrdquo in Off Limits Rutgers University and the Avant-Garde 1957ndash1963 ed Joan

Kaizen | Framed Space Allan Kaprow and the Spread of Painting 105

Marter (Newark The Newark Museum 1999) 438 Marter 13239 Quoted in John Cage Silence (Middletown Wesleyan University Press 1961) 10540 Branden Joseph has developed the link between Cage and Rauschenberg in several

recent essays See Branden W Joseph ldquoJohn Cage and the Architecture of SilencerdquoOctober 81 (Summer 1997) 81ndash104 and Branden Joseph ldquoWhite on Whiterdquo CriticalInquiry 27 no 1 (Summer 2001) 90ndash121

41 For Cage on Rauschenberg see Cage Silence98ndash108 For his description ofTheater Piece No 1 see ldquoInterview with John Cagerdquo in Happenings and Other Actsed Mariellen R Sandford (New York Routledge 1995) 53 Cage subsequently referredto Theater Piece No 1 as ldquothe rst happeningrdquo See John Cage ldquoAn AutobiographicalStatementrdquo Southwest Review 76 no 1 (Winter 1991) 65

42 The score itself has had various incarnations It wasnrsquot published until 1960and in this version includes a note wherein Cage describes the rst performance byTudor For more on 4rsquo33 and its various scores see Liz Kotz ldquoWords on Paper NotNecessarily Meant to Be Read as Art Postwar Media Poetics from Cage to Warholrdquo(PhD diss Columbia University 2002) 83ndash115 Kotz follows a different lineage outof Cage and into performance and happenings than the one traced in this essay

43 Marter 13244 Walter Hopps in the first survey catalog of Rauschenbergrsquos early work does

not name the black paintings as a group as he does the White Paintings He calls themeach Untitled followed by a description in brackets Hopps notes of the largest ofthese works that ldquoThese paintings with a greater vastness and ambiguity of scale thanother Rauschenberg works relate to spatial qualities of Jackson Pollockrdquo HoppsRobert Rauschenberg The Early 1950s (Houston Houston Fine Art Press 1991) 67This convention was also followed in Rauschenbergrsquos 1997 Guggenheim retrospectivecatalog and is followed in this essay Robert Rauschenberg A Retrospective ed WalterHopps and Susan Davidson (New York Solomon R Guggenheim Museum 1997)

45 The piece is called Untitled [two black panels] (1953) Hopps Robert Rauschenberg99

46 Helen Molesworth notes the importance of Rauschenbergrsquos newspaper groundin the black paintings and develops this problem in relation to the abject body as it isfurther pursued in his work throughout the 1950s Helen Molesworth ldquoBefore BedrdquoOctober 63 (Winter 1993) 68ndash82

47 Asked about this work Rauschenberg said ldquoI called them combines I had tocoin that word because I got so bored with arguments I was interested in people seeingmy work When someone would come up and I really wanted to know what they thoughtof it or wanted to sense the exposure there was always this screen that they could getbehind which was if I said lsquoIt is paintingrsquo they would say lsquoThatrsquos not painting Thatrsquossculpturersquo And they thought this was very interestingrdquo Jeanne Siegel ArtwordsDiscourse on the 60s and 70s (New York DaCapo 1985) 153

48 Allan Kaprow ldquoa Statementrdquo in Happenings An Illustrated Anthology edMichael Kirby (New York EP Dutton and Co 1965) 44ndash45

49 Benjamin Buchloh notes the importance of play in the 1950s and its link toconsumer culture During the 1950s he writes ldquoa theory of games would remerge asa cultural project at the very moment of an ever-increasing instrumentalization oflibidinal desire through consumer culturerdquo Benjamin HD Buchloh ldquoRobert WattsInanimate ObjectsmdashInanimate Subjectsrdquo in Buchloh and Rodenbeck Experiments inthe Everyday 25 n 4

