Allan Kaprow - Art as Life

by Alex Potts; Glenn Phillips; Paul Schimmel; Eva Meyer-Hermann; Stephanie Rosenthal

• ISBN13: 9780892368907
• ISBN10: 089236890X
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2008-04-21
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Summary

A self-described "un-artist," Allan Kaprow championed an artistic practice that moved art out of the museum and into the everyday. His works insistently blurred the boundaries between art and life, requiring active participation rather than passive spectatorship, interactive collaboration rather than solitary creation. This richly illustrated volume documents five decades of Kaprow's life and work. Its six essays range across his shifts from painter to environmental artist to the inventor of the Happening and the Activity, while its extensive chronology features scores, letters, posters, photographs, and clippings, most drawn from the Allan Kaprow Papers held by the Research Library at the Getty Research Institute. Though the forms Kaprow largely invented have lost their shock value and were meant in most cases to be ephemeral, in fact they live on, captured in scores and other surviving documentation, still stretching the boundaries of art in the modern world. Allan Kaprow-Art as Life is being published to coincide with a retrospective of the artist's work at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, on view from March 23 through June 30, 2008.

Author Biography

Eva Meyer-Hermann is an independent curator based in Cologne, Germany.
Andrew Perchuk is an Assistant Director in the Department of Contemporary Programming at the Getty Research Institute.
Stephanie Rosenthal is a Curator at the Haus der Kunst, Munich.

Table of Contents

Introduction	p. 2
Early Works and Writings
"Only memory can carry it into the future": Kaprow's Development from the Action-Collages to the Happenings	p. 8
Writing the Happening: The Aesthetics of Nonart	p. 20
From the Archive
Time Pieces	p. 34
Intimate: The Allan Kaprow Papers	p. 42
The Making of a Retrospective
Agency for Action	p. 56
Museum as Mediation	p. 72
Chronology	p. 92
Illustration Credits	p. 344
List of Works	p. 348
Index	p. 350
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