{"id":8764,"date":"2014-02-18T16:31:00","date_gmt":"2014-02-18T15:31:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.uclm.es\/archivoartea\/?p=8764"},"modified":"2026-03-30T16:26:19","modified_gmt":"2026-03-30T14:26:19","slug":"space-and-spectatorship-in-happenings","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.uclm.es\/archivoartea\/2014\/02\/18\/space-and-spectatorship-in-happenings\/","title":{"rendered":"Space and Spectatorship in Happenings"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

support, value, architecture<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Fernando Quesada<\/a><\/h4>\n\n\n\n
2014<\/h5>\n\n\n\n
Referencia bibliogr\u00e1fica<\/h5>\n\n\n\n

QUESADA L\u00d3PEZ, Fernando: \u00abSpace and Spectatorship in Happenings: support, value, architecture\u00bb. En TOWNSEND, Christopher; TROTT, Alexandra; DAVIES, Rhys (eds.): Across the Great Divide: Modernism’s Intermedialities, from Futurism to Fluxus. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, (ISBN: 978-1-443854788) 2014, pp. 102-121.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For the first uptown show staged at Martha Jackson Gallery in New York in 1959, Allan Kaprow wrote a text called\u00a0Paintings, Environments and Happenings<\/em>.[1]\u00a0\u00a0This assessed a series of ideas that Kaprow had been developing for some time and were subsequently explained in his book\u00a0Assemblage, Environments and Happenings<\/em>, published in 1966. There Kaprow openly acknowledged the sculptural value of Le Corbusier\u2019s late work and the organic world of Frank Lloyd Wright, identifying in them the spirit of the times. Furthermore, Kaprow advocated the fusion of architecture and nature, which according to him should become the major working vector of future architecture. Architecture should address its future, abandoning self-reference to find new referents in other disciplines, fully entering into the formal universe of nature as, according to Kaprow, Le Corbusier and Wright had done with masterly effect in their late work. \u2018Hence, when architecture becomes organic to the degree that the other plastic arts have, then probably the blurring of boundaries in those will extend to include it.\u2019[2]<\/p>\n\n\n\n

However, it is not Kaprow\u2019s concrete assessment of architecture\u2019s fading into nature that is the greatest interest for architects today, especially since it has little to do with what subsequently happened to architecture. The real architectural prophecy was implied in his analysis of art history, more specifically of painting. Discussing \u2018the blurring of the boundaries\u2019 Kaprow particularly addresses the removal of the material frame in the construction of space in the visual arts, mostly in his own work, and the substitution of the architectural space by the event-space of art-as-action. So much so that the visual arts of his time ignored the architectural support for building instead -with its own material presence-, the architectural space that supported them and provided spatial self-expression to the artworks (Fig. 1).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Fig. 1- Allan Kaprow:\u00a018 Happenings in 6 Parts<\/em>, The Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (980063) \u00a9 Scott Hyde \/ Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY; \u00a9 Allan Kaprow Estate<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

The dominant architectural style of museums and galleries after World War II \u2013the white cube\u2013 did not seem to meet the needs of the base-space for the visual arts. Artists thus began to camouflage the space provided by institutional architecture, and generated alternative spaces that eliminated the obvious spatial mismatch between architecture and art. This mismatch was caused by an overlapping of skills, one might say, since art created architectural space in open competition with architecture itself. (Albeit not always clearly.) The \u201coverflow\u201d space of American painting inaugurated by Jackson Pollock served as a starting point for Kaprow\u2019s argument as well as providing historical validation of his own work. The second line of historical validation in this evolutionary vision of space in the visual arts relates to the history of modern theatre, and emerges from the work of Michael Kirby.\u00a0[3]\u00a0However, neither interpretation is free of cracks, since Kaprow\u2019s work is hardly pictorial or theatrical\u00a0per se<\/em>, but incorporates parameters of both disciplines equally in what today we would call performative space in so much: \u201crather than only beget performance art, his (Kaprow\u2019s) early work opened up the conjunction of viewing subject, art object and gallery space, turning space into a field of artistic production\u2019.\u00a0[4]<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The split between architectural space and representational space as described by Kaprow was due, in his terms, to the epistemological break that occurred between the painted bison on the primitive cave and the first pictorial representation, i.e. the first painting<\/em> of a bison. In the cave painting, Kaprow argues, the figure floated in its own space, that of the cave itself, which coincides in form and matter with the pictorial surface. The cave is space-canvas, but it is, moreover, architecture. Following this hypothesis, representational space would have made its appearance with the horizon line, which depicts a horizon rather than being the horizon itself. The fact of the unexpected incorporation of horizontality next to the figure of the animal implied the insertion of a representational space into another, real space. This was the first symptom of the autonomy of painting, and its complete split from architecture as an art form:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Painting<\/em>\u00a0is not necessarily\u00a0picture making<\/em>, for the first man to decorate his body and personal implements was\u00a0ipso\u00a0<\/em>facto a\u00a0painter<\/em>. Painting\u00a0came to\u00a0<\/em>mean making pictures, and this special form of painting may be viewed as a pictorial balance established between man and the world which surrounds him. In terms of the familiar object-ground problem, all objects may be interpreted to symbolize the human being and his experience, while all grounds of\u00a0negative space<\/em>\u00a0around objects may stand for his conception of the universe. In some periods, such as the ancient Greek, the image dominates the field and man sees himself controlling the world. In others, like the medieval, the field dominates the image; hence the world constricts the human. And yet in others; such as the late pagan and early Christian, there is a potent ambiguity. This seems to hold true today.