Early performance work deliberately blurred the boundary between art and real life

Evidence

The future science fiction writer and essayist Samuel Delany, who attended the piece as a teenager, remembered being confused by the lengthy pauses: “After a while, a leotarded young woman with a big smile came in and said, ‘That’s it.’ For a moment, we were unsure if that was part of the work or the signal that it was over. But then Kaprow walked by the door and said, ‘Okay, it’s over now.’” Judging from the poster, Delany “assumed that the work, regardless of its content, would be rich, Dionysian, and colorful.” Instead, it was “spare, difficult, minimal, constituted largely by absence, isolation, even distraction.” — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 69

Categorization

• DEFINE: Shows how the Happenings form was constituted by absence and ambiguity rather than spectacle — a defining feature of the genre.
• XREF: connects to: Cubist collage made fragments of reality enter art as reality itself. — Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism: A Marxist…, 238; Contemporary art has escaped the frame of art history — Perry Anderson, The Origins of Postmodernity, 249; Theater and real life are structurally indistinguishable rather than opposed — Donna Landry and Gerald MacLean, The Spivak Reader: Selected Works of…, 725