Currently reading: Allan Kaprow – Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life (ed. Jeff Kelley), 1993, University of California Press (expanded edition, 2003).
www.arts.rpi.edu/~century/MMC11/Kaprow-essays.pdf
The 2003 expanded edition preface includes a Participant Instruction (p.xxvii):
Building a tower of under Coca-Cola cans
Making a lot of noise
Tearing it down
The creation-destruction-creation cycle previously denoted is recurrent. What is also striking is this building of towers, knocking it down, and repeating, is something toddlers do and a milestone marker for early years development. What can be inferred from this ability to stack one thing on top of another is that children are learning that events follow one another or objects fit together in a particular way (Hetty van de Rijt and Frans Plooij – Wonder Weeks, 1992/2010, Kiddy World Promotions). It’s a major developmental leap for a ~12 month old and classed as an independent programme (self-initiated and also conducted independently). I know this because this is what Toby is doing at the moment, repeatedly.
Kaprow also talks about “un-arting” as a way of discarding art’s characteristics. (p.xxix) “But I took a cue from stories of monastic practices in which dissatisfied persons, seeking the proverbial meaning of life, give up the real world and its temptations for a presumed spiritual, and better one. Could this be done in art without physically going into a monk’s cell for life? I thought it could and called it “un-arting.” Essentially, this was accompanied by taking the art out of art, which in practical terms meant discarding art’s characteristics.”
Kaprow is also critical of art in art contexts. “That lint under beds and the debris of industrial dumps are more engaging than the recent rash of exhibitions of scattered waste matter.” (p.97)
He highlights the predicament of art’s un-arting by noting what has previously been done in The Education of the Un-Artist Part I (1971):
“When Steve Reich suspends a number of microphones above corresponding loudspeakers, sets them swinging like pendulums, and amplifies their sound pickup so that feedback noise if produced – that’s art. When Andy Warhol publishes the unedited transcript of twenty-four hours of taped conversation – that’s art. When Walter De Maria fills a room full of dirt – that’s art. We know they are art because a concert announcement, a title on a book jacket, and an art gallery say so.” (p.100)
Therefore, it could be deduced that un-arting requires a certain amount of novelty.
The is a further reference to garbage in Kaprow’s listed modes of art in Nontheatrical Performances (p.175). He cites examples for each mode, but I’ve only listed the garbage reference one here:
“An artist can:
(1) Work within recognizable art modes and present work in recognizable art contexts.
(2) Work in unrecognizable, i.e. nonart, modes but present the work in recognizable art contexts
(3) Work in recognizable art modes but present the work in nonart contexts.
(4) Work in nonart modes but present the work as art in nonart contexts eg garbage collecting, etc (with proviso that the art world knows about it).
(5) Work in nonart modes and nonart contexts but cease to call the work art, retaining instead the private consciousness that sometime it may be art, too.”
The categorisation modes are not so dissimilar to some of the comparative modes I made in my sorting of the artworks into newspaper and thesis piles. It would be interesting to go back and specifically use Kaprow’s method of categorisation against each work; applying his system to the works in the thesis pile in particular as these are the ones I’m now focussing on.