\u00a0[5]<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Kaprow argued that there was a complete continuity in the history of painting from the first\u00a0painting<\/em>\u00a0of a bison to Cubism with respect, at least, to the role played by the flat canvas in the base-space of painting. In Cubism, he argued, fragments of reality are incorporated such as pieces of paper glued and collaged as art, which is, as Hal Foster argued,[6]\u00a0a \u201creturn of the real\u201d anticipated in Kaprow\u2019s words:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Which was the real- the paper that, as a substance, was different from the canvas; the cut-out image which began on the paper and merged with the painted image on the canvas; or the print on the paper which told you it was wallpaper or an advertisement (from the outsider,\u00a0realer<\/em>\u00a0world) and thus could not be part of painting?\u00a0[7]<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

This final statement showed that the painting was simply a painted object, not a representation or a reference to other objects in space, which presupposes a significant step in the autonomy of painting and the conferring of pictorial value strictly to pictorial materiality. In referring to the elements introduced to the canvas by Cubism, Kaprow also employed the term \u2018irrational components\u2019. \u2018Once foreign matter was introduced into the picture in the form of paper, it was only a matter of time before everything else foreign to paint and canvas would be allowed to get into the creative act, including real space.\u2019\u00a0[8]<\/p>\n\n\n\n

However Kaprow\u2019s argument did not encompass the entire process of the spatialization of modern painting during the 1950s. In his assessment of Lucio Fontana\u2019s project, referring to the canvases being torn or punctured, Kaprow does not seem to approve of the idea that behind the canvas lies \u2013 somehow hidden but revealed by Fontana\u2019s punctures \u2013 the sublime of the depth of black space as the ontological background of the painting. For Kaprow, the front and back of a canvas are extraordinarily similar, even equal as a substance: that is, they are merely space. By saying so, Kaprow openly destroys representation as a pictorial category. He denies the existence of two spaces, the real architectural and the sublime-pictorial representational, and establishes a single, architectural space, inhabited by the canvas in terms exactly equal to those in which it is inhabited by the viewer. The full acceptance of this principle of a single space is the solution of the dilemma of representation and reality, and the only possible way in which Kaprow may inform art with everyday life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The concept of a pictorial field is no longer an\u00a0a priori<\/em>. It is generated in the event of picture making. There is a close parallel between Kaprow\u2019s thought and the new ideas of space, including the substitution of the idea of abstract space for the idea of lived place that Ignasi Sol\u00e1 Morales sees as characterising a great part of the philosophical culture of the 1950s.\u00a0[9]\u00a0The field is materially generated with pictorial production. The pictorial work somehow becomes a spatial field in its entirety, architecture becoming a prepared canvas. We might understand Kaprow here as developing Harold Rosenberg\u2019s observation: \u2018At a certain moment the canvas began to appear to one American painter after another as an arena in which to act- rather than a space in which to reproduce, redesign, analyse or \u2018express\u2019 an object, actual or imagined.\u2019\u00a0[10]\u00a0Kaprow\u2019s statement \u2018There\u2019s really no inside\u2019,[11]\u00a0thus means that his pictorial procedure is inside-out. There are available only material items and a spatial relationship with the body or with the space of the room where the painter works, which transfers the idea of \u200b\u200bthree-dimensional pictorial field into architectural space. This is not a bounded space, however, since the painter can work outdoors, or in spaces not so clearly delimited. It is then a painting in\/of space.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This establishes a clear difference between a picture and an environment, not only with respect to the role of painting as object<\/em>, but also with respect to the spectator\u2019s role in this new spatial situation. As Brian O\u2019Doherty has claimed, space became the new canvas:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Through the 50s and 60s, we notice the codification of a new theme as it evolves into consciousness: How much space should a work of art have (as the phrase went) to \u201cbreathe?\u201d(\u2026) We enter the era where works of art conceive the wall as a no-man\u2019s land on which to project their concept of the territorial imperative\u2026 All this traffic across the wall made a far from neutral zone. Now a participant in, rather than a passive support for the art, the wall became the locus of contending ideologies.\u00a0[12]<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

What is the difference then between an environment and a happening? \u2018Fundamentally, Environments and Happenings are similar. They are the passive and active sides of a single coin, whose principle is\u00a0extension<\/em>\u2019.\u00a0[13]\u00a0Kaprow emphasises this point with a concrete spatial reference which assumes that the main difference is merely quantitative in spatial terms. However \u2018environments\u2019 are not decorated stage sets waiting for actors, in order to become space, nor empty boxes or blank canvases waiting to be filled with content. Kaprow would thus reverse Peter Brook\u2019s famous dictum, since his argument would suggest there is no such a thing as an \u2018empty space as a bare stage\u2019.\u00a0[14]\u00a0Rather, any spatial form is always already replete with meaning and activity, so much so that empty space must be rethought as an essentially inhabited space.\u00a0[15]\u00a0This new spectatorship was mostly based on how space was considered as possessing value, as part of the artwork and its ideology, not merely as a neutral support.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Kaprow presented\u00a018 Happenings in 6 Parts<\/em>\u00a0at Reuben Gallery in New York in the fall of 1959. \u201cReuben-Kaprow Associates\u201d produced and mailed invitation cards to a number of people. The invitations read: \u2018You will become a part of the happenings; you will simultaneously experience them.