Many of you may ask, what is this and why in the hell is it considered art? This is a “Happening” and it is a artistic phenomenon that occurred in the Pollockian tradition. Many would contend that this is not art. However, I would contend that it is and should certainly be considered art.
In my own understanding of the word, art is both evolutionary and revolutionary, in the sense that it can build off of other movements or it can completely destroy preconceived notions of those same movements, or even art itself. Take, for example, Jackson Pollock, who can be categorized in the “school” of Abstract Expressionism, which was born out of the school of Cubism, the Picasso generation. Yet, grouped within Abstract Expressionism are artists, like Arshile Gorky or Willem de Kooning, who I would classify pseudo-Abstract-Cubo Expressionists (my own artistic flare added), or simply, as Greenberg would say, late Cubists (because they still relied too much on the emphasis of color, shapes, and even forms rather than complete abstraction). These artists are evolutionary. Jackson Pollock is revolutionary because he took the concept of abstraction one step further until nothing remained but the sheer essence of painting. And in these revolutionary works, he created worlds, not just paintings. Things a viewer could immerse themselves in, get lost in. This figurative world, however, was still trapped, no matter how hard Pollock tried, within the confines of the canvas, inevitably hung on the wall. But what if it wasn’t? What if art like these creative worlds of Pollock exited the bourgeoisie stigma of the galleries and was exposed to the life beyond? Enter, Happenings. They revolutionized the revolution of Pollock by giving the viewership a literal world to enter, not in some privileged art gallery, but in abandoned buildings and the streets, the places of the common people. This world is quite different because it is wholly tangible, though fleeting it may be. It is not a painting, clearly:
Photography is its commemorative medium. And it is not literature, it is without written langue, at least concrete written language. Nor is it a play, as most people think. Plays have a strict dichotomy between the audience and the actor, and, for the most part, the audience has no part in the script, save for a gasp or a response of laughter, etc. So, the play is its own world, but not one that you can physical enter, for if random people walked through a production of Hamlet it would certainly detract from the dialogue/scenery that is integral to understanding the scripted world (meaning there is no chance). But when, as in a Happening, the world is unscripted and devoid of meaning, there is no rift between audience and artist. There is only existence. Which is what Happenings boil down to: the existentialism of art and its prevalence in life. And to allude to my earlier point, its sets the evolutionary basis for the performative, art that is a performance attached with sociopolitical commentary (Fluxus among others), in the same way that the classical art/philosophy of the Greeks/Romans inspired a “neoclassical” revival during the Renaissance. The Happenings created a new style, and a new medium for the deliverance of art to an audience. Pollock might have killed painting, but his painting (his “ejaculation”) bore a new crop of artists, ones who made his worlds of nothingness and purity of the artistic mind tangible.