The first happenings ran in abandoned lofts and gyms near artist studios.

Evidence

The form arrived in New York in early October when painter Allan Kaprow, a thirty-two-year-old Rutgers art instructor and co-founder of Hansa Gallery, staged 18 Happenings in 6 Parts at the new Reuben Gallery, a loft on Fourth Avenue, between Ninth and Tenth Streets, a few blocks down from the studio where Pull My Daisy was shot. Two months later, Grooms presented his play The Burning Building in an abandoned boxing gym on the third floor of a building one block from the approach to the Williamsburg Bridge. “It was a crummy place,” Grooms recalled. He dubbed it the Delancey Street Museum. — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 60

Categorization

• XREF: Core to the reader’s material-conditions argument: cheap rent and abandoned spaces minutes apart made the density of invention possible.