\u2019\u00a0[16]\u00a0On the one hand there is an essential idea, which is to increase the responsibility of the viewer in conferring status to the artwork; on the other the idea of \u200b\u200bsimultaneity, which defines a Happening more radically as an artistic form in opposition to other formats. What is essential in a happening is that it evolves in real time, in the presence of spectators, and is composed of many parts seamlessly developed, taking place simultaneously in the same space or different spaces, through which the viewer can move.\u00a018 Happenings in 6 parts<\/em>\u00a0was a spatial project as it was scheduled to follow a careful \u2018event score\u2019, with no trace of improvisation.\u00a0[17]<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Fig. 2- Allan Kaprow:\u00a018 Happenings in 6 Parts<\/em>, notes, 1959. The Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (980063). \u00a9 J. Paul Getty Trust<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Some guests received a basic plastic envelope, each one different, with collaged pieces of paper, photographs, wood, painted and cut-out paper figures. Other guests received a more formal invitation with a large folded sheet so they could read: \u2018There are three rooms for this work, each different in size and feeling\u2026some guests also act.\u2019\u00a0[18]\u00a0The gallery space was subdivided with translucent plastic walls on wooden posts, creating three rooms (Fig. 2). In each room, chairs were arranged according to a pre-determined plan, so that the orientation of the viewer\u2019s body and his\/her eyes were completely under spatial control. Coloured lights generated different atmospheres, reminiscent of a small format theatrical event. There were floor to ceiling mirrors in two of the rooms in order to reflect the totality of space and its events.\u00a0[19]<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Fig. 3- Allan Kaprow:\u00a018 Happenings in 6 Parts<\/em>, Cast and instructions, 1959. The Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (980063). \u00a9 J. Paul Getty Trust<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The playbill (Fig. 3) that was given to each viewer contained instructions regarding the spatial order of the event. \u2018The performance is divided into six parts. Each part contains three happenings which occur at once. The beginning and end of each will be signalled by a bell. At the end of the performance two strokes of the bell will be heard.\u2019\u00a0[20]\u00a0Intervals between some parts lasted two minutes exactly, while two longer intervals of 15 minutes separated parts 2-3 and 4-5. Moreover, \u2018the program admonished the spectator to be sure to follow the individual directions he had been given and to change his seat at the specified times.\u2019\u00a0[21]<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Fig. 4- Allan Kaprow:\u00a018 Happenings in 6 Parts<\/em>, sketch for the Sandwich Man, 1959. The Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (980063). \u00a9 J. Paul Getty Trust<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

At the entrance, and once the spectators were seated, a very messy and boisterous sound announced the beginning. People moved through narrow hallways between rooms in a line, but informally. As a woman held up one arm and pointed to the floor with the other in room one, a set of slides was projected in room three. Upon reaching the fifth part a pictorial event occurred that broke any potential theatrical order whatsoever. A device called the\u00a0Sandwich Man<\/em>\u00a0entered the space (Fig. 4). This artefact \u2013modelled on Soviet propaganda kiosks \u2013 was a vaguely humanoid creature. The\u00a0Sandwich Man\u00a0<\/em>was moved through the three rooms, reflecting the figures of the spectators upon its mechanical mirror body, thus becoming part of a multiple bodily figure. While this creature moved from the second to the third room, two people rose from their seats with brushes and paint tins in hand and moved to a section of the plastic walls, stopping at a canvas sector in the centre. One, on one side of the canvas, painted lines and the other, on the opposite side of the canvas, painted circles. However, since the canvas sector was not primed, the figures applied on either side of the canvas became visible from both sides. Through this action, the painted canvas stopped making sense as an object, and became a delimiter of space. The painting\u2019s limit or spatial frame was no longer the canvas, but the whole gallery as an architectural frame-canvas (Fig. 5). Painting, and subsequently spectatorship, was absorbed or subsumed in the architectural space of the gallery. The gallery as frame thus produced the subject and space simultaneously.\u00a0[22]<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Fig. 5- Allan Kaprow:\u00a018 Happenings in 6 Parts<\/em>, the Sandwich Man, 1959. The Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (980063) \u00a9 Scott Hyde \/ Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY; \u00a9 Allan Kaprow Estate<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

What happened during those ninety minutes was a performative event, in so much that the fact of its happening in real time was inseparable from its own format as a work of art, in the presence of a number of spectators who also moved themselves in the action space. \u2018The emergence of meaning only appears in the materiality of the piece, in its making before the spectator\u2019s eyes, in a temporal interval determined by the duration of the action.\u2019\u00a0[23]\u00a0Any attempt at a semiotic interpretation necessarily fails (Fig. 6).