Currently Reading: Allan Kaprow: Art As Life, 1980, Getty Research Institute, LA.
Part 2/2
On Kaprow’s use of rubbish; “Reading through the earliest scores, created before he turned to a Zen-like conceptual simplicity in the later 1960s, one finds a focus on commonplace, junky materials and banal, ordinary actions coexisting with the epic pretensions and blatant melodrama. […] “A peculiar concatenation of the everyday with excess and epic pretension.”
“The Happening lives on in Kaprow’s writings as a phenomenom located in the gap between […] the scenario or projection of what the happening might be, and the recollection of, or commentary on what it was.” (Whereas a conventional artwork is an object that fills that gap). (p.27) This “objectlessness” is closer to works using rubbish objects than may first seem. The rubbish object, although can often be elevated to art object status, can also be the “stand-in”, prop or evidence in a photograph of an action or process aligned with a Happening. The rubbish object is not “where the art resides” as my BA tutor Keith Brown would have put it, but it merely a signifier pertaining the event. Perhaps this event is a “rubbishing”, to coin a Kaprow inspired phrase, as in the render rubbish.
In the chronology one work stands out as embodying this creation-decay/destruction-creation cycle Potts refers to on p.23:
Score for Sawdust, 7/10/70, Cologne
Sawdust (a décollage for Vostell)
large wooden beams
placed separately somewhere
reducing beams to sawdust
exchanging sawdust of beam
at each place
mixing sawdust with glue
putting sawdust into molds
to form new beams
getting more from less.