Kaizen | Framed Space Allan Kaprow and the Spread of Painting 105

Marter (Newark The Newark Museum 1999) 438 Marter 13239 Quoted in John Cage Silence (Middletown Wesleyan University Press 1961) 10540 Branden Joseph has developed the link between Cage and Rauschenberg in several

recent essays See Branden W Joseph ldquoJohn Cage and the Architecture of SilencerdquoOctober 81 (Summer 1997) 81ndash104 and Branden Joseph ldquoWhite on Whiterdquo CriticalInquiry 27 no 1 (Summer 2001) 90ndash121

41 For Cage on Rauschenberg see Cage Silence98ndash108 For his description ofTheater Piece No 1 see ldquoInterview with John Cagerdquo in Happenings and Other Actsed Mariellen R Sandford (New York Routledge 1995) 53 Cage subsequently referredto Theater Piece No 1 as ldquothe rst happeningrdquo See John Cage ldquoAn AutobiographicalStatementrdquo Southwest Review 76 no 1 (Winter 1991) 65

42 The score itself has had various incarnations It wasnrsquot published until 1960and in this version includes a note wherein Cage describes the rst performance byTudor For more on 4rsquo33 and its various scores see Liz Kotz ldquoWords on Paper NotNecessarily Meant to Be Read as Art Postwar Media Poetics from Cage to Warholrdquo(PhD diss Columbia University 2002) 83ndash115 Kotz follows a different lineage outof Cage and into performance and happenings than the one traced in this essay

43 Marter 13244 Walter Hopps in the first survey catalog of Rauschenbergrsquos early work does

not name the black paintings as a group as he does the White Paintings He calls themeach Untitled followed by a description in brackets Hopps notes of the largest ofthese works that ldquoThese paintings with a greater vastness and ambiguity of scale thanother Rauschenberg works relate to spatial qualities of Jackson Pollockrdquo HoppsRobert Rauschenberg The Early 1950s (Houston Houston Fine Art Press 1991) 67This convention was also followed in Rauschenbergrsquos 1997 Guggenheim retrospectivecatalog and is followed in this essay Robert Rauschenberg A Retrospective ed WalterHopps and Susan Davidson (New York Solomon R Guggenheim Museum 1997)

45 The piece is called Untitled [two black panels] (1953) Hopps Robert Rauschenberg99

46 Helen Molesworth notes the importance of Rauschenbergrsquos newspaper groundin the black paintings and develops this problem in relation to the abject body as it isfurther pursued in his work throughout the 1950s Helen Molesworth ldquoBefore BedrdquoOctober 63 (Winter 1993) 68ndash82

47 Asked about this work Rauschenberg said ldquoI called them combines I had tocoin that word because I got so bored with arguments I was interested in people seeingmy work When someone would come up and I really wanted to know what they thoughtof it or wanted to sense the exposure there was always this screen that they could getbehind which was if I said lsquoIt is paintingrsquo they would say lsquoThatrsquos not painting Thatrsquossculpturersquo And they thought this was very interestingrdquo Jeanne Siegel ArtwordsDiscourse on the 60s and 70s (New York DaCapo 1985) 153

48 Allan Kaprow ldquoa Statementrdquo in Happenings An Illustrated Anthology edMichael Kirby (New York EP Dutton and Co 1965) 44ndash45

49 Benjamin Buchloh notes the importance of play in the 1950s and its link toconsumer culture During the 1950s he writes ldquoa theory of games would remerge asa cultural project at the very moment of an ever-increasing instrumentalization oflibidinal desire through consumer culturerdquo Benjamin HD Buchloh ldquoRobert WattsInanimate ObjectsmdashInanimate Subjectsrdquo in Buchloh and Rodenbeck Experiments inthe Everyday 25 n 4

106 Grey Room 13

50 Susan Hapgood Neo-Dada Redening Art 1958ndash1960 (New York AmericanFederation of the Arts 1994) 116

51 Marter 13252 On Kaprow and his study with Cage see Joseph Jacobs ldquoCrashing New York agrave

la John Cagerdquo in Off Limits 66ndash69 Kaprow himself says that change is more difcultand more risky than chance as a method downplaying Cagersquos inuence while simul-taneously acknowledging it Kaprow Assemblage Environments Happenings 174For an extended discussion of the relation of ldquochancerdquo and ldquochangerdquo in Kaprow andCage (which reaches different conclusions than those presented here) see BrandenW Joseph ldquoExperimental Art John Cage Robert Rauschenberg and the Neo-Avant-Garderdquo (PhD diss Harvard University 1999) esp 271ndash329