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Fig. 6- Allan Kaprow:\u00a018 Happenings in 6 Parts<\/em>, notes, 1959. The Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (980063). \u00a9 J. Paul Getty Trust<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Kaprow\u2019s piece collapsed a series of limits that typified painting, theatre and architecture. The limit set by the format of a work failed: painting, sculpture, music, poetry and architecture coexisted in a single, spatial medium prepared for that purpose. Relations between each format and the viewer \u2013 the conditions of spectatorship \u2013 changed. Painting requires stillness, a contemplative, static view and visual concentration, while in 18 Happenings<\/em> the viewer could not experience painting with contemplation, but instead attended a pictorial event in a state of vague distraction, since other events might be taking place at the same time in other spaces around them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Theatre historians have persistently maintained that there is an unbridgeable gap between theatre and Happenings. Some theatre critics of the time asserted on the one hand that \u2018early happenings had an anti-theatrical bias, while (on the other) maintaining Michael Fried\u2019s 1967 understanding of happenings as, like minimalism, essentially \u2018theatrical\u2019\u2019,\u00a0[24]\u00a0considering them neither painterly nor sculptural because of time was an essential component of such artworks. Any reflection on this paradox \u2013 maintained for decades \u2013 will conclude that it arose from the assumption by critics that architecture functioned as a merely physical\u00a0frame,<\/em>\u00a0a sort of spatial canvas or neutral support when instead, the architectural space of these works was everything but neutral since, by absorbing painting in space, art\u2019s ideology was similarly absorbed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Here, \u2018architectural space\u2019 was the built codification of a series of behavioural protocols charged with value and located midway between a series of public spaces: the museum, the art gallery, the theatre, and the street. Likewise, the spectator experienced painting in an intermediate role that combined the practices of viewing a sculpture, surrounding the object and moving around it where possible; theatrical spectatorship, which observes actions that are visual, acoustic and dynamic; and party-going, that is, the activity of the normal<\/em> person without a specific artistic role, but still with a series of assigned tasks fixing her spatial position. With this operation the viewer loses its role of the modern canonical spectator (without age, without sex, without body), to return to her personae<\/em> at times.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Indeed, happenings were \u201canti-theatrical\u201d, as participants did not\u00a0act<\/em>\u00a0but simply performed actions because they were assigned a task. In addition, the audience was not an audience, as conventionally imagined, nor was it the typical architecture-user, because this audience was assigned one or more tasks too, thus being treated as a performer. As O\u2019Doherty makes clear, \u2018Happenings mediated a careful stand-off between avant-garde theatre and collage. They conceived the spectator as a kind of collage in that he was spread out over the interior \u2013his attention split by simultaneous events, his senses disorganized and redistributed by firmly transgressed logic.\u2019\u00a0[25]\u00a0This work went beyond being an obvious criticism of authorship and the production-consumption cycle by avoiding the fetishization of painting. The audience was also objectified (or de-subjectified) as a component of the artwork. This was achieved not through the appearance of the audience operating mechanisms of participation, but rather through plain execution. Kaprow disapproved of public participation, considering it as ultimately an instrument of theatrical and institutional illusion. However, a Happening, which was presented as non-art, was also presented as non-daily life, to be staged in the art institution. The word happening, a gerund, while allowing the emergence of what Fried called \u00abpresentness\u00bb, or condition of presence, at once implies certain passivity: \u2018it is happening to me\u2019.\u00a0[26]\u00a0The performativity of the artwork thus occurs through a process of spatialization of the frame in which architecture plays an essential role. Architecture is no longer a frame of frames \u2013 the white cube for paintings or sculptures\u00a0as frames<\/em>\u00a0for representations \u2013 and becomes instead just\u00a0the<\/em>\u00a0frame, the\u00a0only\u00a0<\/em>support of the artwork. However, if architecture is merely available space and matter and does not frame a social representation, likewise painting does not represent objects but\u00a0is<\/em>\u00a0an object; the space-user needs to be redefined as objectified subject, and not as merely another object in space.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The spatialization of art is by no means a new phenomenon that Kaprow introduced. It goes back, in its relationship to modern art, to the relief sculptures by Picasso in 1914, to Tatlin\u2019s corner reliefs in 1915, and was fully integrated in 1924 with Lissitzky\u2019s \u2018Proun\u2019 space in Dresden. In these works, there was a sharp turn in painting, within which, as Benjamin Buchloh observes, pictorial self-reflexivity had suddenly reached \u2013 via the mediation of the relief \u2013 an architectural dimension. In these instances the architectural dimension had pointed toward the dialectical sublation of the intimacy of visual reflexivity into a tactile culture of simultaneous collective reception.\u00a0[27]<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The monochrome painting became an architectural installation prompting the introduction of critical reflection in public institutions such as galleries or museums. Its goal became the production of a new kind of subject, the neo-Kantian modern reflexive-critical spectator. This is the subjectivity that 18 Happenings<\/em> was challenging, for in its semiotic explosion of multiple layers of separately decipherable signs and the complete spatialization of the artwork, meaning could not be located in any particular spot to look at, to concentrate on, or to reflect upon.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Fig. 7- Yves Klein in the exhibition\u00a0Propositions Monochromes,<\/em>\u00a01957. \u00a9 Yves Klein Archives.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Spatialization and performativity were also used in Yves Klein\u2019s work. However, Klein replaced the emphasis on space as support, a typical feature in Kaprow\u2019s projects, with an insistence on space as value, or sign. He thus denied the tradition of critical, collective and reflexive spectatorship by proposing spatialized painting as the representation of something beyond itself, which includes strict economic value and the relationship between art and the institution where a set of power relations are spatially incarnated. In one of his first major exhibitions, \u2018Propositions Monochromes\u2019, at Apollinaire gallery in Milan in 1957, Klein placed blue monochromes with the same dimensions (78 x 56 cm), on trestles spaced 20 cm off the wall (Fig. 7). The paintings were executed by roller, using a special pigment that overflowed the unframed canvas. This, together with the separation from the wall, gave the pictorial surfaces an undeniably objective quality. The artist\u2019s trademark paint, \u2018International Klein Blue\u2019 (IKB) helped to achieve the spill over effect of colour on the entire space. All the paintings were identical and produced in an almost industrial method, but their prices were considerably different. With this show, Klein staged an architecture where perceptive intensity was quantified as pure merchandise. Economically measurable value was assigned to aesthetic perception as a technical resource through the spatialization of his painting. Colour was here a semiotic sign as much as, or more than, pure pictorial matter, depending on individual reception (Fig. 8).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Fig. 8- Invitation by Pierre Restany to Yves Klein exhibition\u00a0Propositions monochromes<\/em>, 1957. \u00a9 Yves Klein Archives.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

On April 28, 1958 Klein presented his exhibition \u2018Specialization of Sensibility in Raw Material State of Stabilized Pictorial Sensibility\u2019 at Iris Clert Gallery in Paris. It is also more often known as\u00a0Le Vide<\/em>\u00a0(The Void). The show was divided into two parts. Upon arrival, visitors saw the windows of the small gallery painted in IKB, which prevented anybody seeing anything inside from the street. The entrance to the gallery was closed: guests entered through an alley passing a threshold with some IKB blue curtains behind two guards wearing the uniform of French police officers, who were supervising the entrance and lobby space. Upon entering, guests received a drink made of Cointreau, gin and blue methylene. They passed a second curtain and, at the end of a corridor, two further guards were supervising the entrance to the exhibition space. This space was absolutely empty and completely painted white: the white interior space of Klein\u2019s pictorial sensibility, which was to be perceived as the dematerialization of the blue outside.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Fig. 9-Invitation by Iris Clert to Yves Klein exhibition\u00a0Le Vide<\/em>, 1958. \u00a9 Yves Klein Archives.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

3,500 invitations were sent for two people each, printed in relief with blue cursive script on Bristol paper, mimicking the official invitations of the French state (Fig. 9). They read: \u2018Iris Clert invites you to honour, with all your affective presence, the lucid and positive advent of a certain reign of the sensible. This event of perceptive synthesis sanctions Yves Klein\u2019s pictorial quest for an ecstatic and immediately communicable emotion.\u2019\u00a0[28]\u00a0Anybody wanting to enter uninvited had to pay 1,500 francs at the door to compensate for the \u00abtheft\u00bb of pictorial space intensity. According to Klein, the space was not empty, because\u00a0tout se passe dans l\u2019espace<\/em>\u00a0(everything happens in space). In a text written a year after the exhibition,\u00a0Le d\u00e9passement de la probl\u00e9matique de l\u2019art<\/em>\u00a0Klein relates (whether true or false) a fundamental event that took place during the\u00a0Le Vide<\/em>\u00a0opening:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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9:50 p.m. In the gallery I suddenly notice a young man about to draw on one of the walls. I rush to stop him and I ask him, politely but very firmly, to leave. While accompanying him to the small door to the exterior where the two guards are posted (the crowd in the gallery is silent and waits to see what will happen), I shout to the guards who are outside: Seize this man and throw him out with violence. He is literally expelled and disappears caught by my guards.\u00a0[29]<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Benjamin Buchloh has argued that Klein\u2019s gesture in\u00a0Le Vide\u00a0<\/em>anticipates Jean Baudrillard\u2019s semiotic formulation of sign exchange value.\u00a0[30]\u00a0It is a subtle and paradoxical operation, because Klein took certain modern art strategies much more literally than Kaprow. He literally spatialized monochrome painting, and proposed a purely spatial-colour architecture to produce through the same architectural mechanisms to Kaprow a diametrically opposite mode of spectatorship, the viewer-consumer of art without any reflexivity whatsoever located within the ethics of the theatrical, bourgeois spectacle. In Klein\u2019s case, spectatorship is produced before entering the gallery space, which performs in a theatrical way, staging and framing the condition of spectatorship rather than building it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

According to Michael Kirby \u2018happenings employ a structure that could be called insular or\u00a0compartmented\u2019.<\/em>\u00a0[31]\u00a0In spatial terms,\u00a0Le Vide<\/em>\u00a0seems to accomplish this. However, Happenings were also\u00a0non-matrixed<\/em>\u00a0performances in so much as, unlike traditional theatre, they did not make use of what Kirby called an\u00a0information structure<\/em>, or in other words, theatrical signs such as \u2018the set, the lights, the expressions and movements of the actors\u2019.\u00a0[32]\u00a0Happenings ignored the semiotic or value system that constituted the structural matrix for a play and addressed themselves to a spectator who decrypts the code of meaning. In bourgeois theatrical culture, the drama was interiorized by the spectator, who individually projected himself or herself into the action on stage as part of a collective process of reception undertaken in complete darkness. This was a clear manifestation of a particular social form, the cultivated bourgeois subject who had abandoned the public space in order to retire to domestic territory for the restoration of their identity. In this theatrical format, drama was completely encoded within semiotic structures and the spectator went to the theatre to\u00a0read<\/em>\u00a0all kinds of signs: corporeal (the expressions of the actors), textual (the dialogue), sonic (the music), and spatial (the objects, costumes or light).\u00a0[33]\u00a0Modern drama was essentially a contrasting process whereby semiotics were drained out of the bourgeois spectacle. This created a new spectatorship, in which the materiality of signs gained presence and meaning against their correspondence with any exterior significance, previously written in a text or laying somewhere in the textual cloud of culture. The architectural installation of monochrome paintings aimed at a similar goal, demanding an attentive spectatorship not addressed to decoding signs in paintings, but to the perception of surface, colour and form: pure pictorial material qualities.