53 The work of artists such as Rauschenberg Kaprow and Jasper Johns in theUnited States and Lucio Fontana Piero Manzoni and Richard Hamilton abroad gureinto a related history of the readymade and the everyday object after World War II Seethe discussions in Peter Buumlrger Theory of the Avant-Garde (Minneapolis Universityof Minnesota 1984) Benjamin HD Buchloh ldquoReady Made Objet Trouveacute Ideacutee Reccediluerdquoin Dissent The Issue of Modern Art in Boston (Boston Institute of Contemporary Art1985) Thierry de Duve Kant after Duchamp (Cambridge MIT Press 1996) WilliamKaizen ldquoRichard Hamiltonrsquos Tabular Imagerdquo October 94 (Fall 2000) 113ndash128 AnthonyWhite ldquoLucio Fontana Between Utopia and Kitschrdquo Grey Room 05 (Fall 2001) 54ndash77and Jaleh Mansoor ldquoPiero Manzoni lsquoWe Want to Organicize Disintegrationrsquordquo October 95(Winter 2001) 29ndash54

54 Robert Haywood notes that Kaprow uses the word value in an attempt to turnthe commodity against itself Robert Haywood ldquoRevolution of the Ordinary Allan Kaprowand the Invention of Happeningsrdquo (PhD diss University of Michigan 1993) 164

55 Kaprow Assemblage Environments Happenings 16956 Kaprow Assemblage Environments Happenings 16857 Lawrence Alloway ldquoJunk Culturerdquo Architectural Design 31 (March 1961) 122

A shorter version of this essay appears in the catalog for New FormsmdashNew Media Iwith Kaprowrsquos rst version of his ldquoAssemblage Environments and Happeningsrdquo essaySee n 1 above

58 Kaprow ldquoa Statementrdquo 45ndash4659 Kaprow ldquoNotes on the Creation of a Total Artrdquo in Essays on the Blurring 1160 Descriptions of the environment can be found in ldquoAllan Kaprow and Robert

Watts Interviewed by Sidney Simonrdquo 74 and Haywood 183ndash18961 Kaprow Assemblage Environments Happenings 16062 Kaprow Assemblage Environments Happenings 165ndash16663 Kaprow ldquoHappenings in the New York Scenerdquo in Essays on the Blurring 1864 Kaprow ldquoa Statementrdquo 4665 For further description of these events see Marter 8ndash10 and ldquoAllan Kaprow and

Robert Watts Interviewed by Sidney Simonrdquo 69ndash73 Robert Frank also took photos ofPastorale Robert Frank New York to Nova Scotia (Houston Museum of Fine Arts 1986)

66 The comments on ldquoplastic panelsrdquo and Kaprow ldquopainting himself out are inldquoAllan Kaprow and Robert Watts Interviewed by Sidney Simonrdquo 71

67 Ofcial in that is was the rst performance actually called a happening and notdescribed retrospectively as such Descriptions of 18 Happenings and the script arein Kirby 53ndash83

68 Kaprow ldquoa Statementrdquo 4669 The painters changed from performance to performance but they were generally

Kaizen | Framed Space Allan Kaprow and the Spread of Painting 107

artists including Alfred Leslie Red Grooms Lester Johnson and most famously thepair of Rauschenberg and Johns Kaprow ldquo18 Happenings in 6 Partsrdquo Happenings 81

70 Photographs of the Martha Jackson Gallery show it to be the quintessentialldquowhite cuberdquo gallery Brian OlsquoDoherty says it is just this white-cube gallery with itssupposed neutrality that asserts its own presence all the more strongly Photos of theMartha Jackson Gallery can be seen in the catalog for New FormsmdashNew Media IOlsquoDoherty Inside the White Cube esp 13ndash34

71 Kaprow ldquoThe Legacy of Jackson Pollockrdquo Essays on the Blurring of Art andLife 7

72 Kaprow Assemblage Environments and Happenings 154