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We can place Kaprow\u2019s work in this tradition, because in his oeuvre the production of subjectivity through architecture \u2013 contaminated by artistic processes \u2013 is paralleled to the emergence of meaning out of materiality. What have changed radically with respect to the monochrome are the artistic process itself, along with the techniques, the materials, and the architecture which is produced. Instead of the pure ideal space created by the monochrome, here there is the semiotic explosion of materiality accumulated in layers in a huge collage, making of semiotics a nonmatrixed feature, an unreadable, undecipherable text.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Fig. 10-Allan Kaprow.\u00a0Penny Arcade<\/em>, photo by W. F. Ganfort, 1956. The Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (980063). \u00a9 Unknown.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In 1956 Kaprow produced a work called\u00a0Penny Arcade\u00a0<\/em>(Fig. 10). That piece, a collage, is framed so that it works as a wall, even as a possible window for junk culture, the culture of detritus that dazzled a generation of artists from Kaprow to Warhol. It is densely populated by many layers of overlapping and drawn materials, hindering the readability of the texts. The work even incorporated lights and sounds to operate as a real carnival of effects. In\u00a0Penny Arcade<\/em>\u00a0Kaprow \u2018turned the gallery space into the street\u2019, back to reality, \u2018filtered through the compositional strategies of collage and abstract expressionism\u2019.\u00a0[34]\u00a0The gallery space is invaded by the street, or vice versa, depending on the perspective, making of this wall a shop window. This makes it impossible for the subject\u2019s critical reflexivity to remain within those parameters of strict self-referentiality which were characteristic of the contemporary monochrome, since Kaprow introduces junk culture as a value, against the predominant value of consumer objects of his own time. Kaprow\u2019s position with respect to value in relation to space is critical, because he turns the gallery space\u00a0outside-in<\/em>\u00a0by spilling the junk space of consumer culture out of the gallery, as if it were a shop window. Conversely, Klein\u2019s\u00a0Le Vide<\/em>\u00a0made the interior space of the gallery invisible from the street; it was hidden behind a huge canvas, the window of the gallery space completely painted with opaque IKB pigment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Beyond Klein\u2019s intentions to present empty space as an abstract architecture of pure spatialized non-colour, what actually \u201cperforms\u201d architecture in his project is the restriction of any kind of relationship between the spectator and architecture itself. Thus while spectatorship is obviously required, the spectator does not create space through performance, but rather is performed by space through the dramatic matrix of signs: the invitation, the four guards, two of them actors and two of them real, the control over body movements of the guests through the queue, the rituals of their behaviour, the spontaneous expulsion, and finally the intake of the Klein blue cocktail, the literal invasion of their bodies with the pigment in the drink. (Those who attended the show were said to have had blue urine for a week.)\u00a0[35]\u00a0Likewise an actor is performed by the dramatic text, becoming a character; the spectator of\u00a0Le Vide<\/em>\u00a0is performed by Klein\u2019s matrixed empty space (Fig. 11). Therefore, architecture becomes the physical incarnation of value, and this means that architecture here, like easel painting, is a theatrical representation. In an artwork dependent upon semiotics, where the author is always present because they have disposed a text onto the work, \u2013 a text that the spectator must decode in order to appreciate it and make meaning emerge \u2013 the state is paradoxically less stable, since the materiality of the work is not the container of meaning, but a mediation element.\u00a0[36]<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Fig. 11-Yves Klein in the exhibition\u00a0Propositions Monochromes,<\/em>\u00a01957. \u00a9 Yves Klein Archives.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In 18 happenings<\/em> any interpretative attempt undertaken in a semiotic stance, that is to say any reading of the piece or some of its features as texts disposed before the audience for de-codification, will be shadowed by the immediate emergence of material meaning, while in Le Vide, <\/em>there is no meaningful materiality whatsoever.<\/em> When space is performed by the spectator, the materiality of space dominates the semiotic attributes of space. When space performs the spectator the opposite occurs. This means that while Kaprow was desperately trying to destroy the white cube through matter (life into art), Klein made evident the impossibility of such enterprise by vacuuming all traces of matter (art into life).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In 1972 anthropologist Milton Singer described the term \u201ccultural performance\u201d as \u2018a defined set of performers and audiences interacting in a finite quantity of time\u2019 in situations such as weddings, religious festivals, recitations, plays, balls, concerts, and so on. He linked his definition of cultural performance to the notion of cultural identity.\u00a0[37]<\/a>\u00a0Architecture plays a crucial role in the generation of cultural identity, space affects the shaping of subjectivity and identity. Even if architecture were devoid of any semiotic capacity, and were identified with pure matter, it would in fact interfere in the production of subjectivity, for matter can never fail to produce meaning. German anthropological studies at the beginning of the twentieth century signalled a strong turn toward privileging ritual over myth, even denying the idea that myth is an original construction and ritual its mere representation, mise-en-sc\u00e8ne or re-enactment. With this turn, ritual was posited as the original event, while myth became its semiotization or fixed text, which clearly minimized the efficacy of the written word and privileged the body in action as the major cultural motor.\u00a0[38]<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One of the most important studies in this context was\u00a0Les rites de Passage<\/em>, published in 1909 by Arnold van Gennep, a work which was tremendously influential to the development of the current notion of performance. For van Gennep the passage is a performative event in which an individual transverses three states in order to acquire a precise social role through a rite. The three states are separation from the group, state or initial environment; the liminal or transitional state, or the state of threshold or passage proper; and the arrival or incorporation, when the individual has already acquired a set of conditions leading to a new social role and group. All these states imply either a physical displacement in space or a virtual spatial projection. This scheme was reinterpreted in 1982 by American anthropologist Victor Turner in\u00a0From Ritual to Theater, The Human Seriousness of Play<\/em>, which has more recently become also a seminal text for Performance Studies. For Turner, the liminal state of the novice is the archetypical condition of the artist;\u00a0[39]\u00a0it is at the same time a state of complete fragility and complete empowerment, because the novice is released from its daily responsibilities with respect to its social environment through being separated from the group, and at the same time it has not yet acquired the new set of behavioural codes and duties that will guarantee a new state of belonging. Therefore, the novice is powerless in practice, but prospectively powerful in its becoming other. The liminal state is thus an asocial state akin to that of the living dead in the world of codes and social roles. This state, however, is not purely individualistic, but produces a spontaneous community, which is different from the other two kinds of communities Turner mentions: ideological and normative. In the spontaneous community, the type of communication is referred to as \u2018intersubjective illumination\u2019.\u00a0[40]\u00a0It contrasts with the notion of perceptual enunciation where theoretical concepts typical of the ideological community and the complete fixation of those concepts are made into sets of closed and well-defined precepts in the normative community. Taking for granted that the three forms of community do not imply accumulation or evolution from the simpler to the more complex, it is remarkable that it presupposes an increase of semiotization as a protocol. Seen in Turner\u2019s terms, both\u00a018 Happenings<\/em>\u00a0and\u00a0Le Vide\u00a0<\/em>were performance rituals, where spectatorship is hard to locate explicitly in the viewer\u2019s mind. As social ritual performances, both works are deeply affected by spatial organization and the way spectatorship is violently started from the body and dispersed throughout the entire space. The relation between form and use, space and events, is deeply affected by this discussion about performativity as a category suspended between matter and language, in as much architecture necessarily combines both phenomenology and semiotics, being thus suspended between support and value.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Notes<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

[1]\u00a0William Kaizen, \u201cFramed Space: Allan Kaprow and the Spread of Painting\u201d,\u00a0Grey Room<\/em>\u00a0no. 13, (Fall 2003), p. 100, n. 2. \u2018It was originally called\u00a0Paintings, Environments, Happenings<\/em>\u00a0and published in a condensed form in the catalogue for the exhibition \u2018New forms-New Media I\u2019, at the Martha Jackson Gallery, New York, the first uptown show of Kaprow and his contemporaries. It was changed to\u00a0Assemblage, Environments and Happenings<\/em>\u00a0for final publication.\u2019<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[2]\u00a0Allan Kaprow,\u00a0Assemblage, Environments and Happenings<\/em>, (New York: Abrams, 1966), p. 153.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[3]\u00a0Michael Kirby is best known as author of\u00a0Happenings, an illustrated anthology,\u00a0<\/em>(New York: Dutton, 1965);\u00a0Art of time; essays on the avant-garde<\/em>, (New York: Dutton, 1969) and\u00a0Futurist Performance: With manifestos and playscripts translated from the Italian by Victoria Nes Kirby<\/em>, (New York: Dutton, 1971), among other titles. Kirby painstakingly devoted himself to disengaging American performance activities of the 1950s and \u201960s from the contemporary visual arts scene, and tried to theorize a firm genealogy of happenings and performance out of the historical European avant-garde.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[4]\u00a0\u2018Framed Space\u2019, p. 82.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[5]\u00a0Assemblage, Environments and Happenings<\/em>, p. 156.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[6]\u00a0Hal Foster,\u00a0The Return of the Real: the avant-garde at the end of the century<\/em>, (Cambridge, MA: , MIT Press, 1996).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[7]\u00a0Assemblage, Environments and Happenings<\/em>, p. 157.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[8]\u00a0Ibid, p. 165.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[9]\u00a0Ignasi Sol\u00e1 Morales, \u2018Place: permanence or production\u2019: lecture at \u201cAnywhere\u201d symposium, Yufuin, Japan {Yufuin}, June 1992, published in Anywhere, (New York: Rizzoli, 1992).\u00a0 An architecture critic, Sol\u00e1 Morales summarizes the architectural implications of the so-called \u201cspatial turn\u201d that characterised philosophical culture during the 1950s, mostly in the field of phenomenology, by comparing the modern notion of space as delineated by German aesthetics of the last quarter of the nineteenth century in the works of\u00a0 {Adolf von}Hildebrand and{August} Schmarsow, among many authors, and the neo-Aristotelian notion of place that dominated architectural theory after World War II, notably in the work of Henri Lefebvre or Christian Norberg-Shultz.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[10]\u00a0Harold Rosenberg, \u2018The American Action Painters\u2019,\u00a0Art News<\/em>, vol. 51, no. 8, (December 1952).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[11]\u00a0Assemblage, Environments and Happenings<\/em>, p. 157.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[12]\u00a0Brian O\u2019Doherty,\u00a0Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space<\/em>, (Santa Monica: The Lapis Press, 1976, revised 1988.) p. 27.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[13]\u00a0Assemblage, Environments and Happenings<\/em>, p. 184.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[14]\u00a0Peter Brook, \u00abThe Empty Space: A Book About the Theatre: Deadly, Holy, Rough, Immediate (London: Penguin Books, 1968)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[15]\u00a0Alan Read,\u00a0\u00a0Theater\u00a0& Everyday Life, an Ethics of Performance<\/em>, (London & New York: Routledge, 1993), p. 13.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[16]\u00a0Happenings, an illustrated anthology<\/em>, p. 67.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[17]\u00a0Ibid. p. 72. \u2018The movements of the performers \u2013 as they would consistently be throughout the presentation- were clear, simple and unspontaneous. Their faces never expressed feeling or emotion. They walked slowly, carefully, almost stiffly, and always in straight lines parallel to one of the walls: all turns, as if marching, would be at right angles (or an about-face), and they would never cross the space diagonally.\u2019 Detailed event scores were developed for each performance, including a complete repertoire of facial expressions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[18]\u00a0Ibid. pp. 67-68.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[19]\u00a0Ibid. pp. 69-70. \u2018The first room had 30 or 35 seats, placed to face toward the other rooms (which were vaguely visible through the plastic dividers), and it was illuminated by a continuous series of 25-watt bulbs \u2013alternately red and white (\u2026) In the second room, two groups of chairs faced each other. There were perhaps twelve chairs in each section. By turning to either side, their occupants would be able to see into the flanking rooms. A single blue light globe hung from a cord in the center of the space, and the plastic wall fronting the corridor (directly behind one group of chairs) was covered with a random arrangement of strings of multicoloured Christmas-tree lights. The third room, at the far end of the outside door, was bordered on the top of its three outer walls, like the first room, with alternate colored lights. Here the colors were white and blue. (\u2026) About fifteen or twenty folding chairs were arranged in the third room so that those seated in them would be looking back toward the other two rooms. The temporary wall behind this seating group was not translucent but a large, bold, ragged collage of roughly torn canvas: the lower portion primarily contained crudely lettered words of various sizes (\u201cwas\u201d, \u201cHa\u201d, \u201cBIRD\u201d, etc.), the upper, a band of diagonal stripes and a slatted construction that jutted out over the chairs.\u2019<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[20]\u00a0Ibid. p. 71.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[21]\u00a0Ibid.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[22]\u00a0\u2018Framed Space\u2019, p. 99.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[23]\u00a0Erika Fischer-Lichte,\u00a0The Transformative Powers of Performance, a New Aesthetics (Trans Saskya Iris Jain.\u00a0<\/em>London and New York: Routledge, 2008),<\/em>\u00a0p. 17<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[24]\u00a0Judith Rodenbeck, \u2018Madness and Method: Before Theatricality\u2019,\u00a0Grey Room<\/em>\u00a0no. 13, (Fall 2003), p.55.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[25]\u00a0Inside the White Cube,\u00a0<\/em>p. 47.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[26]\u00a0\u2018Madness and Method\u2019, p. 59.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[27]\u00a0Benjamin Buchloh, \u2018Plenty of Nothing: From Yves Klein\u2019s\u00a0Le Vide<\/em>\u00a0to Arman\u2019s\u00a0Le Plein<\/em>\u2019, first published in Bernard Blist\u00e8ne (ed.)\u00a0Premises: Invested Spaces in Visual Arts and Design from France, 1958-1998<\/em>, (New York: Guggenheim Museum, 1998). Reprinted in Benjamin Buchloh,\u00a0Neo-Avantgarde and Culture Industry. Essays on European and American Art from 1955 to 1975,\u00a0<\/em>(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000), p. 267.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[28]\u00a0My translation<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[29]\u00a0Cited in , Kaira M Caba\u00f1as, \u2018Yves Klein\u2019s Performative Realism\u2019,\u00a0Grey Room<\/em>\u00a0no. 31, (Spring 2008), pp. 19-21.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[30]\u00a0\u2018Plenty of Nothing\u2019, p. 269: \u201cBy making his work manifestly dependent on all of the previously hidden\u00a0dispositifs<\/em>\u00a0(e. g., the spaces of advertisement and the devices of promotion) he would become the first postwar Europen artist to initiate not only an aesthetic of total institutional and discursive contingency, but also one of total spectacularization\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[31]\u00a0Happenings, an illustrated anthology<\/em>, p. 13.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[32]\u00a0Ibid.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[33]\u00a0See Erika Fischer-Lichte, (Jeremy Gaines & Doris L. Jones, trans.),\u00a0The Semiotics of Theater<\/em>, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), pp. 93-114.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[34]\u00a0\u2018Framed Space\u2019, p. 92.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[35]\u00a0Thomas McEvilley, \u2018Yves Klein conqueror of the void\u2019\u00b8 in\u00a0Yves Klein 1928-1962. A Retrospective<\/em>, (Houston: Institute of the Arts, Price University, 1982), quoted from a Spanish translation \u2018Yves Klein conquistador del vac\u00edo\u2019, in 3ZU Revista d\u2019Arquitectura, Escola T\u00e9cncia Superior d\u2019Arquitectura de Barcelona, n. 2, January 1994, p. 34 (my translation)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[36]\u00a0The Transformative Power of Performance<\/em>, p. 140.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[37]\u00a0Milton Singer,\u00a0When a Great Tradition Modernizes: An Anthropological Approach to Modern Civilization,\u00a0<\/em>(New York: Praeger, 1972), p. 71<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[38]\u00a0The Transformative Power of Performance<\/em>, p. 30-31<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[39]\u00a0Victor Turner,\u00a0\u00a0From Ritual to\u00a0Theater, The Human Seriousness of Play<\/em>, (New York: PAJ Publications, 1982), p. 27.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[40]\u00a0Ibid. p. 47.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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